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ALL HAT, NO CATTLE

All hat, no cattle, C says as we drive. I am visiting him in Lubbock, Texas. My endometriosis has flared again and we’re on our way to Fun Noodle Bar when we pass the boy in the Ray Bans and the fake cowboy hat, his upper lip bristling with a patchy twenty-year-old’s mustache. The boy drives a pickup truck, a GMC Sierra. Back on O‘ahu, my dad drives a truck too, a smaller truck, a Tacoma he’s made into a camper, a truck I haven’t seen because of the virus. We—C and I—pass the boy in the GMC, and C rolls his window down, the window that’s not broken, we broke mine weeks ago, driving 1,100 miles to Lubbock from where I live now, in Knoxville. C waves his beer and shouts all hat, no cattle, but the boy doesn’t hear him through the tinted windows of his Sierra. I hear him, though. I remember when Dad used to drive a Ford F-150, the truck he had when I was eight, the truck he sold so my stepmom could get her Honda Pilot. Before he first went to rehab, Dad and I would take the Ford on spins through Kāhala. We’d play this game: Dad drove slow; I’d yell at people walking the sidewalk. One day I yelled at a woman and she jumped. She fell over, and that’s when we saw her from the front. That’s when we found out she was pregnant. Stop, I said. Dad drove off, even though he was a fireman, even though he used to be a paramedic. I kept asking is she okay. On the phone with the cops, my dad said I saw someone yell at a woman on Hunakai and they said we’ll check on it. Kāhala is a wealthy neighborhood. In C’s car, I forget the window’s broken and push the button but it’s the kind of broken where up is down and down is up so it doesn’t move. It grinds. C rolls his window up because we’re on the freeway and we’re driving his favorite part, the nicest view in Lubbock. He calls it rainbow road, but really it’s an offramp or maybe it’s an overpass. The sun sets in front of us, so bright that if I didn’t trust C, I might be afraid he’d drive us off the road. He pulls into the strip mall lot, and I point at the moon. It’ll be full tomorrow. The best places to view the moon in Lubbock are from parking lots, C says. He takes his beer and leaves me to grab our takeout. I think about the lot on top of Tantalus. We’d go there when Dad was really fucked up, when he didn’t want to disappoint my stepmom. On the open tailgate of his Ford, we’d sit and watch the sunset lay a sheet of gold over everything, from Diamond Head to the airport. Yesterday, C and I went to Lubbock Lake after I cried in the closet from the pain. We walked in the wind. We kicked tumbleweeds and they bounced. You’ll feel better with oxygen in your lungs, my dad always says. He started saying this after his second—or was it his third?—stint in rehab. And sometimes it’s true. Sometimes I do. But back in the car, a receipt blew out my door and I watched C chase it. It snuck below the fence and into the Little League game the kids were playing in the stadium. C came back to the car empty handed and out of breath, his beard blown up like a skirt. Almost got it, he says. Sometimes I wonder if this is all life is, chasing things we’ll never catch, losing bits of ourselves in the process. Like me, here and in love with C, who’s so much like Dad. Like Dad, going to rehab for coke, then alcohol, only to get addicted to Bikram yoga. When C and I get home, I’m so nauseous I can’t eat, can’t even sit at the table. I lie balled up on the floor and C rubs my back, tells me through a mouth of whiskey and noodles, it’ll get better, when it will only get worse.

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LINGER

The rats were in the walls. Your roommate, Harris, set traps for them. Traps with cheese, like they do in the movies. We waited. We waited so long we forgot about them. The traps, not the rats. The rats walked around your Eugene house like they owned it, taking bites of your bread, shitting on the stovetop. But the traps. The traps got lost in the walls. They caught a rat, and it rotted.

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The first house Dad bought after Mom left him was built on the side of the mountain. The backyard had a jabong tree. Dad didn’t know it when he bought the house, but it had rats. Dozens of them. They lived in the jabong tree’s roots. They’d been there for years and were huge, two feet long, grown fat on sweet citrus. I used to hear them at night, scratching in their den. I used to see them on the wall outside my window, their shadows running over my blanket.

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Harris was upstairs when the rat fell through the ceiling. You and I were eating dinner in the basement. It landed on my steak. Its red eye locked with mine: What are you doing here? I couldn’t answer. You smashed it with a broom. You broke its leg. When it screamed, I screamed too. It dragged itself across the concrete. It found a hole in the drywall as you were winding up to hit it again.

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I didn’t mind the rats. I liked that they had been on the mountain longer than we had. I thought of them as owning it. But one day I came home to a bulldozer tearing down the jabong tree. I watched as the bulldozer pushed and reversed, pushed and reversed, until the tree fell. Its roots were full of cardboard and cotton, nests of shredded leaves. A single rat darted out of the den, escaping to our neighbor’s. The rest were killed and stacked beside our fence where they lay, limp and flat, until my dad bagged them up in a black garbage bag.

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I swore the rat you hit with the broom was the same one we found rotten, but you said that one had a longer tail. Whatever. All I know is you and Harris fought those rats for months. You fought me for months. Until you gave up. Now, I’m in Knoxville, and you’re in Texas. Alone in my apartment, I think of you and the rats often. Harris says they’re still alive. I’m happy for them, happy without them, but sometimes I wonder. Sometimes I think about what would have happened if we’d had a little more time, if a rat hadn’t fallen down and ruined our dinner.

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GUT-PUNCHING

Six months later, I sit in your outdoor shower in Eugene with my arms around my knees, watching the leaves of the apple tree dance emerald in the sun’s last fingers. You stand behind me. My head rests on your thighs, the water flowing from you to me, warmed twice over by the heater and your body. It’s dirty, but it can’t be worse than our own piss, which we lay in for months, curled inside our mothers. I feel safest here, soaped in Dr. Bronner’s, the mint so sharp it burns my eyes. Suds pop in my ears and down my body, catch in the filth that sticks to the blooming lilies. Have you ever thought about how everything we think and feel right here and now has been thought and felt by someone else in this same place but in the past? I say yeah and you sigh, and I know you’re thinking of the who came girl before me. Do you ever think about how everything we’re thinking and feeling here and now is going to be thought and felt again by someone in the future? I say no, and mid-wash, your hands squeeze, spasm against my temples. I know you’re wondering who will shower here when you move. Above us, a vine crawls up the wall and twists into a canopy.

After a drunken night of fucking, I wash the dishes. The hardwood floor has bruised my knees, and the plates in the sink are crusted with the dried sauce of frozen pizza, dusted in the ashes of half-smoked, burnt-out joints. The last petals of June’s roses drop through the window’s glass. I smell the honey of the baklava you bought from the store on the corner, the sharp Parmesan you shred over spinach-swirled eggs. Fleetwood Mac is playing. I want to archive this moment, but I’m multitasking: thinking also of my best friend, Bri, who’s quarantined in DC. Two years ago, we spent St. Patrick’s Day dancing to this album. Bri belted along with Stevie on her roommate’s microphone—the same girl who’s now in Nashville making music. Back then she was in my creative writing class, where she sat next to me. I remember a story of hers about a blue light and a man who wouldn’t change. When the teacher read it, he cried. Here I am, in Eugene, trying to write something gut-punching, but mostly falling in love with the way you twist your hands and look at me after we’re done fucking, your face whispering I love you even as your mouth says That was fun. I wish I could blame you, but neither of us has learned how to say what we feel, and I know it’s easier to be in love with the memory of a person than with someone you have to leave. I put the last dish on the drying rack, and you kiss me. Up close, your eyes swirl like water just outside the reef, blue once the surf’s whitewash is good and settled. I wonder what you see when you look at me.

When you leave, I’ll try to be okay. I won’t wear deodorant for weeks, because you once told me not to, and supposedly it only takes fourteen days for your body not to stink. I’ll quit washing my hair and start smelling like you, of firewood and onions souring. I’ll ride my bike by this house and one night, when I’m sloshed with whiskey, I’ll sneak around back and pull apples from the tree. I’ll eat them in the dark, and when I go home, I’ll cook meat, scare my vegan roommate by grilling it to a char, but it’ll be better that way. Something chewed up and burnt inside me.

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One Way to Listen

I cut branches from the money tree, surely
unlucky. A jackal’s head—no matter
what body we find it on—is a sign of death.
But then the good news, announcements,
store credit. And still, a jackal’s head,
if I move carelessly, will enter my kitchen.
I can’t recognize my ghosts today. This one
has an 80s windbreaker and short curls,
and my mother asks if I’m sure she’s not
a woman in white instead of a white woman.
She’s a white woman looking at my wedding
photos, I tell my mother. But what
does she feel like, my mother presses. I
don’t know every woman who made me.

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