The bar’s big enough and almost empty anyways. I sit right at the bar and get a beer, it goes down fast and cold with a couple flexes of my throat.
I order another and the bartender’s like, “Easy, Hawaiian.”
“Yeah yeah yeah,” I say. “I’m not driving anyway, howbout I do my thing.”
“Just go easy.”
“No worries,” I say. “Nothing gonna happen. I’ll be like the son you never had.”
“I got three sons and had to kick them all out the house,” the bartender says. “So.”
I laugh. “Well, I won’t let you down.”
“They said that, too.”
I raise my hand like, Enough, and the bartender goes over to polish the chrome part of the counter. Then I figure, this cheap little place, I bet that part of the bar is plastic, fake chrome everything. I almost say that, too, but I’m not that stupid. I bet his sons would have said that.
A few more beers go, a couple guys come in and sit down at the far end of the bar. I figure they’re from construction, because they both got on hyper-yellow shirts and when one guy raises his arm to signal for a couple of drinks you can see the sharp tan line on his arm. I keep drinking and they keep complaining about their wives or how it’s hard to catch good fish too close to the coast. After a while they’re still going: She always trying to get me to change something, my shirts or my haircut or whether I watch football on Sunday.
One of ’um looks over at me. Then they go back to talking to each other.
I stand up and go over next to their stools, lay my hand on the guy’s shoulder. He’s got these small ears and meaty cheeks with some Okinawan-style stubble.
“Eh, mahu,” I say. “Why the fuck were you looking at me all funny just now?”
He shrugs his shoulder out from under my hand.
“You heard me or what?” I ask.
“Go home,” he says. He doesn’t turn from his drink or his friend.
“Oh,” I say. “Only you were looking at me just now like you wanted my phone number or something. Guys looking to make a new fag for yourselves?”
The one guy, the one close to me, sighs, like a dog trying for sleep on the floor. “You’re all buss already,” he says. “Go home.”
Then to the bartender, “Eh, Jerry, maybe you should cut this guy off.”
“Your wives sound like real bitches,” I say. “Give me a few minutes with ’um. I’ll straighten everything out. Straighten ’um out to the tips of their toes.”
Both guys laugh and I think I hear the bartender laughing, too, until he says, “Brah, pay your tab and go piss on a wall somewhere.”
I take a bunch of money out my pockets. I know it’s all ones and not nearly enough so I flutter ’um over the bar, tell the guys to go suck some goat balls, and push myself out into the afternoon.
Something’s not right. It’s hard for tell where I am. Sun’s like a headache and my legs is not totally listening to my head. There’s the white stone pavilion in the distance, the round one over by the bus station. I try for turn my body toward it, find something in between to aim my legs at. Got the light post at the intersection, so I make it there and grab the metal and wait for the light to change. Feels like I’ll fall off the planet if I let go.
The light goes to a walk signal, but someone grips my shoulder and twists me around. It’s the construction moke from the bar. He swings his fist up into my chin and there’s a white explosion in my eyes and I sit down hard on the curb, but I don’t fall all the way over. Just sitting there like I’m relaxing, and the moke stands over me.
“Not so smart now, yeah?” he says.
“I’m still plenty—” I start saying, but I figure why finish talking and stand back up and punch him in the throat. He makes that huuuuh sound everyone loves to hear from the person they just hit. The moke staggers back and his knees go all chicken-wobble, but he doesn’t fall down, too.
Whole thing feels good. I want everything broken.
So when the moke comes at me again I drop my hands and wait for his next punch. He gives it, and there’s a black crunch and my head sparks again and I tilt and pitch and my shoulder blades smack the sidewalk. I open my eyes and I’m on the ground and there’s the sky and then grass and cigarette butts and plastic wrappers and the moke’s boots, stepping forward. I hear traffic go by in the street behind us. He punches me two more times. My skull feels like it splits open on the concrete each time and there’s all sorts of dull throbbing after. Got red spots dancing in my eyes.
There’s someone shouting and tires screech to a stop. More voices saying things to each other before the moke says to someone in the street, “Get back in your car.” I think it’s happening behind me. “I just talking with my cousin over here,” the moke says. “He fell down.”
Mostly my eyes are pointed at the sky, where gray breaks up into blue every now and then, but here comes a shadow over me. It’s the moke standing there, leaning down into my face. “Not so funny now, yeah?” he says, fresh beer fizzing off his breath.
“Thank you,” I say. I start noticing the hurt, places where it feels like I’m ten inches thick on my forehead, must be new lumps forming. My tongue is like a fully dead whale. “That was perfect,” I say.
“You sick fuck,” he says. Then he’s gone and it’s just sky again.
I close my eyes. Someone comes asking if I need help and there’s another voice—a woman’s—saying, “We’re down by Bayfront, over by the bus station. Yeah. Some sort of fight. He’s bleeding a lot.”
That first voice asks again if I need help. I keep my eyes closed and just listen.
* * *
THERE’S AN AMBULANCE that comes but they don’t take me anywhere, it’s just cuts and bruises and swelling, I still got my brain. They close all my cuts up right there on the curb, give me some cold-ass gel pack I can press over my lumps, and I cannot believe it, but I make the next bus. Driver doesn’t even flinch when I get on and he sees my bust-ass face. Plenty empty seats, I find one on the sunset side and lay my head back against the sagging headrest. Smell the ashtray stink, hear the old vinyl creak when I squirm in the seat. The inside lights drop down and we leave Hilo.
22
KAUI, 2008
San Diego
God, please let me forget this winter. First came December, an ugly end to the semester. Me and Van like strangers in our dorm room, functioning off the smallest working vocabulary we could, one-word answers to each other. Trying to be in the room only when the other person wasn’t. Each time we were forced into that tiny space, it felt like something was strangling me, right? We tried our best to get ourselves out of tune, so one of us was coming while the other was going and we were only there when the lights were out and we could sleep away our shared space. Finals in Vector Calc and Physics III and materials in front of me like a guillotine, trembling above the bloodstained chopping block.
In the middle of that hell Mom called. It was over. Noa was gone. Dean had found a landslide that ended in the sheer edge of a cliff into the sea and that was what had taken Noa to death. We had his backpack and a wrecked boot and that was it. I talked with Mom on the phone and I talked with Dad on the phone and I talked with Dean on the phone. No one had any opinions about the world. The calls were full of quiet space. I think we were focused on breathing. Take this breath, then the next. Each day I tried to sort out the words and symbols in my homework, work that was supposed to be my best shot at becoming something, while all around me the things I’d thought would survive were extinguished. Van gone. Noa gone. Classes next. Let it be.