Jordan Hartt

Maui Nui

it wasn’t just that he was a haoleleathery skin the burned-out color of vegetable oileyes burned out like extinct volcanoes with whatever passion that had once glowed within—that must have glowed within, she thought, crossing the street, canvas bag heavy on her shoulder with papaya, mango, onions, chocolate—now long-since extinguished, it was that he was now like the island itself on its slow descent back into the sea(he lies on the roof at two in the morning geminid meteor shower slow streaks of white smeared for an instant across blackstarstreaks framed between weak streetlightsthe hard fronds of the palms rustling like the sound of the old washing machine all the stars falling from the sky at once, it seems to him, and he’s surprised, gripping his thermos of rum and mountain dew, that any stars still remain)it’s that he was green- and yellow-colored, she thoughtit’s that he was like the spotted green and yellow of a philodendron twisting around a milo tree, wrapping its skinny arms and legs and fingers and toes around the native milo and suffocating it, climbing it to the top, swelling and growing and thickeningher sons (cassiopeia still remains, he notices, drinking deeply from the thermoscassiopeia looking less like the w-shaped crown he’d grown up with on the mainland and more like the islands themselves now, as if he’s not looking up at the stars but down on the islands from a great distance, as if from space, each burning star a different island—ni‘ihau, kaua‘i, o‘ahu, maui nui, hawai‘i—and if he can only stare intently enough, for long enough, he’ll see himself staring back up across the distance, and he’ll see her, too, snoring on the mattress beneath the roof, and he’ll figure out whatever it is that’s pulling her away from him, like the rip of water away from the shore) arrive that evening with cases of beer and bottles of rum, surfboards glorious in the back of their trucks like hard flags marking her land, her home her boys leaping from their trucks and from the backs of their trucks with their wives and their girlfriends and their friends and their cousins and their own sons and daughters just as glorious and strong as they are, and her sons stepping victoriously and gloriously down from their trucks to her house and her grandchildren run to her and jump into her arms, tutu! they scream, in delight, and she squeezes them to her and from the backs of the trucks come barbecue grills and bags of charcoal and cases of beer and soda, food and drink dropping from trucks as if from loaded-down canoes paddled with breadfruit and coconut sweeping up the hard concrete swells of highway from kahului to the foothills—as earlier, in the early afternoon, she sweeps carefully the bare, hard-packed earth of her lawn she sweeps the patches of crabgrass she sweeps broken sidewalksshe sweeps the earth getting ready for the party, she hoses off the cinderblock foundation, the garden hose the color of lizard, the color of philodendron, the hose wrapping briefly around her ankle and she jumps, startled, feels herself kicking at the hose, gasping for oxygen in the humid air (he drinks mountain dew and stares up—down—at the stars at the islands) he is on the roof already, she notices, as she sprays the cinderblock—he’s already hiding from her powerful sonsfrom her glorious victorious sons wal-mart tiki torches are set up and glow against the fading evening and the coming night (in the late afternoon he hangs, sullenly, she points out to him, christmas lights for the party; he strings orange-sand-colored lights from the flanks of the palm tree to the househe wraps lights tightly around the trunk of the tree and he embeds nails in the cracks of the cinderblockhe attaches the string of lights to the nails and he thinks of his years of construction on the california beach, thinks of the long, downcurving shore, thinks of the high rolls of surf that would lift him up—bronzed, glorious—toward the heroin-colored beach, the world a beautiful menagerie of jeeps, of tan girls, of bikinis in all the colors of the rainbowhe remembers stars, sunsets, campfires and the foamy taste of beer and the twanging of guitars and the feel of bikini bottoms being shed in his hand like deflating balloons and he remembers the feel of the surf behind him and the hard shortboard and the roar of the wave and the sudden weightlessness, the sudden lifting up, like getting flung like a baseball, or a jet plane, and he remembers springing to his feet, alive and glorious, the roar of the wave behind him as he steers downward gloriously on waterthe board on his feet)sitting in their bare living room she waits for her sons to arrive, the television off, only the sound of early-evening trafficthe sun droppingat night, wrapped up between her two best friends since childhood, their great bodies warm as beach sand on either side of her, their thick arms draped across one another’s shouldersshe licks clumpy, watered-down heroin off her index finger and they sway together to the music pouring from speakers that one of her sons has set up in the drivewaysome of the keiki smash a rubber ball at one another in a game they seemed to have just made up but that seems to have very clear rules and she sighs, and she closes her eyes, and she sways, and she feels her friends’ bodies on either side of her, she feels the warm wind on her face, and she looks up at the palm fronds waving shaka in the wind, and she feels the earth turning, and she feels inside her the waves that eat into the island on all sides (and he thinks, as he strings the lights, of the waves on the northeastern shore, and the gentle way that they crumble, here, the soft waves perfect for his aging, construction-broken body, perfect for his creaking knees and ankles, the perfect way that they crumble toward the hazy green shore) as earlier, she kneels close to the cinderblock and she sprays it hard with the garden hose, even though no dirt remains she sprays it hard as if to spray him off her (two of her sons are fighting they wrestle on the hard dirttheir legs like great rolling sandalwood logsand he’s watching from the roof, she sees, and there’s a white gleam in his eye, she sees, beneath his sunken cheeks and the ragged beard, and she sees that he’s smiling at this flare-up between her volcanic sons he’s smiling with the scrape of skin and twist of muscle, as if willing these new gods to burn themselves out too (the sun implodes into diffuse haze to the west as he strings lights) (rum on the rooftop, mountain dew, pakalolo and rum in his veins, he lives again the morning’s sessionhe rides the gentle waves toward the shore and for the first time since the first time it feels like he’s riding a slippery turtle shell instead of a surfboard, a slippery shell and even though he’s on an easy wave he feels off-balance, like he could be thrown at any momentand he drops down to one knee—just for an instant—and grabs the rails—just for a moment, no biggie—until the feeling goes and he stands again, but he stays low and crouched like a shredder on this, the easiest of waves)lying in bed, unable to sleep, the party over, bodies sleeping in corners, on the lawn, in the backs of trucks, the glimmer of dawn through the window, she remembers watching him surf for the first time she remembers he was the first surfer—haole or hawaiian or filipino or anyone—who had ever watched her back like that as a girl she’d walk to the red sand beach in hana with thin naomi and busty elaine and spread a blanket on the worn grass at the park above the beach and sit sidesaddle, a hibiscus flower tucked behind her right earmore than availability it was invitation, it was almost a megaphone, she sometimes thought, shouting her availability as she spread out her blanket and a magazine and cookies and chips and sat with elaine while naomi and their other friends—their bodies thin and hard as their surfboards, their bikini bottoms tight—paddled out into the waves with the boys, their bodies the color of barkthe color of sandthe color of earthand she watched them displace the haole surfers whose bodies were the color of airplanesthe color of invasive sharksuntil her friends had paddled out so far they were nothing more than bobbing heads, as small as seeds, and then they were lined up and she watched as they came back in, but she especially watched the boys, paddling, then standing, everything breaking, waves and white downrushing foam and pure blue wave and perfect hard bodies coming in one by one, like the first windblown seeds to land on the islands, like the first canoes to the shores she watched them riding and throwing shaka and howling and then backflipping off into the rushingfoam and then paddling out to come in again—and it hadn’t been for decades later until this one had come in on his last wave of the daythat she’d been looked at the way she always wanted to be looked at by a surfer she was standing by her car to pick up her granddaughter and she saw him look at her the way she’d always wanted—not settling, wanting—and although something in his green eyes had gone out a long time ago they were still looking at her his body was as thin and hard as a rock and she ate with her eyes the way his eyes ate her and she ate his shoulders and the shape of his jaw and the v shape that ran into his surf shorts and the way that he was looking at her were all too much and she started to shake, standing there, his gaze running over her and she turned toward him so he could see her better and she invited it all in and as he came up to her she soaked in his smell of saltwater and coconut (he lies on the roofthe party burned out beneath himhe watches the meteor shower) and she decided to go for it, she decided to paddle in front of the wave, she decided—what the hell, why not—she decided to catch the wave and ride it

Jordan Hartt is a writer, writing teacher, and community and events organizer. His work has appeared in about thirty different literary magazines and journals, including Another Chicago Magazine (ACM), Crab Creek Review, Verdad, and Prose Poem. He holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Idaho, and has taught literature and creative writing at Peninsula College for the past eight years. Hartt’s first book, Myths and Legends of the Pacific Northwest is forthcoming in June, 2015.