House of Many Gods (29 page)

One night the sound of sirens screaming up and down the road. Cops had busted up a drug deal back in the valley and gave chase to one of the dealers whose truck was painted with skull and bones. During the
pursuit, he took a curve too wide. The speeding truck crashed into a ravine and flipped over, crushing the girl beside him.

Ana squeezed Rosie’s hand as the surgeon spoke softly, measuring each word for tact as he explained Makali‘i’s condition, her shattered skull, her chances of recovery. In the following weeks Rosie sat silent, tended by the family while Ana watched her child, a strapping boy named Koa Jacob Jesus. He would be a three-god child. As she held him, she watched cars drive slowly past, like in the old days, the ogling of unregenerate voyeurs.

People pointed at the house where the “gang girl” lived, the one now rumored to be brain-dead. Ana imagined how they appeared to strangers: maimed and warped, a family of illegitimates. She suspected that Makali‘i would be their icon when they spoke of bad blood, the downward spiral of that family’s genes.

The girl remained in a coma for weeks. Her body, hooked up to transparent tubes, appeared smaller yet somehow larger—an immense absence in her presence. Whatever part of her still alive was no longer in the room. In that time, Rosie sat on the porch swing like a statue in repose, eyes slung low, her mouth and lips weightless. Sometimes she sat out there all night. In humid mornings, steam rose from her shoulders, air rippled with her body heat like concentric afterimages of herself. Her odor so strong they smelled her pulse.

No one in the family seemed able to speak. All they knew was pain. At night there was only the sound of cicadas like scorching heat rendered into sound. Even youngsters—little beauties dark and electric—moved on tiptoe, their expressions at the window sad. Lopaka’s face was so mythical and harsh, Ana moved close, wanting to press the tattooed teardrop near his eye as if it were a doorbell. Wanting to gain entry and share his pain.

She tried to talk to Rosie, to draw her out. Finally, she just sat with her, rocking back and forth. Afraid she was losing her, that Rosie’s mind would go, Ana began to pray. She even stopped using profanities. She waited. What would happen waited with her.

T
HE DAY WAS OVERCAST AND MOODY WHEN THE PHONE RANG
. Lopaka answered it, then left the house. Hours later he returned, switched off the ignition of the car, and sat staring through the windshield. Then he slowly walked up to the screen door and asked Ana to come out to the
yard. In the kitchen, she was suddenly aware of the smell of wet drainboards.

She stepped out to the
lānai
, and moved down the steps. She searched Lopaka’s face as he placed his hand on her shoulder. Then she sank slowly to the ground, folding like a paper doll.

Anticipating her question, in a confused reflex, he asked the question instead. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

“Is she?” Ana asked.

“She is.”

PART THREE
HŌ‘IKE NA KA PU‘UWAI
 
Revelations of the Heart

F
OR YEARS SHE WILL DREAM OF FLYING OVER MILES OF TREMBLING
, turquoise skin. Of planes stacked upside down like smashed toys. Boats sprawled belly-up across wrecked piers. A body floating in a harbor. She will remember buckled tarmac, her plane skidding sideways, coming to a bouncing stop. Relief crews stretching bright blue tarp over miles of roofless houses
.

She will remember the crunch of shattered glass as they climbed through the rubble of hotels, searching for survivors. Winds moaning through thousands of caved-in rooms. The wrecked and ringing chandeliers. When flashlight batteries went dead, they searched by candlelight. And when generators failed in makeshift hospitals, they performed surgery by candlelight
.

Ever after, when she sees flickering candles, she will think, ‘Iniki. ‘Iniki brought him to her. He was not in her life. And then he was
 …

T
HE HURRICANE HIT EVERY ISLAND—TAKING RESORTS, ENTIRE
towns. It shaved the island of Kaua‘i to the bone—whole forests denuded and flattened, buildings crushed like pickup sticks. For days highways were knee deep in water and debris, undermining the efforts of relief workers. And everywhere surfaces glittered with shattered glass, giving devastation a diamond shimmer.

Twenty-four hours after Hurricane ‘Iniki passed, across the blacked-out island homeless people huddled in armory shelters, or at campfires, or they walked the beaches, numb. Near the ruins of the Coco Palms
Hotel, Ana sat at a campfire holding a child who had been pulled unharmed from a nearly flattened house.

She rocked her back and forth, half crooning, “Shh, soon your mama and papa will come for you. Meanwhile, I will tell you a story.”

The child stopped struggling as Ana stared at the campfire.

“Now … shall I tell you of our island winds? Oh, there are so many they are worshipped as gods. Elders can name two hundred different kinds of winds. There is the
Kona
wind, warning of winter. It blows long and hard, brings gray, humid weather, torrents of rain! And there is
Ha‘i Mo‘olelo
, the ‘telling wind,’ that makes a haunting sound like bamboo nose flutes heard at night.”

Ana spoke softly, watching the child’s eyelids flutter. She prayed her sleep would last until her parents were found, that they would be all right, that she would never know the terror of thinking they were dead. While she gazed at the child, a stranger approached and stood listening, just beyond the light of the campfire.

“…  As with our winds, there are hundreds of rains. Each one is a god, and has a god-name …”

The child slept now, Ana felt her soft snores against her chest. She looked round the campfire at people needing comfort, and continued “talking-story.”

“…  Just now we have been in the ‘punishing rains and hurling winds,’ the time of
Makani Pāhili
, the hurricane. But now the hurricane is
pau
. We are in the gentle winds of healing.”

She covered the child with a blanket, and long before dawn a priest brought her parents, who took her in their arms. Ana had talked for hours, and now sat back exhausted. And that is when the stranger stepped out of the dark, his sudden face a match-strike, like a painting revealed on the wall of a cave.

He sat down at their fire and began to talk. He talked in mixed accents—the argot of a drifter—his words seeming to bob in the phlegmy workings of his lungs. At some point, almost shyly, he told them his name, then continued spinning tales, distracting them from the wreckage all around them.

The storm had left polluted rivers, water shortages, and, in the daytime, killing heat. Yet this stranger was dressed head to toe in black leather so stiff it creaked. His teeth were big and crooked, his face pale, slightly sunburned. Under thick, dark hair, his eyebrows shot out in ecstatic skyward angles. She found his eyes uncanny—black, intense—the
eyes of someone who could carve his life into another human’s skin. He handed out cigarettes and chain-smoked, the movement of his hand slow, almost tender, as he brought the cigarette to his lips. He seemed to anticipate each long inhale like someone who had known deprivation.

Ana glanced round the dying campfire at faces sad and dark as angels, as folks listened, intrigued by this man’s stories. He saw they were exhausted, newly homeless, some even wounded. Maybe he saw them as childlike, needing comfort, to just sit still and listen. So he continued, his long-winded yarns slipping through the hours. And listening, they learned how war and hunger had invented him. How his past seemed to give him permission.

He coughed, shared a warm beer, then talked again, rolling up his sleeves and pants. In growing light and heat, sweat cataracted down his neck, soaking through the leather shirt. Ana saw he was lean, of average height, snakes of muscles in his arms and legs. Yet, his hands were remarkably huge and scarred. As morning temperatures continued to rise, he slowly pulled off his leather boots, and then his socks. Even his feet were scarred.

A big red ball of sun ascended, yet he continued telling tales as if he needed to talk himself empty. The sun began to hover, then hammered overhead, the fire slowly embered. National Guardsmen in fatigues passed with chain saws, dragging chopped-up utility poles. The stranger paused in his telling, his eyes darting to armed Marines scouting for looters across the road. They stood laughing at a couple with shotguns in their laps, dozing in front of their dry-goods store. A slapdash sign stood between them, NOTHING HERE WORTH DYING FOR!

The storyteller yawned and someone asked him, “Tired, fellah? Where you from?”

He fell silent as if there were a right and a wrong answer. Now folks slowly stood, preparing to meet the new day’s manifesto of tragedies. A thousand more people homeless. Another dozen missing. Another body found. Ana gathered her things and glanced his way as dusty leaves fluttered overhead, casting the stranger in dappled sunlight. In that moment a kind of beauty gathered round him, the beauty of bright sky reflected off black stubble on his chin. He would lose them now; she saw his panic. It was like seeing the whole curve of a man’s life pass through him.

She kept her face neutral, hoping it looked kind, the particular kindness one extends to loners and the lost. He bent, helping someone fold a blanket. His shirt fell open; his bare chest looked skinny, almost adolescent.
He helped stamp out the fire, then leaned forward offering his hand, telling her his name again.

“Nikolai … Volenko.”

A name that seemed to fit his stories.

She shook his hand. “I’m Ana. Well, I’ve got to get back to the med team …”

“You are doctor?”

“Yes.”

“You live here on Kaua‘i?”

She shook her head. “I’m one of the volunteer medics from Honolulu.”

“So. What I can do to help you?”

The island was already glutted with branches of the military, the National Guard, Red Cross. So many disaster-relief organizations, storm victims were complaining that these people were eating all their rations.

“What did you come here to do?” she asked.

“Normally, I make films … documentaries.”

Ana looked up at half a dozen helicopters with camera lenses hanging from their bays. The media had swarmed in like locusts. She shook her head, picked up her backpack, and walked away.

He ran alongside her. “Wait. I am not ghoul like them. I flew in before hurricane. Was trying to get footage on … something else.”

“Like what? Our local drug trade? Our women’s prison?”

He skipped in front of her, blocking her way, then stood so close tiny shafts of dust danced between them.

“I am not sensationalist. My films are very relevant, very sympathetic.” Then he smiled. “You liked my stories?”

She thought of the amazing things he had told them. “They weren’t stories one would like, or dislike. Were they true?”

“Yes. And no. I watched you. You are very good listener.”

She started to ask what he was doing on the island, but was afraid it would turn into conversation and she would not be able to get away.

She stepped back, half joking, “You’ll die in this heat, in those clothes.”

He slapped the leather pants and grinned. “Yes. They are killing me.” Then he looked around nervously. “So. You do not need help?”

Ana shook her head. “But, thank you.”

Reluctantly, he bent to gather a canvas bag and backpack. For some reason she stood there, watching him prepare to go.

“Then. Is better I get off island quick. How I will find you in Honolulu?”

Before she could answer, he saw two Marines approaching from the distance. He suddenly wheeled and headed off.

Ana hesitated, then lifted her arm, calling, “Wait.”

He was already a scribble on the landscape.