This Is Paradise (9 page)

I spotted a turquoise negligee ballooning up from the back cage, and I laughed to think of the Indian stuffing all my underwear into a rooster coop. I would admit that his revenge was perfect, and I deserved it. I knew he would eventually forgive me, make keys to match the new locks, wash the smell of rooster shit off my clothes.

I was still smiling when I spotted a white, downy roll beneath the final coop. It looked like an old sweater of mine, and I bent down to pick the thing up. Only when my hand grazed its side did I feel the feathers and the remnants of body heat coming off the dead chick.

I ran to the hen house. The wire door was ajar, its wooden base bent and misshapen as if it had been kicked in. Hens lay strewn across the yard, and bullet casings littered the ground, the red plastic blending with the blood. Everywhere I saw feathers. White, ochre, orange, the peculiar blue-gray color down turns when wet: the feathers carpeted the ground. Black feathers melted into the shadows. Brown feathers blended with the dirt. Some of the hens looked like they were nesting, their feet tucked beneath their heavy breasts, while others had their wings spread, as if in flight, silhouetted against a muddy sky. I picked my way to the coop, careful not to step on any out-flung wings. Several had fallen on their backs, legs sticking in the air like two flags of surrender, and these I took the time to turn over, on their sides, in a show of respect.

In the coop, every egg had been smashed. The wooden walls were yellow and glossy with yolk. I backed out
slowly. I didn’t want to touch anything in the coop, didn’t even turn the rest of the birds on their side. I felt filthy. I felt dead myself.

I didn’t bother to retrieve any of my clothes or belongings. I just climbed into my car and drove away.

I’ve had six years now to think about vengeance and forgiveness, to ponder my nature and those of the men I’ve known. These days I live in Honolulu, where I run little risk of seeing family or old acquaintances from Maui.

Three years ago I earned my Culinary Arts degree at Kapiʻolani Community, and I now work downtown as a chef in an upscale French bistro. In my spare time, I write. At college I found an affection for the rigorous academic English the Indian had once imposed on me. Now pidgin is a translation of sorts, the speech of my past.

In my last semester at college I took a course in poetry and read the writers who once influenced him: Bashō, Issa, Buson. They write about the beauty and majesty of nature, and I understand why he loved them. But the Indian failed to understand their work in its fullness, how their poems at times celebrate the violence, loss, sadness, and cruelty inherent in the natural world.

When I left the Indian, I ran to the only person I knew who wouldn’t ask why I was without my birds. My grandmother paid for a one-way plane ticket to Oʻahu, and she helped me start my life here. In the months after I fled
Maui, rumors spread that I had come to Oʻahu seeking Mr. Oh’s bosses, the men who had arranged for my father’s death. Some claimed I murdered my hens because my win had meant so little to Mr. Oh. Others said I left the Indian because he had refused to help me kill Mr. Oh. I ignored everything. It belonged to another era, another life.

In the intervening years, my grandmother and I have found our way into the sort of relationship I suspect she had hoped for after my father’s death. In our phone conversations, I describe the restaurant’s patrons, the meals I create, the friends I’ve made. She gives me the news from Maui. Zoo died of a heart attack last spring, but Uncle Lee and Al are still around, fighting birds and taking bets as they’ve always done. They ask after me, but my grandmother tells them little.

The Indian still lives in Makawao, alone. He keeps the rooster coops just as they were when I was still living there. He is not the same man he was, Uncle Lee tells my grandmother. My uncle thinks my leaving broke him, but I know this isn’t true. The moment the Indian killed that first bird, he returned to his childhood home, his father’s child.

For a long time I missed him. I ached for him. I wanted to send him the essays I wrote in school or the menus I created for the restaurant or a picture of those boulders in Makawao bathed in the last light of the day. I wanted him to know I’d become the woman he wanted.

I dreamt of him as I once dreamt of my father. In every storefront shadow I saw the outline of his broad shoulders. In every dark bed I wondered if he was waiting for me. At times I was tempted to write to the Indian, but my grandmother always talked sense into me. In other moments I wished I could just write about the Indian, about my father, about my uncles and those birds. I wanted to commit them to paper and then leave them there.

That I have finally succeeded in speaking of those men—the most important in my life and the most disappointing—is, oddly enough, thanks to Mr. Oh. Not long ago, after closing up the kitchen at the bistro, I walked to the Blue Conch for a pau hana before returning home. I took a corner stool in the back where I wasn’t likely to be interrupted and ordered a beer. Diagonally across from me sat a man I almost didn’t recognize. He looked old and tired. His polo shirt was speckled with food stains, smudges browned his collar. A long scar ran from beneath his left ear to just under his chin. From the way he held himself, stiff and regal, though wary now, too, I knew it was Mr. Oh.

When I gave him the same curt nod he had afforded me at that derby so long ago, his eyes grew, and he scooted from the bar. I guessed that he, too, had heard the rumor I was seeking out his bosses, and he must have thought I had also come for him.

I followed him outside. “Wait,” I called from the bar entrance.

He was across the street and several storefronts down, but he paused. He looked over his shoulder and in that same careful English said, “It is over for me now. You know that, do you not?”

I wanted to assure him I meant no harm and the islands’ gossips were not to be trusted, but he didn’t wait to hear me. He hurried down the street and disappeared into an alley. For a moment I was frustrated by his departure, by his refusal to listen to me, but then I felt a great release. I can only describe it as the relief of loss. I now haunted him as once he had haunted me. This was my revenge: I had liberated myself from those men, but they could not be free of me.

As I looked down the empty street, the shadows hid nothing. I didn’t hope to see the silhouette of the Indian. I didn’t hope to return to the life I once had.
Wanle
, I said to myself.
It is done. They are all gone
.

He’d be happy with Becky forever, Cameron thought on their flight to Maui, and again when they rented the little Chevy Aveo, and even when they’d stopped for a late breakfast in Pāʻia and she poured shoyu on her fried eggs and the liquid left black streaks through the yolks. She had told him that she wanted to buy a condo in Honolulu, but now he wondered aloud if eventually she’d wish to return to Vegas because her parents and aunts and uncles were there.

“Never,” she said, reaching for his hand across the glass tabletop. They were sitting on the restaurant’s patio, close to the kitchen, and through the screen door he could hear the cooks’ laughter and the sizzle of the grill. “I came back here to stay.”

Cameron squeezed her hand in his. “But you should feel free to change your mind. Go where the jobs are or where the adventure lies.”

“You can be so silly sometimes!” she laughed. She stood and walked around the café table, then sat herself in his lap. Her fingers were cool against his temple. A stray dog wandered onto the open patio and sniffed along the bottom of the kitchen door. Cameron tossed it a slice of toast. “If you leave, I’ll go with you,” he promised.

Becky didn’t answer him right away, but later, in the car, she said, “It’s just you and your parents here, but for me there’s an entire ancestry. I’m not going anywhere, Cam. This is my real home.”

Cameron appreciated her reassurance. He loved her for it. And yet, he wondered what Honolulu was if not
his
real home. He had been born there, raised there. His parents and friends were there. He taught history at McKinley High, and his students respected him. Just because his parents were born in Minnesota didn’t mean Hawaiʻi wasn’t his.

She held out a bottle of sparkling water. “Because you’re always dehydrated after a big breakfast,” she said, and kissed his cheek. He smiled then because she was right and she knew him so well. He took a long sip from the bottle, and as they drove out of Pāʻia he turned the radio to her favorite Hawaiian music station. Houses gave way to cane fields, which ascended Haleakalā’s gentle slope. Dense clouds hid the crater’s upper reaches. All the plants were green, even the scrub beside the road, and it was hard to imagine he was ever thirsty here.

Just before Māliko Bay the radio went to white noise.
Cameron ignored it. He needed to concentrate on the road, the way the Hāna Highway followed the topography of the cliffs, teetering above the ocean, then turning tightly inland.

“See that church?” Becky pointed to a whitewashed chapel. “My auntie was married there. My grandma’s sister.” The church was small, trimmed in a rust-red reminiscent of the color of volcanic soil.

“It’s so quaint.”

“Isn’t it?” She squeezed his knee with her hand. “Her holokū was all lace, and she made every inch of it herself. Can you imagine?”

“Is that one of the traditional skills you want to learn? Sewing your own wedding dress?”

“Hardly,” she giggled. “I’ll learn to pound kapa, but lace-making I’m happy to leave in the past.”

“It’s from the missionaries anyways,” he teased her.

“Exactly.” Her tone was serious. “My aunt’s dress was beautiful, though. I’ll show you the pictures one day.”

The car coasted down a hill and settled into a curve that reminded him of the inside of Becky’s elbow, the smooth pocket of her
antecubital fossa
. Becky was in her second year of residency at Queen’s Medical Center in Honolulu, and she was teaching him the scientific terms for his body. Sometimes he’d pick her up at the end of her shift and she’d tell him what she’d treated that day: scapular fracture, septicimia, tarsal dislocation. He enjoyed the sound of these words, like coral popping underwater. He
loved watching her mouth moving around the syllables, her tongue tapping against her palate and her teeth flashing white beneath her chapped lips. From her even “influenza” sounded urgent and exotic.

She gestured toward a bamboo forest at the side of the road where the reeds grew densely together. He had once been to a bamboo forest in Japan, outside of Kyoto, where he studied for a year in college. Paths had been cut through the forest, and the bamboo grew in thick arches that curved over the walkways. The light that managed to trickle through the leaves was thin and green. A girl had taken him there. His girlfriend at the time. He could still see the way her black hair hung straight and thick, its blunt cut running parallel to her bra strap, the outline of which he glimpsed beneath her white blouse. She had run ahead, and when she turned to tell him something, the viridian light caught in her hair and turned it a deep turquoise.

“One of my uncles used to dig up the bamboo shoots,” Becky said. “He’d boil them all day, until they were soft, and then cook with them.” She rested her head on his shoulder, and he could smell the piney scent of her shampoo. “I wish everyone was still here.”

“Me, too. I’d ask your uncle to cook for me!”

She laughed. “He’d love that. He loves feeding people.”

“Were you happy when the rest of the family moved to Vegas? You were all together then.”

“We were, but then it wasn’t the same. Everyone was far from home.”

“Were they happy when you left for Oʻahu?”

“I guess. They didn’t really say.” She tucked her legs underneath her and offered Cameron her hand.

“Maybe they were jealous. Not angry jealous, just sort of wistful.”

“Maybe. It’s funny, they spent years trying to get my parents to move back here, and now they’re always asking me when I’m coming home to Vegas. But I tell them, Vegas isn’t home. It’s not where I’m from.”

“But you were born there. That doesn’t make you less Hawaiian, but it does make you something else, in addition. Maybe Vegasian.” He waited for her to laugh, but she was quiet, thinking about something.

“I know it’s hard growing up haole on the islands. You’ve said before the teasing was rough.” She paused. “I never got teased for being Hawaiian. No matter where you are, being Hawaiian is cool. But in some ways, I think it was harder growing up Hawaiian and
not
being here. That sense of displacement, of never quite fitting in.”

He brushed his fingers through her hair, and she held his hand there, his palm warming the corner of her earlobe. “I know that feeling. I used to think, I wouldn’t stick out if my parents went back, if we were in our homeland.”

“Germany?”

“Minnesota.”

“I think the Ojibwa might take issue with you calling Minnesota your homeland.” Now she laughed, as if she were teasing him.

“But I’m not from Germany. My parents and grandparents weren’t from Germany. They’re Minnesotans through and through.”