Ursula Pflug - Seeds and Other Stories

On the hike back down towards Hana she quailed from the sudden heat. They were unsure of the streams because of pack horses using the main trail sometimes. Jim gathered liliko’i, a type of passion fruit. They were perfectly spherical, their bright yellow skins the consistency of plastic. She’d always found them disgusting, their insides, while sweet, were also almost impossibly acidic, and resembled in appearance and texture, tapioca. That day she ate seven.

Later, hitchhiking up the ranch side of the mountain again, after the scene at the courthouse, the landscape itself seemed buttoned by the same buttons that closed her soul, made it seem foreign even to herself. Except for the blooming jacarandas. How could anything be that purple?

“When will he kill me?” she remembered thinking. After he was gone it seemed funny. Yet those thoughts had occupied a space in her, space that had left no room for him after a time. Now, having thought them so often, they fluttered away, little bats. Too bad it was too late.

As before, Tanya was alone. Her natural state. Except they hadn’t left yet. She could still go find him, agree to sail to Vancouver, whether his friends proved irksome or not. She ought to turn back. It was ridiculous to hike through the crater again so soon, and alone, although that wasn’t the part that scared Tanya. What if he sailed away before she got back? She crossed the highway, faced the opposite direction.

She stuck out her thumb as the first car appeared. In her mind’s eye Jim was wearing the red paisley shirt she didn’t have the money to buy him, the one in the window of the store in Lahaina, so expensive it was frequented by visiting rock stars. He wouldn’t have killed her, she thought. It would be as impossible for him to hurt her, as it would be for Mouse to do so.

After their camping trip, Jim went to visit his sailor friends at the dry dock up island. Again, he invited her to come meet them, but Lulu was at Baldwin Park, and so Tanya hung around there for a few days. Already Lulu felt like an old dear friend. A sober young American woman, twenty-one years old, her buddy. The one she would turn to if she was in trouble. The one she talked to about what was really going on. Sometimes the irony of it struck her; for a best friend she had a woman she’d known three months to talk about a lover she’d had ten days. It heightened her sense of strength, and also fragility. There was no one in her present life who knew her from the previous years, years in which she had been known always by the same others: her parents, her siblings. Her old friends too: if they hadn’t known her for years, they’d known someone who’d known her for years.

“We are a composite picture which is passed on to and entered into by any new person we meet, who may change the image but only in infinitesimal ways,” she’d told Jim under the waterfall. He’d smiled. Anyway, here all of that broke off with a snap. And she didn’t know herself anymore, who she was. She could say anything, and no one would think it out of character. She was Kaolani, from Kaua’i.

“Don’t think you know me,” Jim had said, an edge to his voice, after he’d finished smiling. The only time there had ever been even the slightest edge. I wonder when he’ll kill me, Tanya had thought in reply.

Try and kill me was better. It wasn’t as if she didn’t intend to fight back.

There was no one like Lulu for doing her laundry. It was Tanya who didn’t mind still wearing her grubby camping clothes even after her return. At last Lulu lent her a clean dress and took Tanya’s as well as her own; they caught a ride from the park into Pa’ia. Tanya left her friend in the laundromat. Instead of helping she looked for Mei’s restaurant, hoping to find Jim. She didn’t find it; maybe it was in Lahaina that day. She went and sat on the courthouse steps and cried. Jim walked by then and looked at her, as though she was someone he didn’t know very well, and finally, after some hesitation, came and sat down beside her on the stone steps. He put his hand over hers, tentatively, almost shyly, as if their hands didn’t know each other so well.

“I wish I could help you,” he said. “What is wrong?”

She could only shake her head mutely: no no no, no no no. I cannot speak it; it cannot be spoken.

My father my father my father. And even if she had spoken what would she have said? It is he who has cut out my tongue.

“I’m hungry,” Jim said. “Let’s go eat, and then we can talk.”

“I’m hungry too.” But she started to cry again, and pushed Jim away, physically too, until at last he got up and walked away.

She assumed he’d gone to his friends again and the next day hitchhiked up the mountain alone, then changed her mind and turned back. Two days later in the rich kids’ Lahaina bar with Lulu he appeared. “I have a house for us,” he said, and even though the bouncer was trying to kick him out for some reason Tanya didn’t understand, Lulu had smiled encouragingly and so Tanya had gone to Michael’s house with him.

Tanya and Jim couldn’t make it together in town life, were both too conscious of being with someone weird, an outsider to the human flock. You need at least one who swims with the school, who has the right protective colouring, Tanya thought later. They were both from the UFO, problem was. It all fell apart after the party; they’d slept together in Michael’s spare room. She’d thought they’d make love but they hadn’t, and it had been her turn to ask what was wrong.

“I have something I have to tell you.”

Her heart had begun hammering, for no reason at all.

She didn’t ask, and he didn’t tell her. At some point, they found itchy uncomfortable sleep. Just before she drifted off, Tanya thought, there’s no stitching it back together.

The day after she was back on the courthouse steps, crying again. It had shown promise, she had to admit. Lulu had come to the party too, and slept on the couch. They’d all almost felt like a family. That night Tanya had even changed her name back to Tanya from Kaolani, because Michael’s lady really was Hawai’ian and it seemed dumb.

No matter how long she sat on the stairs crying no one passed by: not Lulu, not Jim, not even Michael or Plumeria, which wasn’t Michael’s girl’s real name either, but it suited her long black hair.

She hitchhiked back to Baldwin Park alone, before dark. She didn’t mind hitchhiking alone, but not at night.

At her old campsite under the ironwood trees she found a little note, again with the same drawing of a mouse. “I’m sorry you’re sad, little sister. I wish I could help you but I don’t know how.”

Had he seen her crying on the courthouse stairs again, and, feeling helpless, not spoken to her this time? What else could the note mean? Or had it been here since before they’d moved into Michael’s? Tanya didn’t know.

After you spend this time with me, you’ll be able to go anywhere, for free.

She was barking up the wrong ironwood tree. Maybe there was still time.

Three days later they were drinking coffee and eating almond cookies in the back room of the Chinese restaurant in Pa’ia. Lulu paid. Tanya was out of money and thinking of applying for food stamps. Most of the restaurants took them. She needed very little; the food stamps would feel like wealth.

“Do you know where that dry dock is? I know he told me the name but I can’t remember. No one I’ve asked knows. It’s not the kind of thing people like us know. I should ask Michael, or Kai.” Kai was her pakalolo connection; he lived in Makawao, where a lot of Hawai’ians lived.

Lulu didn’t hear. Passed her the front page of the Honolulu paper. “Isn’t that him?”