House of Many Gods Page 5

  She lay facedown, spread out like a pelt. Paramedics said lightning, but her body seemed untouched. Then they said she must have tripped and fallen. The medical examiner found a big crack in the back of her skull from a powerful blow. He thought lightning had hit a branch which struck her. Folks said Ben had struck the blow. Or Rosie. The skies calmed down. The family buried Ava, then sat back tipping long-necked beers, letting the wounded world become green glass.

  Only Ana saw how Noah smiled at an empty chair still rocking to and fro, remembering the boy who had sat there. Months later he called her to his room and pointed to his closet. Inside was something big and round, wrapped in moldy cloth.

  “Bury it,” he said.

  That night she unwrapped it in her room. Rusty now, the way iron gets. The weight of the skillet profound. The back still matted with blood, gray strands of hair, bits of skull like ice chips. She wiped it clean and buried it.

  IN A HOUSE EVER BURGEONING WITH INFANTS AND YOUNGSTERS, love for the older ones became general, rather than specific. Less and less the center of attention, Ana became a watcher. Elders were only vaguely aware of her standing in the shadows, or half-buried in a book, but always attentive, listening to their conversations.

  She began to see how books could be a shield, a bulwark behind which she hid—only her eyes and the top of her head visible—observing. On dark days, when she felt totally forgotten, invisible even to herself, she learned to turn her attention to the book before her, lost in a landscape of words that lifted her out of herself.

  She sat with Noah while he kept watch over the valley, reading to him about the discovery of penicillin, or the thermoscopic eyes of squid which perceived heat-generating objects through photochemical reactions. The boar-hounds gathered outside his window, laying their dark, wet muzzles on their paws. Ana’s voice seemed to calm them down. And children gathered too, making her the center of attention. And in that way, she became a lover of books, pirating them out of the library, dragging them up Keola Road.

  One day a young man followed her. When she stopped for a rainbow shave-ice, he stopped, too. He was wearing blue jeans, a T-shirt with a pack of cigarettes rolled up in one sleeve like a Merchant Marine. He looked sort of local, and yet not, a sloe-eyed hapa-haole with long surfer hair.

  “I know who you are,” she said. “Your father’s called Steve-a-dor.”

  “Who calls him that?”

  “My uncles.”

  “They making fun of him because he’s Jewish?”

  She didn’t know what “Jewish” was. “They call him that because he works the docks. They got nicknames for anybody with a job.”

  He moved closer. “No need to lie. I know folks hate us because my dad was Army, and married a local girl. And because he’s Jewish.”

  She watched her shave-ice melt through the hole in the bottom of the cup. She felt its coolness hit her feet.

  “So, what’s your name?”

  He stood up straighter. “Tommy … Suzuki … Goldberg.”

  It didn’t sound right. It didn’t sound wrong. It just didn’t sound usual. He wore two chains around his neck. One held a small crucifix, the other what looked like a six-pointed star.

  “What’s that you’re wearing?”

  “Catholic cross. And Star of David. My mom and pop have different kind religions.”

  “.… is that hard for you?” she asked. He shrugged. “Sometimes confusing.”

  He reached out and caught a drip from beneath her shave-ice, then licked it from his hand. She held her breath, caught by his scent. Tobacco, young man sweat. He smelled different from the boys she knew. She wondered if it was because he was “Jewish.” His hair was brown, but blondish at the ends. His skin was brown too, but with a yellowish undertone like when brown skin was wet. His almond-shaped eyes were ordinary for a local, but he had the longest eyelashes she had ever seen on a human. She found him rather beautiful.

  He asked her name, then rolled down his sleeve, flicked a match with his thumbnail and lit up a cigarette like a pro. She watched him exhale, watched the smoke drift like a thought. They sat on a bench facing the sea, and almost in one breath he told her how his grandparents, German Jews, had settled in someplace called New Jersey. Wanting to see the world, his dad had enlisted in the Army, got stationed in Honolulu, and married a Hawaiian-Japanese girl.

  “So, what’s your story?”

  Ana shrugged. “My parents died. No big deal. So tell me … what does ‘Jewish’ mean?”

  In stops and starts, he tried to explain what he understood. How they were people descended from ancient Hebrews … who were descendants of northern Semitic people … who claimed descent from the prophets Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

  “Pop says they were also called … Israelites. Folks who shared one heritage based on, ah … Judaism.”

  She tried very hard to follow. “And what is that?”

  “A religion based on the Bible and the Talmud.”

  A dozen words she had never heard before.

  “Pop says there was once an ancient kingdom called Judah in this place South Palestine. Between the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea. But it disappeared.”

  While he talked about Moses and the parting of the Red Sea, Ana sat back overwhelmed. This boy was opening up a brand-new world, people and places she could never have imagined.

  “I like the sound of that guy, Moses. I’ve always been suspicious of Jesus Christ.”

  “Yeah? Why?” Tommy fingered his crucifix.

  “Well, he makes plenty mistakes. He lets folks get away with murder.”

  She was thinking of her mother. If Jesus was fair, he’d burn down her house in San Francisco, so she would have to come crawling home.

  Walking her up the highway to Keola Road, he touched her elbow. “I heard about your family, too. All those wounded vets. Who takes care of them?”

  She suddenly wanted to impress him. “I do.”

  “Don’t they have wives and things?”

  “Yeah. Sure. But folks always coming and going. You know, real island style.”

  That night, all the youngsters asleep, she watched her Aunty Pua sit in a chair with her Bible. As she got into the swing of the text, the woman swayed backwards and forwards rhythmically, ducking her head in great nods of moral affirmation. Each night when she opened that Bible, she seemed to have the time of her life.

  Ana glanced round the room at her elders, then took a deep breath. “How come we’re Christian, instead of Jewish? Jesus never parted the sea like Moses.”

  In the silence, Pua stood and swerved across the room, and smacked Ana’s head with her Bible. She sat on the floor in shock, watching her uncle and aunty go at it. Ben finally pushed the woman into a corner, using his arm as a club.

  “You evah touch dis girl again … I going broke yo’ face.”

  Pua held up her Bible. “She said a sacrilegious thing!”

  “Oh, you!” Ben shouted. “One day you spouting Christian, next day you calling on our ancient gods. Why you think dis girl’s mixed up?”

  “Not mixed up,” Pua said. “Too clever. Going be just like her mama.”

  Tito slapped down his playing cards. “I think you jealous of her mama. She got momentum. What you got?”

  They squandered half the night, arguing, while Ana studied the heavens, wondering which star was David.

  MEETING TOMMY SUZUKI GOLDBERG WAS THE BEGINNING OF awareness, of how small her island world was. And of how she could love someone, knowing they would not love her back. He would become the thing she rested her eyes upon. His mere existence in the world—the knowledge that tomorrow he would walk down a hall toward her—would help Ana survive the random atrocities of high school, the knifings, and pregnancies, the murky smell of the public lav where gang girls nodded out in the sweet declensions of drugs. Even the sentencing of two drug-running cousins to five years at Halawa High-Security Prison, which locals called the “Halawa Hilton.”

  Mostly, she would be grate
ful to Tommy for awakening in her a deeper awareness of her damaged uncles, that fraternity of broken men. Sometimes she stood in the center of the house and looked around. She had never known if it was patriotism or love of combat that drove the men in her family to volunteer for every war. And now each week Ana wrote letters to her cousin, Lopaka, recovering somewhere from bomb fragments that had shattered his leg in Vietnam.

  This is what we live on, she thought. Their military pensions, their veteran’s disability checks.

  Folks said her uncles had it made. No more grinding ninety-hour workweek, no more union dues. No need for food stamps, or Welfare. But some nights she watched Tito in his wheelchair, staring at his lap like a child wondering what had happened. And one night she saw Ben standing in the field, waving his arm and shouting at the sky. Later, she found him weeping in his room.

  “No mo’ pride! So many years now, useless.”

  Before his war he had been a heavy-equipment operator, one of the best on the Wai‘anae Coast. When he came home without an arm, the VA tried to train him for clerical work.

  He had gone into severe depression. “Sitting at one desk … like a girl!”

  Now Ana put her arm around him, softly scolding him.

  “Uncle Ben, pick up your eyes. Look how you keep us safe in this crazy family. Without you, we’d be killing each other. You feed us kids, make us do homework, buy our clothes. You give us plenty pride, reminding us what’s right, what’s wrong. You’re our papa, our ali‘i. Folks up and down Keola Road respect you. How can you say you’re useless!”

  He sat up and wiped his eyes, and scratched his belly with his big, bronze hand. “Ana. You my best medicine. My best t’ing.”

  Perhaps that was the beginning of caring on her part. A conscious need to look after the men of her family, men who had chosen to look after her.

  SHE ENTERED HER MIDTEENS FULL OF TREMOR, A LUSTFUL RANCOR at the world. A young woman training for adversity. Some days she stood in the yard slugging a ratty old punching bag, then wiped red dirt from her feet, ran into the house, and studied her face in a mirror. Pale probing eyes, defiant cheekbones. A stubborn jaw. She twisted in front of the mirror, studying the reflection of her skinny behind. She wanted muscles, the buttocks of a horse! She wanted to be desired but powerful, a woman beyond possession.

  She spent long hours in the sun until she was dark as kukui nut. Dark showed she was local, and tough, not a girl to kid around with. But she avoided Tommy’s gang, the “park boys,” who hung out at beaches, drinking and breaking into cars. In less than two years, all goodness seemed to have been rinsed out of him. By now he was seasoned, with a tough, hapa look, yet sometimes she felt his eyes on her. An uncanny sensation: to be held in the eyes of a handsome young man. A surfer and a stoner, he kept a rolled joint over his ear, always in a crowd, yet watching her. Maybe admiration, maybe curiosity.

  “No need for friends. Ey, Ana?”

  She wondered if that was good or bad. She tried to sound world-weary. “No time for fun. I have responsibilities.”

  “You mean your uncles, all those men you take care of?”

  “Yeah. Cooking, cleaning, laundry.”

  Tommy smiled. “Liar. I know your pretty cousin, Rosie, does all that.”

  Hippies had started flooding the coast in psychedelic-painted vans, lying on Nanakuli’s beaches stoned, exulting in the syntax of grass. In clashes with locals, there were knifings, even shootings. One day Tommy broke into a van. He brought her a tie-dyed scarf and showed her four ten-dollar bills.

  Ana looked at him, disgusted. “You think this makes you interesting?”

  He began to reek of bad deeds. Next time it was a silver bracelet he had lifted from a shop. He put it on her wrist and tried to kiss her. Ana flung the bracelet to the dirt.

  “Well, what you want, then?” he asked.

  “Not you. You think you can have what you want from me with stolen goods?”

  She walked toward the beach, shouting back at him. “It’s all downhill for you, Tommy Two-Gods! You trying so hard to fit in, you going wind up at ‘Halawa Hilton.’ Know what they do to boys in there? Pretty … young … Jewish boys?”

  He stared after her in shock, as she dived into a wave, feeling the undertow, wanting to drown out of shame. Why did she say that thing to him? Where had it come from? She stroked into another slamming wave, then picked herself off the ocean floor, remembering what a girl had told her about Jewish men. They were different. They had gone through something called “circumcision.” Whatever it was, it was painful. It made them more gentle in bed, yet made them better lovers. Ana realized her rudeness to Tommy, her pushing him away was because she wanted him to touch her. She simply wanted him.

  One morning she heard the skies crack, reverberating thunder. She sat up in bed listening to her uncles curse.

  “Sounds like next war starting here.”

  “Army testing bombs again up in Mākua, blowing that whole valley to hell.”

  Mākua, up near the tip of the Wai‘anae Coast, had once been a beautiful mountain ridge overlooking the sea, a sacred place of temples and grave sites. For over twenty years the mountains and valley there had been so heavily gouged and gutted by bombs in Army war maneuvers, it had turned into a no-man’s-land.

  Across the island, high-school and university students who had protested the war in Vietnam now demonstrated against the military’s continuing use of their homelands for war games. Every other weekend Ana watched students march down the highway carrying banners. GET OFF OUR ISLANDS. BOMB YOUR OWN BACKYARDS.

  On such a day Tommy walked up to her. “Ana. I’m dropping out. Going to enlist.”

  She saw his face, even his posture, had changed. “Don’t you want to graduate high school?”

  He shook his head. “What I want is action. See some combat.”

  “But Vietnam is over.”

  “My pop was a sergeant for twenty years. He says there’s always going to be a war. The military needs wars.” He almost shook with anticipation. “So, what you think? I’m going be one hapa Green Beret.”

  She reached up and touched his face. “I guess it’s better than prison, Tommy.”

  He took her hand and held it. “What you said, it made me think. There’s more to life than this dead coast. A whole world to see. I hope you see it, too.”

  He sounded like Lopaka, like all the wounded men she knew.

  “I will,” she said. “I will.”

  “Look. I’m sorry I stole. Sorry I disappointed you. I know your mama didn’t die, she left you. I’m sorry about that, too. You know, you’re not the prettiest girl at school. Not even the smartest. But … you’re different, Ana. Something proud about you. Even just the way you walk. I think I’m going to miss you.”

  They stood under a plumeria tree and trade winds blew the petals past their shoulders. Deep shadows of Nanakuli now determined they must enter them. They walked for a while, hand in hand, then lay down in vines and weeds and struggled awkwardly, becoming lovers. At first she felt terror. She had spied on couples and knew the posture of love, knew he would climb on top of her. He could possibly crush her in a moment’s passion.

  Just before he entered her, she asked, “Tommy. How much do you weigh?”

  He lost his erection. But then he was hard again, trying not to collapse on her. It seemed to be over in a minute. Later, they tried again and it was better. Better, for the incredible smell of his hair in her face, his bittersweet tobacco breath. Better because he lasted longer before he shuddered and sighed. She felt pain. She bled, and cried a little. They both cried. Not out of guilt, but out of astonishment. Was that all there was to it?

  Tommy lay down beside her. “There’s got to be more. There must be something we don’t know about, something we left out.”

  She looked at his handsome face, his features so perfectly aligned. This is enough, she thought. I will remember this. She would relive these hours for years, remembering every word he uttered, knowing he c
ould never utter them again, because there would only be this one first time. They made love each night for weeks, and it got better. They had left nothing out.

  Then one day as he approached, she saw a different face. There was nothing there she recognized. Very tenderly, like a priest, he put his hands on her shoulders.

  “Yesterday I enlisted in the Army.”

  She stared at sunlight varnishing his forearm. She smiled, and stroked that arm like someone gently stropping a razor. She was already moving ahead, building her life without him. Already wise to the truth: that no one stayed. That no one stood beside you, defending you, for now, for good, for always.

  Tommy left. She sat with Noah in the dark.

  “I know we have to take what comes. To forget, and then move on. But sometimes I wonder … where does all this forgetting lead? I mean, when we’re older, what’s left when we look back at this thing that was our life?”

  Noah hung his head. She was too young to ask such questions. Too young to sound so old.

  “I wonder if I would understand things better if I had had a mother.”

  He tried to respond. But just now he had no words for her. His hands shook as he lit a cigarette, trying to introduce order to his mind.

  … here’s a match, here’s a ashtray on da sill. Careful, careful. Yesterday, knocked it out da window, butts all over chili pepper plant … auwē! Little chili pepper shriveled. Hosed it down … picked up butts … threw dem to da goat. Same goat used to faint when Ana screamed, tied up to da clothesline … Cannot be! How old dat damn goat now? … Here’s her hand, soft and warm in mine … here’s her sweet face crying in da Kleenex …

  He wanted to whisper “Ana! Live!” He wanted to tell her it did not matter if folks went away. That she was richer because other humans had loved her, even hurt her. And that those humans were enriched by her. He had come back from a horrible place, but that place had let him live. He wanted to tell her how life was a miracle. Each moment of living, each living thing, a miracle. He had so much to tell her. He did not know how.