This Is Paradise (10 page)

She sighed and lifted her hand from his. He let his fall back to the steering wheel. “My cousin can chant back twenty-five generations. That’s what it means to be from a place. And yet, you’re from Minnesota, and I’m from Vegas. How can that be?”

He wanted to say he wasn’t from Minnesota. He was from Hawaiʻi. Yet, that didn’t seem quite right. He was local, he knew that much. He was local and she wasn’t. But did that matter? Was local being from a place, or just of it? “I have to think about what you said.”

“I like when you think.” She took his hand again. “I’m happy we’re doing this. It’s good to take a vacation together.”

She looked out the window then, her cheek pressed against the plastic wall of the car, her hair tangling in the wind. They passed a house with two tireless cars in the yard and a lime green schoolbus on blocks. A dog lay panting beneath it in the cool dirt. “Remember when we went to North Shore together for the first time?” she said. “You packed your truck with a cooler of food and that tiny bridge on the way to Waimea was covered in water. The waves were practically at the road, and you wanted to
keep the windows rolled up with the air-conditioning on, and I wouldn’t let you. It’s like that every time, isn’t it?”

“I get hot is all.”

“And I don’t like the smell of air through the conditioner. It’s too clean.”

“What’s wrong with clean air?”

“It doesn’t smell like Hawaiʻi. It’s just like after you shower and all I smell is that green soap you use. You don’t smell like you.”

“What does me smell like?” He winked at her in the reflection of the windshield.

“Like mushrooms and dried limu and raw beef about to go bad.”

He made a face. “Sounds disgusting.”

“No, it’s wonderful.” She brought her mouth to his ear and whispered: “You smell like a man.”

Happiness was a balloon inflating inside his chest. He felt for the backpack behind his seat: inside its left pocket, tucked underneath a battery charger, was the ring. He ran his fingers along the nylon shoulder strap. The dozens of ridges in its weave were smooth and slippery.

“Tell me something else,” he said.

“Something else.” She smiled. “How about this: I love you like a wave loves sand.”

He thought of how the ocean unfurls in every direction on the beach and then retracts like a gigantic, curling tongue. “Hungrily?”

“Powerfully.”

The road crested and Cameron glimpsed a narrow inlet. The cliff walls were sheer, black rock, and the road hugged them, falling steeply. As they descended toward sea level, Mustang convertibles lined the narrow road, parked in even narrower turnouts. Every convertible had its top down. Between hala trees he glimpsed a couple of twentysomething girls walking gingerly across the stone beach. They held hands, fingers knitted together, arms raised above their heads as they tried to balance against one another. He saw a flash of hot pink, a purple flower pattern, a bare stomach. A little boy was collecting stones near the side of the road and placing them carefully in a red sand bucket.

“Tourists,” he said.

“They remind me of crabs. The color of their skin.”

Cameron nodded in agreement, then realized he didn’t feel the same. He knew tourists by their choice of car, not their skin color. Locals didn’t drive convertibles; they drove trucks. With air-conditioning.

They reached the bottom of one hill and began to ascend another. To their right, a narrow ravine cut deeply into the mountainside. The rock was hidden by the flat, feathered leaves of palapalai ferns, and two hundred feet above a waterfall surged over the cliff edge. The falls were white and slender, like the waist of a young girl. On the ground, the water streamed through the ravine and then beneath a narrow bridge, before being deposited into the ocean. Cameron pulled to the side of the road to let two
cars headed in the opposite direction pass over the bridge first.

“You had the right of way,” Becky said.

“But they’re coming downhill. It’s safer to let them go.”

She shrugged and looked out the window.

He felt her drifting from him and struggled to find a way to draw her back. “So why is Hāna so important to the Hawaiian people?” he asked finally. They were high on a cliff again, above the harsh winds that made the water take on the wrinkled appearance of elephant skin. The sky was the same color as the sea, and only its smooth surface separated it from the ocean.

“In ancient days, Hāna is a vacation spot for the Big Island chiefs,” Becky said. She always spoke of history in the present tense, which never failed to unsettle him. To him, history was not available for reintroductions and reliving but accessible only via careful and protracted study. For Becky, however, the past and present existed in the same moment. In her memory the two met, and through their meeting, she layered them, until the past and present were like ocean and sky, without noticeable boundary. “The chiefs paddle the channel between Big Island and East Maui, spending their summers in Hāna. They build second homes even. So when King Kamehameha and his armies want to conquer Maui, they land in Hāna first because they know the people won’t rise up against them. They will be torn between allegiances.”

“And are they?” He corrected himself: “
Were
they?”

“I guess. They tell the Maui chiefs that Kamehameha has landed, but they don’t fight him. I suppose they can’t. They are outnumbered. They don’t want to fight. East Maui has never been known for its warriors.”

“How do you know that?”

“Know what?”

“That East Maui isn’t known for its warriors.”

Her eyes lifted to the upper right corner of their sockets until he saw the fine, red veins at the outer corner. Finally, she said, “I suppose I read it somewhere. Wherever I read about the battle. Why do you ask?”

“It just seems like an odd blanket statement. An entire portion of an island not being known for its ability to fight? That’s an era when everybody would have been trained to fight.”

She threw up her hands and let them land with a smack on her bare thighs. He noticed how her skirt had edged up her legs, her skin smooth and brown, and he almost regretted challenging her. “This is how Hāna folks are known today. As farmers, not fighters.”

“But what of then?”

“What of then?” She turned her head toward him. He looked at her lips. They were lightly closed, not pressed together in anger, but closed all the same.

“What are you thinking?” he asked carefully.

She sighed. He could sense she wanted to tell him something but chose not to. Instead, she said, “I’m reminded of driving out here as a little girl. My dad is taking
the curves too fast and my mom keeps saying she’s dizzy. That’s how they always are. You drive much slower.”

“I have to go slow. I haven’t driven this road as many times as your dad.”

“I didn’t mean it as a bad thing. I like how you drive. Cautiously, carefully.” She leaned across the console and kissed him gently on the cheek. “You’re a good man, Cam.” He wanted to ask why she had said that, but he hesitated and then it was too late. “You know what?” she said, sitting up on her knees. “The trees are the same color now as when I was a child.”

“Your memory is a vise,” he laughed.

“I can’t help it.”

“I don’t mind. I figure as long as I have you, I never have to remember anything on my own.”

She raised her right eyebrow and touched her tongue to the bud of her upper lip. “Oh, I’ll make sure you remember a few things.” She reached her hand between his legs and curled her fingers around the crotch of his boardshorts. He tried to focus on the road even as her fingers thrummed gently against his testicles. She smiled up at him, her mouth slightly open, as if she was about to laugh or kiss him or both. He felt himself get hard. He wanted to watch her, the movement of her face, the creases squeezing at the corners of her eyes, her lower lip curving over her labiomental fold, that soft indentation above her chin.

She slid her thumb between the Velcro fastenings of
his shorts. He glanced away from the road again. Her hair hung over her eyes. She had worn it down just for him. Usually the soft curls framed her cheekbones, making her face appear lean and delicate, but today the humidity had weighed down her hair, and she looked different to him. She was breathing warmly on his thigh. He studied her for a moment longer. He wanted to remember her like this. He looked up just in time.

The dog was in the middle of the lane. It had lifted its left foreleg and frozen, staring at Cameron. He slammed on the brakes. The tires screeched against the asphalt. He closed his eyes, waiting for the impact. A lumpy bump. He heard Becky’s shoulder hit the dashboard, hard. She yelped. He opened his eyes. The dog hadn’t moved. It watched him.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, gasping. “Are you okay?” He didn’t look at Becky, just kept his eyes on the dog, and he felt as if he was addressing the animal rather than her.

She followed his gaze out the windshield. Her hand was still on his leg, her weight now, too, but she didn’t seem to notice how she was pressing against him. He saw her see the dog. The animal was black and white, with longish hair that had collected dirt and leaves. Cameron waited for it to run, dash into the forest to their right or scramble down the incline to their left. Becky lifted her hand from his leg. He wanted the dog to make a decision.
Go on
, Cameron thought to himself.
Make a move
.

He heard the passenger door open, and suddenly
Becky was on the two-lane road. A guy in a red convertible honked behind them, started to pull past, and then had to brake hard to avoid hitting her. “What in the hell?” the man yelled.

Becky didn’t seem to hear him. Her attention was on the dog. She held out her arm, the back of her hand facing it in a practiced way. The dog eased toward her, sniffing her. Somewhere behind Cameron another car honked. He wanted to yell at them that his girlfriend was trying to save a dog. And he wanted to yell at Becky to get the hell in the car and leave the animal to its fate. He wanted all these things at once, and he didn’t understand why Becky was scooping up the large dog in her arms.

Becky’s legs peeped out from beneath the dog’s body. Its lean face replaced Becky’s head. She wrestled it toward the car, the dog squirming to be released, or perhaps with delight, for as soon as Becky loosened her grip it leapt into the front passenger seat and settled itself there. It had big eyes, deep brown and watery, and it looked up at Cameron with great expectation.

“No,” Cameron said, looking at the dog. “Not in the front seat.” The red convertible screeched past their Aveo. Two more cars followed. Cameron watched them with something akin to jealousy.

Becky lifted the mutt’s hind legs and pushed it into the backseat. It sat in the center, leaning forward, its nose sticking between the two front seats. Becky pulled her door closed. “Ready?”

“For what? Where are we going?” Cameron turned to face her, but the dog was there, breathing on his shoulder. Long, curling lines of spit drooped from the dog’s open mouth and onto Cameron’s T-shirt. “Gross.”

“He’s lost. We have to find his house.” Becky tickled the underside of the dog’s neck and then pushed him back when he tried to step on the center console. “Stay!” she commanded. The dog sat.

Cameron put the car into drive again, though he didn’t know where they were going. The dog had no collar. No collar meant no tags, and no tags meant no address. Still, Becky was insistent. “We’ll just turn down the next road. These communities are so small. Someone will recognize him.”

“It.” Cameron pressed the gas pedal.

Becky frowned at him. “Look.” She pointed to the dog’s underside. “The dog’s a ‘he.’ ”

Cameron didn’t reply. He watched for a turnoff, but they’d already passed the one for Keʻanae and, if he remembered correctly, Wailua was another five miles. There was no way the dog had traveled that far on the highway. “We have to turn around.” Cameron lowered the windows all the way. The dog stank.

She nodded, serious. “You’re right.” She gripped his right arm, and her fingers dug into his skin. She leaned over to kiss him but the dog was there again, panting on Cameron’s cheek, its breath smelling of rancid trash and shit, and Cameron turned his face away. She laughed.
“Back,” she commanded, and again the dog retreated to the backseat.

Cameron found a turnout at the top of a cliff and pulled a U-turn. He headed back toward Keʻanae. In the rearview, Cameron watched as the dog circled twice and then plopped down on the backseat. It looked at him and panted, its lips stretched into a smile, and Cameron smiled back. He really wasn’t so bad. Cameron just needed to recover from the shock of nearly hitting him and Becky’s impulsive rescue. Cameron didn’t like the way she had jumped into traffic, the cars honking at her. She had made him feel helpless. He chastised himself for not getting out with her or at least yelling at the jerk in the red convertible.

Becky rested her hand on his thigh again, and for a moment he could imagine them years from now, in a car like this one, their own dog in the backseat and a road in front of them, a vacation, a life. Yes, this was what he wanted: Becky, a dog, a baby or two, and an endless stretch of road. “I love you,” he said. He wanted her to feel the weight of their future, too, the hope of it and the moment of it folding over on the present. She smiled softly and then peered back at the dog.

“Uh-oh,” she whispered.

“What?” He slowed the car and glanced in the rearview. The dog’s chest hair was delicate, white giving way to a pale tawny color. Beneath these fine tendrils, next to its pinkish skin, three thick, black lines of fleas were snaking through the fur. The fleas streamed beneath the stray’s
armpits and up into the dark scruff of its neck. They disappeared over the dog’s sides, finding their way onto its back, and he pictured them hopping on to the upholstery in great parabolic leaps.

He hit the brakes in the middle of a hill. “Get it out of the car!” To their left was a rock cliff. To their right the incline fell precipitously toward the ocean several hundred feet below.

“We can’t leave him here!” Becky squealed. “Just keep driving. We’ll turn off at the first road.”