But it doesn’t happen. Augie shakes his head, something he’s remembering that he won’t say. The realization comes to me: he is cracking, inside; I’m losing him.
“You heard that?” he says. He pivots toward the hall, our bedroom the rectangle of light at the other end, where the ceiling fan is creaking out a constant beat. “Like a song.” And when he says that there’s a flicker of recognition in my head, of what I’ve just seen, and something now that feels the same. There’s the smell, the same smell the man on the Pali left behind: wet ferns, thriving soil, seedy and brown and spicy, a lawn after rain, a field being harvested. It’s coming off Augie.
“Hey,” I say.
Augie starts moving down the hall, only says Mmm? over his shoulder.
“Augie, stop.”
He disappears into the dark bedroom, and I follow, stopping at the doorway. Augie is sitting on the bed in the darkness.
“Where did you go?” I ask as gently as I can.
He starts rolling his shirt off over his head.
“I was walking,” he says, his lips moving through the threadbare shirt. “All up the way, with the water. Up the way. Toward the clouds, the Pali.
“Farther back you go, bigger the houses get here, yeah? You and me was gonna get a two-story house, big lanai on top, watch the sunrise. Watch the sunrise. You remember? Here comes the sun, we gonna watch it from our lanai?”
It was a dream he and I had, a vacation we went to the same way people come to these islands, something they store away for their cold and bitter city winters, the blue-and-gold-and-soothing beauty of something possible in the near future: us on the lanai of our own home, high in the hills, looking down at the island’s green ridges, the ocean after.
“We never getting that house,” he says. “No no no, chicken shit, we only getting this chicken shit”—he has his shirt off, and he flings it toward the closet doors—“closet, tiny bed, this stink, old, beat-up chicken-shit house. We gonna die just like this.”
It’s the most clarity his voice has had since he’s walked in the door. He’s coming back into focus. The smell that was here is leaving just as quickly. His hand on his knee is trembling. I kneel down and grasp it. He won’t look at me. I move my knees forward and hug against him, my shoulder under his chin, and a sob jerks from his chest. Another. I want to tell him immediately, what I saw on the bus, how it gives me so much hope. Even now I can feel, the two are connected. What is it he walked to in the night? What is it that’s trying to reach us?
“Stay with me,” I say to Augie. “Please, Augie, please. Stay with me. Stay.” I say it over and over, as if it’s the music he heard, as if it’s what’s been in his head all along.
21
DEAN, 2008
Waipi‘o Valley
Four weeks is how long it’s been, yeah, which means no job left for me back in Spokane, soon not enough money for my part of the rent, but I don’t care, I go down and up to the other side of Waipi‘o, into Waimanu and beyond. For real I can run the whole trail now, and this morning I’m on at dawn and by the time the first surfers is splitting the ocean at the mouth of the valley I’m most the way up the other side, on the Z-Trail, my legs going like pistons. Below me there’s the whole green valley and the lines of waves rolling in, one after another, cracking across the sand and stone and scraping back out.
I’m still searching for Noa, all alone now after the SAR team and family and friends had to stop. Sometimes Uncle Kimo and some of his friends come along, but I move so much faster they just get left hours behind.
For most the time since I left Hawai‘i it didn’t matter what Noa was, because I was all basketball. But when I fucked that up, what was the point of me? Just making beer money at a package-handling company, waiting around for what? But when Mom and Dad had for go back to O‘ahu, or else lose their jobs, and we still hadn’t found Noa yet—there they were on the back lanai at Kimo’s place, both of them with swole faces, red no-sleep eyes, quiet because every time one of them talked they’d just cry—never mind my bad job and ratty little room in Spokane, they needed me again. Here I am. I can still do this, and who knows what it’s gonna make me after.
I keep moving. Over the crest of Waipi‘o, through the thirteen gullies after that, the cold coming off the streams. When I cross each one I can feel the sore curve of the river rocks on the bottom of my feet, then after there’s mud that sucks at my ankles, stinks like pig, but I keep moving. I speed up, even. Gotta get to the far side of Waimanu and start searching there again.
Steep miles, me down the front side of Waimanu, into the valley, mostly empty except for a few tourists stupid enough to hike here in the winter. Hala plants and gray sand and black-egg rocks the size of refrigerators. All these haoles squatting out by the edge of the ocean, or back by the dirty lake, or the cold-ass waterfall. Makes me shake my head every time. Welcome to Hawai‘i, dumbasses, here’s wet rocks and shitty camp food in an empty valley.
I go more miles. Up the other side of Waimanu, right on time. I shove a PowerBar into my mouth and chew, my jaw clicking by my ear. I already searched all of these parts of the trail, so mostly I’m running through here. Machete slapping on the outside of my backpack and the ruff ruff ruff cotton sounds of my jeans. My ankles is strong still from basketball. That’s one thing I got. Plus I figure I lost plenty weight, from all the running and hiking and small food since I been searching. No more Korean ribs and white rice. I feel light as hell, moving like a mongoose again, like I got a basketball in my palm.
But then I slow down. This is the new part of the trail for me. I’ve checked the back of the valley, near the waterfalls, I’ve checked our old campsites and down along the coast. I spent days checking through what looked like little side trails he might have followed, hacking back the new growth, crunching over stiff weeds and heavy grass. Yesterday I found this dying old cabin, I think it used to be from the state-park people or something. Holes in the walls and the ceiling and a sagging floor. He wasn’t there, no sign of anyone, even, but it was as far as I got before I had to turn back.
This time when I reach that place, there’s something tugging me hard. Got a flow feeling, almost like when I was mongoosing on the basketball court back in the day. Everything around me bends away out my vision and there’s just the one thing, only this time instead of my body moving between players it’s my body moving between trees. The leaves lean away, the ground not sucking me down or rolling my ankles but holding me up, boosting each step, and the vines and the grass I swear start pulling back so this whole new path opens, through the dirt and bugs and green.
It’s a clearing. The trees and grass go right up to the edge like they didn’t use to stop, and at the edge there’s huge cracked plates of dirt and mud and even rock that’s all chewed off, like it recently broke, and there’s a steep slope for maybe thirty feet before it breaks again into a straight drop a thousand feet into the cracking surf.
And down that slope before the straight drop I can see this funny lump, poking upside down from some of the dirt. Takes me a minute, but I figure out what it is: a hiking boot. I can’t reach down the slope by myself, too steep, guaranteed the whole thing would pitch me into the ocean. But there’s a tree small enough I can hook my legs around ’um, like I’m riding a horse upside down. I lock in and swing upside down and the dizzy comes into my head, like syrup. But I hang down the slope and can reach the boot, the dirt all torn and the loose plants going below it, over the cliff. I snag the boot with one hand and pull myself back upright. Sit away from the edge. Inside the boot there’s some plants and mud and yeah, just like that, brown stain of old blood, all along the ankle and heel.