I knew they’d know Nainoa, or Dean, all the legends I didn’t want to be mine. If I stayed with those kids and did my hula, what then? Old Hawai‘i life would slip back into me like a sleeping pill. Sludge me down until I was just another member of the club. Just again his shadow, shaped like a sister.
* * *
BUT THEN THERE WAS THE CLIMBING: That day when in the bland and heavy, pancake-smelling dining hall Van said to Katarina, “I bet you she can climb. You think?” And Katarina said, “Let’s find out.”
Van’s friend had a car he’d gotten on the cheap. A busted-up Japanese sedan from who knows what year, right. Bumper duct-taped and fence-wired back to the frame. All the seat belts cut or chewed or sawed or burned off, a radio that sounded like electrocution. Upholstered in, okay, a vague armpit smell. All that mattered was it had four seats and a trunk big enough for our climbing gear and that Van’s friend had this communal key he’d leave around like a treasure hunt and if you found it you could drive the car. If it was still in the lot and hadn’t been towed.
It was still in the lot. We took it north. It was a golden early California hour. We had the windows down like you do in Hawai‘i and everyone’s hair was bucking with the beat of the wind, except Hao, his swirled explosion of spiky hair too short and stiff to move much. We stayed in the left lane all the way, the billboards and the barbed-wire lots and the shitty endless sameness strip malls slipping in and out of view with their stucco white. And the matchstick-brown-and-sagebrush hills. Until Van blinkered us off the 5 and it wasn’t until the loop and drift of the turn gave me gravity in my belly that I realized we’d been doing above ninety the whole way.
All the veins of retarred cracks in the road plus pink-gold smogginess of sunup plus the prickled slack palm trees and flat brown rectangles of unused land. Van drove down two wrong streets and past a barely up chain-link fence with frothing pit bulls, barking their guttural balls off.
Katarina and Hao were bantering like the stupidest siblings. Now Katarina was suggesting Hao touched himself while listening to boy bands on the radio. Now Hao said it wasn’t masturbation, he was just learning the dance moves. Which brought them back to me, hula, oh God—
“Are we almost there?” I called out to Van.
“Okay, okay,” Van said. We all bounced with the sudden potholing of the car. Gravel popping under the tires. “Here we are,” Van sang out. She swung a sudden right and locked the brakes into a skid. The dust cloud caught up to us and when it cleared we were looking at the darkened husk of grain silos, columns of cylinders weeping unidentified industrial creams, skeletal crane arms and scaffolding lurking behind them. A small flock of crows ribboned into the breeze, crying out in creaky voices.
And then we were inside the thing. The ground floor of the elevator crammed tight with riveted beams and spears of light, huge pipe joints and all along the train-car-shaped center aisle, rail tracks for whatever carts used to move here. I couldn’t believe how holy the air felt.
It was just me and Van standing in there at first, Hao and Katarina still catching up. Van’s breaths sounded small and even as she turned to take it all in. She hooted once, softly. The brightness in her face. I said okay, this was okay, only I wasn’t talking about the climbing or the elevator. But I didn’t tell her that. I didn’t tell her how much I wanted what was happening, right now. All around there were so many angles and edges and blunt corners and places to grab and hold on and go up.
“Sometimes this is all I think about,” she said. She nodded off to Hao and Katarina as they entered. “I love them,” she said. “Let’s see if you can keep up.”
“You tell me how my ass looks in these jeans when you’re watching me from below,” I said.
She laughed. We were looking right at each other. Take a match and hold it to the strip, start the strike. Somewhere at the microscopic level there are whole worlds of hot light that gather and jump to the match tip. That’s what we were.
“All right, hula girl,” she said. “Be a bitch on it.”
We climbed. At first just me and Van, straight up our columns of iron, clutching the ridges and edges and using our rubber-soled feet like paws, dancing and moving and pulling, going up together. As we went we spread out, all four of us, grunting and clattering and rising up off the floor, climbing our way into the ribs of this long-dead steel giant. Toward the heart of the thing. I moved closer to Van, Katarina, Hao. I wanted us together, wanted them to feel with me the big nameless thing we’d worked our way into, a silence like the presence of our own private God.
* * *
I TALKED TO my parents on the phone but I hated it. They kept me a person of two places, okay? A person of here and there, and not belonging in either place. But if it was a give and take between the two, Hawai‘i was starting to lose. I could almost feel the sun and sand and salt of Hawai‘i flaking off.
“How’s the haole land?” Dad would ask, his favorite way to start calls.
“No one showers and the food sucks,” I said.
And Dad straight cackling on the other end of the phone. Almost so I could hear his smile lines. “I knew it!” he said. “I knew it. Fuckin’ mainland and its stink-ass haoles. So, what, you’re running the campus now or what?”
So you are paying attention, Dad, I thought. Maybe just a little bit.
“You know it,” I said. “I started robbing banks on the weekends, too.”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Dad said—both to me and to Mom, off-phone. “Better be, with the bill they’re sticking us with.”
I wanted to say I’d cosigned on the loans and it wasn’t just him. That some of the kids here didn’t have any loans, or if they did, spent them like the future was a certain thing: new laptops and nights out at restaurants and the sort of apartments where the cabinets were, like, Scandinavian sexy. While I was working off scanned pages or library-lifted books where I’d removed the magnetic strip. Quadrupling up on the McDonald’s Dollar Menu to stash enough in our mini-fridge for half the week, then chopsticking bricks of saimin on the late nights. I didn’t forget where I was from or how each semester’s tuition bill alone felt like I was holding a gun to their heads. And my own.
I clamped my mouth shut. So hard pain cranked through my teeth. “I know, Dad, trust me, I know.”
“People these days,” Dad said, “it’s like everyone’s out to get as much money from you as they can, yeah? Like, if they figure the price can be just a little higher, every time, they raise ’um up.”
“So life’s good at home?” I said. “You and Mom still doing your thing?”
“What, you mean like sex?” he asked. “Yeah, we still oofing. In fact, just last night we was—”
“Dad—”
“No, serious, just last night we went for happy hour at Osmani Bar, and I was like, ‘Babe, no one gonna see nothing in the parking lot, and—’”
“Dad! I’ll hang up the phone. I swear to God.”
He laughed and laughed. “Only joke! Sheesh, everyone’s all uptight over there. We doing good, Kaui, we doing good. I dunno. Working our asses off. Price of paradise and like that. It’s home.”