I take a knee. I see what’s right there in my hand, the answer. I check down the slope again. There’s all this colored fabric sticking out from where I yanked the boot out of the dirt. I set the boot down gentle, then I hook my legs around the tree and go upside down again, reach out for the fabric. When I first grab it, the cloth doesn’t come. So I yank and dig and yank and jerk and whole scabs of mud shift and slide away and pitch over the cliff, I hear cracks and hissing. I pull one last time and up comes a backpack. Orange and red and just like Mom and Dad described to the SAR, back when we first started. I pull it up into me, all these ropes of heat and pain along my arms from pulling, and then get myself right side up. My skull is spangling from the upside down.
I sit cross-legged and set the backpack in my lap. It’s ripped open in a couple places, and when I lift the main flap a food wrapper, like from a trail bar or something, flashes like a knife blade in the light and curls off into the air. There’s a few muddy clothes inside, then part of a camping stove and a few nylon bags with cords and stuff, and when I shift those aside, there’s his ‘ukulele. It’s in a soft case, but when I unzip the case the ‘uke is there, clean and true.
I set it down like it’s a baby. Next to the boot, where I can see the rusty bloodstain, and behind and far down, the surf cracks and rips against the cliff.
* * *
“YOU’RE BACK?” Uncle Kimo asks, when I come out of the room at his house the next morning.
I can’t say nothing, I can’t make my voice. I shake my head.
“Eh,” Uncle Kimo says. He’s looking at me serious. “Eh, Dean, what happened, brah?”
I’m shaking. I can’t stop shaking, it’s like I’m run through with that volt that hits at the end of a good session at the gym, the way I used to get after double overtime, just shook with light and juice, ready for jump. Only this one is different, got a blue feel to it, like I know it’s one that’s going come and go and wreck me whenever it feels like it, and I reach out and touch the counter and I start for say, I think I know what happened to Noa, but the words don’t come.
Why can’t I stop shaking?
I go back into the room and bring the boot, the backpack, the ‘ukulele, set ’um on the table. Scabs of mud flake down.
“Okay,” Uncle says, and he blows a good breath. “Okay.”
Maybe we wait awhile or whatever, Uncle just thinking, then he says, “We gotta get some people, we gotta go get the body. Your parents, too.”
“No.”
“No?”
“There’s no more body. Just got one place where there was a landslide, broke off into a cliff. There’s nothing else.”
“What do you mean,” Uncle Kimo says, “nothing? Gotta be something. You went down farther, or what? All the way to the bottom of the slide?”
“There’s nothing,” I say. “Past where the boot and the backpack was buried.”
“You have to—”
I tell him I’m not doing nothing else, not another thing. I don’t have to do one more fucking thing. All this time I been here. Before and since, while everyone else went back to everything they had, I’m in the valley almost every day, sinking down into the mud and shit and centipedes and coming back up, climbing the long wet shining asphalt out Waipi‘o, where I kept seeing the bent guardrails and the busted, black frames of wrecked cars down in the forest below, drunks that went off the road and died making themselves into comets, their leftovers rotting in the trees, it was only me still out there, still searching. All for nothing.
Back when the sharks first gave us back Noa, I was the first one for reach him on the boat. I don’t talk about it much. That time it was crazy quiet when the sharks came at us, the crew leaning over the railing, seeing the lead shark nudge Noa up against the side of the boat, not biting, not thrashing, just placing him as close to us as they could. Then the captain and his deckhands with their ropes and loops plucking my brother up, and the sharks dropped back, darker darker darker shadows until they became the deep blue. I was right there. The deckhands and Dad pulled Noa over the rail and I bear-hugged my brother hard, while Mom came out of nowhere and tackled us both. Got so that all three of us were crushed up together and there was the smell of mustard and potato chips and fruit punch from our lunch, our pulses beating on top of each other, and our arms and legs crushed together, me and Mom and Noa, like so you couldn’t figure where one of us ended and the other started.
I was supposed for be the older brother, but after that day it was like every day he was growing up faster, until it was like I was the younger brother. And now here I am, carrying the last piece of clothing to touch his blood. Uncle Kimo’s standing there, looking at me with liquid eyes that’s all shining and trembling.
“You gotta call your mom and dad,” he says.
“I will,” I say, and he looks like he doesn’t believe me, because Uncle’s a smart man.
“Let me do it my way,” I say. “I found him, not you.”
“I know,” he says.
“No you don’t,” I say.
Uncle Kimo starts for say something, then he stops. He leaves me there and wanders out to the lanai, then past it, out into the yard, with his hands up on his head like he’s trying for get breath after a long run. I go the side table, where he’s still got a landline, and white-knuckle the headset for who knows how long.
I start for dial Mom. I hang up.
I start for dial Dad. I hang up.
I start for dial Mom again. I get to the last digit, but I stop and hang up.
Uncle Kimo had come back inside, now he’s watching me from across the living room.
“No one answered, Uncle,” I say. I get up from the table, grab my shoes, and go to the front door.
“Where you going?” he asks.
“Out,” I say.
He crosses his arms.
“I can call when I get back,” I say. “They’re always up late.”
“Don’t go thinking you can take my truck,” Uncle Kimo says. “I gotta go back office after lunch.”
I wave a hand over my shoulder. “Great, thanks for the help, Uncle,” I say. I’m out the front door, down the driveway, up the hill, and thumb-out on the highway. Start walking toward Hilo, and after like fifteen minutes a car pulls up ahead of me along the shoulder. The driver’s this old hapa-Japanese guy, clothes like he’s been working in a garden, and he asks me where I’m going.
“Anywhere but here,” I say.
“You have to have a destination,” he says.
No I don’t, not anymore. I almost say it, but keep it inside instead. “Hilo, then,” I say. “Thanks.”
* * *
IN HILO, I walk around Bayfront and watch the ocean and the breakwater. The water’s all gray and murky, same like Waipi‘o Valley after a storm, only this is a long curved bay, with barges and cruise ships out by one end, where the harbor is, and even farther past that, Coconut Island and the hotels. I watch the trees above me, their spiked fronds clattering lazy. All along the Bayfront road there’s these small-kind old-school businesses, hand-lettered signs and everything. I go into the first bar I can find.