“We don’t have much light left, and it looks like it’s going to start raining,” one of the SAR crew says. She’s haole, her hair braided in a knuckled ponytail and her blue baseball cap pulled down low on her face. “I think we’re going to call it for the day.”
“Fuck that,” I say. “There’s still light. I got a headlamp.”
Dad is standing there, too. His eyes has these folds of skin under them with lines all sharp and broken. He leans against a tree and lets out a long breath. When I look at his hands on his thighs I can see they’re all shaking like he’s run through with electric current. I see it and I think again: Something is wrong.
Uncle Kimo has his hat off and runs his hand through his thick black hair. His gray shirt is sweat-dark all across his chest. Everyone looks like they want to sit down, but there’s nowhere to sit because everything is mud and there’s just this narrow little trail.
“We have to make sure we can make it back to the valley floor so the chopper can come grab us,” the SAR lady says. “And I’m not running Pomai all night.” She gives the German shepherd two good, whumping pats on the side.
Then rain starts falling. First it’s just a few spitty drops, but it starts to pick up until there’s a tapping drizzle.
“I’m staying,” I say.
“We’re all going back down,” Dad says. He stands back up off the tree he was leaning against.
“He’s still up there somewhere,” I say. “Not like he gets a break just because it’s raining.”
“We have to go back,” the SAR woman says. She turns the dog. The dude with her, the other SAR guy, who’s Japanese but pretty big and cop-looking, turns, too, and steps back down.
“I’ll sleep on the goddamn trail,” I say, but I’m already talking to their backs, everyone else going back down the trail. Leaving my brother or his body—no, my brother—to whatever this storm brings.
“Pussies,” I say. No one listens.
By the time we get back to base camp the rain is coming down gray and steady and the clouds washed out any of the sun. The tents are all up close together under some other trees, out past them there’s the lake and plenty bushes.
Dad’s talking with Uncle Kimo-them about running the Zodiac around to Waipi‘o Valley so they can get out and grab some more gear, and the SAR team’s all off talking together near their tents, and so I’m just standing alone, in the small rain under the ironwood trees.
For the first time I’m really starting for think Noa might be gone. Already I been thinking about all the things I wanna say sorry for, all the times I tripped him or pushed him or made anything in our house a weapon I could try on him when we was small. All the times I wanted for make him think I was the one with all the mana, even when we both knew that wasn’t true. There was this one philosophy class I been in at the university, where the professor was talking about force. He said people think force and power is the same thing, but really force is what you use when you don’t got power. I think about me and Noa and I’m like, I been using force my whole life. What does that make me?
The SAR helicopter is coming in for its people. As it comes down, the blades whack through the air and each beat hits me in the chest, going all the way through, out my ears, even though I’m probably three hundred feet away. The helicopter’s striped all yellow and red and it’s not a Blackhawk or like that, the ones in movies, it’s smaller, a beetle without wings. It’s loud. Each beat cracks the sky and then underneath that there’s a silvery whine. The grass all washes back and flaps at the edges. The SAR team and their dog run to it with their heads ducked, their jackets snapping in the wind and the rain, and the lady in front, the one with the dog who told us we had to stop looking for my brother, she’s clamping her hat to her head, and she and the guy behind run with that funny ducked-head, creeping-robber run, and they climb up and the blades run faster and crack harder, and all the grass leans away as the SAR team rises up and swings outta the valley.
20
MALIA, 2008
Kalihi
Me and Augie both had to come back to Kalihi a week ago. We left the Big Island to return to our another-day-another-dollar life, not our choice, because I know my son is still alive, somewhere in those valleys, and I want to be there when he makes it back out. But we would’ve lost everything—our jobs, the pathetic rusting house we rent, our junker car—if we’d stayed on the Big Island another day. So we’d stuffed back up our duffel bag and suitcase and stood in the gravel outside Kimo’s place with the early-morning bird burbles and chirps, the cool vanilla skies.
“We gonna find him,” Kimo said, the white of his eyes browned from all the sleepless nights in the valleys, bushwhacking and tramping beside Augie.
“Yeah,” Augie said. “We going to, one way or the other.”
“Nah, come on,” Kimo said, placing his meaty paw on Augie’s shoulder.
“You know,” Augie said, “maybe not. Maybe he’s gone, yeah? Maybe one of the valleys swallowed him whole.”
“Come on,” Kimo said. “No be like that.”
“Or maybe,” Augie started—I could see him trying to hold his face, and not let it break—“if he’s gone, we can try again.” He grinned, reached out, and goosed my ass. “We can make another Nainoa, yeah babe?”
And then he broke with laughter.
“You dirty, panting dog,” I said, laughing with them. “Always thinking about burying your next bone.”
“I cannot help,” Augie said, and giggled. “Let’s go inside real quick for something, Malia. Ah, Kimo, try wait here for five minutes.”
“Augie!” I said, but we couldn’t stop laughing, all of us.
That laughter carried us through the truck ride with Kimo, through the ranch hills and leaning trees and back sides of the valleys in Waimea, past the fingernails of beach and black flaking lava fields of South Kohala. But eventually we had to stop, of course, at the concrete and screaming engines of the airport, where it was impossible to not feel like we were abandoning our child. The plane took off and we arced along the clouds and landed back in a Honolulu that that seemed to have become both empty and dangerous. Everything could take something from us now; we had so little left.
I am still here, I remind myself. I am still here, and so is my son, I swear it.
* * *
DAYS WENT WITH NO NEWS, only that Dean and Kimo and a few others are still searching, and here I am now, driving my bus back to the station at the end of another shift. Empty and large, shuddering and cannonballing along the night roads. The most peaceful time of my day. I like to ride dark, turn off the seat lights and the cab, so that it’s just the instrument lights on the dash. There’s something soothing about the sheer weight of what I pilot.
I’m halfway down the Pali, almost to the Nu‘uanu turnoff, and from between the trees, below the sloping green shoulders of the Ko‘olaus around me, Honolulu is swelling into view, the yellow-and-red haze of lights in the night.
The bus headlights sweep brightly ahead of me, showing asphalt, more asphalt, then guardrail, and then they catch a figure on the highway ahead. It is a man, stooped and almost naked, only a malo cloth wrapped around his hips and boto, then barefoot and bare legs and bare chest, dark-dark skin. He wears a lei po‘o on his head, leaves spiked out in a crown, although his head is tilted strangely to one side, his eyes in black shadow.