You’d buried the dog here and sometimes came back to visit. You said it always made you feel better, lighter, as if you were again the dog, running.
And standing there was exactly like that. Later the field would be fenced off and the fence would become a wall and the wall would become another building, storing and manufacturing cement, and the graveyard was gone, somewhere under the foundation. But I remember it as it was then.
You explained that other animals had come after the dog. Flocks and strays, poisoned from antifreeze and wrecked from car strikes and being chewed up by cancer, crawling on their last to arrive here, waiting for you. To give up their last sparks.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I don’t know what to do with it,” you said. “I keep messing up.”
Augie put his hand on your shoulder. “No you don’t,” he said.
“What do you mean?” you asked.
“Feels way happy, doesn’t it?” Augie asked. “Right at the end. Feels that way to me, anyway.”
But you shook your head. “I have to start fixing things.
“I have to fix everything,” you corrected.
Whole nights after the sharks, your father and I had been wondering what would happen, what you would be. I believe that graveyard day was the first time we truly understood the scale of you. If you were more of the gods than of us—if you were something new, if you were supposed to remake the islands, if you were all the old kings moving through the body of one small boy—then of course I could not be the one to guide you to your full potential. My time as a mother was the same as those last gasping breaths of the owl, and soon enough you’d have to gently set down my love, fold it up into the soil of your childhood, and move beyond.
I remember leaning back against your father’s chest as we sat in the grass. Shadows had moved over the water in the canal, but far beyond that, the lights in Honolulu were winking on. The golden feeling of the owl’s last flight stayed with me, even if the vision had long since coasted into the dark.
PART II
ASCENSION
6
DEAN, 2004
Spokane
Way I figure, before the first Hawaiians became Hawaiians, it was them back in Fiji or Tonga or wherever and they had too many wars with too many kings and some of the strongest looked at the stars and saw a map to a future they could take for themselves. Broke their backs making themselves canoes to cut through forty-foot swells and sails big enough to make a fist out the wind and then they got free from their old land. Goodbye old kings goodbye old gods goodbye old laws goodbye old power goodbye limits. Came a time in all their salty tattoo-muscle nights on the water when they seen the white light of the moon over the new land of Hawai‘i and they was like: This. This is ours. All us, all now.
That’s me that first night in Spokane. For real I felt all the kings that came before me in a heavy way, like they was right inside my heart, like they was chanting through my blood. I could see them with me, even if my eyes didn’t close. We were the same, me and them: I went launching across the big gap of sky between Hawai‘i and the mainland, seen the big grids of mainland city lights from the plane window, skyscrapers and highways that just kept going and going, all gold and white. For me they was just like those navigating stars for the original Hawaiians, pointing the direction to what’s mine. When I stepped off the night shuttle to Spokane and stood in front the clean lawns and new brick buildings and saw the coaching staff ready to greet me as one of the top freshman basketball recruits in the whole country I was like: all me, all now. King me, motherfuckers.
Before, back in Hawai‘i, all everyone wanted was for me to believe in Noa, to raise him up. Like my job was to be his keeper, to be second place and help him get to the finish line.
Hate to break it to you, but I don’t fit in second place.
And for what? It’s not like Noa ever got us nothing to show for it, Mom and Dad still hurting for money at the end of the month. Same thing all over the islands. Only way you get out of something like that is to be so good the only thing anyone can do is pay you. And pay you big. That’s what I knew I was finally gonna do when I got to Spokane.
This started in, what, fall 2004. Only thing that mattered was basketball. Captains ran the off-season work and so we was all in the arena, upstairs where the track is, wall squats and wind sprints, then back to the weight room. Guys was asking if I’d ever seen a place like this, rows and rows and rows of clean bleachers for thousands of fans, the weight-room facilities with top-end machines and new paint on the racks, and I was like, Just because I’m from the islands you think I never seen nothing like this. But, then, it was true, too, not because the islands but because Lincoln High. I only seen facilities this way when we was playing away games at Kahena or the other rich-ass prep schools. So, yeah, I seen a place like this, but never before was it mine.
All the halls and laboratories and commons like they got fresh paint every other year, pretty little bookshop with all its way-too-fucking-high prices. But everywhere I swear except in the locker room the university was white as milk. I saw brown people on the sidewalk and I was like, Thank God, I was starting for think I was the last one left.
And the classes? Didn’t even know what I’d signed up for, serious, someone from the front office of the team took care of registration, and the homework I got help on, guys on the team tipped me off to finding a tutor first week, sophomore girl if I can help it, big eyes toothpick jeans cross around her neck, like that. She’ll help out, they said, She’ll know who we are. And it was just like they said. I had to write down the numbers and words myself, sure, but if my brain was there it was on the scoop of her elbow, the freckles across her nose. Gotta love college.
But basketball, we went hard. Every day, all the time. Fifteen of us on the grind ten times harder than I ever did back home. Just balling all the time, the tamp tamp tamp of the basketball into that polished wood, the perfect chirp of our shoes. We ran one-on-ones, we ran two-on-twos, we ran two-on-ones. Contested mid-range jumpers and turnarounds and arc shooting drills. This was a whole new level, though. Guys on the team was all way quicker and stronger and smarter than anyone I ever played against back at Lincoln, now I’m playing men instead of kids, and for that first year I felt it. They all had a step and an inch more in the air than me, half my stuff was getting blocked or picked, and it was almost like the atmosphere around me would sink and get soft.
Be bigger. Be stronger and faster. I had to.
After practice, there’d be like four or five of us in the cafeteria, knees icing in fat blisters of plastic sports wrap, staring at our plates of limp beef broccoli, no hunger since we was all still on the afterburn of whatever bull-ring-type drill coach had just put us through. The greasy smell of burnt meat filling the cathedral ceiling of the dining hall, the cold of the tabletop, it was all huli-huli in my head. Made me feel faded even though I was sober as a Jehovah.
“I think I just fell asleep with my eyes open,” Grant said.
“You did,” DeShawn said, “I seen it. Me, I’m just trying to keep from pissing myself. How am I supposed to take a leak when I got all this in the way?” He jiggled his ice-packed knees. “They ice up our knees like this, they should give us some diapers, too.”