The Lion-Dog of Waipahu

The Pegs

The paarankuu was the smallest drum in the room, and Hōkū Tamashiro dropped it anyway.

It was a flat round drum about the size of a dinner plate, with a handle on the back and cowhide stretched tight across the front. You held it in your left hand and hit it with a short stick in your right. The big kids at the back of the gym had the odaiko, the barrel drums that hung across their bodies on straps, and they made a sound like somebody moving a refrigerator upstairs. The middle kids had shimedaiko, tight and bright. The little kids, the ones in front where the aunties could see their feet, had paarankuu. Hōkū was nine. She was the smallest of the little kids. She had the smallest drum in the room, and it was lying face down on the gym floor, and her stick had rolled under the bleachers.

"Keep going, keep going," Aunty Michiko called, clapping the count. "Don't stop for one drum. The song doesn't stop."

The song didn't stop. Mr. Ganeko kept singing from his folding chair by the stage, his sanshin on his knee, his voice high and scratchy as a radio between stations. Twenty-two kids kept stamping and turning. The odaiko kept moving furniture. Somebody behind Hōkū shouted "Iya-sa-sa!" right on time, which was the call you shouted on the beat, and which Hōkū had never once shouted on time in four Saturdays of practice.

She picked up the drum. She did not go under the bleachers for the stick. She walked out the side door of the community hall into the August afternoon, past the plumeria tree and the parked cars, and sat on the curb with the drum in her lap like a plate nobody had put food on.

The heat in Waipahu at three o'clock came up off the asphalt in waves you could see. Across the road, over the roofs, the old sugar mill smokestack stood up into the sky, tall and brick and doing nothing, the way it had done nothing since before her dad was born. The trade wind came down off the mountains and pushed at her hair. It smelled like cut grass and somebody's barbecue and the hot rubber of car tires.

Her cousin Shayna came out after ten minutes. Shayna was thirteen and played odaiko and wore her purple headband tied with the knot over her left ear, which was how the big kids did it.

"Aunty says you can come back in."

"I'm good."

"You're not good. You're sitting on a curb."

"I'm good sitting on a curb."

Shayna sat down next to her. She smelled like sweat and the strawberry lotion she always borrowed from Hōkū's mom. "Everybody drops their stick," she said. "I dropped mine on Mr. Ganeko's foot one time."

"Everybody else knows when to shout."

"You just shout when your left foot comes down."

"Which one is the left foot when you're turning?"

Shayna opened her mouth and closed it. "Okay," she said. "That part's hard."

Obaa came at four in her blue Tercel, which had a dent in the passenger door shaped like a peanut and a dashboard covered in sun-faded parking stubs from the Hawaii Plantation Village, where she volunteered on Tuesdays. She leaned across and pushed the door open. She did not ask about the drum. She looked at it in Hōkū's lap and looked at Hōkū's face and said, "Get in, I need help with the gōyā."

---

Obaa's house sat on a short street below the old mill, a wooden house painted the green of a guava leaf, with a carport in front and a mango tree behind. Hōkū slept there on the nights her dad worked the late shift at the harbor and her mom had to open the okazuya at five in the morning, which this month was most nights. She had her own drawer in the dresser and her own toothbrush in a cup shaped like a pineapple.

The gōyā was a bitter melon, green and bumpy like a crocodile's back. Obaa cut it lengthwise and handed Hōkū a spoon. "Scrape out the white part and the seeds. Scrape hard. The white part is the bitter part."

"Then why are we eating it?"

"Because it's good for you and because your great-grandpa grew it up the side of every fence he ever had." Obaa sliced pork belly into thin strips on the cutting board and dropped them into the hot pan. They hissed and curled at the edges. The smell filled the kitchen, salty and sweet, the smell of every lunch Hōkū had ever liked. Then the tofu, pressed and torn into pieces with her fingers. Then the gōyā in thin green moons. Then an egg, scrambled right into everything at the end, and a splash of shoyu. "Champuru," Obaa said, stirring with long chopsticks. "Means mixed up. Everything in one pan."

"Like the drum group," Hōkū said, before she could stop herself.

Obaa laughed through her nose. "Like the drum group. Big ones, small ones, loud ones, the one who drops the stick."

"Obaa."

"What? I dropped things. I dropped a whole tray of andagi at the very first festival. Rolled all the way under the uncles' table."

They ate at the kitchen table with the radio on low, the gōyā bitter and then not bitter, soft against the salty pork. Hōkū ate more than she meant to. Afterward Obaa took her tablet out of the drawer and opened the family pages, the private ones that only the family could see, where Uncle Corey in Las Vegas had just added his new grandson as a little leaf on his branch. Obaa held the tablet out at arm's length and squinted. "Look at that face. That's a Kaneshiro chin. Poor baby."

---

The sanshin lived on the wall of the back bedroom, over the bed where Hōkū slept.

It was a three-stringed instrument with a long dark neck and a small square body, covered on both faces with snakeskin that had gone the color of weak coffee, with darker scales like a map of tiny islands. At the top of the neck, where the three wooden pegs stuck out sideways like ears, the neck curled back on itself. And in that curl, carved right into the wood, was a little lion-dog.

He had a curly mane cut in fine lines. He had round eyes and big feet with toes. And he had his mouth wide open, as if he had been about to say something important for a very long time.

"A shisa," Obaa had told her the first time, years ago. "Guardian. You see them on the rooftops back in Okinawa, and by the gates, always two. One with the mouth open, one with the mouth shut. Your great-grandpa Seikichi made that sanshin himself, out of a broken bedpost and a skin his cousin mailed him from Kin. He carved the shisa with a pocketknife."

"Where's the other one? The mouth-shut one?"

"He never did it. Said he would carve it when he had time to sit still." Obaa had smiled. "He never sat still."

Nobody in the family played it now. Great-Grandpa Seikichi had died long before Hōkū was born, and Obaa could sing but said her fingers were "all thumbs on the strings," and Dad had taken guitar lessons in high school and quit when his teacher moved to Maui. So the sanshin hung on the wall and was dusted on Saturdays, and once a year Obaa took it down and wiped the skin with a soft cloth and hung it back up.

Tonight Hōkū could not sleep. The fan turned on the dresser. The mango tree scraped the gutter. In her head, twenty-two kids stamped and shouted "Iya-sa-sa!" and she was always half a beat behind, her mouth open with no sound coming out.

She stood up on the bed and took the sanshin off its hook.

It was lighter than she expected and heavier than it looked. The skin was cool. The strings were slack, loose enough to flap. She touched the little lion-dog's open mouth with one finger. It was smooth inside, worn smooth, as if somebody's thumb had rested there for years.

She did not know how to tune it. She only knew the pegs turned. So she turned them, one and then the next and then the third, slowly, the way you would turn a key you weren't sure about, plucking each string as it tightened. The first string was low and grumpy. The middle one came up higher. The thin one at the bottom went up and up until it rang like a bell, and Hōkū stopped, because the three of them were suddenly sounding together, low and middle and high, in a way that felt right, like a door clicking shut in a house where all the doors usually stuck.

Outside, the trade wind, which had dropped after sunset, came back all at once. It hit the house so hard the louvers in the window rattled. The mango tree threw a whole branch of leaves against the roof. The fan on the dresser blew backward.

And from somewhere under her fingers, at the top of the neck, a voice said, very loudly, "FINALLY."

Open Mouth

Hōkū did not scream. She thought about it later and was proud of that. She sat down on the bed very hard, with the sanshin across her knees, and stared at the top of the neck, where the little carved lion-dog was shaking out his mane like a wet dog after a hose.

He was still wood. That was the strange part. He was the dark brown of the neck, with the grain running through him in thin lines, and when he moved, the wood moved too, smooth as water. He stretched his front legs. He stretched his back legs. He climbed off the curl of the neck and stood on the snakeskin of the body, where he was exactly as long as Hōkū's thumb.

"Thirty-two years," he said. His voice was enormous. It did not fit him at all. It was the voice of a man calling across a field. "Thirty-two years on a wall. Do you know how many geckos I have watched? Do you know how many moths have flown straight into my mouth?"

"Shh," Hōkū whispered. "My grandma."

"I can't shh. Look at me." He pointed at his own face with one wooden paw. His mouth was wide open, the way it had been carved. He could talk around it, the way you can talk with your mouth full, but he could not close it. "I'm the open one. Open ones don't whisper. That's the other one's job."

"The one Great-Grandpa never carved."

The lion-dog sat down on the skin and looked at her for the first time properly, with his round carved eyes. Then he sneezed, a sound like a door slammed in a storm.

"You're Setsuko's," he said. "No. You're too small. You're Setsuko's boy's girl."

"I'm Hōkū."

"Hōkū." He tried it out, loudly. "Star. Good name for somebody who is up at midnight. I'm Gaju."

"Like the tree?"

"Like the tree." Gajumaru was the Okinawan word for banyan, Obaa had told her once, the kind of tree with roots that hung down from its branches and grew into new trunks until you couldn't tell which one was first. "Seikichi named me. He said I was going to be a lot of trouble and hang around forever."

Down the hall, Obaa's bedroom door stayed shut. Her snoring went on, steady as surf. Hōkū let out her breath.

---

Gaju explained things the way a person explains the rules of a game while already playing it.

He was a shisa. Shisa guarded houses. They kept out bad luck and bad spirits and bad weather, and in the old country they sat on red tile roofs and by village gates and stared down the road with their mouths open and shut. He had been carved to guard this sanshin and whatever house it lived in, and he had done it, he said, every single night for thirty-two years, from the wall, which was very boring and also, he wanted her to know, hard work.

"Then why didn't you wake up before?"

"Nobody tuned me." He looked offended. "Seikichi tuned the strings every night before he played. Three strings, honchōshi, the basic tuning. Low, middle, high. When the strings are right, I'm right. When he died, nobody touched the pegs. Your grandma dusts me. Dusting is not tuning."

"I didn't know how. I just turned them."

"Your ears knew." Gaju walked up the neck and back down again, as if checking a fence. "Now. We have business. There's a whole island out there and I have not seen it in thirty-two years. Get up. Let's go."

"Go where?"

"Out!" He threw his paws toward the window, where the louvers were still rattling in the wind. "The trade wind is up. A shisa can ride the wind anywhere it's blowing, as long as it blows. Kahuku. Kaʻena. Downtown. The top of the smokestack. Get on."

Hōkū looked at him. He was the length of her thumb.

"Get on what?"

Gaju looked down at himself. He seemed to notice his size for the first time. He turned around once, like a dog trying to see its own tail, and then he said a word in Uchinaaguchi that Hōkū did not know, and which she was fairly sure Obaa would not have liked.

"Oh," he said. "Oh, right. That."

---

The rule, it turned out, was this. A shisa was only as big as the help around him.

"Not my help," Gaju said, pacing. "Anybody's. When people carry something together, I grow. When people do things alone, I shrink. Seikichi used to take me to parties in Kalihi, everybody cooking, everybody hauling chairs, and by the end of the night I was the size of a pickup truck. Then he'd go home and sit on the porch by himself and play, and I'd be back to this." He held his paws apart the width of a thumb. "Thirty-two years on a wall. Nobody helping anybody in this room. I'm lucky I'm not a toothpick."

"So how do you get bigger?"

"Somebody has to help somebody."

"It's midnight. Everybody's asleep."

Outside, as if it had been waiting for its line, something clattered in the dark, and then something squawked, and then several things squawked together in a panic.

Hōkū went to the window. Next door, in Mrs. Pascua's yard, the wind had blown the door of the chicken coop off its latch, and it was banging open and shut, and four brown hens were running in circles around the papaya tree, wings out, offended at everything.

"Well," said Gaju, from the windowsill. "Somebody's awake now."

They went out the back door in Hōkū's rubber slippers, quietly, with Gaju riding on her shoulder. The concrete of the carport was still warm from the day. The air was cooler, and it smelled of wet leaves and chicken and the sweet rotten smell of a mango that had fallen and split. Mrs. Pascua's house was dark. The hens were very loud.

Hōkū had never caught a chicken. She found out quickly that you could not catch one by running at it. The hens scattered like water when you stepped in a puddle. She stood in the middle of the yard, breathing hard, with one slipper half off.

"Not like that," Gaju said in her ear, too loudly. "Like a drum. Slow. Big. Make yourself into a wall. Arms out."

She put her arms out.

"Step. And step. Push them with your feet. Don't chase. Stamp."

She stamped, left foot down hard on the grass. The nearest hen stopped and looked at her sideways with one orange eye. She stamped again, right foot, and moved the hen one step toward the coop.

"Again. You're the big drum. You're slow and you're coming and there's no hurry."

Left. Right. Arms wide. The hen walked into the coop, grumbling. Hōkū came around for the next one. Gaju jumped down off her shoulder and ran along the far side of the papaya tree, low, the way a sheepdog runs, and when the second hen tried to break past him, he made himself into a little wall too.

And he was bigger. Hōkū saw it as he came around the tree. He was not the length of her thumb anymore. He was the size of a mongoose, with a mane she could have run her fingers through, his wooden sides catching the streetlight like polished koa.

"Keep going!" he shouted, which made all the hens jump.

Two more hens. Stamp, stamp, arms out. When the last one walked into the coop, Hōkū pushed the door shut and twisted the wire latch twice, the way she had seen Mrs. Pascua do it. Her heart was going fast. Her feet were wet. She could smell chicken on her own hands.

She turned around. Gaju was sitting on the grass in the light from the street. He was as big as a cat now, a big cat, the kind that steals fish off the counter. He looked very pleased with himself.

"See?" he said. "Two of us. Four chickens."

"You only got one."

"I got one and a half. You got two and a half. The half counts double for me because I'm a guardian." He shook his mane.

Hōkū looked down at her feet. Her legs were still humming from the stamping, left and then right, slow and heavy, the way the odaiko kids moved at the back of the gym.

"That was the stamp," she said slowly. "From eisa. I was doing it."

"Was it?" said Gaju, who had four feet and had never danced in his life. "I only know chickens."

"In the gym I can't do it."

"In the gym nobody's chickens are loose," said Gaju. He yawned, a huge wooden yawn that did not change the shape of his mouth at all, and climbed up her arm, and by the time they reached the back door he was the size of a mongoose again, and by the time she hung the sanshin on its hook he was a carving the length of her thumb, with grass on his feet.

Smiling Dough

On Thursday the ladies came to make andagi.

They came at eight in the morning in a parade of small careful cars, and they parked in a row along Obaa's curb with their front wheels turned in, the way you were supposed to on a hill even though the street was flat. There was Mrs. Kina, who was eighty-three and wore a sun visor indoors. There was Mrs. Oshiro, who brought her own bowl because she did not trust anybody else's. There were the Uehara sisters, who were twins and finished each other's sentences and argued about which one of them was older by eleven minutes. With Obaa, they were five. They had been meeting on the first Thursday of every month since 1979.

"Moai," Obaa told Hōkū, tying an apron around her twice because it was too long. "That's our group. Every month everybody puts in a little money, and every month one person takes the whole pot. Next month somebody else. Around and around. Mrs. Kina took it in 1985 and put a new roof on. I took it when your dad needed braces."

"Is that why they're here?"

"No, today is for the festival booth. But if you have a moai, you have five people who will come when you call. That's the real money."

Obaa's kitchen filled up with women and flour and the smell of oil heating in two deep pots on the stove. The recipe was on a card in Obaa's mother's handwriting, the ink gone purple-brown, flour fingerprints all over it from fifty years of Thursdays. Obaa did not need the card. She propped it against the sugar canister anyway, and later she took a picture of it with her tablet and added it to the family's shared recipe shelf, under the photo of the card from last year, which had fewer fingerprints. "So you can see who cooked," she said.

The dough was eggs and sugar and flour and baking powder, mixed by hand in Mrs. Oshiro's bowl until it was thick and sticky and pale yellow, like wet sand. You did not roll it. You wet your hand, and you squeezed a lump of dough up through the circle of your thumb and finger, and you scooped the ball off the top with a wet spoon and dropped it into the oil. Mrs. Uehara the older one did it so fast it looked like a trick. Plop, plop, plop, plop.

Hōkū's first one came out the shape of a foot.

"Wet your hand more," said Mrs. Uehara the younger one.

Her second one stuck to the spoon and would not come off, and she shook it and it flew into the oil and splashed, and all five ladies stepped back at the same time, like dancers.

"Less shaking," said Mrs. Kina.

Her third one was round. It sank to the bottom of the pot and sat there, and then slowly it rose, and turned over by itself in the bubbling oil, and while Hōkū watched, it split open along one side. A crack, wide and jagged, the inside showing pale and fluffy against the deep brown outside.

"Oh no," Hōkū said. "It broke."

"No, no." Obaa leaned over the pot, and all the other ladies leaned in too. "That's the smile. A good andagi has to smile. If it doesn't crack open, the dough was too tight. If it smiles, it's happy."

Hōkū looked at the andagi, floating in the oil with its wide-open mouth. It looked like somebody she knew.

---

By noon there were four hundred andagi cooling on newspaper on every flat surface in the house, and the whole place smelled like hot sugar and fried egg. Hōkū's hands were sticky to the wrist. She had made about forty andagi, and maybe twenty-five were round, and maybe fifteen smiled. She ate three of the broken ones. They were crunchy outside and soft inside, sweet but not too sweet, and still warm enough to steam when she bit them.

Then everything had to go into boxes, and the boxes had to go into the cars, and the cars belonged to five women whose combined age was over three hundred and eighty years. Mrs. Kina's knee did not do steps. The Uehara sisters both had bad shoulders, the same shoulder, the left one. Mrs. Oshiro had to hold her bowl.

So Hōkū carried. She carried boxes down the front steps and across the carport to Mrs. Kina's car, and to the sisters' car, and she held the trunk of Mrs. Oshiro's car open with her head while she slid the boxes in. Halfway through, Obaa came out and carried with her, one box each, back and forth across the hot concrete in their slippers, and then Mrs. Uehara the older one, bad shoulder and all, came out and carried the light boxes, and then they were all doing it, all five ladies and one girl, a line across the carport, handing boxes one to the next because that was faster than walking.

"Yuimaru," Mrs. Kina said, handing a box to Hōkū. "You know that word?"

Hōkū shook her head.

"Means, when you need help, I come. When I need help, you come. Everybody takes a turn pushing the cart." She patted Hōkū's cheek with a hand that smelled of oil and sugar. "You're good at it."

---

That night, Hōkū tuned the sanshin without being told. Low, middle, high. The door in the music clicked shut. The wind came. Gaju climbed off the neck and onto the bed.

And kept climbing. And got bigger as he came, the way the andagi had risen through the oil, until he was standing on the floor because the bed was too small for him, his wooden mane brushing the ceiling fan, his big wooden feet with their carved toes taking up the whole rug.

He was the size of a pony.

"What," he shouted, "happened today?"

"Andagi," said Hōkū. "And boxes."

"How many hands?"

She counted. "Twelve."

"Twelve!" He shook his mane, and the fan blades went tick tick tick against it. "Help counts for the whole day, you know. It doesn't wear off till the next sunrise. Seikichi used to save his parties for Saturday so he could ride me Saturday night. Get on. Get on, before it wears off."

There was no saddle. She climbed onto his back from the bed, the way you climb onto a rock at the beach, and held on to his mane. He was warm, warmer than wood should be, and he smelled of cut wood and old snakeskin and a little bit of the sea. Then he went through the window, which should not have been possible, and Hōkū felt the louvers pass through her like cool water, and then they were outside, and then they were up.

The trade wind lifted them the way a wave lifts a bodyboard. They rose over Obaa's roof and the mango tree and Mrs. Pascua's chickens, sleeping now, over the street and the parked cars with their wheels turned in. Waipahu spread out under them in orange streetlight: the shopping center parking lot empty and shining, the freeway lit up in two rivers of white and red, the dark flat water of the harbor lochs off to the south with lights pricked along their edges. Behind them the Waiʻanae mountains were black against a sky full of more stars than she had ever seen from the ground. Ahead, the Koʻolau range lay along the other side of the island like a sleeping animal.

"Where are we going?" Hōkū shouted, because you had to shout up here.

"Where Seikichi was born," Gaju shouted back. "Hold on."

He leaned into the wind and came down, and down, and landed with all four feet on the very top of the old mill smokestack, on a ring of brick no wider than a sidewalk. Hōkū grabbed his mane with both hands and did not look down for a long time.

When she did, the town below looked like a map of itself.

"There," Gaju said, pointing with his nose. "Where the shopping center is now. That was a camp. Rows of little houses for the plantation workers. Different camps for different people, back then. Okinawan families over there, by the stream. They kept pigs and grew gōyā on the fences, and they talked in Uchinaaguchi, which isn't the same as Japanese, whatever anybody says. Some people teased them about the pigs. Seikichi's mother said, let them laugh, the pigs are paying for school."

Hōkū looked at the shopping center, its sign lit up for no one.

"He was born there?"

"In the back room of a house with a tin roof. He used to say the rain on that roof was his first song." Gaju was quiet for a moment, which for him meant he was only very loud. "Sing something."

"I don't know any songs."

"You know one. You hummed it in the gym, under your breath, when you were dropping your stick. Everybody in the family hums it."

She did know one, she realized. The one Obaa hummed when she was washing rice. She had never thought of it as a song. She hummed it now, on the top of the smokestack, into the wind, and Gaju hummed it with her, very loudly and a little bit wrong, and the town lay below them with its mouth open, listening.

Night Shift

Hōkū spent Friday at the okazuya where her mom worked, which was one long glass counter and a hot back kitchen in a strip of shops on Farrington Highway, between a shave ice place and a store that fixed phones. It was called Leinani's, because her mom was Leinani, and it opened at five in the morning for the construction crews and the nurses coming off night shift. All day it smelled of shoyu chicken and sesame oil and of the coconut syrup that drifted in from next door every time the door opened.

Her job was boxes. The plate lunch boxes came flat, in stacks taller than she was, and you folded each one along its creases until it popped into a box, and Hōkū folded them on a stool beside the big rice pot, two hundred before lunch. Behind the glass, in metal trays, sat everything people pointed at: shoyu chicken, nishime with chunks of gobo and carrot, fried noodles, little rolls of maki sushi, shrimp tempura standing up in a row. When Aunty Rowena at the other end of the counter needed somebody to tear wax paper, Hōkū tore wax paper, one sheet at a time, the size she was shown. When a pickup order for a baby luau came in early, right on top of the lunch line, Aunty Rowena packed the whole baby luau order without anybody asking, and Mom bought her a shave ice, lilikoʻi and li hing mui, and they split it with two spoons between customers.

"That's how we do it here," Mom said, when Hōkū asked. "Rowena covers me, I cover Rowena. Otherwise one of us would be dead by Christmas."

That night Gaju came off the wall the size of a big dog. Not a pony, but big enough. His back was level with the top of the bed.

"Okazuya," he said, sniffing her hair. "Shoyu chicken. Sesame oil. And somebody split a shave ice. I can smell it on you. Not bad for a Friday."

"Can you carry me?"

"I can carry you. I can't carry you and an opinion, so don't tell me where to go. I know where we're going." He crouched for her to climb on. "Your dad's at work, yes?"

---

The wind carried them east, over the lochs and the dark shapes of the airport runways, where a plane was coming in with its lights on like a slow shooting star. Then down along the edge of Honolulu, past the lit-up towers of downtown and the stubby old Aloha Tower with its clock, to the water, where the city stopped and the harbor began.

Hōkū had seen the harbor from the freeway a hundred times. She had never seen it at night, from above, with the wind in her face.

It was a city of boxes. Containers, stacked five and six high, red and blue and green and rust-brown, in long straight rows like a town where all the houses had been built by one very neat child. Between the rows ran lanes lit by tall white lights, and in the lanes moved huge four-legged vehicles that straddled the stacks and picked up containers from above, like a crane fly picking up a crumb. At the edge of the water stood the cranes. They were taller than anything else along the water, with long arms that reached out over the ship in the channel. The ship was so long Hōkū could not see the end of it.

"Which one is Dad?"

"Third crane," said Gaju. "Look at the cab."

High up on the third crane, under the arm, was a little glass box with a light in it. And in the box, very small, was a person in an orange vest, hands on two levers, looking straight down between his own feet at the ship.

Gaju landed on top of a stack of containers near the third crane, a red one that rang a little under his wooden feet. Nobody looked up. "They won't see us," he said. "People only see a shisa out of the corner of the eye. If they look straight at us, we look like a shadow. Your grandma's been looking straight at me for thirty-two years."

Down below, the crane's arm moved out over the ship. Cables ran down from it to a steel frame, and the frame came down, slowly, slowly, and settled on the top of a blue container in the ship's hold. Clank. Then it lifted. The whole container rose into the air, swinging a little, the size of a house, and came back toward the dock, and settled onto the back of a waiting truck so gently that Hōkū could not hear it land.

"He did that," she said.

"He did that. Watch the ground."

On the dock, where the container had come down, two workers in hard hats and vests were already moving. They had long metal poles and they reached up together to the corners of the next box, unlocking something, and then they called up to the crane, and then they moved on. They worked as a pair. One went high, one went low. One called, one answered. When one of them slipped on a wet patch, the other one's hand was on his arm before he finished slipping, and they did not even stop talking.

Hōkū listened. Underneath the engine noise and the beeping of the straddle carriers backing up, there was a rhythm to it. Clank of the frame. Two calls, a high voice and a low one. Clank of the lock. A pause. Then again.

"Don, don," Hōkū whispered, before she knew she was going to. "Ka. Don, don, ka." It was the shimedaiko part, the one the middle kids played. She had stood in front of it every Saturday for a month and never once heard it out in the world.

Gaju nodded along, softly for him. "Seikichi worked the docks too, for two years after the war, before the pigs. He used to say the harbor was the best drum teacher on the island."

Hōkū tapped it out on her knee. Don, don, ka. The lashers called. The crane moved. Don, don, ka.

"And when do you shout?"

"When the thing lands," said Gaju. "Watch."

The next container came down out of the dark. The frame swung. The two lashers waited, poles ready, and Hōkū waited with them, and when it touched the truck bed, gently, the high-voiced lasher shouted "Okay!" and Hōkū, without meaning to, shouted "Iya-sa-sa!" at exactly the same moment, loud as she could.

The lasher looked up at the containers. He frowned at the shadows on top of the red one. Then he shrugged and moved on.

Gaju was laughing so hard his mane shook. He had gotten bigger again; Hōkū could feel it under her, his back widening, his sides rising like a boat lifting at the dock. "On the beat," he wheezed. "On the beat! Thirty-two years I waited for somebody in this family to shout on the beat."

---

At two in the morning the crane stopped. A siren gave one short blip, and the lights in the crane cab dimmed, and Hōkū watched her dad climb down a ladder that went on and on, round and round the leg of the crane, to the ground. He took off his hard hat and wiped his forehead. He walked to the edge of the lot, where a lunch wagon was parked with its window open and its lights on, a white truck with a picture of a smiling plate lunch painted on the side.

Gaju floated them over and set down on the roof of a little guard shack nearby, where the air smelled of diesel and saltwater and, suddenly, hot rice and frying meat.

Musubi. The lunch wagon had a whole tray of them under a heat lamp, wrapped in plastic: a block of white rice as big as a hand, a slice of canned luncheon meat fried brown and glazed with sugar and shoyu on top, a strip of black nori seaweed wrapped around the middle like a belt. Hōkū's dad bought two. He stood at the counter and unwrapped one and ate half of it in one bite, and then a younger worker came up beside him, a guy with a new-looking vest and a tired face, and patted his own pockets and frowned.

Hōkū's dad held out the second musubi without looking at him. The young guy took it. They stood there and ate, side by side, not talking, the way people eat at two in the morning.

"New guy forgot his wallet," Gaju said. "Your dad didn't ask."

"Does he do that a lot?"

"Every night I've ever watched him," said Gaju. "Which is tonight. But I can tell."

Hōkū looked at her dad, a small figure in an orange vest at a lunch wagon window under the giant cranes, chewing. She thought about him every night up in that glass box, all alone, looking down between his feet. She had always thought of his job as a lonely one. Now she could see the two lashers down below, waiting for each box he set down, calling up to him. And she could see the new guy with no wallet. He wasn't all alone at all. Nobody down there was.

Gaju turned his head toward her. He was the size of a pony again, nearly a horse.

"You want to go home?" he asked.

"Can we stay till he goes back up?"

They stayed. The siren blipped. Her dad crumpled his wrappers and threw them in the bin and walked back to the crane and started to climb. Halfway up the ladder, he stopped and looked out across the containers, toward the guard shack, toward the place where a shadow sat on a roof with a smaller shadow on its back. He looked for a long moment. Then he lifted one hand, the way you wave to somebody across a parking lot when you are not sure it is them.

Hōkū waved back. Then her dad turned to the ladder again and kept climbing, round and round the leg of the crane, until he was a small orange shape in a glass box, and the arm moved out over the ship, and down on the dock the two lashers lifted their poles and waited for him.

The Split Drum

On Saturday Hōkū went back to practice, and she did not drop her stick.

She did lose the beat. She lost it in the turn, the same place as always, where the line of little kids spun all the way around with their drums up and their left feet came down and everybody shouted. Her left foot came down late. Her mouth opened and nothing came out. But her stamps were better. Aunty Michiko noticed. She came down the line during the water break, a small fierce woman with gray hair cut short as a boy's and a purple headband she wore even when she wasn't dancing, and she stopped in front of Hōkū and looked at her feet.

"Who taught you to stamp like that?"

"Chickens," said Hōkū.

Aunty Michiko considered this. "Good teachers," she said, and moved on.

There was a new girl in the line. She stood at the very end, next to Hōkū, which meant she was now the smallest, though only by a little. Her name was Kawehi Kauhane. She was eight and had just moved from Hilo, on the Big Island, and she had a gap where her front teeth were growing in and a voice much bigger than the rest of her. She shouted "Iya-sa-sa!" perfectly on time every single time, which Hōkū tried not to notice.

Kawehi's drum was wrong. Hōkū could hear it from three feet away. When Kawehi hit it, instead of the bright flat crack of a paarankuu, it made a sound like somebody stepping on a paper cup. During the break, Kawehi turned it over in her hands and frowned.

"It's split," Hōkū said. There was a crack in the skin near the rim, long as her finger.

"It's the club's," Kawehi said. "From the extra box. My mom says we'll get a real one later." She said "later" the way you say it when you know it means never. "We just moved. Everything's in boxes."

Hōkū looked at the split. Then she went to her bag and got the roll of purple tape that Obaa had put in there for no reason she had explained, and they sat on the floor by the bleachers and taped the crack from the back, three layers, smoothing it flat with their thumbs. When Kawehi hit it after that, it still didn't sound right. But it sounded less like a paper cup and more like a drum with a cold.

"Thanks," said Kawehi, and then, because she was eight, she said, "You lose the beat in the turn, you know."

"I know."

"You have to look at the person across from you. When they come around, you shout. That's what my aunty in Hilo said. Don't look at your own feet. Look at somebody else's face."

---

At the end of practice, Mr. Ganeko waved Hōkū over to his folding chair.

He was eighty-one. He had been the club's jikata, the singer and sanshin player who sat at the side and gave the dancers their song, for as long as anybody could remember. He wore an aloha shirt with faded pineapples on it and a straw hat with a sweat stain around the band. His sanshin rested on his knee, its snakeskin dark and glossy, and his fingers on the strings had calluses like little shells.

"You're Seikichi Kaneshiro's great-granddaughter," he said. "Setsuko's grandkid."

"Yes."

"I knew it from the face. Your great-grandpa played at every party in Kalihi when I was a boy. Every wedding, every birthday, every time somebody got a new truck. He'd show up with that sanshin he made himself, with the little shisa on top, and he'd play till the coffee ran out." Mr. Ganeko laughed, a dry wheeze. "He played too fast. Always too fast. The old men used to yell at him. He'd just play faster."

Aunty Michiko came over carrying a laptop. "Show her," Mr. Ganeko said, and Aunty Michiko opened the club's photo archive, the one the club office kept, with all the old pictures from fifty years of picnics and festivals that families had brought in to be scanned. Some were for anybody to see. Some only the families could open. Aunty Michiko had to type in a code for this one.

"His daughter said yes to members," she explained. "Your grandma."

It was black and white. A crowd at a picnic under trees, tables with food, a man in the middle with a sanshin, his head thrown back, his mouth wide open, singing. He was skinny and his hair stuck up in front. At the top of his sanshin's neck, too small to see clearly, was a little dark shape.

"1961," said Aunty Michiko. "Kapiʻolani Park."

Hōkū looked at Great-Grandpa Seikichi singing with his mouth open. She thought she knew who had taught him that.

---

That night there was no wind.

Hōkū tuned the strings, low, middle, high, and the click came, and Gaju climbed down off the neck. He was the size of a cat. He walked to the window and pushed his nose against the louvers and sniffed, and then he sat down on the sill with his back to the room and his mane drooping.

"Nothing," he said. "Not a breath. The air's just sitting there like soup."

It was true. The mango tree was still. The curtain hung straight. It was hot, the sticky kind of hot where your legs stuck to the sheet, and somewhere a long way off a dog was barking at nothing.

"So we can't go anywhere."

"A shisa rides the wind. No wind, no ride." He turned around. "We can talk, though. I'm a very good talker. Ask anybody. Ask the geckos."

So they talked, Hōkū lying on the bed with her feet up on the wall and Gaju sitting on her stomach like a heavy, wooden, loud cat.

She asked him about Great-Grandpa, and he told her. Seikichi Kaneshiro had been born in the camp under the smokestack in 1926, the third of six children. His parents had come from a village near Kin, in Okinawa, on a ship, to cut cane. He went to school until eighth grade and then he worked. He worked at the mill and on the docks, and then when he was twenty-five he bought a piece of land in Kalihi Valley, up a dirt road where the stream came down out of the mountains, and he raised pigs.

"Two hundred pigs," Gaju said. "At the most. And here's the thing. You know what pigs eat?"

"Pig food?"

"Leftovers! Every restaurant in Honolulu, every hotel, every school cafeteria, had leftovers. Rice and vegetable scraps and noodles nobody finished. Seikichi had a truck, an old green one with wooden sides on the back, and every morning before the sun came up he drove around town and picked up the leftovers in big cans. The restaurants didn't have to throw it away. The pigs got fed. And then at New Year, and for weddings and parties, the pigs fed the restaurants and everybody else. Round and round."

"Like the moai."

"Like the moai. Like everything good." Gaju shifted his weight on her stomach. "And when somebody in the valley needed a house built, all the pig farmers came. When somebody's truck broke, everybody's truck came. When somebody got married, Seikichi played, and somebody else roasted a pig, and somebody else's wife made andagi. Nobody had a lot. Everybody had a little. You put all the littles together and it's a lot."

Hōkū thought about Kawehi's drum with its purple tape.

"Kawehi's drum is broken," she said. "The new girl."

"I know. I can smell the tape on you." Gaju turned his round wooden eyes on her. "What are you going to do about it?"

"I already taped it."

"Tape is a start. Tape is not a drum."

"I don't know how to fix a drum."

"Neither do I," said Gaju cheerfully. "I'm a lion-dog. But I bet somebody does." He curled up, all of him, on her stomach, and he was heavy and warm, and he smelled of wood and old snakeskin and the faint sea smell that never went away. "Sing that rice-washing song again. The no-wind nights are long."

She sang it. She knew more of it than she had the night before. There was a part in the middle she had not noticed, where the tune went up and stayed up, like something lifted onto a shoulder. Gaju sang the low part under her, and for once he was not too loud, and out in the hot still dark, the dog that had been barking at nothing stopped barking.

A Pot for Two Hands

Obaa started the pig's feet soup at seven on Sunday morning, which meant the house smelled of it by eight and the whole street smelled of it by noon.

"Ashitibichi," she said, lifting the feet out of the sink, where they had been soaking. They were pale and knobbly and had little hooves, and Hōkū decided not to look at them too long. Obaa boiled them once and poured the water out, to get them clean, and then she put them back in the big dented pot with fresh water and a long strip of dried konbu seaweed, dark green and stiff as a belt. Then a hand of ginger, smashed with the flat of the cleaver. Then she turned the flame down low, so low the water only shivered, and she put the lid on crooked.

"Now we wait."

"How long?"

"All day."

"All day?"

"Good things take all day. That's how you know they're good."

So they waited, and while they waited they did other things. Obaa cut a daikon radish into fat white rounds, thick as hockey pucks, and dropped them in after the third hour. She showed Hōkū how to tie the softened konbu into little knots and put them back in the pot. She read the newspaper. Hōkū drew. Every hour or so, Obaa lifted the lid, and a cloud of steam came out that smelled deep and meaty and a little like the ocean, and she skimmed the top with a spoon and put the lid back crooked.

While they waited, Hōkū asked about drums.

"Who fixes them? When they break?"

Obaa looked up from the paper. "Which drum?"

"Kawehi's. The new girl. Her paarankuu has a split. It's the club's old one and her mom can't buy a new one yet." Hōkū thought about how to say the next part. "She's good. She's better than me. She shouts on time."

Obaa folded the newspaper in half and in half again. "There used to be a man in Mōʻiliʻili who made drums. Mr. Yonamine. He passed." She tapped the newspaper against her chin. "But his son-in-law used to help him. I think the son-in-law is in Mrs. Oshiro's daughter's bowling league. Or her ukulele class. One of those." She picked up the tablet. "I'll ask on the moai chat."

"There's a moai chat?"

"Of course there's a moai chat. What, you think we write letters?"

---

The soup was ready at five. The pig's feet had gone soft and sticky, the skin glossy, the meat falling off the bone at a touch. The daikon had turned see-through at the edges. The broth was cloudy and gold. Obaa put a little salt in at the end and that was all, and they ate it in big bowls with rice on the side and a little dish of grated ginger to put on top, and it was rich and warm and tasted like something that had been thinking about itself all day.

Then Obaa ladled out a second pot, a smaller one with a handle on each side, and put the lid on and wrapped the whole thing in a dish towel.

"Mrs. Kina's knee is bad this week," she said. "We'll take her some."

They walked it two streets over, in the long gold light of the evening. Obaa held one handle. Hōkū held the other. The pot was heavy and hot through the towel and the soup sloshed when they stepped off curbs, and they had to match their steps so it wouldn't, left together, right together, like two people in a three-legged race. Mrs. Kina came to the door in her sun visor and took one look at the pot and said, "Oh, Setsuko," in a voice that wobbled, and made them come in and sit on her plastic-covered sofa and eat mochi crackers from a tin while she put the soup away.

"My father used to do this," Obaa said on the way home, swinging the empty pot. "Your great-grandpa. Every time he made ashitibichi, he made two pots. One for us, one for whoever needed it. Sometimes he didn't know who needed it till he was out walking. He'd just walk the valley road with a pot till somebody came out of a house."

---

That night the wind was back. It came down hard off the Koʻolau and rattled the louvers and threw mangoes on the roof, and when Hōkū tuned the strings, Gaju came off the wall the size of a small horse.

"Soup," he said happily. "Soup in a pot with two handles."

"How can you tell?"

"Your left arm's longer than your right. Get on."

They rode the wind east and inland, across the freeways and the dark neighborhoods, toward the mountains. The Koʻolau rose up ahead of them like a wall of green velvet folded into pleats, black at the top where the clouds caught on the ridge. The air got cooler as they climbed. It smelled of wet leaves and ginger flowers and the overripe guava that rotted in the gutters along the valley roads.

Gaju came down in Kalihi Valley, on a narrow road that ran up beside a stream, where the houses got farther apart and the mountains closed in on both sides. He landed beside a chain-link fence. Beyond it there were rows of raised garden beds, dark and neat, with little signs on sticks, and a water tank, and a shed.

"Here," he said.

"This was the pig farm?"

"This was the pig farm. Now it's a garden for the neighborhood. Thirty families have a bed." He sniffed. "Somebody's growing gōyā on the fence. Of course they are."

Hōkū looked at the dark rows. She thought of the photo Obaa had pinned on the family map that morning, while the soup cooked: a little red marker on Kalihi Valley, and when you touched it, a picture of a wooden shed and a green truck with wooden sides and a skinny man with his hair sticking up, and under it, in Obaa's typing: "Dad's farm, about 1958. The pigs are not in the picture because they would not hold still."

A car came slowly up the valley road with its headlights on. It stopped at a small house just past the garden, an old wooden house with a sagging porch, and a woman got out. She was still in her work clothes, a hotel uniform with a name tag, and she was carrying a plastic bag with a takeout box inside and a carton of milk. She went up the porch steps and knocked twice, softly, and waited. After a long time, the porch light came on, and an old man opened the door, leaning on a walker.

They talked for a minute. Hōkū couldn't hear. The woman held out the bag. The old man took it. Then the woman reached past him and turned off the hose that was dripping by his door, and picked up a newspaper from the steps and handed it to him, and said something that made him laugh, and went back down to her car.

"She's not his daughter," Gaju said quietly. "Next-door neighbor. Every night after her shift. I can tell by how she knocks."

Gaju was bigger. Hōkū felt it as they lifted back into the wind, his back widening under her knees. They rode the valley breeze down toward the city lights, and as they rode, Gaju sang. It was the rice-washing song, but he sang a part of it that Hōkū had not known was there. Not the tune. The words.

One bag on one back is heavy,
one bag on two backs is light.
Give me your end of the morning,
I'll give you my end of the night.

"Did Great-Grandpa make that up?"

"He made up all the words. He made up different ones every party. That's the one he sang when he was carrying something." Gaju flew lower over the dark roofs of Kalihi, the wind lifting his mane. "Your grandma knows them all. She just sings without the words now. Ask her."

Hōkū held on, and said the words over to herself so she would not lose them, morning and night, one back and two, all the way home.

Faces Across

In the morning, over rice and the last of the soup, Hōkū asked Obaa about the words.

Obaa stopped with her chopsticks halfway to her mouth. "What words?"

"To the rice song. The one you hum. One bag on one back is heavy."

Obaa put the chopsticks down. She looked at Hōkū for a long moment, the way you look at a cat that has just opened a door by itself. "Who told you that?"

Hōkū had thought about this. "I heard it somewhere," she said, which was true.

"Huh." Obaa set her rice bowl down and turned it slowly on the table, a quarter turn and then another. Then she sang, quietly, in a thin, sweet, slightly cracked voice that Hōkū had never heard her use, the one under the humming:

Wash the rice and pour it cloudy,
wash again and pour it thin.
Fourth time, look, the water's clear now.
Fourth time, friend, the pot can begin.

"That's the first part," she said. "Dad made it up for me when I was little, so I'd wash the rice four times and not two. Then he'd do the bag part when he was carrying something. And there was a part for when the pot boils, and a part for when somebody's sad." She shook her head. "I haven't sung the words since he passed. I don't know why. I just hum."

"Can you teach me the rest?"

Obaa stopped turning the bowl. She got up and got a pencil and the back of an envelope from the electric bill, and she sat down again, and she wrote, slowly, in her neat cafeteria-manager printing, the way she used to write the lunch menu on the whiteboard for thirty-one years at the elementary school down the road. She wrote four verses. Then she stopped and crossed one line out and wrote it differently. Then she pushed the envelope across the table.

"That's all I have," she said. "There were more. He made them up every party. Nobody wrote them down."

Hōkū folded the envelope into her pocket. Later, at home, her mom helped her type the verses into the family pages, on Great-Grandpa Seikichi's page, under the picture from 1961, and Obaa sang each one into the tablet so that next to every line there was a little button you could press to hear her. Uncle Corey in Las Vegas pressed them all that same night. He left a note: "I forgot the boiling one. Thank you, Mom."

---

That night the trade wind was strong and steady, the best wind yet, and Gaju came off the wall the size of a horse.

"Envelope," he said. "Pencil. A grandmother singing. I'm full. Get on, we're going north."

They rode the wind straight up the middle of the island, through the gap between the two mountain ranges, over the dark fields where the pineapples used to grow and the red dirt showed even at night, past Wahiawā with its quiet streets, down the long slope toward the North Shore. The air changed as they came down. It got wetter, saltier, with a smell of cut grass and sea spray and something sweet that Hōkū could not name until they were almost on top of it.

Corn. Rows and rows of it, in the flat fields behind Kahuku, where the land ran right to the ocean.

And there were lights in the field. Not streetlights. Little bobbing lights, a dozen of them, moving along the rows. Headlamps. A family was picking corn in the dark, before the heat came. Hōkū could see them as Gaju came down to land on the roof of a farm stand by the road: a grandmother, and a man and a woman, and two teenage boys, and a girl about Hōkū's age with a headlamp too big for her head, all moving down the rows with sacks over their shoulders, snapping ears off the stalks. A flatbed truck waited at the end of the row with its tailgate down. Next to it, crates. A lot of crates.

"They're behind," Gaju said. "Look. Four rows picked, six to go, and the sun comes up at six. And somebody's missing. See the extra sack by the truck?"

Hōkū looked. There was a sack by the truck, empty, with a headlamp sitting on it, switched off.

"Somebody's sick, maybe," Gaju said. "Or somebody's baby is sick. Either way they're one pair of hands short."

"What can we do? They'll see us."

"Corner of the eye," said Gaju. "Only the corner of the eye."

He came down off the roof and walked to the end of the row, a big wooden lion-dog the size of a horse, with a girl on his back, and he picked up a full crate of corn in his mouth. His mouth was open anyway. It fit. He carried it to the truck and set it on the flatbed, and went back for another. Hōkū slid off his back and grabbed the edge of the next crate with both hands. It was heavy, much too heavy, but when she lifted, Gaju lifted the other side with his teeth, and between them it went up onto the truck bed.

The man in the headlamp looked over. He looked straight at them, and Hōkū froze. But he only frowned at the truck, at the crates moving onto it, and rubbed his eyes, and said something to his wife, who laughed and kept picking.

They loaded crates for an hour. Hōkū's arms burned. Her slippers filled with dirt. The wind came off the ocean steady and cool, and behind the corn, on the low hills along the coast, the wind turbines turned. Hōkū had seen them from the car a hundred times, tall white towers with three long blades, turning slowly, slowly, in a line along the ridge. At night they had red lights on top that blinked all together, all at once. Blink. Then dark. Then blink.

"Look at those," Gaju said, setting down a crate. "Big spinning shisa. Thirty-two years ago they weren't here."

"They're so slow."

"They're not slow. They're big. Look at the tips."

She watched the tip of one blade. It went around fast, very fast, faster than the middle, sweeping a huge circle through the dark. And then she understood something about the turn.

"In eisa," she said, "when we spin, the big kids are on the outside. They have to go faster."

"Mm."

"And the little kids are in the middle. We don't have to go fast. We just have to go around."

"Mm."

"But I always watch my own feet, so I don't know where I am in the circle." She thought about what Kawehi had said: look at somebody else's face. "If I watch the person across from me, I'll see when they come around."

Gaju set down another crate and looked at her with his round wooden eyes. "Seikichi used to say, when you dance, you don't dance with your feet. You dance with the person across from you. He said it to me every party for forty years. I never knew what he meant. I'm a lion-dog. I have four feet and nobody across from me."

"You have me across from you," said Hōkū.

Gaju stood very still for a moment. Then he grew. She felt it, a kind of rushing, like a wave pulling back before it comes in, and when it stopped he was bigger than the farm stand, bigger than the flatbed truck, his mane brushing the bottoms of the clouds, his wooden sides gleaming in the red blink of the turbines.

"Last six crates," he said, in a voice like a ship's horn. "Let's go."

When the grandmother in the field straightened up from the last row and looked at the truck, it was loaded. All of it. The sky over the ocean was going from black to dark blue. The girl with the too-big headlamp was standing by the tailgate, staring at the crates and at the corner of the farm stand, where something big was just turning away.

"Grandma," she called. "Grandma, who did this?"

The grandmother came up out of the corn. She looked at the crates and wiped her hands on her jeans and looked at the farm stand, and the road, and the dark, and the turbines turning on the hill.

"Neighbors," she said, and patted the girl on the head, and closed the tailgate with a bang that sounded, Hōkū thought, almost exactly like the low drum.

Kona Weather

On Wednesday the wind turned around.

Hōkū knew before she opened her eyes. The air in the back bedroom was thick and still and wet, and when she breathed it in, it tasted faintly of burnt matches. The fan pushed the same hot air from one side of the room to the other. Outside, the sky over the Waiʻanae mountains was not blue but a dirty white, as if somebody had smudged it with a thumb.

"Kona weather," Obaa said at breakfast, fanning herself with the newspaper. "Wind from the south. And the vog's come over from the Big Island." Vog was volcano smog, from Kīlauea, blown two hundred miles across the ocean when the trade winds stopped. It made the mountains disappear and made everybody's eyes itch and made Mrs. Kina, on the moai chat, write, "Cannot breathe, staying inside, somebody bring me ice cream." "Everybody gets grumpy in kona weather," Obaa said. "Even the dogs."

There was other news on the moai chat. Mrs. Oshiro's daughter's ukulele teacher's husband was Mr. Teruya, and he was the son-in-law of old Mr. Yonamine who used to make drums in Mōʻiliʻili, and he still had some of his father-in-law's tools in his garage, and he said he could put a new skin on a paarankuu. He would need a cowhide. He would need a morning. He said bring it by.

Hōkū read it twice on Obaa's tablet. She had been planning to tell Kawehi on Saturday. She had been planning it all week, the way you plan a surprise: Kawehi turning the drum over, Kawehi hitting it, the bright clean crack it would make.

---

Practice on Saturday was in the hot gym with the doors open and no wind coming in, and everybody was sweating through their shirts before warm-ups were over. The festival was eight days away. Aunty Michiko had a clipboard.

She called out the lines for the festival stage. The big kids with odaiko in the back, Shayna on the end. The shimedaiko in the middle. Then the paarankuu line, the little kids, the front of the whole group, the ones the audience would see first.

"Front row, paarankuu," Aunty Michiko read. "Mason. Keiko. Kainoa. Lily-Ann. Kawehi."

Kawehi let out a little squeak and grabbed her taped drum to her chest.

"Second row, paarankuu. Hōkū. Ikaika. Brysen."

Hōkū stood very still. Second row was the row behind. Second row was the row the audience would see between the heads of the front row. She had been in front all summer, at the very end, the smallest. Now Kawehi was the smallest, and Kawehi shouted on time.

She danced the whole practice in the second row. She did not lose the beat in the turn. She watched Brysen's face come around and she shouted when he shouted, and it worked, it actually worked, and she did not feel happy about it at all. Her stamps hit the floor hard. Harder than they needed to.

At the break, Kawehi came over, still holding her drum, smiling her gap-toothed smile. "You didn't lose it in the turn! I saw!"

"Good for you," said Hōkū.

Kawehi's smile wobbled. "Did you want to—"

"Your drum sounds like garbage anyway," said Hōkū. "Everybody can hear it. They'll hear it in the front row. It sounds like a paper cup."

She had not known she was going to say it. It came out of her mouth all at once, the way the oil spits when you drop the andagi in too hard. She saw it hit Kawehi's face. Kawehi's mouth closed. Her eyes went shiny. She turned around and walked to the other end of the bleachers and sat down next to her mother, who was waiting there with a cooler, and she put her face against her mother's arm.

Shayna, across the gym, was staring at Hōkū with her mouth open.

Hōkū looked at the floor. The floor did not help.

---

That night she tuned the strings anyway. Low, middle, high. The click.

Nothing happened.

She waited. The fan turned. The vog sat in the room like a wet towel. She plucked the strings again, all three. And very slowly, at the top of the neck, the little carved lion-dog moved. He did not climb down. He did not shake his mane. He turned his head, just his head, and looked at her.

He was smaller than she had ever seen him. He was smaller than the carving. He was the size of a grain of rice, a dark speck of wood in the curl of the neck, and his voice, when it came, was so small she had to put her ear right against the sanshin to hear it.

"Well," he said. "That was a day."

"It's the kona wind," said Hōkū. "Obaa says everybody's grumpy."

"It's not the wind."

"There's no wind, so you can't ride—"

"It's not the wind." Even that tiny, he could make his voice sharp. "I'm not this small because of the wind. Wind or no wind, I'm as big as the help around me. Today somebody took some help away. You can do that, you know. It's not just adding. You can subtract."

Hōkū sat on the edge of the bed with the sanshin in her lap. Her face was hot. "She got my spot."

"She didn't get your spot. Michiko gave her a spot. You can't own a spot in eisa. It's not a chair."

"I was going to fix her drum. I was going to surprise her. And then she—"

"Then she was happy," said Gaju, "and you didn't like it."

Hōkū didn't say anything. Outside, somewhere far away, a car alarm went off and stopped. The mango tree did not move at all.

"I'll tell you a thing," said Gaju, after a long time. "Seikichi had a best friend in the valley. Tokuichi. Tokuichi had a better truck. A red truck, nearly new, with a real metal bed instead of wooden sides. Seikichi wanted that truck so much he couldn't look at it. One day Tokuichi's truck broke down on the valley road, and Seikichi drove right past him. Didn't stop. Just drove past with his cans of leftovers, looking straight ahead."

"Then what?"

"Then he got home and I was the size of a sesame seed and he couldn't play a single song all night. Every string sounded wrong. And in the morning he drove back down the valley road and towed Tokuichi's red truck all the way to the garage in his old green truck, with the rope tied to the wooden sides, and the wooden sides nearly came off, and they were both laughing so hard they had to stop twice."

Hōkū wiped her nose on her wrist.

"Was he still mad about the truck?"

"Oh, he wanted that truck till the day he died," said Gaju. "Wanting is allowed. It's the driving past that's the problem."

She held the sanshin. She could hear, if she listened, the tiny tick of the grain-of-rice lion-dog walking back and forth in the curl of the neck, the way somebody paces in a waiting room.

"I don't know how to say sorry to her," she said. "She won't want to talk to me."

"Probably not," Gaju agreed. "So don't start with talking."

"What do I start with?"

"What did Seikichi start with?"

Hōkū thought about the green truck and the rope and the wooden sides nearly coming off. She thought about Obaa's moai chat, and Mr. Teruya's garage in Mōʻiliʻili, and the cowhide, and the Saturday.

"With the truck," she said.

"With the truck," said Gaju. He was, she thought, maybe the size of a green pea now instead of a grain of rice. It was hard to tell. "Go to sleep. The wind'll come back. It always does."

Stretching the Skin

Hōkū did not start with talking. She started with Obaa.

She told her the whole thing on Sunday morning at the kitchen table, the front row and the second row and the paper cup, and Obaa listened without saying anything, peeling a tangerine in one long curl. When Hōkū was done, Obaa put a section of tangerine in her own mouth and chewed it and looked out the window at the vog, which was thinning now, the Waiʻanae mountains coming back as pale gray shapes.

"So what are you going to do?"

"Fix her drum. With Mr. Teruya. And her. Together." Hōkū had been awake half the night working it out. "But she won't come if I ask her."

"No," Obaa agreed. "She won't." She wiped her fingers on a paper towel and picked up her phone, which she only used for calling, never for anything else, holding it a little away from her ear the way she held the tablet. "But her mother might come if I ask her mother. Grown-ups are easier. We forget faster."

Kawehi's mother's name was Mrs. Kauhane, and she worked at the airport, and she said yes on the phone before Obaa even finished asking, in the voice of a woman who had been unpacking boxes for three weeks and would say yes to anything that got her kid out of the house.

The cowhide cost forty dollars. Hōkū had eleven dollars in a jar. Obaa wrote on the moai chat, and in twenty minutes Mrs. Uehara the older one, whose turn it was to take the moai pot that month, wrote back: "Take twenty from my pot. Tell the girl the Uehara sisters say chibariyo." And Mrs. Uehara the younger one wrote underneath: "The younger Uehara sister says it louder." And Mrs. Kina, still stuck inside with her knee, wrote: "Ten from me. I want a photo of the drum."

"Chibariyo," Obaa said, reading it. "Means do your best. Don't give up. Hang in there. The Uehara sisters say it to everybody. They said it to the mailman when he hurt his back."

---

Mr. Teruya's garage was in Mōʻiliʻili, on a narrow street of old wooden houses and newer apartment buildings, near the university, where the air smelled of plumeria and somebody frying garlic. The garage door was open. Inside, it was cool and dim and full of things: a workbench with a vise, coffee cans of nails, three surfboards hanging from the rafters, a radio playing Hawaiian music very softly, and on the back wall, on a row of hooks, drums. Old ones, new ones, half-finished ones with no skins on them, just wooden rings like empty picture frames.

Mr. Teruya was a big soft-spoken man in board shorts and a T-shirt from a plumbing company. He looked at Kawehi's taped drum and turned it over and made a little sad noise.

"Who did the tape?"

"Me," said Hōkū.

"Good tape job," he said. "Wrong problem. Come."

Kawehi had come in her mother's car and had not said one word to Hōkū. She stood on the far side of the workbench with her arms crossed and her chin down. Hōkū stood on the near side. Mr. Teruya did not seem to notice. He cut the old split skin off the drum with a short curved knife, and pried out the old tacks, one by one, and dropped them in a can with a plink. Then he took the new cowhide out of a bucket of water, where it had been soaking all morning. It was pale and floppy and slippery and it smelled like a wet dog that had rolled in a barn.

"Ew," said Kawehi. It was the first thing she had said.

"Ew," Hōkū agreed, before she could stop herself.

Kawehi almost smiled. Then she remembered and put her chin back down.

"Now," Mr. Teruya said, "the skin goes over the frame wet. When it dries, it shrinks, and it gets tight, and that's your sound. But it has to go on even. If it's tight on one side and loose on the other, it'll sound like—"

"A paper cup," said Kawehi.

"Sure. A paper cup." He held the dripping skin over the wooden ring. "I can't do it by myself. Nobody can. Old Mr. Yonamine used to say one person stretching a drum skin is like one person folding a bedsheet. You need somebody across from you."

So they stretched it. Mr. Teruya laid the skin over the frame and told each of them to grab an edge, Kawehi on one side and Hōkū on the other, across from each other, and pull. Not hard. Even. When Kawehi pulled, Hōkū pulled. When Hōkū's side went slack, Kawehi felt it and let up. Mr. Teruya went around between them with a little hammer, tack, tack, tack, fixing the skin to the rim as they held it.

They had to look at each other to do it. There was no other way. Hōkū watched Kawehi's face across the wet skin, and Kawehi watched hers, and when Kawehi's eyebrows went up it meant pull, and when they went down it meant wait.

Halfway around, with her fingers aching and cold from the water, Hōkū said, "I'm sorry I said that thing. About the garbage."

Kawehi pulled. Hōkū pulled. Tack, tack.

"It did sound like a paper cup," Kawehi said at last, not looking up.

"It sounded like a paper cup with a cold."

Kawehi snorted. She tried to stop it and it came out her nose and she had to let go of the skin with one hand to wipe it, and Hōkū's side went slack, and Mr. Teruya said "Whoa, whoa," and they both grabbed it again at the same time, and then they were both laughing, holding a wet cowhide over a drum in a garage in Mōʻiliʻili, while Mr. Teruya waited with his hammer and the radio played a slack-key guitar song about a waterfall.

When the last tack went in, Mr. Teruya set the drum on a shelf in the sun by the door to dry.

"Two days," he said. "Don't touch it. I mean it. Don't even look at it too hard."

---

Monday night the trade wind came back, cool and clean, and blew the last of the vog out to sea, and Gaju came off the wall the size of a horse with a very satisfied look on his face.

"Somebody," he said, "stretched a drum."

"How did you know?"

"You smell like a wet barn. Get on."

They rode west this time, out past the edge of Waipahu, past the new houses and the old fields, along the dark Waiʻanae coast where the mountains came right down to the sea and the road ran between them in a thin line of lights. Past the beaches and the little towns. Past the end of the road, where the pavement stopped and there was only a dirt track and then not even that. The land narrowed to a point, low and rocky and covered in scrubby bushes with little white half-flowers, and the ocean came in on three sides, loud and white in the moonlight.

Kaʻena Point. The westernmost tip of the island. Gaju landed on a flat rock above the waves.

Below them on the sand, a big gray shape lay like a log. It lifted its head and looked at them, and Hōkū saw whiskers and dark round eyes. A monk seal. It looked at them for a long moment, out of the corner of its eye, and then put its head back down on the sand and sighed.

"She can see us," Hōkū whispered.

"Seals see everything," Gaju said. "She doesn't care. She's had a long day."

They sat on the rock, the girl and the lion-dog, and looked west, out over the black water toward where the moon was going down.

"Okinawa's that way," Gaju said. "Past the end of the sky. Seikichi's mother came from there on a ship when she was seventeen. She used to stand on the beach at Nānākuli sometimes and look this way. He told me. She never went back."

Hōkū thought of the pictures Obaa's cousin's daughter in Kin had posted on the family pages last spring, when she visited the old Kaneshiro house plot for Obaa: a small square of land with a low stone wall around it, a tree with hanging roots growing out of the corner, a cat sitting on the wall. Obaa had looked at those pictures for a long time. "Same gajumaru," Obaa had written underneath. "Bigger."

"There's a gajumaru there," Hōkū said. "On the old land. In the pictures."

"Is there." Gaju's voice was quiet. For him. "Good. Something should stay put."

The seal sighed again on the sand. The waves came in white and went out black. And Hōkū sat with her hand in the wooden mane of a lion-dog who was exactly as big as a horse, and not one bit bigger, because tonight it was only the two of them out here at the end of the island, looking at the same piece of dark.

The Mouth That Keeps

The new drum skin dried the color of a manila folder, smooth and tight, with the little round heads of the tacks shining all the way around the rim. When Kawehi hit it for the first time, in Mr. Teruya's garage on Wednesday afternoon, it went ka! so bright and clean that Mr. Teruya's dog woke up under the workbench and barked at it.

Kawehi hit it again. Ka! Then she held it up over her head, both arms, like a trophy.

Obaa took the photo for Mrs. Kina. Kawehi with the drum over her head, Hōkū beside her pointing at it, Mr. Teruya in the background pretending not to smile. On the moai chat, Mrs. Kina wrote: "That is a forty-dollar drum. I can tell from here." The Uehara sisters wrote CHIBARIYO in capital letters, both of them, one after the other.

After that, Kawehi came over to Obaa's carport every afternoon to practice. Mrs. Kauhane dropped her off on her way to the airport and Hōkū's mom picked her up on her way home from the okazuya, and in between, the two girls stamped and turned on the warm concrete between the Tercel and the mango tree, drums up, faces across. Don, don, ka. Obaa sat on a folding chair in the shade with a cold barley tea, calling the count, and sometimes she sang the rice song for them to dance to, with the words, which made Kawehi stop and stare.

"Your grandma made that up?"

"Her dad did. My great-grandpa."

"In Hilo my aunty has a song about her car," said Kawehi. "But it's not as good."

Obaa taught them a few words in Uchinaaguchi for the festival. Not many. "Nifee deebiru," she said, which meant thank you, the island way, not the way they said it on the mainland of Japan. "Chibariyo," which they already knew. And one more, which she said slowly, so they could get it: "Ichariba choodee."

"What does that mean?"

"Once we meet, we're family." Obaa took a sip of her barley tea. "It's an old saying. You meet somebody one time, and now they're your brother, your sister. That's how the old people did it. That's how they got through."

Kawehi said it to herself under her breath. Then she said it to Hōkū, loudly, with her gap-toothed grin, and stamped.

---

On Thursday after practice, Hōkū went to Mr. Ganeko's folding chair by the stage and asked him if he would teach her to play.

He looked at her over his glasses for a long time. "Sanshin?"

"Just one song. The rice song. My great-grandpa's."

"On his sanshin?"

She nodded.

He was quiet a while, plucking one string, listening to it. "How's the skin on that old thing?"

Hōkū thought about it. She had looked at the sanshin every night for two weeks. "There's a line," she said. "On the back. By the corner. It's thin. Like a hair."

Mr. Ganeko nodded slowly, as if he'd expected that. "Snakeskin dries out when nobody plays it," he said. "Gets brittle. Starts to crack. Playing keeps it alive. The sound going through it, the hands on it. Thirty years on a wall, no hands—it's a wonder it's not in pieces." He plucked the string again. "Bring it to me after the festival. I'll look. It might need a new skin. That's not cheap. The good skins come from Okinawa." He looked at her over his glasses again. "But I'll teach you on mine first. Your fingers are small. You'll start slow."

"Great-Grandpa played fast."

"Your great-grandpa," said Mr. Ganeko, "played too fast. Don't learn that part."

---

That night, when Hōkū tuned the strings, she did it very carefully, and when the click came, she looked at the back of the sanshin. The line was there, thin as a hair, curving from one corner of the skin toward the middle. She touched it. It was a tiny bit rough.

Gaju climbed down. He was the size of a horse, a good big horse, but he did not say "get on." He walked to the window and looked out at the wind moving in the mango tree, and then he said, "I want to go on the roof."

"Which roof?"

"This roof. Ours." He crouched. "A shisa belongs on a roof. Thirty-two years on a wall and I've never once sat on a roof. Seikichi always meant to put a proper shisa on the roof, a clay one, like the old houses back in Okinawa. He never did."

So they went up, a short hop on the wind, and Gaju settled himself on the peak of Obaa's roof, between the old TV antenna and the vent pipe, and Hōkū sat between his front paws on the warm, rough shingles. Below them was the street, with the cars parked along it and the streetlights humming. Mrs. Pascua's coop, latched. Mrs. Kina's house two streets over, with her porch light on. The smokestack. Beyond it, the lights of the freeway and the dark lochs and, far away to the east, the faint orange glow of the harbor, where her dad was in his glass box.

Gaju looked down the street with his mouth open, the way he had been carved, the way shisa had looked down roads for hundreds of years.

"This is right," he said quietly. "This is the job."

They sat for a while. Then Hōkū said, "Mr. Ganeko says the skin needs fixing."

"I know."

"Does it hurt?"

"No. It's like a draft in a house. Things leak." He was quiet a moment. "That's the thing about being the open one, you know. I let everything in. Good luck, good songs, the smell of soup, the wind. That's my job. But I can't keep anything. It goes right through. That's why I only knew one verse of the rice song till you asked your grandma. Seikichi sang me fifty verses. I let them all in and they all went out the other side."

Hōkū looked at his wooden face. The wide-open mouth. The eyes that never closed either.

"That's what the other one's for," she said. "The mouth-shut one."

"That's what the other one's for. The open one lets good things in. The shut one keeps them. It's a pair. One without the other is only half a guardian." He shook his mane, and a little shower of mango leaves fell off it onto the shingles. "Seikichi always said he'd carve her when he had time to sit still. He never had time. He was too busy carrying things. Driving the truck, playing at parties, taking soup up the valley. And then he was old, and then he was gone, and I was on the wall with my mouth open, letting in dust."

"I could carve her," Hōkū said. "I could learn."

Gaju made a sound that was almost a laugh. "With what? A butter knife? You'd cut your thumb off and your grandma would never forgive me." He looked down the street again. "Anyway. When the festival is over, you'll be busy. School. Practice. Friends. You'll forget to tune me. That's how it goes. Then I go back to wood and everything I let in goes out again. That's all right. It was a good two weeks."

"I won't forget."

"Everybody forgets," said Gaju, not unkindly. "Even me. Especially me. That's why there are supposed to be two."

Hōkū pulled her knees up and put her chin on them. Down the street, a car went by slowly with its windows down, playing Hawaiian music, and turned the corner. The wind moved in the mango tree. She thought about Obaa's envelope with the four verses on it, and about the little buttons on Great-Grandpa's page where you could press and hear Obaa sing each one. She thought about the moai chat, five ladies who had been meeting every month since 1979, keeping track of whose turn it was. She thought about Mr. Teruya saying you needed somebody across from you.

"What if the other one isn't a carving?" she said.

Gaju turned his head and looked at her.

"What if it's not one thing," Hōkū said slowly, working it out as she said it. "What if it's a lot of people. Keeping things. Taking turns."

The lion-dog on the roof was silent for so long that she thought maybe he had gone back to wood right there on the shingles. Then she felt it under her, that rushing, the wave pulling back, and he grew, not much, just a little, just enough that the roof creaked under his feet and somewhere below them in the house Obaa turned over in her sleep and said something cross to nobody.

"Huh," said Gaju.

Two Thousand Smiles

The Okinawan Festival happened every Labor Day weekend, and it was so big it filled the exhibit halls of the Hawaii Convention Center, the huge glass building at the edge of Waikīkī. Hōkū had been every year of her life. She had never been at six in the morning, when the parking garage was empty and echoing and the exhibit hall was a vast gray room full of folding tables and extension cords and people in club T-shirts yelling to each other across the concrete.

The andagi booth was at the back, by the loading dock, because of the fryers. It had a long table in front for selling and two long tables behind for working and six deep fryers on a row of carts, with a fan blowing over them and a fire extinguisher at each end. A banner over the top said ANDAGI in big red letters, and under it, smaller, the name of the club and the year it started.

The plan was two thousand andagi on Saturday and two thousand on Sunday. Plus the andadogs: a hot dog on a stick, dipped in andagi batter and fried until it puffed up golden around the hot dog, like a corn dog that had gone to Okinawa for the summer. The line for those was always the longest one in the hall.

The plan had been made, as always, by the five ladies of the moai.

At six-fifteen, Mrs. Kina called to say her knee had gone out on the stairs and she could not come.

At six-forty, Mrs. Oshiro arrived with her own bowl and a bad cold.

At seven, the Uehara sisters arrived together, both with their left arms in identical wrist braces, because they had, they explained, both slept on them wrong.

Obaa stood in the middle of the booth with her apron tied twice and looked at the six fryers and the bags of flour stacked as high as her shoulder and the two thousand andagi that were not made yet, and Hōkū watched her face, and for the first time all summer, Obaa looked old.

"Okay," Obaa said. "Okay. We'll do half."

"No," said Hōkū.

She did not know where it came from. It came from the top of a smokestack, maybe, or a dock at two in the morning, or a cornfield in Kahuku with one empty sack. She took out Obaa's phone, the one Obaa only used for calling, and she called.

---

She called her mom first. Her mom was at the okazuya with Aunty Rowena, finishing the early rush so they could both get to the festival by noon. Her mom said "Oh, no," and then "Okay," and then, to someone behind the counter, "Rowena, turn off the fryer and grab the big rice paddles, we're going to the convention center."

She called her dad, who had just gotten off his shift and was asleep. He answered on the fifth ring in a voice like gravel in a bucket and said, "Which door?"

She called Shayna, who said a word Hōkū would not repeat and then said she'd bring her friends from odaiko, all four of them, because they were all just sitting around in the hall waiting for their stage time anyway.

She called Mrs. Kauhane. Mrs. Kauhane was there in twenty minutes with Kawehi and Kawehi's two big brothers and a cooler of ice and a box of disposable gloves from the airport.

And then she did not have to call anybody else, because the people who came started calling people too. Aunty Rowena called the shave ice lady from next to the okazuya, who came with her husband. Shayna's friend's grandpa came, and he had worked in a hotel kitchen for forty years and knew fryers. Mr. Teruya came with his wife and his dog, which was not allowed in the building and which slept under the table all day anyway. At nine o'clock, a man Hōkū didn't recognize came to the back of the booth and said, "Is this Setsuko's booth? I'm Tokuichi's grandson. My grandpa said if Seikichi's family ever needed anything." He was holding a bag of flour under each arm.

They made a line, like the line across Obaa's carport. Somebody mixed. Somebody squeezed. Somebody dropped. Somebody turned and lifted with the long wire scoops. Somebody drained the andagi on racks, and somebody boxed, and somebody sold, and the money went into a cash box that Mrs. Uehara the older one guarded with her good arm. Obaa walked up and down behind the fryers like a general, tasting, calling out "Too tight!" and "Wet your hand!" and "Look at that one smile!"

Hōkū's job was squeezing. Up through her thumb and finger, a ball of pale yellow dough, scooped off the top with a wet spoon, into the oil. Plop. She did it four hundred times before ten o'clock. Most of hers were round now. More than half of them smiled.

At eleven, the line in front of the booth stretched all the way to the escalators. At noon, the andadogs sold out. At one-thirty, Mr. Ganeko came by in his pineapple aloha shirt, on his way to the stage to warm up, and bought six andagi and ate one standing there and said, with his mouth full, "Seikichi would be mad. These are better than his."

Then he took Obaa's tablet, which was lying on the end of the table open to Great-Grandpa Seikichi's page—the one Obaa had made for his hundredth birthday this year, where people could leave a wish—and with one finger, very slowly, he typed something. Hōkū saw it later: "Happy 100, Sei. You played too fast. We miss it. — Ganeko, Kalihi."

---

The eisa was at three.

Hōkū changed in the bathroom with Kawehi: the white shirt, the short dark vest, the striped sash across the chest, the black leggings wrapped tight to the knee, the purple headband tied with the knot at the side, the way the big kids did it. Her hands smelled of oil and sugar no matter how much she washed them. So did Kawehi's. They looked at each other in the mirror and Kawehi said, "We smell like andagi," and Hōkū said, "Everybody does," and it was true, because by now half the people in the dressing area had been through the booth.

The stage was at the far end of the hall, under big lights. When the group walked on, the crowd filled the folding chairs and stood at the back and along the sides, a thousand people, more. Hōkū found her spot in the second row. In front of her, through the gap between Lily-Ann and Kawehi, she could see the audience, and in the audience, in the third row, she could see Obaa, still in her apron, with flour on her glasses, sitting between Hōkū's mom and dad.

Mr. Ganeko started to sing. The odaiko came in behind, moving furniture. The shimedaiko. And then the little drums. Don, don, ka.

She did not think about her feet. She stamped like she meant the ground. She held her drum up and hit it on the beat and did not drop her stick. And when the turn came, the line of little kids spinning all the way around, she did not look down. She looked through the gap in the front row, at Kawehi, who had turned around too, so that for one second they were facing each other across the space between the rows, and when Kawehi's face came around, Hōkū's left foot came down, and Kawehi's eyebrows went up, and they both shouted, at exactly the same moment, as loud as they could:

"IYA-SA-SA!"

It was not the best eisa in the world. Ikaika dropped his stick. Brysen went the wrong way in the second turn and bumped into Kainoa. Shayna's headband came untied and fell in her face for the whole last song. At the end, everybody did kachāshī, the free dance where the music goes fast and you put your hands up over your head and twist them, like waving to somebody far away, and you dance however you want. The audience got up and did it too, a thousand people with their hands in the air, the moai ladies with their wrist braces, Mr. Teruya, Tokuichi's grandson, Hōkū's dad in his work boots, all of them twisting their hands over their heads, while Mr. Ganeko played too fast, just this once, on purpose.

The booth made three thousand eight hundred and twelve andagi that day. Mrs. Uehara the older one counted the boxes twice.

That night, Obaa fell asleep on the couch at seven o'clock in her apron with her slippers still on, and Hōkū put a blanket over her, and took off her glasses, and wiped the flour off them with the corner of her own shirt before she set them on the table.

Around the Whole Island

Hōkū waited until the house was quiet. Obaa had woken up long enough to go from the couch to her bed, grumbling about her back, and now she was snoring through the wall. The trade wind was steady, cool, smelling of the sea. Hōkū took the sanshin down and sat on the floor with it, because she had a feeling about tonight, and tuned. Low. Middle. High.

The click.

Gaju came down off the neck, and kept coming, and the back bedroom was not big enough. He went straight through the wall without asking, and Hōkū heard the mango tree outside creak as something leaned on it, and when she climbed out the window after him, she had to tip her head all the way back to see his face.

He was as big as the house. Bigger. His wooden paws stood in Obaa's yard and Mrs. Pascua's yard at the same time. His mane was up in the streetlights. His sides, in the dark, shone like the hull of a koa canoe.

"Three thousand eight hundred and twelve," he said, and his voice came down out of the sky like weather. "And everybody who made them. And everybody who ate them. And a thousand people doing kachāshī." He put his huge head down on the grass beside her. "Get on, Hōkū. Tonight we go all the way around."

---

They went east first, along the south shore, with the wind at their back.

The city went by underneath them in a river of lights. Downtown, with its towers. The harbor, where the cranes stood still and dark tonight because the ship had gone, and the lunch wagon was closed, and her dad was home asleep in his own bed for once. Waikīkī, bright as a dropped tray of jewelry, and then the dark shape of Diamond Head rising up out of the edge of the city, its rim sharp against the stars. Gaju went up the side of the crater and over the top, and Hōkū could see down into it, a huge round bowl of dark grass and trees, quiet as a schoolyard on a Sunday.

Then along the coast, past Hanauma Bay and the blowhole, where the waves came in and shot up white through the rocks with a sound like a giant breathing out. To Makapuʻu Point, where the lighthouse sat on the cliff with its light turning, sweeping over the water and over them, so that for one second every few seconds they were lit up white, a girl on a lion-dog the size of a hill, and then dark again.

"Hold on," said Gaju, and turned north.

The windward side was different. The wind came straight in off the ocean and hit the Koʻolau and went up, and the mountains were a wall of dark green pleats on their left, and the water on their right was black and silver. Waimānalo, with its long beach. The lights of Kailua. The wide flat shine of Kāneʻohe Bay, with little boats asleep at their moorings, and out in the water the small steep island of Mokoliʻi sitting like a hat that somebody had set down on the sea. They flew low along the coast road, through Kualoa, where the cliffs came right down to the edge of the road, past Lāʻie and the little towns with their porch lights, until Hōkū saw red lights blinking on a ridge ahead.

The turbines. And below them, the cornfields of Kahuku, dark and empty now, picked clean. By the farm stand, the flatbed truck was parked with its tailgate up. On the porch of a small house behind it, a light was on. A girl about Hōkū's age was sitting on the steps in her pajamas, looking up.

She was looking straight at them. Not out of the corner of her eye. Straight up at a lion-dog the size of a hill going by over the fields.

The girl waved.

Hōkū waved back. Gaju dipped his huge head, and the wind of it moved the corn stubble in a long wave across the field.

---

Around the top of the island. Over the North Shore, where the waves were small tonight, just lines of white curling onto the sand. Over Waimea Bay, round and quiet. Over Haleʻiwa town with its old wooden stores. Past the tall chimney of the old mill at Waialua, standing up over the fields like the one in Waipahu, its brick cousin. Then inland, up the long slope through the middle of the island, between the two mountain ranges, over the red dirt and the dark gullies, toward home.

And as they flew, Hōkū saw something she had not seen before. Maybe it was because they were so high. Maybe it was because she knew how to look now.

Everywhere, people were carrying things.

A man on a dark road was helping another man push a stalled car onto the shoulder. In a parking lot in Wahiawā, a woman was loading her neighbor's groceries into the trunk because her neighbor had a baby on one hip. In a hospital window, somebody was carrying a cup of water to somebody else. At a bus stop, a teenager was holding a bag for an old woman while she counted change. A family in Mililani was carrying a mattress up the stairs of a townhouse, four of them, one at each corner, laughing. Somebody was walking a dog that wasn't theirs. Somebody was rocking a baby that wasn't theirs. A fishing boat was coming into a harbor with two men on deck, coiling one rope between them.

"Do you see it?" said Gaju.

"Everybody's helping somebody."

"Not everybody. Not all the time." He banked over the dark lochs, and Waipahu came up ahead with its smokestack. "But a lot of people. Every night. More than anybody counts. That's what an island is, you know. A lot of people carrying things across a small piece of land in the middle of a big ocean. You can't do it alone here. There's no room to be alone. Your great-great-grandma knew that when she got off the ship. Seikichi knew it every time he drove the truck."

Gaju came down slowly over the town, and as they came down, he got smaller. Not all at once. Bit by bit. The size of a hill. The size of a house. The size of a horse.

"Why are you shrinking?"

"It's almost morning," he said. "The help wears off at sunrise. Size is like andagi, you know. You can't put it in a box and save it for next week. Somebody has to fry a new batch."

He landed in Obaa's yard as a big dog, and Hōkū slid off, and they sat together on the back step. The sky over the Koʻolau was turning gray at the edges. In the mango tree, a mynah bird was starting its first argument of the day. The air was cool and smelled of wet grass and mango and the faint sweet fry-oil smell that was still in Hōkū's hair from the festival.

"Hōkū," Gaju said. He was the size of a cat now, sitting next to her on the step. "The crack on the back. It's longer tonight."

She knew. She had seen it when she tuned the strings. The hair-thin line had grown, curving almost to the middle of the skin.

"Mr. Ganeko said he'd look at it. After the festival."

"The festival's over."

"I know."

"Take me to him. Before it goes all the way across. A sanshin with a split skin can't hold the tuning. And if it can't hold the tuning, I can't wake up." He looked up at her with his round wooden eyes and his wide-open mouth. "I'm not scared. I just want you to know. In case it costs too much, or takes too long, or you get busy. It's all right if I go back to the wall for a while. Shisa are patient. We're made of wood and clay. We can wait a long time."

"You won't have to wait."

"You don't know that."

"I know a lot of people," said Hōkū.

Gaju looked at her. Then he leaned against her arm, a cat-sized lion-dog made of wood, warm against her skin, and as the first edge of the sun came up over the Koʻolau and lit the top of the smokestack orange, he climbed into her lap and became, very gently, a carving again: small, dark, with a curly mane and big feet and his mouth open, at the top of the neck of an old sanshin that Hōkū was holding in both arms.

The Small Hands Moai

Mr. Ganeko lived in a little house in Kalihi with a carport full of potted orchids and a wind chime made of old sanshin picks. He turned Great-Grandpa Seikichi's sanshin over in his hands on Tuesday afternoon, very gently, and held it up to the light, and ran his thumb along the crack in the skin, which now went almost all the way across.

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, yeah. New skin."

"How much?"

He told her. It was more money than Hōkū had ever heard of anybody spending on anything that wasn't a car. "And it takes time," he said. "The good skins come from Okinawa. You order, you wait. Then I put it on, and it has to rest. Then you play it, slow, every day, so it learns the sound." He looked at her over his glasses. "Your great-grandpa's skin lasted more than seventy years. It was a good one. It just got lonely."

Hōkū thought about the forty-dollar drum. She thought about Mrs. Uehara the older one's moai pot, and the five ladies who had been meeting every first Thursday since 1979, and the green truck with wooden sides, and a line of people across a carport, handing boxes one to the next.

"Mr. Ganeko," she said. "Do you know how a moai works?"

He laughed his dry wheeze. "Girl, I've been in three."

---

They started it the next Saturday after practice, on the bleachers, with a notebook.

It was a plain composition notebook with a black-and-white cover, and Hōkū wrote on the front in purple marker: THE SMALL HANDS MOAI. Inside, on the first page, she wrote the rules, the way Obaa had explained them to her, but changed a little, because they were kids and most of them did not have money.

Every month, everybody puts in some help. Help can be money if you have it. Help can also be time. Or work. Or something you know how to do.

Every month, one person gets the whole pot.

Next month, somebody else.

Around and around.

Kawehi signed first, in big letters. Then Shayna, and two of her odaiko friends. Then Lily-Ann and Brysen and Kainoa from the paarankuu line, and Ikaika, who had to ask how to spell "moai." Then Mr. Ganeko, who said every moai needed one old person to keep the time and settle the arguments, and who signed his name in tiny old-fashioned writing that took up half a line. Then, because she was standing there listening with her clipboard and could not help herself, Aunty Michiko.

"The first pot," Hōkū said, "is for the sanshin. My great-grandpa's. It needs a new skin."

"What's the help?" Brysen wanted to know.

So they worked it out. The kids could not buy a snakeskin from Okinawa. But they could work. And there were five ladies in Waipahu with bad knees and bad shoulders and bad colds, who had needed help all summer and were, as Obaa said, too proud to ask anybody but each other.

That September, the Small Hands Moai picked every mango off Mrs. Kina's tree and carried them to her porch in buckets, and she paid them in five-dollar bills and andagi. They carried the Uehara sisters' groceries up the steps every Friday, one bag per kid, and the sisters paid them in quarters out of a coffee can and shouted "Chibariyo!" from the door as they left. They weeded Mrs. Oshiro's gōyā fence. They washed Mr. Teruya's van, and he paid them in a twenty-dollar bill and a promise to teach anyone who wanted how to build a drum. Kawehi's brothers mowed Mrs. Pascua's grass, and Mrs. Pascua paid them in eggs, which Obaa bought from them at the going rate, which Obaa decided was very high.

They wrote it all in the notebook. Who helped. How long. What came in. Hōkū kept the pages, and Kawehi checked her arithmetic, and Mr. Ganeko read it over every Saturday on the bleachers and said "Hm," which meant it was right.

And in Okinawa, Obaa's cousin's daughter in Kin—the one who had posted the pictures of the old Kaneshiro land with the gajumaru growing out of the wall—went to a sanshin shop in Naha on her day off and posted photos of every skin they had, so that Mr. Ganeko could squint at them on Obaa's tablet and pick the right one. "This one," he typed, with one finger. "Tell them to wrap it good." She wrapped it good. It came in a box covered in tape and stamps, and it smelled, when Mr. Ganeko opened it, like the inside of a very old closet.

Mr. Ganeko put it on in his carport, among the orchids, on a Saturday in October. He soaked the skin, and stretched it over the body of the sanshin, and he needed somebody across from him to hold it even while he worked, so Hōkū held one side and Kawehi held the other, looking at each other over the wet skin, eyebrows up, eyebrows down. Shayna and Brysen held the clamps. The rest of the moai sat on upturned buckets and gave advice nobody took.

When it was done, it had to rest. Two weeks. Then Mr. Ganeko tuned it himself, the first time, low, middle, high, and played the rice song on it, slowly, not too fast. The new skin rang. It was brighter than the old one had been, a little stiff, like new shoes. "It'll soften," he said. "Play it every day."

On the first page of the notebook, under September, Hōkū wrote: "Pot #1. Great-Grandpa Seikichi's sanshin. New skin. Paid in full."

Under October, she wrote: "Pot #2. Kawehi. Her family still has 31 boxes. Everybody unpacks."

Under November, she left a line for Mrs. Kina, who had said that if anybody could get the mynah birds out of her eaves, she would put in for the whole moai to go to the zoo.

---

The sanshin came home to Obaa's back bedroom on a Sunday. Hōkū did not hang it on the wall. She sat on the bed with it in her lap while the trade wind came in through the louvers, and she tuned it, carefully, the way Mr. Ganeko had been teaching her every Tuesday on his own sanshin. Low. Middle. High. Her fingers were slow. The strings bit into the soft tips of them. The click, when it came, was cleaner than before.

Gaju came down off the neck no bigger than a mouse, because it had been a quiet Sunday and nobody had carried anything for anybody all day, and stretched, and sniffed the new skin all over, from one edge to the other, the way a dog sniffs a new rug.

"Okinawa," he said. "Naha. A shop with a cat in it." He sniffed again. "And eleven kids' hands. And mangoes. And somebody's eggs."

"Mrs. Pascua's."

"Mrs. Pascua's," Gaju agreed. He sat down on the skin and looked up at her. "Play me something."

So she played. She was not good. She played the rice song with one finger, slowly, three notes, then four, then the part where the tune goes up and stays up, like something lifted onto a shoulder, and she missed a note there and went back and played it again. It was nothing like the way Great-Grandpa Seikichi had played. It was, Hōkū thought, much too slow. Gaju did not seem to mind. He hummed the low part under her, with his mouth open, a little too loud.

When she stopped, she reached into her backpack and took out the notebook. THE SMALL HANDS MOAI, in purple marker, the cover already soft at the corners from being carried around. She closed it, and set it on the shelf under the sanshin's hook, flat, where Gaju could see it.

Gaju looked at it for a long time.

"What's that?"

"The other one," said Hōkū. "The one that keeps things."

The lion-dog walked to the edge of the sanshin's body and looked down at the closed notebook on the shelf. The rules were inside, and the names, and who had carried what for whom, and the line for November with Mrs. Kina's mynah birds, and a space after that for whatever came next. On the front, in purple, it said what it was. It did not say anything else. It was shut.

"She's quiet," Gaju said.

"She's supposed to be."

"She is," he said. "She is supposed to be." And then, for the first time in forty-some years of parties and thirty-two years on a wall and one long summer of riding the trade wind across the island, Gaju the open-mouthed shisa tried to whisper. He leaned toward the notebook and put his wooden face close to its cover and tried, with his mouth wide open, to say something only she would hear.

It came out loud enough to rattle the louvers. Next door, all four of Mrs. Pascua's hens woke up at once and complained about it. Down the hall, Obaa's snoring stopped, and started again. And Hōkū laughed so hard she had to put the sanshin down on the bed, carefully, on its back, with the new skin facing the ceiling and the trade wind coming in across it, while Gaju sat on the shelf beside the notebook with his mouth open, very pleased, as if he had meant to do exactly that.