Target Island
Fifty-eight years before Harrison’s granddaughter is born, the US government drops a two-thousand-pound bomb on the island of Kaho‘olawe. It is 1948. The shock from the bomb is so strong that it shatters the glass of the living room window, and Harrison, a baby still in his crib, starts wailing in time with the family mutt.
In the kitchen, Harrison’s mother is thrown against the gas stove. She puts her hands out to stop her fall, and the pan of frying Spam slips to the side, exposing the gas burner. Oil bubbles down the back of her left hand, and the ring of flame burns a hole in her right palm’s heel. When the shock stops, she peels her melted flesh from the stove. She dashes to the living room—where Harrison lies kicking under the broken window. The dog jumps to lick her face. It circles her knees, and she pushes it away to pick Harrison up.
Miraculously, he is not cut, though shards of window lay around him. She rubs his back, runs her fingers along his rib cage for comfort. Through the open frame of what was once a window, she sees Harrison’s father lying beneath their mango tree, knocked unconscious after falling from its branches. She runs to him, Harrison’s head bouncing against her shoulder, and when Harrison’s father wakes—eyes bleary, the beginning of a concussion itching across his skull—she is there, round face hanging like fruit above him. Harrison reaches, grabbing for his father, and even as the movement cracks her burn, even as the brush of Harrison’s small fingers tender the bump already forming on Harrison’s father’s head, both of his parents smile.
The flesh burnt from the heel of Harrison’s mother’s palm will never grow back, and though she and Harrison’s father will tell the story of the two-thousand-pound bomb over and over—in the backyard of their Wailea home at Harrison’s fifth birthday lū‘au, in the parking lot of the pineapple plantation where Harrison’s father works, on the white sands of Yokohama after their family moves from Maui to O‘ahu—Harrison will not remember when the ground first shuddered beneath him. He will not remember the tickle of the dog’s nose like a cockroach or the warmth of his mother’s face against his. What he will remember, instead, is the bitter smell of his mother’s burnt flesh. And, nearly six decades later, on the day he harvests his last torpedo from Kaho‘olawe’s soil, this is the scent that will envelop him.
FIFTY-ONE YEARS BEFORE HIS GRANDDAUGHTER IS BORN, Harrison finds his first missile washed up on the sands of Ke Ono O’ Polo. It is the day after a storm, and the beach has become the ocean’s junkyard, its sand covered in glass balls leftover from Japanese fishermen’s floats, broken heads of coral, and halved cowries hauled from the ocean floor.
Harrison is seven, and happy to be outside after a week cooped in the house, watching rain flood the front yard and wind strip the tree of mangoes. He plays tag with the waves. He digs moats and drips lumpy towers for sand castles, his hand massaging the wet grains like a farmer would the teat of a cow. He gathers shells and drags floats, piling both under the shade of kiawe trees at the edge of the sand, where his mother rests. She is tired from their mile walk to the beach and heavy with the weight of his brother, who grows inside her.
It is decades before the Fairmont or Four Seasons will occupy this land, long before blue umbrellas scallop the beach and paths of dead coral cut through the hedge of green naupaka. When Harrison’s tunneling accidentally collapses a ghost crab’s home, he holds the crustacean in his fist and walks it to the safety of the water. It is as Harrison kneels, releasing the ōhiki into the foam, that he sees the missile’s casing floating outside the shorebreak.
When the missile rolls to where Harrison stands, sunk calf-high in sand, he thinks at first it must be a submarine for a very small person.
Then he sees the hole in its side. He kneels, slips a hand inside the missile, then a wrist, then his whole arm up to his shoulder. His fingers press against the empty fuel tank walls. If he had pushed a little harder, he would have broken the thin sheet of metal and brushed against the clenched fist of the missile’s detonator, fired already in the ‘Alalākeiki Channel, between Maui and Kaho‘olawe. Instead, Harrison pulls his arm from the missile’s belly, and the rough edge of the algaed hole scratches the flesh of his inner elbow.
In four months, Harrison’s brother will be born. In ten, his father will lose half his hand to a pineapple harvester. The family will move from Maui to O‘ahu, where his mother will find work as a nurse at Queen’s Hospital. Harrison will enroll at St. Louis, where he’ll get the private school education his father always wanted. But on that cloudy summer day in 1955, wet sand sucking his feet, cut stinging his elbow, Harrison strains to push the hollow shell casing up the hump of shore. “Look what I found!” he yells to his mother. And as she turns, the wind snarls the kiawe branches above her into knots.
FORTY-ONE YEARS BEFORE HIS GRANDDAUGHTER IS BORN, Harrison sees his first picture of Kaho‘olawe. He is sitting at the back of his high school history class. A breeze sweeps through the open door just as the picture comes up on the slide projector, and its cool is a relief after hours spent tugging at the neck of his collared shirt.
“This”—the haole teacher shouts over muttering boys—“is the most bombed island in the Pacific.”
It is the last period of the day. They are studying World War II. The shot is an aerial one, taken, the teacher tells them, by the US Navy in 1943. Harrison can make out the white outline of Kaho‘olawe’s sandy shore, cliffs to the right, and in the background, Maui, the island of his birth. He leans toward the rise of Haleakalā, toward the fleecy crown of clouds that encircled his childhood, but when his ribs press against the desk’s table, he gasps.
“You better not be jerking off,” someone calls from the front, to a chorus of laughter.
The teacher sighs and clicks to the next image. A battleship floats to the left of the frame, anchored a few hundred yards out to sea. It
is dwarfed by the gray dome that stands, two-men high, on the shore.
All day Harrison has been nursing a bruise he got from his father. They have been fighting for years, ever since his father got the job at the airport, where he unloads tourists’ baggage from Hawaiian Airlines planes for half pay because he can only lift half as much with the use of one hand. Their fights are without end, beginning every evening when his father comes home with a near-finished six-pack. Harrison plays defense, distracting his father from unwashed dishes and dirty laundry, and in payment for this he often receives a backhand to the face, last night a fist to the side. Harrison takes these because it is better, in his mind, to bear the brunt of his father’s attention than have it focused on his mother, or worse, his younger brother. For at least Harrison can nurse the bruise with the memory of who their father was before his hand was lost to the pineapple harvester, before they sold their family home in Wailea and moved from the green of the Valley Isle to O‘ahu’s swiftly graying skies.
Harrison’s teacher lays out Kaho‘olawe’s history, tells the boys how the island was a penal colony in the 1800s, a site for farms and goat ranches. “Now, in 1965,” he says, “the island is where the US military fine-tunes our weapons to prepare for war.”
The teacher clicks again. The room is flooded with the white of a photographed explosion.
On the projector screen, the coast of Kaho‘olawe is umbrellaed by a mushroom cloud, its tip reaching all the way to the battleship that sits parallel to shore. Harrison’s dress shoes squeak as he pushes himself backward. When he blinks, the explosion looks fake, too bright for the frame. Flames burn seven stories high. Smoke rolls across the water. The only part of the photo that Harrison can convince himself is real is the grass that grows over the lava at the bottom of the frame. The blades are white and dry, perfect for kindling, something Harrison knows from the many bonfires he has built for his friends on the west side of O‘ahu, on those Friday nights that they smoke pakalolo and drink Hawaiian moonshine—fermented ti root brewed by men who work O‘ahu’s pineapple fields.
The teacher clears his throat. “A few months ago,” he says, “the US Navy set off explosives on Kaho‘olawe as part of something
called Operation Sailor Hat. Because of the navy’s work, we now know what a nuclear explosion might look like on the ocean. It’s a huge step for weapon research. It’ll be instrumental in winning the Cold War.”
He clicks on, to another picture, and then another, but Harrison does not pay attention. He thinks instead of the green cliffs that loomed across the channel of his childhood, imagines how they might have looked when they exploded, red clay of their centers thrown into the sky. If he had been standing across the channel from them, would he have felt it? His pencil slips in the sweat of his fist, and he remembers the cool of the missile’s metal after washing up to shore.
When the bell rings, the room is filled with motion. Harrison’s classmates slide notebooks into bags and under arms, walk out the door to track and baseball practice. Harrison’s teacher turns the projector off, and Harrison stands, the last to go. The room is dark, its silence punctuated only by the shuffling of papers that Harrison’s teacher stacks in the corner.
“See you next week,” Harrison says, and the teacher nods.
Harrison walks out of the classroom and through Saint Louis, nestled within the campus of Chaminade University, thinking of the mossy forests of Oregon, where his teacher told Harrison that he grew up. Someday, Harrison thinks, he would like to live on the mainland. It would be nice to get lost there—in the millions of people, in the billions of acres—nobody knowing who he is or where he’s from.
Harrison spends the next three hours on the corner of Waialae Ave., waiting for his mother. To pass the time before her shift’s end, he does homework—spreading books over the grass, writing math equations on lined paper that, over time, stains green with crushed blades. Harrison does his best to focus, hands over his ears to block the roar of cars that drive down Waialae, but he cannot help but think of the photographs on the projector. And every time he blinks, the shock of the bomb goes off again behind his eyes.
THIRTY YEARS BEFORE HIS GRANDDAUGHTER IS BORN, Harrison takes his first boat to Kaho‘olawe. He does not plan to, does
not plan, in fact, to even be in Hawai‘i.
Harrison has lived on the mainland for nine years now. He is married, and has a son. With his fiancée, Harrison owns a two-bedroom house in Palo Alto. He is a PhD candidate at Stanford in geology, where his focus is soil science—studying long-term soil formation, vegetation growth, and hydrology, all of which are affected after a bomb is dropped.
One afternoon, the landline rings with a call from Harrison’s mother. He takes it leaning against the kitchen’s stucco wall, free hand pointing his three-year-old son to the sparrow perched on the blooming prickly pear that grows beside the driveway. Harrison has not returned to O‘ahu since his father’s funeral a year ago, has not set foot on Maui in two decades. Over the phone, his mother tells him they’ve been invited to his grandma’s eightieth birthday. She can’t go, busy working to pay off the mortgage and loans from his father’s failed chemotherapy. Harrison’s brother, who is there too, says, “We never moving back, so why bother?”
And Harrison wants to answer him with the memory of their uncles tossing him back and forth in the backyard, the mango their grandma mashed with the back of her fork so he could taste its sweetness, yellow rivers dribbling down his chin as he swallowed. But he knows his brother does not remember these things. He saves them for his son and will recount them to him later—in the bath of their Palo Alto house that day, on the beach after they’ve moved back to Honolulu, as they ride down into the bowl of Kalaupapa, a decade from now, the sweat of their legs itching against the ribs of their saddled donkeys.
When Harrison hangs up the phone, he floats the possibility of Maui to his wife, but she has already planned to go to Denver to see her family. Harrison boards the plane alone and pretzels his six-foot-four body next to a family of mainlanders for the five-hour flight to Honolulu, deboards and switches to a smaller aircraft for another half-hour flight to Kahului.
At the airport, his uncle—his mother’s brother, who, when Harrison was a child, pushed him into the shorebreak at Ke Ono O’ Polo—waits for him in a lifted Chevy. It is only as Harrison pulls himself up by the truck’s grab handle that he realizes the presumption of his coming. Silence prickles the cab for the first five, ten minutes of the ride—the vinyl seats going slick against Harrison’s legs—and just as Harrison has decided to book the first flight back to Honolulu, he
gets a glimpse of Kaho‘olawe.
“What, you never see the ocean before?” his uncle says as they make a turn onto the coastal highway. “So pale you look like one ghost.” He laughs. “You marry one haole and turn into one haole yoself!”
And though part of Harrison is defensive of his wife—in love with the blond hair that curls over her ears, with the triangle of freckles on her left breast and her blue eyes, which hold his reflection—even though Harrison is embarrassed of his own skin, which has paled in the fog of San Francisco Bay, he laughs too, and for the next twenty minutes the two men talk story.
Harrison spends the next days eating and drinking. He plays bocce in Grandma’s backyard. He bounces a cousin on his thigh while eating kālua pork smoked in an imu dug beneath his uncle’s banana trees. He honis more people than he can remember the names of, and every time a relative steps back to say “You look just like your faddah!” he takes a long swig of beer to keep the shaking from his hands.
When they ask about his mother, he tells the truth: she is working. When they ask why she didn’t take off, why his brother didn’t come—“Isn’t he in high school?” they say. “He still get spring break!”—Harrison lies and says they’ll come next time, not knowing that in three years his mother will die from a heart attack, that his brother will move north to coastal Washington and run an auto shop, spending his days drunk under the bodies of cars.
On Harrison’s fifth night on Maui, he learns of the protest taking place the next morning. Over beer and kūlolo, his uncle tells him about the flotilla to Kaho‘olawe, of the proposed occupation, organized to stop the island’s bombing. “I don’t know if it going change anything”—his uncle shrugs—“but at least they try.”
It is nearly midnight, and Harrison is drunk. He asks his uncle about the morning the bomb shattered his parents’ windows. He tells him of the missile he dragged up the beach as a child, tries to show him the scarred valley of his elbow, but there is nothing there.
“We don’t have to camp,” Harrison says. “But maybe we could escort them?” And his uncle looks at Harrison, who is somehow a man,
though he remembers him as a boy. He agrees to drive to Ma‘alaea Harbor, where, with the other protestors, they load tents and crates of food into boats.
On the morning of January 4, 1976, Harrison stands at the front of his uncle’s Whaler. The wind is high with winter, and he is tired and nauseous from last night’s drinking. Behind him, his uncle sits and drives. They are at the very middle of the flotilla that, over decades, will become a historic part of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement. As they round the uneven point of the lava rock jetty, Harrison turns back to look at the harbor. The docks that were once full of grandpas smoking in rusted metal folding chairs, with boys like Harrison who stood at the edge of the jetty, ...
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