Page 6 of The California Dreamers

5

Hōkūlani Charlemagne Akamu Winslow Keahui

1983

El Zafiro, California

Fourteen years old

Charlie shakes out her wet hair, sending fine droplets my way, but her focus has turned to Dyl. She doesn’t come too close or look him in the eye, somehow knowing instinctively that she must take it slow. She points to the book he’s holding over his chest, protecting his field journal: my water-rippled copy of Island of the Blue Dolphins , which she naturally assumes is his. “Are you at the part where Karana fights the Aleut yet?”

He nods, but seems like he’s about to bolt back into the Gull behind us.

As Charlie holds her hand out—gently, asking Dyl if she can take a closer look at his book—I glimpse a small tattoo high on her right arm, two crossed oars, a flower behind them, then worry I’ve been staring and focus on the book. She studies the cover appreciatively, handling the novel with care before returning it to Dyl, and I feel him soften a little.

Griff recovers first, stepping away from the circle of chairs on the new picnic blanket, where Mama and Cap and Bass are, and coming over to where we’re standing by the Gull’s rear bumper. “I guess this place is nothing after surfing Hawai’i,” he says.

Charlie gazes over her shoulder toward the ocean. From here we can only hear it, and faintly. It will be all chop now, but I know she’s seeing how it was earlier, wide, steady sets.

“It’s not bad,” she says. “I’ve had a postcard of the California coast on our fridge for years, so being here is kind of surreal.”

“This girl begged to spend her Thanksgiving break with me in the Winnie,” Bass says proudly, appearing at her side.

“Hardly.” She leans against him, ruffling his thick black hair, which is nearly as long as hers. “You snore.”

“Wait’ll you hear the tapes she makes me play, Merricks. Prepare yourselves.”

“Is Charlie short for anything, sweetheart?” Mama calls from the picnic blanket. “There’s a Steinbeck book…”

“ Travels with Charley ! I love it, but that’s not where they got the name. Listen to what they stuck me with. My real name is…” She pauses dramatically. “I don’t expect you to remember this—Hōkūlani Charlemagne Akamu Winslow Keahui.”

Bassett laughs. “A killer, beautiful Hawai’ian name like that and she makes us call her Charlie. Her mom and I never got over it.”

“I liked Charlie’s Angels when I was little,” she says, shrugging. She turns to me. “He was like this mysterious god. You know, just a voice with power? I didn’t want to be an angel, I wanted to be Charlie.”

I have no idea what she’s talking about, but I nod.

“What does Hōkūlani mean?” Griff asks politely.

“ Lani is like, heavenly, or royal. Hōkū means star. So, heavenly star.” She rolls her eyes.

“We put a lot of thought into that name, kiddo,” Bass says.

But Charlie isn’t looking at him. “Can I sit by you, Dylan?” she asks. “I’m starved. Can I look at your other books sometime? I’ll be careful. So you’re studying botany, huh. I loved botany in school. I have Island but my copy has a different cover, with Karana by her hut.”

Bass, too, is open, easy. He works a spell on Mama and Cap. Mama feels rooted right here with us, laughing. Not like she seems sometimes, as if her mind’s half on her past ramble, or her next one.

And Cap—all four of us kids are mesmerized by the effect Bass has on him. His hat is tipped far back and laughter crinkles his eyes all night. Bass even swirls Cap’s sacred radio dial in the Gull from KOLD to KZSD—and for an hour after we eat he and Charlie give us lessons on her taste in music, bantering back and forth. “This one thinks Talking Heads are gods. I don’t get it.”

“Well, he won’t admit it but he likes Madonna. And she sounds like Minnie Mouse on helium.” Charlie gets blank stares and translates: “I mean her voice is beyond high.”

After a while, conversation turns to old times.

“So how’d you swing the new wheels?” Cap asks Bass.

“Miguel’s old rig flooded in St. Pete and molded to hell, so he gave me a deal. I paid him for as much as I could, but the shell’s in the RV junkyard now. Bled and dead, poor thing. He’s living in an apartment in Vancouver now, miserable summumma bitch. Excuse me, kids. Ella. I mean, poor sucker. So have you seen any of the crew from Taos?”

“Shelby and Mick,” Mama says. “She had a little girl, last I heard. They bought a sweet cottage in Arizona somewhere.”

It’s strange hearing someone call Mama and Cap Ella and Merrick, but within his portly body, Bass seems to hold great stores of information about my parents. I understand only fragments here and there. Old friends, old towns, the Gull’s long-lost RV cousins, travels far east of where we go now. I wonder when Mama and Cap stopped venturing inland. Why we fly up and down, but not side to side.

When Bass tells a funny story about how after some surgery he fell in his bathroom in New Mexico without his pants on and his seventy-four-year-old, eighty-pound neighbor had to crawl in his window to hoist him up, Charlie says, “Hey, Dad? I’m sure everyone will hate to miss your next no-pants story, but can I give them a tour?”

“Sure. I mean…” He glances at Cap, who hesitates before ever so slightly nodding his approval.

“Half an hour,” Cap says. “I’m sure these two travelers need their sleep.”

The four of us follow Charlie along the weedy road toward the water, then north along the sand, away from the hotel. It’s a steep walk up to the regular parking lot where Bass has parked his Winnebago. The Winnie, he and Charlie call her.

“We can’t get it down where you are because it’s too long to turn around, and my dad can’t back up,” she explains over her shoulder.

She calls her RV “it.” We climb up the railroad-tie steps behind a family of citizens who are headed home—huffing, sunburnt, gear-laden—after their precious beach day.

“One of us can back her up for you,” Griff offers. Then, hastily: “I mean it .”

“You two have licenses? I thought you were fifteen.”

We don’t volunteer that the twins have driven since they were ten, as soon as their feet could reach the pedal extenders Cap made. He’d wrapped our steering wheel in dried kelp so their small hands could grip it more easily. In a few years Dyl will learn, too.

Mag glares at Griff. He’s right to, I guess. Griff has thrown caution to the wind, forgetting that the twins’ driving is illegal. Charlie’s not one of us, no matter how accepting she seems, and how friendly her father is with ours.

Griff recovers, “Oh. We only learned in case of emergencies…”

“Wow. I wish you’d teach me to drive.”

We round one more switchback on the trail up to the parking lot, pass a truck, a van, and a convertible, and then Charlie says, “So here it is, ta-da!”

The first thing I notice is a parking pass hanging from the visor.

We circle the sleek vehicle, airbrushed on all sides with a design of a racing wolf pack. It’s three times the length of the Gull, tall enough to stand in without bumping your head.

Our silent admiration feels like a betrayal of the Gull, cobbled together, made of rehabbed parts and Cap’s creative additions.

But I trail my fingers along the painted fur of the wolves. “I remember these,” I say half to myself, finally finding my voice.

“You do?” Charlie asks.

“Your father told us a pack of wolves followed him once, thinking these were real, and I believed him. I was six, maybe.”

Charlie laughs and swings open the door like she has nothing to hide. “That’s so him. He doesn’t get the whole this-might-not-be-age-suitable thing. My mom said he took me to some horror movie when I was younger, before they split, and I got nightmares. I think that stuff was a bigger factor in busting them up than the cultural differences.”

“But they’re both Hawai’ian, right?” Mag asks.

“Oh yeah. I meant because she loves our house and Bass was a vanner at heart before he had to slow down. That culture difference.” She shrugs, shakes her head. “Speaking of, welcome to our palace on wheels.”

I’ve never been in someone’s house before. I don’t think any of us have, and Charlie doesn’t seem to recognize how momentous this invitation is. As we enter the long, gleaming white Winnebago, I realize she probably doesn’t even think of this as a house.

Griff and Charlie keep up a steady stream of conversation as we all roam the space. How long is her vacation? What’s our favorite break? And on and on. I tend to Dyl, who clings to me, but I’m alert to every detail. The roomy front seat, the fixed wooden ladder leading to the sleeping berth above, which is at least three times the width of Cap and Mama’s. In the middle of the rig, there’s a two-burner cooktop and a refrigerator, an L-shaped eating nook with two orchid-patterned placemats. Across from this, a little bathroom with a sturdy wooden door. And in the back is Charlie’s own soft bed that’s as wide as the whole Winnie, wide enough for the four Merrick siblings to fit.

Only two people in all of this space—it’s unreal. But it’s also a pigsty. We wouldn’t leave the Gull like this even for a morning.

“So is this the first time you’ve traveled with your father?” Griff asks.

I pretend to look out Charlie’s bunk window so that I can concentrate on her answer. Dyl, too, is listening attentively; he’s in his fact-finding mode. Charlie is a new species and demands analysis.

“Yeah,” she says. “Usually I just visit Albuquerque for a few days. I want to get my GED next year so I can road-trip with my dad even more, but my mom’s not into it.”

I don’t know what a GED is. Something to do with school, and I store the term away for later.

I study the stack of books in built-in shelves surrounding Charlie’s bunk. Cap would not approve of some of the titles—cheap-looking mysteries and fantasies mixed in with classics. Her collection is not as big as our library, but almost, and all for her.

I wonder what she’d think of the books, held in place with a length of chicken wire, that form the vanilla wall between Cap and Mama’s bunk and the rest of the Gull.

The walls and ceiling around Charlie’s bed are a mosaic of taped-up mementos: postcards and maps and concert tickets and posters of music groups I don’t know. What surprises me most are her photographs. Little doors into her world. Her mother, who looks like her, kissing Charlie’s shoulder tenderly, the way you’d kiss someone’s head, because she’s shorter than her child. Her home on Oahu, a white clapboard place on stilts. Her cats, whose dishes have their names, Kealani and Kai. Sketches of tattoos she might get when she’s older. Her hallway at school, lined with lockers. Her friends. Surfing friends, snacking friends, friends in their own enormous bedrooms. So many of them grinning and making funny faces back at me.

On the Hawai’ian-print comforter there’s a brochure of a building I recognize—one with a blue roof. It’s a list of spa services from the Sapphire Resort. Twenty dollars to get your toenails painted.

“Oh, I just gave that to my dad as a joke,” she says over my shoulder, making me jolt. I’d been so immersed in studying her things, I hadn’t realized she’d crossed to this end of the van. “That place is over-the-top, isn’t it? I mean, how many fountains do you need? It’s such a gross waste of water.”

I smile vaguely and half turn from her, too embarrassed to admit that I haven’t gone near the hotel, and pull a book from one of the cubbies under her bed—the copy of Island she’d described. I’m glad she wasn’t lying about owning it just to woo Dyl.

“Want to trade copies before I take off?” Charlie asks as I flip the pages. “Temporarily, of course.”

“Okay,” I manage, startled by the offer. I have so few possessions, and the idea of trading, of owning something new, sends a spark through me. Temporarily, of course.

“So my dad said your mom homeschools you. That’s so cool. Total freedom.”

As if sensing I’m in deep water, the twins join us in the back, and we all huddle awkwardly next to Charlie’s bed. I don’t know what the rules are—are we supposed to lie to her? Cap and Mama teach us all the time, in their offhand ways, about surfing and nature, their classical and ’60s music, philosophy. But it’s not what Charlie’s imagining.

We’re silent a heartbeat too long before Mag answers, looking up at a poster on the ceiling. “Yeah, school’s so lame. So who’s this guy in the big suit?”

“Oh, that’s only the genius David Byrne. Talking Heads? We heard ‘Once in a Lifetime’ after dinner, remember? Here, listen.”

She drags out a boom box from under her bed and hits Play, and there’s a bouncy driving beat, percussion, electronic and real music whipped together. Griff asks about her other posters and her surfing magazines and the many taped-up pictures.

“Now I want to hear about you four. Tell me every place you’ve hung out this year.” Charlie shovels a pile of clothes from her bed to the floor so we can sit.

Mag and Griff trade glances, as if realizing we may have plunged into this visit recklessly.

“Thank you, but another time,” Griff says.

“Really?” Charlie asks. “My dad said you might want to look under the engine. I can at least show you that before you go.”

I know that Mag would love a look, but caution wins out. “We’d better take off,” he says, resolved.

He’s imitating Charlie’s slang the way he sometimes copies kids on the beach, and I wince at how wrong it sounds. Charlie can say “hung out” and “lame” and “take off,” but coming from Mag it’s forced.

“Already?” Charlie asks. “Your dad said half an hour.” She seems so comfortable. Unfazed by our nervousness in her fancy rig, or the way we evade her questions.

Charlie shoots me a look, but I need to leave for my own reasons, too. I need time in the dark, in my bunk, to sift through the events of this odd day.

“Dyl’s tired,” I tell her. Though Dyl seems content for the first time all night, and the only one of the four of us who’s finally relaxed. He’s settled on Charlie’s soft bed with a fat reference book, and I have to place a hand on his shoulder to pull him back to us.

The four of us are out the door and walking down the hill when she calls down hopefully, as if we’re just like all her friends in the pictures, “Same break at four thirty tomorrow? That’s two thirty for me, but I’ll rally!”

***

“You were quiet,” Griff says as we follow the railroad-tie trail in the sand, back down to the beach. “Worried about saying the wrong thing and getting Mama and Cap in trouble?”

“Yes.”

By instinct, we walk straight for the ocean, kicking off our sandals. There are some stragglers on the beach, but it’s not yet dark enough for bonfires, and I’m grateful for this quiet, in-between time. I’m grateful for the caress of surf up to my shins, a familiar sensation after the foreignness of the Winnie.

“You talked enough for all of us,” Mag says to Griff. “Why didn’t you just go ahead and show her Cap’s tin of fake IDs while you were at it?”

“He wouldn’t have let us go off with someone he didn’t trust,” Griff says. “We should be careful what we tell her until we discuss it with Cap. But she seems safe.”

I’m glad the twins have taken the focus off me. Griff may have picked up on how funny I acted, how withdrawn. But he is wrong about the reason.

I wasn’t quiet because I was worried about saying the wrong thing.

I’d been quiet the way you’re quiet when you don’t want to break a spell. I hadn’t known someone like her existed.

The way she’d yanked her hair out of her wet suit and shaken it out, the way she’d asked Griffin, straight-up, after Mag silently slipped off at one point during dinner, “What’s up with Mr. Chatty?”

The way she figured Dyl out instantly. How she’d said to me, like I was the only one who’d understand, “easier out there this way.” Shrugging.

I can’t get that shrug out of my head, that tiny motion, the few inches up and down of bare shoulders.

Hōkūlani Charlemagne Bassett Winslow Keahui.

I pronounce it in my head, picture Charlie’s crossed-oar tattoo on her right arm. The photographs of beaming friends, arms flung around each other, the hallway in her big school, her cats lazing on that wide, sloping green lawn on Oahu.

“Ro?” Griff prods me now to back him up.

As the shallow water rushes back out to sea, foam tickles my ankles and feet, clinging to my skin. I bend to scoop up a handful of the fine white bubbles.

“She’s okay, I guess.”