House of Many Gods (19 page)

She kicked off her shoes, slid into a sarong, and danced hula with half a dozen aunties. Some rinsed their mouths with beer and spat on her hands for luck. Ukulele and guitar, the old songs. One by one, folks got up and harmonized.

A gang of cowboy cousins came,
paniolo
smelling of saddles and horses. They brought a roasted boar, roped kids with their lariats, and sang their
paniolo
songs. Then, a thundering locomotion up the road. Tattooed bikers all in black roared into the yard on Harleys. The Turks of Nanakuli, gleaming with sweat like muscled crows. Several bikes were slung with freshly caught red snappers, which they presented to Ana. In their nose studs and topknots, they unfurled the Hawaiian flag, and raised their fists and shouted
Huli!
Then they broke out ukuleles and sang in sweet falsetto like castrati.

Hours passed. The food they had planted and sowed, and raised and slaughtered, and caught in the sea and called the gods to bless, now came alive. The air was coated with the odor of singed skin as Panama and Florentine Chang grilled mounds of
hulihuli
chicken. Roasted meats burst out of the night by the light of their dripping fats.
Poi
glowed purple in big, deep bowls. Fish scales grew into piles like pink fingernails, which kids stuck all over their bodies and their faces so they glowed.

And in the steam clouds of
kālua
pig, the sounds of people physically responding to their food. The lip-smacking saltiness of
lomi
salmon. The
ho! of fiery
kimchee
clearing their sinuses. The zsss! of flip-top soda cans. Men opened Primo bottles with their teeth. The ping! as they spat the metal tops at empty Crisco cans, then heartily drank, dark throats moving like shifting gears.

Ana dished out food, filled bowls and glasses. She drank too much and danced until her feet were scraped and numb. Hours later, she flung herself into a chair and gathered kids around her, faces like dark flowers as they dozed against her legs.

T
HE NEXT DAY SHE AND
R
OSIE WALKED THROUGH OLD
N
ANAKULI
Homestead Cemetery. They knelt at Emma’s grave while Ana spread flowers.

“I did it, Aunty. And I will keep on doing. I will never abuse the
mana
you bestowed on me in the Ritual of
Hā
. I will make you proud.”

They strolled the grounds and stood in front of Ava’s grave.

“Mama was so beautiful,” Rosie whispered.

“Your mama was insane.”

“It could happen to me. It’s in our blood, you know.”

“Rosie, blood can change.”

“How? How can it change?”

“Determination. Human will is a powerful medicine. It heals.”

“And what about forgiveness?” Rosie said. “Does forgiveness help us heal?”

For a moment, Ana fell silent. “She was there, at my graduation. Wasn’t she?”

“Could be. And so?”

“She’s like some kind of extinct species that’s come back to haunt. It’s been nine years. What … in … the … world does she want?”

“She came back from time to time but you refused to see her.” Rosie stared at the ground. “Ana. Tell me something. Do you want kids? As far as you know?”

“I take the Pill to avoid having conversations like this.”

“Well, your mama didn’t want kids either. A lot of women don’t. She got pregnant by mistake, tried to raise you alone and couldn’t do it.”

“…  Maybe she should have thrown me out and raised the placenta instead.”

“
Kuli kuli!
Hush now. Stop being so clever. She’s proud of you. She’s not trying to take credit for it.”

Ana tapped her foot impatiently. “Then, what does she want?”

“Maybe in the little time we have on earth, she might just want to know you. After all, she gave you life. She didn’t try to
take
it.”

She moved closer now. “Rosie, I’m sorry. I forget what it was like for you.”

“Sometimes I look at my daughter, Makali‘i, so pretty and so smart. I wish Mama were here to see her. I know she was seriously disturbed, the way she beat me and little Taxi. But when you have a child … you want to hold it up and shout, ‘Look, Mama!’ We women, we’re the
bridges
. The connections. But you want to tear down that connection, out of meanness.”

“I don’t even know her,” Ana said. “What would I say to her?”

Rosie laughed. “Oh, you. You’re worrying about the thickness of the
poi
before you even plant the taro.”

S
HE BROODED OVER NOTES ON THE ETIOLOGY OF RHEUMATOID
arthritis. For a few minutes she felt very clear about things. An hour later, nothing made sense. Each page of her notes reproached her. Ana sat back depressed, sure she would not last through four years of medical school.

Molecular genetics. Immunosurveillance. Chromosomal clustering. She could hardly pronounce the words. They were branches of research for highly trained specialists, not for doctors of general medicine. Yet in almost every course, professors threw these terms at them, expecting students to absorb and understand them.

In class, she raised her hand. “I don’t understand how knowledge of these new, esoteric sciences will help me as a doctor. I need to learn how to treat a parasite, not how to clone a titmouse.”

The professor smiled indulgently. “You see, I’m trying to show how the line between biology, chemistry, and physics has, in the past few years, been totally eradicated. Understanding human cells helps us understand disease. But to get there we had to combine all three sciences.”

He wore an aloha shirt and a reddish toupee, which Ana avoided looking at. Rather she looked to the side of his head, wondering why
haole
seemed to like wearing other people’s hair. Students muffled their yawns as he droned on.

“We now have in our hands the keeper of the keys to life. The double helix or twin spiral, of the DNA molecule …”

Later, one of her classmates complained, “Another visiting professor
on sabbatical from Stanford, or Columbia. To them, we’re just a coconut med school. They want to show us how backward we are.”

Ana thought he was probably right. The John Burns School of Medicine had been founded only in the past five years. Administrators were still proposing ideas for the curriculum, while frustrated students transferred to mainland schools.

“Meanwhile, we’re falling behind in the important stuff, microbiology, immunology. All we do is stab needles into fruits. If I inject one more nectarine, I’ll die.”

Yet she pressed on, feeling a small transformation with each thing learned, a milestone in her life. For hours, she sat emptied of everything but the text before her. She studied through a hurricane, glancing up dreamily when a cow flew past her window, when the lights blew and she had to read by candlelight.

In spite of her apprehension, Ana approached her first cadaver with cool finesse. Even the word
embalmed
intrigued her, suggesting something hidden inside a tomb, so that when she sliced into cold, gray flesh, cutting deep into the abdomen, she felt she was slipping inside a mausoleum. The smell of formaldehyde swept over her. A young man beside her was violently ill, but Ana stood her ground. She bent for hours probing the flesh carefully as if the nerve ends were still alive, and when she finally stitched up the abdomen, she patted the cadaver’s stomach thoughtfully. The anatomy instructor singled her out for her “professionalism.”

“Of course,” Rosie said. “It’s in your blood. Your mama wanted to be a doctor.”

She did not respond, hoping that without words to sustain it, the subject of her mother would eventually die out.

L
OPAKA STARED AT THE MOUTHPIECE OF THE PHONE, THEN HUNG
up and rubbed his leg thoughtfully.

“That was Philomena Lobo’s husband. He wants to know if he’s got legal rights to sue her doctors.”

Ana looked up from her books. “What’s wrong?”

“Cancer. It started in her leg. Doctors wanted to take it off, she said no, and now it’s in her lungs.”

Rosie spoke softly so the children wouldn’t hear. “That’s the third case I heard of in this valley. Over toward Lualualei, that boy with muscle cancer … doctors say it’s real rare.”

The next day Ana walked down the road to Philomena’s house. A huge Hawaiian with a lovely face, she was known to consume a whole baby pig, and a coconut cake in one meal. Her husband sat on the porch, looking lost, a clean, rather handsome man who always seemed to be covered with flies. She set down a fresh-baked pie and hugged him. Inside, the house was dim but clean and stark as if everyone had moved away. Seeing Philomena, Ana stood still. The woman had lost all flesh, the skeleton of her face now hovering just behind the skin. Ana smelled the other thing. It had already taken over.

“Ana. Come. No be shy.”

She sat beside the bed and took the woman’s hand. “I am so sorry. I just found out. I … I brought you a pie.”

She laughed softly. “Dey nevah tell you? No mo’ appetite. Philomena dying.”

She said it with such candor, Ana hung her head

“Dey give me plenty pills fo’ pain. When get real bad, dey going shoot me up wit’ big-time drugs.”

“My God. How did this happen?”

She shrugged and pointed to the ceiling. “When He call, we go.”

Walking home, she watched children spinning hula hoops, and wondered how there could be such a thing as death when every evening angels chased their halos into the dusk.

D
AYS LATER SHE SAT WITH A GIRL NAMED
G
ENA
M
ELE, WHO WAS
working her way through law school.

“If I was already practicing, I’d have a major class-action lawsuit against the military. Those bastards are the ones polluting the soil and air, making everybody sick.”

Ana was not sure how much she liked this girl. She did not have the gift of inquiry. She was hot-tempered, made friends and enemies too fast. Men called her “sexy” but her dark eyes glowed with a cool perversity.

She came from the town of Wai‘anae farther up the coast between Ma‘ili and Makaha. But Gena seemed to come from another country, someplace unnamed and difficult. They had met through Lopaka, and Ana saw they were infatuated; they tended to stare at each other a lot. That was why she had befriended her: to find out what kind of woman appealed to this cousin she loved.

Both girls had found jobs at a steakhouse near Waikiki, and after classes they waited tables, then took a late bus home to the coast. Some
nights they stopped at the Humu Humu Lounge, where locals gathered. Over beers, Gena cursed the lack of law-school scholarships for native Hawaiians, the lack of brown faces among her professors. The fact that their educational system, like their lands, had been almost totally appropriated.

“And now they’re killing us off with toxins.”

Ana thoughtfully sipped her beer, thinking the girl was too much of a firebrand to make a good lawyer.

“Gena. You can’t change things overnight.”

“They’ll change. Sooner than you think.”

“How’s that supposed to happen?”

“The way it did with the antiwar movement. The Civil Rights movement. Constant vigilance. Resistance.”

“Well, I’m planning to be a physician, not a revolutionary. Education is the way to fight back. Even Lopaka says so.”

At the mention of his name, Gena calmed down.

He will tire of her
, Ana thought.
She will take away his peace of mind
. She didn’t see that, in many ways, the girl was a mirror image of herself: her impatience, the way she expressed her passion and her anger. She didn’t see how together they cut a swath, two smart lower-class girls on the rise, not yet aware of it.

That weekend folks were gathering on the beaches at Mākua, up the coast, in support of homeless Hawaiians living there. Hurricane ‘Iwa had destroyed their makeshift shanties and encampments, and they were attempting to build new ones. It was rumored that the state was sending in police and bulldozers to stop them.

“We’re also mobilizing to protest the Army’s bombing of Mākua Valley. You’ve got to come.”

“I have to study,” Ana said. “Mondays are my heaviest class load.”

“Mākua is more important than Monday.”

Ana felt her face flush. “Listen, Gena, you’ve got two more years of law school. You’re not careful, you’ll flunk out. Or be kicked out. Can’t you see they’re just waiting for us Wai‘anae girls to drop the ball? Remember, we’re supposed to be pregnant and on Welfare.”

She leaned in closer. “Ana. You didn’t hear what happened? Kids sneaked up into Mākua Valley after the Army had been shelling. You know what they brought home? An unexploded ordnance—a bomb the size of a football. They found it lying on the open ground and thought it was a dud. Cops called in a bomb squad, evacuated half the town. You know how many folks could have been killed? Come on! Take a stand.”

That night while the family sat discussing the live bomb the children had brought home, Lopaka reminded them how in 1976 folks had begun to wake up.

“That’s when they staged land occupations on our island of Kaho‘olawe during Naval war maneuvers there. Remember? That same year they filed a lawsuit against the Navy for bombing that island relentlessly for thirty years.”

Ana had been sixteen then, and it was somewhere in that time that the phrase ALOHA ĀINA began appearing on bumper stickers. Love for the Land.

“I tell you now,” Lopaka said. “Kaho‘olawe was just the beginning. We will never stop reclaiming what is ours.”

A
NA PUT HER BOOKS ASIDE AND LEANED FROM HER WINDOW, PONDERING
Nanakuli Valley. With its parched earth, its harsh, near-barren fields, it was ugly and beautiful at once. It would always be her history, her conscience. And some nights she thought of the silent beaches and valleys of Mākua, farther up the coast. For almost two thousand years it had belonged to
kānaka maoli
, the true Hawaiian people, who considered it
wahi pana
, a sacred place.

The valley still contained sacred
heiau
, temple sites, and ancient altars of worship. Deep in caves that had been blown open by military explosives were the bones of ancient chiefs. She imagined their skulls graveled by shrapnel. Above the bones were petroglyphs showing that the protective walls of the valley had once been a sacred training site for traditional martial arts. It had also been home to diverse and unique native birds and plants, most of which had been destroyed forever. Below the valley, the beaches themselves held numerous burial sites. Artifacts found in the waters offshore proved they had once been sacred fishing grounds.