House of Many Gods Read Free Page A

curtains, even miniature gardens. But some yards looked like dump sites—pyramids of rusted cars, skulls of hog heads, naked, running children, their bodies sequined with flies.
    She would pass the chicken farm of the Chinese-Portuguese brothers, Panama and Florentine Chang, and then at the end of Keola Road, where it began to trickle out, Ana would slow down. Here were the turnoffs, degraded dirt roads that people stayed away from. Down these roads were rusted-out Quonsets long ago condemned, hideouts for the death gangs. Men who dealt serious drugs and kept arsenals of guns. They were seldom seen in daylight, but at night they rumbled, their trucks skidding up and down the road. Gunshots were heard. A body found floating facedown in a feeding trough, nudged back and forth by the snouts of pigs. When police raided the huts, they always found them empty. The gangs had melted farther back into the valley.
    Sometimes after a long run, Ana would hose herself down, then come in and sit under a big, translucent light globe, watching a geckowarm its belly against the genial glow. She would whisper to the small, transparent thing, observing its internal workings as it digested mosquitoes. She adopted a toad and three stray cats.
    Ben shook his head. “This thing with animals, too much. She take that toad to bed with her, make conversation.”
    “She’s lonely,” Pua said.
    “Why, lonely? She got a house of folks who love her.”
    “She doesn’t have a
mother
. Not the same.”
    Each time Ana heard that word, a ship eased out of the corner of her eye and into the horizon. She would lie in the raw yellow light of a naked bulb, holding a textbook behind which she studied old snapshots of her mother.
    “Maybe she never left the islands.”
    “What you mean?” Rosie asked.
    “Maybe she’s in Honolulu. Could be right now she’s with some handsome beachboy, sipping Mai Tais.”
    Rosie gathered her in her arms. “Ana, when she’s ready, she’ll come home. She only got one home.”
    “When she comes back, I’ll make her beg.”
    N EWSCASTERS ON THEIR BLACK-AND-WHITE TV DESCRIBED THE long hot summer on the U. S. mainland, whole cities burning during “race riots.” Then riots escalated into assassinations. It happened to men named Martin and Bobby, names that did not mean much to her for they were far away.
    But in that same year, 1968, Duke Kahanamoku died. Handsome, regal, pure-blood Hawaiian, he had been their living royalty, a fearless swimmer and record-breaking Olympic champ. When the sixty-five-year-old Queen Mother came from England touring the Pacific, Duke Kahanamoku was the man who charmed her so, she had got up and danced the hula. Now a wailing went up across the islands, people mourned for days.
    Life suddenly seemed to escalate. Ana’s cousin, Lopaka, enlisted in the Army, and was on his way to Vietnam. Ten years Ana’s senior, he was a wild “park boy” who rumbled all night and came home at dawn when the frogs went to sleep. Sometimes he smelled of liquor and the musk of women. Yet he was fearless, hunting wild boar—wrestling them to the ground bare-handed—slaying them without a knife or gun. He swamspearless through caves of sleeping tiger sharks, and one day he walked into a burning house and walked out with his hair singed off, carrying two children.
    And Lopaka loved her. She was the one to whom he brought jars of fresh bamboo hearts. He taught her how to swing a machete. How to dive in the wildest surf, and how to eat a fish head. And when some girl broke his heart, Ana was the one he turned to, his damp, smoky sweat like eucalyptus fires, exciting the air around her. He took her net-fishing, and taught her how to pick
‘opihi
off the rocks. How to use
limu
as a poultice when she cut her foot. And days when she seemed irretrievably sad, he blew cigarette smoke into her ear, leaving her shivering with laughter.
    Before he left for ’Nam, Lopaka drove her round the island to the wet side and