Sharks in the Time of Saviors - Kawai Strong Washburn

PART I

DELIVERANCE

1

MALIA, 1995

Honoka‘a

When I Close My Eyes We’re All Still Alive and it becomes obvious then what the gods want from us. The myth people tell about us might start on that liquid blue day off Kona and the sharks, but I know different. We started earlier. You started earlier. The kingdom of Hawai‘i had long been broken—the breathing rain forests and singing green reefs crushed under the haole fists of beach resorts and skyscrapers—and that was when the land had begun calling. I know this now because of you. And that the gods were hungry for change and you were that change. In our first days I saw so many signs, but didn’t believe. The first came when your father and I were naked in his pickup truck in Waipi‘o Valley, and we witnessed the night marchers.

We’d come down into Waipi‘o Valley on a Friday, pau hana, with Auntie Kaiki babysitting your brother at home, and me and your father both knew we were going to use this childless night to screw our brains out, were run dumb with electricity just thinking about it. How could we not? Our skin rubbed dark by the sun and your father then with his football-days body, me with mine from basketball, the two of us feeling our love like the hottest habit. And there was Waipi‘o Valley: a deep cleft of wild green split with a river silver-brown and glassy, then a wide black sand beach slipping into the frothing Pacific.

A slow descent to the bottom of the valley in your father’s bust-up Toyota pickup, hairpin turn after hairpin turn, a sharp cliff to the right, cobbled tar underneath, the road so steep it caused the truck cab to fill with the smell of the engine’s burning guts.

Then a jarring road of silt and waist-deep mud puddles at the bottom of the valley and we reached the beach and parked the truck right up against the freckled black eggs of rock that rimmed the sand; your father made me laugh until my cheeks prickled with heat and the last shadows of the trees were pointing long toward the horizon. The ocean boomed and sizzled. We unrolled our sleeping bags in the bed of the pickup, over the gravel-smelling foam pad your father put down just for me, and once the last teenagers were gone—the thick buzz of their reggae bass fading into the forest—we took our clothes off and made you.

I don’t think you can hear my memories, no, so this won’t be so pilau, and anyway, I like to remember. Your father gripped a small fist of my hair, the hair he loved, black and kinked with Hawai‘i, and my body began to curl into a rhythm against his pelvis, and we groaned and panted, pressed our blunt noses together, and I pulled us apart and straddled above and came back onto him and our skin was so hot I wanted to store it for all the times I’d ever felt cold, and his fingers traced my neck, his tongue my brown nipples, this gentleness that was a part of him that no one ever saw, and our sex made its sounds and we laughed a little, closing our eyes and opening them and closing them again, and the day lost its last light even as we kept on.

We were on top of our sleeping bags, the cool air minting our dampness, when your father’s face got serious and he rolled away from me.

“You see that?” he asked.

I didn’t know what he saw—I was still coming out of some sort of fog, still rubbing my thighs together for the tingle there, the last of the oiled rush of our love—but then your father jolted to a sitting position. I rose to my knees, still sex-drunk. My tits swung in against his left biceps and my hair fell down across his shoulder and even though I was scared I felt sexy and almost wanted to pull him into me, right there, never mind the danger.

“Look,” he whispered.

“Come on,” I said. “Stop messing around, lolo.”

“Look,” he said again. And I did, and what I saw yanked me tight.

Out on top of the far ridge of Waipi‘o a long line of trembling lights had appeared, slowly dipping and rising as they moved along the valley’s crown. Green and white, flickering, it must have been fifty, and as we watched we saw the lights for what they were: fires. Torches. We’d heard of the night marchers