This Is Paradise (5 page)

The policewoman follows our gaze with her eyes and watches the waves with us. For a moment, we’re all looking at the ocean with the same longing, the same sense of hurling through time and space. She approaches us. “If we talk now, you all should still have time for a short session,” she whispers, smiling gently.

We relax. We can trust her. We’ll make it into the ocean after all. With sudden clarity, we remember hearing splashing in the water the night before and a woman’s scream. We hadn’t thought it anything more than a shriek of laughter.

“I tink we heard one scream last night,” Cora begins. At the same moment, Lani cuts in with “She neva like listen.”

The policewoman pulls out a pad of paper. She looks at all of us at once. “Girls, let’s start at the beginning.”

By the time Paula conference calls us on our office lines we’ve already watched the early news. We tell her the police sketch looks just like him, that man with Susan. We have learned the girl’s name and now we use it. Susan. It makes us feel as if we’re helping her.

Paula tells us a group of surfer girls contributed to the artist’s sketch, which Paula personally approved. “Just like how we saw him,” she says, echoing the rest of us. Her voice is hollow over the phone, and we know what she’s thinking: We’re older and more experienced than the Susans of the world. We’re career women. We should have seen that Susan was getting herself into trouble. We should have done something.

“What about the brother?” Kiana asks as if to divert attention from herself, or ourselves.

“He returned to the hotel not long after we all went home,” Paula says. “He figured they had gone out to a club or something. He didn’t think to go looking for his sister. He felt like, if he gave her space, he was helping her out.”

“What was he thinking?” Laura asks.

“He wasn’t,” Kiana says, sighing.

“If my boy left his sister alone in a hotel room with some …” Paula stops herself.

We wonder how many days will pass before someone comes forward with information on the suspect. On an island like ours, a man doesn’t run. Can’t run. The airlines
have his sketches, the ships as well, though we’ve never heard of a suspect trying to escape via Carnival Cruise Lines. On island, a man has to hide, hunker down, find friends and use them. The question is not how will he be caught, but who will turn him in.

We don’t tell each other about our dreams, but we hint at them.
Last night I barely slept
, we say, or
I was awake all night thinking about that girl
. In the early morning, alone in our apartments and condos and houses, when the only sounds were the winds sweeping out of the valleys and a dog barking in the distance, we found ourselves wondering how we escaped those treacherous years of our late teens and early twenties.
We lived in a different time
, we tell each other, and the world suddenly appears fragile and sad.

Esther says Hawaiʻi is becoming more and more like the mainland, and for once we don’t hear anger in her voice, just regret.

But Laura is angry. “If you were in Chicago, would you go home with a man you just met at a bar? Would you trust a stranger with your hotel key in L.A.?”

“If I was young, maybe, and on vacation,” Kiana answers.

“How young?” Laura challenges. “This woman, this Susan, she was twenty-two. She should have known better!”

Paula interrupts. “Laura, at that age we hardly knew any better.”

“I knew better.”

Paula offers a hollow laugh. “I visited you at college. I saw the risks you were willing to take in those days. Inviting guys back to your apartment, getting into cars with friends of friends of friends. You didn’t know those guys any better than Susan knew this man.”

Laura is quiet.

“Back then we all were that way,” Esther says gently. “We were young, naive.”

Laura’s sadness radiates across the phone lines, and we shiver. “So were we just lucky?”

Throughout the day we argue over Susan, acting as if we knew her enough to speak for her. Some of us claim she was all over that Bryan at the Lava Lounge. Others say she was too innocent to know what he was really after. Cora tries to find a middle ground: “Maybe she wanted to hook up but didn’t want to sleep with him, and he got mad.”

We watch the news on television, wanting to know the latest updates. Two hotel security guards are interviewed. They say they saw a couple rolling in the sand. “Two lovers,” they claim, but when pressed, they admit it could have been a struggle. “All da time we see tings like dat, but,” they tell the reporters. We feel disgust with Security. Why didn’t they investigate? Why didn’t they interrupt? We think of the noises we heard and we ask ourselves the same questions.

In the late afternoon, we hear that the hotel is going to sponsor a small remembrance ceremony and that more than one hundred people plan on attending, mostly locals. Our community has been shaken. We want to give something, but we don’t know what or to whom. Susan’s family has already stated, via a lawyer, that they will not be present at the ceremony. They know none of us, so they mourn alone. We feel sorry for them. We are angry at them. When they see local people, they must think we are the ones who brought them death.

Us girls buy white plumeria lei at Safeway and put them around our necks. We meet on the beach in front of the Banyan, but we don’t stay for the ceremony. Instead, we paddle out to Pops, past the break and into deep water until we are far from any other surfers. We sit on our boards and form a tight circle, our knees bumping into the rails of the boards on either side of us, and we
pule
, we pray. We ask forgiveness. We ask for patience. We ask for guidance, not only for our lives but also for Susan’s family, and for the islands. Then we chew through the strings of our lei and toss each flower into the center of the circle. The strings we tie around our wrists.

We begin the long paddle back to land. The flowers are still there when we glance behind, sunlight reflecting off their white petals like small lanterns on the surface of the water.

By the time we return to shore, the beach is filled again with its usual sunbathers and swimmers. All that’s
left of the remembrance ceremony is a confused jumble of magenta orchids and red carnations, pale pink roses toppling over green ti leaf, orange birds of paradise sticking out like cheap sparklers. We stand over the pile and look down. The setting sun is hot on the back of our necks, and in the heat all the flowers are wilting.

The Indian said “Poi Dog” the way other men say Princess or Babydoll. He always said it real sweet, as if he didn’t know the meaning, didn’t know a poi dog was a mutt, the kind of dog that finds you and not the kind you breed special. Even in bed, naked and chilled, waiting for the damp air of the valley to rise around us in ghostly mist, he’d whisper, “Poi Dog,” and I’d tuck my head beneath his neck to feel his breath hot on my cheek.

I called him the Indian. I didn’t mean it bad or good. I just called things what they were, as my father had before me. My dad was the one who named me “Wanle,” which he said in Chinese means “It is gone.” He claimed, after I
was born, his fears left him. “Dey all wen go away,” he’d say. “Oh, and yoa mudda.
It
wen go away, too.”

Every morning, even before the roosters awoke, the Indian started banging pans around in the kitchen. When I smelled frying eggs, I knew it was time to climb out of bed and fix breakfast for my boys. I measured their food carefully, mashing together a quarter pound of raw ground beef, two chicken eggs, three tablespoons of vitamin powder, and four teaspoons of fish oil for omega-3s. I divided the mixture into two aluminum pie tins and added extra cornmeal to one of the dishes. The cornmeal was to help bulk up my two blacks. My hatches, who fought with their speed and agility rather than brute strength, didn’t need any extra weight.

In the yard, my roosters were blinking at me from behind the wooden-slatted walls of their cages. The first two coops belonged to Hapa and Keoni, my prize blacks; Lono and Kū, my hatches, occupied the next two. At the front of each cage was a wooden door, and cut into each door was a square opening just large enough for the birds to poke their heads through. A plastic feed cup hung in front of every hole, and I scraped a portion of the food into each cup. The birds stuck their heads out the door and began to eat. I left promising to exercise them in the afternoon when I returned home from work.

Once the boys were fed, I visited the hen house to collect
eggs, pour fresh water in the bowls, and toss feed. I kept hens mostly for the eggs, but also because I hoped the scent of females might keep my boys a little riled, and they needed that extra edge if they were going to win. I always lingered too long with the birds, and the Indian would come out on the back porch, his thermos of coffee in hand, and call me in. “You’ll make me late for work again.”

I’d toss the last of the seed at the hens and sprint to the back door. No matter how hot the afternoons were destined to become, the mornings were always fresh and damp, and their air soothed me like a drink. “Those cocks are worse competition than the other kind,” the Indian laughed.

“Oh, stop it.” I smacked him on the ʻōkole, and he bent down to kiss me. The Indian never left for work without kissing me goodbye, and though I sometimes teased him about being soft for me, I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

After the Indian’s truck set off rumbling down Haleakalā Highway, I showered and dressed. I locked all the doors to the house, though no one else Upcountry bothered to, but my father’s habits had stayed with me. The Indian, he never locked anything.

I cooked the breakfast shift at the Pāʻia Diner, returning home in the early afternoon to train my birds. I made them run, peck, scratch, and extend their wings. I used the training tricks my father had taught me, and I discovered
some of my own. The birds were exercised separately—if left alone, their natural tendency was to fight each other. I worked with my boys until early evening, when the Indian called me into the house to cook dinner, and then I nestled the birds in their cages for the night.

My dad used to say cockfighting was in his blood: the Chinese in him liked betting, the Hawaiian liked fighting, and the Filipino liked birds. Before he died, my dad raised some of the most aggressive, well-trained battlecocks on the islands. His birds never lost a fight, so he made plenty of money off his roosters. He provided security at the fights, too, didn’t have an allegiance to one boss or another, and wasn’t asked to. The bosses only expected him to stay honest, and stay quiet, and he said no problem, he could do both.

My father treated his birds like children, allowing them to eat inside the house or inviting them to ride with him in his truck. He trusted his birds more than he did my grandmother or uncle. My dad’s favorite black, ʻOno, slept at the foot of his bed. “My guard dog, him,” my dad claimed. “ ʻOno like tell me if someone try kill me.” He told me that between his birds and my mom, he had chosen the birds. He said one day I’d have to make the same choice, and I’d do as he had, with the same result.

When I turned sixteen, my father gave me my first rooster to raise and train myself. The bird was a hatch,
and I named him Makana, which in Hawaiian means “gift.” My dad showed me how to hold Makana’s feet and beak so the bird wouldn’t attack, and how to hum to calm him. More importantly, I learned how to make Makana into a better fighter. In the yard, I’d come at him with my hand wrapped in a sparring glove, back him into corners, wave a feather duster in his face, flip him on his back, and watch him right himself. Makana needed to feel both threatened and capable, afraid enough to fight but not so scared he’d flee. Sometimes I emerged with a bloodied arm, my skin bearing deep lines where his beak had found me, but I became used to this. It was all part of being a pitter.

“You tink I be good like you, Dad?” I asked my father one day in the yard. In those days I spoke pidgin without thinking of it, not switching for one person or another, not even for my teachers in school. I had my father’s way with words, which was to say, I didn’t consider them.