Sleeping Beauties (22 page)

“You think about them?” he asked. “My cousins believe the government is going to hand over a lighthouse to them. They want to secede. Rachel Kaanehe thinks she’ll be crowned queen when the legislature settles her claim. The same legislature is building a hydroelectric plant in her backyard and she’s worried about what she’s going to wear to her coronation.”

It was hard for Clio to know when he was teasing. He had the occasional humorlessness of someone who has had to struggle to get knowledge. He was both detached and furious. She wondered if he knew that Hawaiians were once put to death for sarcasm.

“All that we have left, as Hawaiians, are gestures. As a race, I mean. You know that. They’re just using what they have.”

“The Kilohanas?” she asked.

“All of us. Especially the Kilohanas, because they have the least of anyone.”

“And my family?” she asked. “My aunt?”

“Maybe memory is a gesture, too,” he said.

She stood there, thinking about it, and he smiled at her.

“How do you know how to fix buses?”

“Oh,” she said. “From the time when I was trying to be a boy.” She made herself smile. “How do you know about gestures?”

He handed her the little palm lariat and said, to her surprise, “You have a great conscience.”

•   •   •

They stopped by the side of the road so that he could look at the surf.

Clio stayed behind in the pickup while he strolled slowly onto the beach to talk to the boys who sat against the banked sand patiently studying the movement of the wind and the waves. He pulled off his shirt and squatted down in the sand, his elbows on his knees. A man on the beach, his arms held tightly across his bare chest, had a large tattoo on his back, from neck to waist, of the Virgin Mary.

Clio knew that even though she was waiting, Henry would feel no need to hurry. The men on the beach would talk about a few things, the currents and tides, but not much more. Clio could hear their conversation as clearly as if she’d been hunched down with them on the sand. She had grown up listening to Dix and his friends, and it had always seemed to her that most of the important things that passed between boys had never been spoken. An exchange of information had occurred—she had been there to feel the transaction, if not to hear it—but very few words had been used. She’d been confused by it. She’d thought that intuition was a feminine, graceful trait, but the rough boys who communicated with a glance or a grunt or a nod were very intuitive.

Henry came to the truck and stood at the window, his T-shirt around his neck,

“No good,” he said. “Waves are breaking to the left. Toward the rocks.”

Clio nodded and looked at the water, trying to be as coolly nonchalant as one of the boys on the beach. It made her smile.

He got into the truck and started it, leaning out over his arm as he backed out of the brush. The rear tires caught in the sand, and the engine raced as he moved the truck back and forth, finding a sure place.

“Who was that man with the tattoo?” Clio asked.

“I went to grade school with him.”

“I like his tattoo.”

“He got it in prison. He designed it himself. For protection. A guy from Japan did it with razors and Magic Markers.” The wheels pulled free of the sand and Henry drove slowly onto the beach road.

“Why was he in prison? Did he occupy a pool hall and claim it belonged to his grandfather?”

He did not answer at first, and she wondered if she had offended him.

“Two tourists were blown up in his marijuana field. He learned how to lay mines in Viet Nam,” he said at last, smiling.

“Why did the tattoo protect him?”

“Because of the other men. He figured if he had the Mother of God on his back, they might think twice.”

Clio was silent as she herself thought about it.

“I think you like local guys,” he said, looking at her over his outstretched arm, his hand on the big steering wheel.

She looked at the smoothness of skin on his bare shoulder, the brownness of his skin, and the black hair on his arm and on his chest. She shuddered. Cheap thrill, she thought.

“Maybe I do,” she said, forcing herself to look away.

He waited silently on the small porch while she picked limes from a tree in the yard. When she went into the kitchen, he sat on the floor in the front room and looked at her books, and the ferns that she had brought back from her walks.

She filled an abalone shell with red salt, and made fish and rice and
namasu
. She was pleased by his praise of her small collected things, and of the food, not because she
thought that he might be right, but because he thought so. He did not say very much. She knew that it was not lack of interest, but temperament. He did not need to speak, or to be heard.

She looked at him and she thought, I cannot wait any longer.

She could count the times that he had touched her. He had brushed against her in the grove of Norfolk pine, and in town when he had helped her to put boxes of food in the back of the Jeep. He had touched her fingers when she gave him the shell of salt, and again when he gave it back to her.

She went to him and gave him her hand. She led him into the little room where she slept. He sat down on the bed. She pulled off her wet bathing suit and stood before him. He was very still, even when she put her hand on him.

“What is it that you want?” she asked. When he did not answer, she said, “You confuse me by not telling me.”

He gently pushed her from him and lay her on the bed. He placed his scarred hands on her body. He still did not speak, but she could hear his breathing grow deeper and quicker. She listened carefully, as if each breath were a declaration.

She forced herself to lie still. There was sand between her legs and under her breasts, where it had settled on her damp skin. He held her knees as he lifted first one leg, then the other, to brush the sand from the bottom of her feet. There was the faint dry sound of sand falling to the floor.

He was on his knees behind her, his hands slow on her body. He lifted her hips, and pulled her to him. His brown fingers with their pink nails encircled her waist, the fingers separated, holding her. He took off his shirt, pulling it over
his head, never releasing her, changing hands as he removed it. She did not know what he was going to do to her and this uncertainty was as arousing as the feel of his hands on her.

He leaned her back against him. She was cold and his body warmed her. He braced her against his heavy thighs, moving her back and forth. She could smell lime on his hands.

She thought of Mabel. We liked to swim the horses, Mabel used to say. I am his horse and he is swimming me. He is my horse and we are in the white water, the spume of the surf on my coat, mixed with the foam of my sweat, his hands in my wet mane. I am his horse. He is mine.

“When my cousin Leroy Kilohana was staying with me one summer, we found an
‘aumakua
image inside a cave near Halawa. It was a foot long, with one pearl-shell eye. Human hair was pegged into its head with iron nails. We covered it with rocks and threw leaves and dry branches across the opening of the cave and ran like hell back down the mountain. We knew it was a sorcery image because we’d felt the lump of human flesh or shit or nail parings stuck in the opening at the back.

“Sometimes at night I dream about it. My father has a big poi-pounder, nearly two foot high, that he keeps behind the front door. He says it’s his
‘aumakua
and sometimes when he’s drunk he squats over it as if he were going to sit on top of it and take it in like a woman would. He slaps his thigh like he is galloping, and pretends to ride it. The statue that we saw in the cave was not like the poi-pounder. It was not a symbol of procreation or food. It was a symbol of death.”

He rose from the bed and stood at the porch door. Clio
watched him. His thick, strong legs, his heavy arms, seemed suddenly dear, as if the recognition of his imperfection made him more valuable to her.

“Sometimes when I walk in the forest, going
mauka
, going to the mountains, I want to see it again. I don’t want to take it, only to look at it.”

He stepped into the yellow moonlight. Clio was surprised that he’d told her about the cave—not its location, not even that it was on Moloka‘i—but the story of finding it and the mystery of the memory of it, woven day to day, month to month, over those years. It was not that Henry believed in magic, although she knew that he did, and it was not that he feared that he’d be struck lame or blind or even dead if he betrayed the god, it was that the unseen, seen, image possessed the history of his expiring race in all its poignant, willful destruction. It was the Hawaiians who had sold all of the sandalwood trees, not the
haole
traders. It was the Kilohanas who were in jail, unable to post bail, too furious to accept the money raised by
haoles
on their behalf.

Clio came onto the porch. The channel glistened through the trees, and there was the sound of surf against the rocks, hurrying to meet the tide. Her
pareu
flapped behind her in the fresh breeze, like a wing. “You look like Hina, the moon goddess. You shine in the light,” he said, smiling at her.

She went to him, between his knees, and he paid obeisance to the moon as she paid obeisance to him.

Henry’s father, Packard Kilohana, lived in a cottage on the side of a hill, surrounded by surfboards sunk vertically into the ground. Clio thought that the history of surfboards could be learned just by walking around the fence. There were old
koa
boards, heavy and clumsy-looking, and the
new short boards called Thrusters, and the thick epoxy boards from the sixties.

Packard Kilohana held open the screen door for them. He had a huge head, matted with gray hair. “I never cut my hair in twelve years,” he said to Clio in greeting. “Not since the unhappy days I stopped chasing cows.”

Ginger had told Clio that Packard was named after the car.

“The car?” Clio had asked. “He likes Packard cars?”

“No, honey, he was got in one.”

Clio hadn’t understood.

“You know, made love in one. His ma and pop.”

A young German shepherd followed Packard Kilohana as he went to open a window. No matter how careful Packard was in his housekeeping, Clio knew, it would be impossible to keep the red dirt of west Moloka‘i from drifting like smoke through the house. Even if he kept the windows and doors tightly shut, the dust would find its way inside, into his teeth and ears. Clio sneezed, just thinking of it.

He went to the back of the house and returned with a piece of coconut cream pie on a paper plate. He gave it to Clio and gestured to her to sit on the sofa. Henry walked to the back of the house.

“Laka kept me up all night,” Packard said, pulling the black ruff of hair at the dog’s neck. The dog looked at him, lovesick and patient. “I hear this barking, barking. I get up. Nothing. I go back to bed, she bark again. I come outside, and she is looking up at the sky, barking. You know what she saw?” Packard Kilohana had the same accent as Mabel, a combination of old English and Pidgin.

Clio shook her head. She finished the piece of pie. It was delicious.

“Shooting stars. She was barking at stars.”

Clio touched the dog on her back and she looked around at Clio for a quick moment, black pupils rolling in the corners of her eyes. The dog turned back to Packard, who laughed at her.

There were trophies on the big television set. Cowboy hats encircled with dried flowers, and whips and spurs, hung from nails on the walls. In the corner on a wooden stand was a Mexican hand-tooled saddle, black with years of sweat. Clio thought of the bridles and boots in Tommy’s house in Malibu; chaps that would never be worn, ropes that would never be thrown.

The stone poi-pounder was in its place behind the door. A ragged pile of pornographic magazines was next to the sofa. A pillow was propped against the wooden arm of the sofa, and Clio wondered if Packard had been reading the magazines when they arrived.

Henry came into the room and handed her a can of Mountain Dew.

“I think I knew your auntie,” Packard said as Clio put the paper plate on the floor. “But I’m not sure I got the right lady.” Clio watched the dog lick the plate clean, pushing it across the floor with her big tongue. “Long time, was she married with the manager at Nalakaa Ranch? I was the cow boss there one time. Was she nimble and fat? I’m trying to recall her.”

Clio noticed that he was staring at her legs. She wondered if he meant Emma, even though Emma was tall and slender. “I never knew Auntie Emma’s husband,” she said. Out of politeness rather than an attempt to be understood, she had slipped into Pidgin. Packard would understand her if she spoke in a more formal way, but to talk Pidgin was a sign of acceptance for both of them. It meant that she was a child of the land, as was he—not a newcomer, not a white, not a
haole
. Pidgin made them equal for a moment.

“It was long time ago.” He shook his head in apology. “You and me might even be cousins,” he said with a laugh. His teeth were crooked and stained. His eyes were heavy-lidded, and red from too much sun and drink.

Clio wondered if it were possible that they were cousins. She liked that she did not know anything about Henry. She did not want to know. Aunt Ginger had tried to whisper things to her: his mother had been killed in a car at the bottom of the hill when he was a boy; he found her body in the
kiawe
trees on his way home. His girlfriend lived in Maunaloa, down the hill from Packard. His cousin Leroy was better-looking than Henry, but not so nice. Leroy didn’t like
haoles
. Packard Kilohana molested his niece. Clio had tried to stop Ginger when she told her these things over six-packs of beer, Ginger not troubling to separate the gossip from the true. “Love ’em and leave ’em,” Ginger had said. But Ginger had not mentioned that they were related.

Henry stood at the screen door, looking down the narrow, slanting lanes of Maunaloa town, his hands in the back pockets of his jeans. The weight of his hands pulled the waistband low on his hips. Clio could see the black hair at the small of his back. Below his waist, there was the faintest change in the color of his skin. She felt herself flush with desire.