I was all, You can keep playing, just that it’s dinner soon, and he said he was done anyway, then him just sitting there half curled over his ‘uke and me holding the doorknob thinking, How come every time now I talk in this house it’s like someone caught me kissing my cousin.
“You didn’t have to lie,” I said. “With Mom.”
He leaned back on his arms. “I know,” he said.
And I guess that’s all we could do.
Then there was dinner, me and him just listened to Kaui or Mom, not much except if we were asked whatever, which was plenty from Mom for Noa, come to think of it. Still wasn’t long before dinner was done and we all peeled off on our own, Kaui back in her room on homework and Noa in the garage with his ‘uke, back to the crazy stuff he did when he got lost in it, and I tried for work on my econ homework but in the end all I could do was write The market clearing price is I’m fucked and then I was on the couch, watching SportsCenter, and everyone else was asleep.
I still had hours left before my head would give up, I could tell. So I went into our bedroom and there’s Noa’s sleep-weight in the darkness, could feel him all heavy and gone in his breathing. In the closet had my Flu Game Jordans and the Allen Iverson Sixers away jersey. I suited up and grabbed my basketball and felt all the places the texture bumps was wearing down. It was way-black in the night, like after midnight. Had the basketball pinned under one arm, carrying my shoes in that hand, when I came back out to the living room and there was Mom’s purse.
The refrigerator kicked on and grumbled, ice clattered inside. I could see where Mom’s wallet was, right in front, the gold clasp rubbing off to silver underneath.
The cash I was holding all came from someone else—just strangers I sold pakalolo in the park—but, then, that money was mine, maybe the only thing that felt like it. And it wasn’t nearly enough for change anything that mattered in our family. The only way I could do that for real was to make, like, haole-kind money, until there wasn’t nothing I couldn’t buy for Mom and Dad. Noa could become president or a new kahuna or famous doctor or whatever, but the only thing I could be was right there in my hands, that basketball. I put the money back in my pocket. Then I was out the door and down the street, through Kalihi in the dark.
The park was closed that late but that didn’t mean nothing, had the backboard all mossy on the edges and streaked with mud from other people balling in the rain from earlier that day. The net was broke in one or two places, sagging and hanging into its own holes.
I bounced the ball a few times, listened to the ringy pound. The wind came on and the trees clattered like applause. I closed my eyes for the first shot, I don’t know why. I took my shot, let the ball start with everything coming up through my ankles, jumping clean, but when the ball came off my fingers I knew it was all wrong and then the clang of the rim and the ball bouncing into the chain-link fence. I watched it till it stopped moving.
I went and snagged the ball and took another shot, eyes open, and it swooped in and out of the rim and bounced, bounced, right to the edge of the court. I quick-stepped and scooped the basketball. I cut to the corner and then busted a crossover, turned, bent with my back to the rim like I had D on me, might as well it was Kahena Academy, or whoever else thought they could try for defend me. But can’t no one defend me. I was fadeaway spinning for the hoop and I let my shot go high and right at it. I watched it rainbow down. I knew that shot was going in, already I could see it dropping through with that swish, it had to, it had to, just like I’m saying, I’m unstoppable.
5
MALIA, 2002
Kalihi
I can’t hear your voice, but I know that you’re still listening, always. And so I can tell you: sometimes I believe none of this would have happened if we’d stayed on the Big Island, where the gods are still alive. Fire goddess Pele with her unyielding strength, birthing the land again and again in lava, exhaling her sulfur breath across the sky. Kamapua‘a, wanting her love, bringing his rain and stampede of pig hooves to break her lava down, make it into fertile soil, the way it is all across the grassy hills of Waimea, down into the valleys, surrounding where you were born. Or there is Kū, god of war, who one day plunged himself into that same soil, turning from a father and a husband into a tree, a tree to bear fruit for his starving wife and children. The first breadfruit. He was a god of war, but he was also a god of life. Sometimes he came as a shark …
So I wonder if some of him is you, and if some of you is him, the way the ocean and the dirt and the air here are all made of the gods. It was what I believed at first: That you were made of the gods, that you would be a new legend, enough to change all the things that hurt in Hawai‘i. The asphalt crushing kalo underfoot, the warships belching filth into the sea, the venomous run of haole money, California Texas Utah New York, until between the traffic jams and the beach-tent homeless camps and big-box chain stores nothing was the way it should have been. I believed that you could defeat this.
With shame now I see that could never have been the case. But I remember when I was especially full of faith, and it was the day your father and I discovered your graveyard.
Do you remember? You were a junior in classes, although barely sophomore-aged, and still Principal’s List and Science Club captain and playing the ‘ukulele like you’d swallowed the whole Hawaiian history. And it was good, all of it. Excellent. Though the truth is that, for all the pride we had in everything you were doing, there still was, especially for me, a feeling of failure. We’d pushed you the wrong way after that New Year’s, expecting you to fix the people who heard what you were capable of and came to our door, hollowed out with desperation. Yes, I thought, this is it, he’ll start with them, and it will grow.
And yes, there was something in it for us, too. We did want—we did need—the extra money that came in. I’m sorry.
When you stopped taking those requests, you closed off from us even further. So much about you became a secret, and I don’t think you ever completely came back. This we also came to understand after that graveyard day.
Do you remember the graveyard? I do. The rare day your father and I were both home in the after-school hours; we noticed you’d left and hadn’t come back.
“He just took that same path he always takes,” Kaui said, shrugging when we asked.
It was late. We wanted you back. So we took the path, too. Around the corner and across the street from our house, the brown footpath dropped behind frazzled hedges to an open field. Scummed water trickled through a canal to the left, and beyond, a hurricane fence fronted the dusty backyards of muffler shops and industrial warehouses. Tuna smells bloomed along the path, which continued straight to a distant clump of trees. Along the path, as we walked, we saw cairn after cairn, each rock pile newer than the one before. Only the cairns weren’t all stone: they were spiny and flashing with bike cogs, car engine parts, abandoned elbows of pipe. Some were already covered in weeds.
“What are these?” I asked your father. He squatted next to one.
“Look like graves to me,” he said, which I had already known would be the answer.
“Augie,” I said.
“He’s down here,” your father said. “Somewhere.”