Honoka‘a
We beat our run out on the road. And the road it beats us back. The chopping pattern of our running shoes on the blacktop, me and Dad on our eighth mile, and with each stride the earth drives back into our bones and muscles. Sugarcane and eucalyptus scroll by and occasionally, farther out in the fields, there are rust-cancered mill houses and zinc storage-sheds getting swallowed by leaves. Scrubby green unused farmland tilts down toward the faraway cliffs. Okay, and then beyond, the blue ocean flickers with whitecaps from the trade winds. We keep running and we keep hurting, right? Through our toe bones. Through the knots of our calves and the stiff bands of our thighs. All the way up through our bellies goes the beat. Tff tff tff is the sound. Each time we stride now there’s a sort of gasping from both of our throats. I bet that’s the wrong way to run, losing breath like that. But I don’t care about being wrong. Or losing breath. I just want to go.
Okay, still running, me and Dad, just like we did at the start when I came home. Back when I figured maybe just running would make him better. You run hard enough and long enough and everything inside is muted under the torrent of your body moving blood and oxygen and your head buzzes bright. Back when I first came home I was ready to get lost with Dad. And I did some days. Some nights.
Then the hurt unlocked itself, Dad and the land. Now whole days go where he’s like he was before. There’s no muttering, okay? There’s no set of staring eyes, as empty as the rusted sheds we’re running past. There’s no shitting himself or wandering off into the dark green. No. We have all of him now: Pull my finger, he ordered at dinner on Saturday. And after our run yesterday morning he said: I been running so hard I think your mom gonna die.
Who, by the way. Mom. It hasn’t been since my hanabata days that I’ve seen her like she is now. For a while a part of her had given up. She’d lost everything and was only continuing to wake up because it’s what she’d always done. Or maybe she thought there was something in Dean and me that she could live for. I don’t know about that. But I do know Noa will always be her favorite; it wasn’t even about Noa, really, or at least not just the person. For Mom, Noa was a son but he was also the legends that came with him. How those contracted everything that hurt us—the broke years, the move to the city, the shit jobs she and Dad had—into a single point of purpose. And that purpose was so big she didn’t have to understand it to know she had an important part to play. Big destiny is a thing you get drunk on.
Tff tff tff. Me and Dad still pounding down the road. Something shifts and crackles in the trees when we run by, where the bushes and branches are spiky and low to the ground. My own sweat is wetting my eyelashes, tickling the muscles in my neck, and the road humps up hills and rolls down and curves away. Orange late light. We keep running.
Okay, nothing’s the same now when we run. Now I’m not looking to lose myself. I’m looking to expand what I’ve made. I call it a new ahupua‘a: the old system resurrected. When the island was ali‘i split in stripes top to bottom and everything produced was given to everything else: fish from the sea traded for sweet potato from the plains grown from water from the ridges. Only now me and Hoku have enclosed the whole thing in a smaller space, plus incorporated photovoltaics plus water reclamation. It trades and feeds among itself, see? The kalo and the fish and the flowers. Much from little land. It’s going to change what these islands are, I swear. When we first started talking about it. When the articles were in the paper and the island airline’s in-flight magazine, people started coming around. Tita earth mamas with toenails like cracked roof shingles and vana-hair armpits, koi tattoos, and whole farms they were building, just like us. Guys with kinked hair that fell to the middle of their backs, dark-skinned chests that are just plates of muscle. But it wasn’t the news that brought them. They’d been called, too, is what they said. That same voice, the one that came to me like a hula, that came through Dad like a river. All the people that came to us had been hearing it. Driving them to make what they had. And so all us Kānaka Maoli and all our noise? Even important people are coming around: After all, the county councilwoman shrugged, we have to do something with all this land. Me making visits to the legislative hearings, to universities, joined by other farmers and fishers and speakers of the old ways.
“See that,” Dean said on the phone last night. Like I was just figuring out something he always knew.
“Oh Jesus, Dean,” I said. “See what.”
“Noa was right, wasn’t he,” Dean said. “Wasn’t just about him. Even from the grave he gets for be a know-it-all.”
I couldn’t help it, I laughed.
But what about you is what I asked him then. Does it call you now, too.
“You know what,” he said. “You wanna talk about calling. Try listen to this.” And there was a tumble and thump from his side of the phone, an underwater sound. A sound I knew meant he was moving the phone, then moving himself. Then there was a rush of city sound so loud it almost turned into a white-noise rainstorm: car horns, sirens, the cracking of wood pallets and doors. The boom of heavy things tumbling into a dumpster. The long grind and roar of a city bus. Hisses and clatters. Voices. Then those sounds faded and the phone thumped, moving again. A television voice rose, something about markets and expected quarterly growth, predictions of valuation, and then he was back on the phone, right? And his breath. “You heard ’um, yeah?”
“I heard noise,” I said. “That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“Noise,” he said. “That’s money,” he said. “That’s me finding ways to make it.”
He’d been sending more money as he made it, deposits showing up in Mom and Dad’s account on the regular. Mom never asked where he made it, and I didn’t, either. I bet the answer was not as bad as we imagined. But we didn’t ask, because maybe it was worse.
There was a creak of leather on his end of the line, thump of something closing. The whole time we talked I bet he was moving. He’s always moving. I wonder if that was the worst part of prison for him, the way movement was taken from him.
“How’s Mom and Dad been?” he asked.
“Better, every day,” I said. “All of us.”
“Look at you,” he said. “Maybe Noa wasn’t the only superhero.”
“He never was a superhero, Dean,” I said. “That was the problem. No more saviors, okay? This is just life.”
“Huh,” he said. And then: “You know, I still think about Waipi‘o,” he said. It was like I could hear him shaking his head over the phone. “I was down there way after everyone was all back home. The helicopters and dogs gone and me just hiking for find Noa. Up and down all those trails. I kept having one feeling like maybe he was just around the next corner. Just right up ahead of me. Same as when we was kids, he was always ahead of me. Even the last time, like he took the fall because he was so far away from where everyone else walks.
“Part of me gonna stay down in the valley like that forever. Just chasing him. Part of me ain’t never coming back up. You know?”
While he talked, I moved through the little house we have now, on Uncle Kimo’s property. I stepped onto the lanai outside our side door. Felt how, like, the hapu‘u ferns and the banana trees and ironwoods made their own atmosphere. And it was different than what there was in San Diego. But just like that how quickly I was back there. Van and all those parties, those climbs. Those drives and climbs and the culverts. And Van. And Van.
“Yes,” I said. “I know exactly what you mean.”
He didn’t say anything.
“You’re not coming home, are you?” I asked.
“Home,” he said. Like it was a word he’d heard before but still didn’t know. “Whole time I was back in Hawai‘i,” he said, “I run into people and they’re all ‘I remember when you scored thirty-five against Villanova, last-minute bank shot,’ or ‘Back when you was playing for Lincoln I remember going to all your games.’
“That’s all Hawai‘i is now, yeah? It’s the me that I was before. There’s that and there’s the valley and everywhere Noa. I can’t beat it, sis. That’s it, that’s Hawai‘i. I can’t beat it.”
Give it another chance is what I told him. “You’d be surprised,” I said, “what this land can do to you.”
“Nothing surprises me anymore,” he said.
Oh, Dean. Such a butthole, still. Once upon a time it would have made me angry, right? But I figured what he needed then was just a little credit. Just a little bit of being the best.
“Hey, Dean,” I said. “The money you sent us, that first time. It got here just when Mom needed it most. I mean really needed it. She was almost gone. Did you know that?”
He inhaled then. Sharp and fast. Voice cracked a little when he spoke. “Ah,” he said. “Okay.”
“And I remember that day in Portland,” I said. “I remember who took the wheel. At the end.
“But you don’t have to keep doing whatever you’re doing now,” I said. “We’re going to be okay.”
“Oh, yeah?” he asked. “What about all the farming you got started up now? Not gonna be cheap, try and turn that into something big.”
Okay, he was right—even with potential investment from the county or state, governments never had real funding for people like us. I said as much. And I could already feel his money moving over the wire. Like the muscle of an ocean current.
“Yeah,” he said. “See that? It’s what I’m saying. We’re not okay enough. Not yet.”
I realized that this would always be a difference between me and Dean. After everything that had happened to this family. Everything we’d seen and felt from Noa. The echoes of it in ourselves … I only wanted, finally, to understand. Let the money fall where it may, you know? But there was no settling that way, not for Dean. For him it had to be his hand, taking as much as he thought we needed to wipe away everything that had happened to us before. To guarantee it was all over. But there wasn’t enough money in the world for that.
“There’s way more I can make, like coming out our ōkoles,” he said. “Whatchyou think about that?”
“I think Mom wants her only living son back,” I said.
He was quiet a long time. But he was there. I knew he was.
“Let me think about it,” he said. “Meantime, I keep sending money. Plenty more. I gotta go.”
I wanted to tell him no again. No more money, just him. That we’d be here, when he was ready. But he’d already hung up.