Mahu Surfer m-2

by Neil S. Plakcy

  Standing at the water’s edge and looking back, I could see you’d be protected. But you’d still be vulnerable from the street. It wasn’t until I saw an amateur photographer begin to set up his gear that I realized how the gunman had completely avoided suspicion. Bring enough gear with you, a couple of cameras with big lenses, some umbrellas, coolers and other paraphernalia, and everyone on the beach would assume you were there to shoot pictures, not surfers.

  Once I figured that out, it was time to get wet. I hadn’t tackled big water for a long time, and I knew it would take a few days before I looked like I knew what I was doing. I stuck to Pipeline, because Mike Pratt had been killed there, and because both he and Lucie Zamora had been tournament-class surfers. At Pipeline, I’d be likely to meet up with other surfers who knew them.

  Pipeline is actually a series of three reefs, meaning it can generate a variety of swells, from small to monster. You almost never get a wave to yourself there: if the surf is low, then every surfer and bodyboarder is out, fighting for those few precious feet at the top of the swell. Even when the surf is high, there are daredevils all around, dropping into your wave and pushing you out.

  The potential for disaster is everywhere, and maybe that’s what makes Pipeline so much fun. The drops can be so high that you get giddy with exhilaration-yet that reef is waiting for you when you fall. You may have mastered a tall wave, but watch out for that guy cutting across in front of you. With every tube you face the possibility of getting sucked under the water.

  Pipeline requires the most basic skills: getting in early and placing your turn just right. Those were things I knew I could do, if I worked at them long enough. I took the small and medium waves, often sharing them with other surfers when the beach was busy, and I let the really big ones go. If you aren’t prepared for those, you can end up hurting yourself on the rocky, coral bottom.

  I alternated between Pipeline and Backdoor, a perfect right only about 150 feet away, and though every muscle in my body ached by the time I dragged myself back to my little room, I was starting to feel like a real surfer again. But all the time, I was thinking about the case, too, trying to come up with ways to learn about the dead surfers and who might have killed them.

  Occasionally when I surfed, I’d run into my cousin Ben, who was about ten years younger than I was. He was doing what I’d done at his age, trying to see if he could make it as a professional surfer. My mother is the oldest of five daughters, and Ben’s mom was my Aunt Pua, the youngest. Pua was a hippie, far from my prim and proper mother. She was an aromatherapist at a posh resort in Hawai‘i Kai, and had been married and divorced three times.

  Because of the age difference between us, and the attitude difference between our mothers, we didn’t know each other that well, but we recognized each other and made small talk about the family and the surf. He was a Pipeline expert, making it his home base, and I learned a few tricks from talking with him.

  Some people seemed to know who I was, and sometimes they wanted to talk. A haole guy with Rasta hair and tattered board shorts wanted to know if I knew a good attorney-I didn’t. A middle-aged Japanese lady waiting with me to buy bottled water asked me if I knew where her son could get information about AIDS. I told her about an agency in Honolulu.

  Nobody seemed aware that three surfers had been killed, and though I dropped names with everyone I met, I got no reactions to Mike Pratt, Lucie Zamora or Ronald Chang. I could see why the original detectives hadn’t made much progress, and started to doubt whether I could learn anything they hadn’t.

  When I returned to Hibiscus House, I called Lieutenant Sampson to let him know I was settled in, and pass on my idea on how the shooter had brought the rifle to the beach. Then I called my parents, just to check in. They were full of well-meaning suggestions for my future. “You could come work with me,” my father said. “I could do big projects again, if I have you to help me. No more malasada shops.” The malasada is a kind of Portuguese donut, and of late my father had been building tiny shops to sell them around the island.

  “Al, let the boy alone,” my mother said. “He should go back to school, get a graduate degree and become something-an architect, a businessman, a lawyer.”

  “Pah, back to school,” my father said. “Why go back to school when he can learn everything he needs from his father?”

  “I’m not making any decisions for a while.” I had already heard that my brother Lui was sure he could find me a job of some kind at KVOL, if I wanted it. My brother Haoa wanted me to join him in the landscape business. My sisters-in-law and my friends all had their own ideas.

  And I had to lie to each and every one of them, telling them all I was still figuring out what I wanted, that I was enjoying just surfing every day. More lies than I had ever wanted to tell. And telling them kept getting harder and harder for me, and would only keep getting harder until I could come home with a solved case.

  The Next Wave

  By the end of my second full day of surfing, I was beat. I collapsed on the beach, catching my breath and massaging my calves, when a haole girl who couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen stuck her board in the sand and sat down next to me and said hi. She was wearing a neon yellow bikini, and had her sandy blonde hair pulled up into a pony tail with a matching ribbon. Her skin was the deep bronze of someone who spends a lot of time on the water.

  “Hi,” I said back. I’d seen her surfing; she was pretty damn good.

  “You’re that guy who used to be a cop, aren’t you?” she asked.

  “Guilty as charged. Kimo.” I held out my hand.

  “Trish,” she said, shaking it. “I saw you on the news.”

  “My fifteen minutes of fame.”

  She nodded toward the water. “Your form’s pretty good for somebody who hasn’t surfed for a long time.”

  “I’ve been surfing since I was a kid, The last few years, though, not too much. Mornings, before work. Weekends. The occasional odd trip up here.” I paused. “How about you?”

  “I was born in Iowa, but my mom wanted to be a movie star, so she divorced my dad when I was seven and we moved to LA so she could pursue her destiny.”

  “And did she find it?”

  “If her destiny’s waiting tables at the International House of Pancakes on La Cienega, then she found it, all right. Me, I found surfing.”

  I had a gut feeling that Trish had something she wanted to tell me, something more than just the story of her mother’s failed attempt at movie stardom. I wasn’t in a hurry; my calves still needed a rubdown before I could stand up. And I’ve learned that when somebody has something they really want to tell you, they will, if you give them enough time.

  “How long have you been in Hale’iwa?”

  “Two years. I didn’t actually run away; I waited until I was sixteen, and I left a note.”

  “A note’s always good.”

  “And I talk to my mom every Sunday. Religiously.”

  “Admirable.” I waited. Trish watched the surfers. Finally, I said, “You must know a lot of people around here after two years. You know any of the surfers who’ve been killed?”

  She looked up in alarm. “More than Mike?”

  Pay dirt. “Two others. Did you know Mike?”

  She nodded. “He was my boyfriend. I was surfing just behind him, and I was the one who pulled him out of the water.”

  “That’s tough.”

  She looked like she was about to cry.

  I was thinking about what to ask her next when a guy called “Yo, Trish!” from up the beach. “Come on, let’s go!”

  “I gotta run,” she said, standing up. “I’ve got some stuff to think about, but I want to talk to you. You’ll be around?”

  “I’ll be here.”

  “Good. Catch you later.” She grabbed her board and started running up toward Ke Nui Road.

  That was progress. I had seen Trish around, and I was sure I would see her again. There are, after all, a limited number of spots
for serious surfers. Plus, surfing is an individual sport, but after you’ve caught a monster wave, you want to tell everyone about it. You want to hang out with other surfers, compare notes on gear and breaks. Pipeline was one good place to meet people who might have known the three victims, but I needed more sources.

  I left the beach with a plan. Each night, I’d choose a different bar, ordering a burger and a beer and showing my face around. I started with the club where Lucie Zamora had been shot, but the crowd there was very young and only interested in drinking and dancing, and there was no way I could strike up a casual conversation with anyone about her or her murder. A couple of times, it was clear people recognized me-there was some whispering, and a guy pointedly moved away from me when I walked up next to him to order a beer.

  Over the next few days, I saw Trish a couple of times, but the time was never right for us to talk. She always made eye contact, though, and I knew I just had to give her time. On TV, when they compress an entire case into an hour-long show (with time out for commercial breaks) the witnesses and the suspects always talk on cue. In life, though, people tell you the most when they’re ready to talk, and I was willing to wait.

  I spent my first few days at Pipeline, getting to know the surfers and working on my cover story. A few wouldn’t speak to me, though I didn’t know if it was because I had been a cop, because they knew I was gay, or just because they were unfriendly. After long, hot showers and lots of sports cream rubbed on to my aching calves, I went out every night, but finally I realized that in the places I’d been choosing, the music was too loud and the patrons too drunk. I decided to rethink my strategy and find the best surf shop on the North Shore, the one where the top surfers would hang out to swap stories and salivate over new gear. Maybe someone there could give me a lead.

  After cruising up and down the Kam Highway, I decided The Next Wave was the place. The collection of high-end equipment and the cappuccino bar made it a place not only where surfers would hang out, but where it was quiet enough to strike up a casual conversation.

  As I moved around Hale’iwa, I discovered that there weren’t many people left on the North Shore who remembered me from the time I’d spent there; most of those I surfed with had moved on with their lives, as I had, or else were chasing waves elsewhere around the world.

  One person had remained, though. Of course, he was the one I didn’t particularly want to see, and of course, he was the owner and manager of the Next Wave, meaning I was bound to see a lot of him.

  Dario Fonseca and I had a complicated history. He was not the reason why I gave up pursuing a career as a professional surfer, nor was he the reason why I entered the police academy. But he certainly contributed to both those decisions. Dario was a few years old than I was, but no better a surfer. Unlike me, though, back then surfing seemed to be all he had; no education, no family, nothing but a board and a wave and the desire to put them both together.

  He and I, along with many of our friends, regularly entered tournaments we had no hope of winning. Then in March, when the great winter waves on the North Shore had died down and the best surfers had gone to chase waves elsewhere, I came in fifth in the Pipeline Spring Championships. It was the best I’d ever done, and I was riding high, thinking I was finally reaching my potential.

  A bunch of the guys took me out drinking that night, buying me beers and shots until the bar closed and dawn streaked the dark sky. I was in no condition to drive, so Dario dragged me over to his place, a one-room cottage north of Hale’iwa, to crash. I remember wanting to lay down right there on the beach, I was so wasted.

  The next thing I remember is waking up in Dario’s bed, naked, his mouth on my left nipple. He bit and sucked at both nipples until they were hard and sore, and then licked a trail down my stomach to my crotch, where he gave me a blow job.

  I wasn’t a virgin then-I gave up that title to a girl named Penny Phillips, who transferred into our class at Punahou junior year with a voracious sexual appetite, and was gone by the Christmas holidays. In the interim, she slept with at least a dozen of our male classmates, relieving one and all of that most unwanted commodity among teenaged boys. I’d had girlfriends in college, and one night a girl named Jocelyn had talked me into a three-way with another guy, which both freaked me out and turned me on intensely. For the most part, though, I had successfully repressed my attraction to other guys, convincing myself that it was something I could grow out of if I just ignored it.

  I must have passed out after Dario finished, because when I woke again it was almost noon and there was a note on the refrigerator from Dario. “You’re a champ, Kimo,” it read. “I’m on the water.”

  I felt paralyzed. My mouth was dry and my head pounded, and my body was sore in unaccustomed places. When I looked in the mirror I saw my nipples were raw and red, and I had a hickey on the side of my neck.

  I didn’t know if I was gay or not, back then. I knew that I liked to look at men’s bodies, in magazines and catalogs, and on the beach when I thought no one would notice. But the only men I knew who were clearly gay were fairies, effeminate guys who flounced around. If that was being gay, then I didn’t want any part of it, and I determined to hide any part of me that threatened to become like them.

  Waking in Dario’s bed, though, I knew I no longer had Jocelyn to blame for what had happened. Sex with Dario, even as drunk as I was, was amazingly more erotic and thrilling than sleeping with a girl had ever been. And that knowledge scared the hell of out of me.

  Once I’d had a taste, though, I knew that I would have to keep on fighting, harder and harder, to hold back. And the more effort I had to put into hiding that desire, into forcing it down into the deepest part of my being, the less I would have to put into surfing.

  I was scared and confused, and somehow I decided that I had made the best showing I would ever make in a competition, because I knew you had to put 110 percent of yourself into surfing if you wanted to be a champion-it had to be all that mattered to you. And as long as I was hiding my sexuality, I couldn’t give surfing that 110 percent.

  So I left. I hitched back to the place where I was staying, packed up, and went home. I slept nearly non-stop for a few days, and awake or dreaming, I kept coming back to that night with Dario. It felt like my world had been turned on end and I didn’t know how to make sense of it.

  My parents couldn’t figure me out. I wouldn’t tell them the details, just that I’d decided to give up on being a champion surfer. My mother wasn’t exactly depressed-after all, she’d sent me to college for four years so I could become a professional of some kind-and not a professional surfer. My father knew something was up but I don’t think he ever figured it out. He kept trying to get me to go down to Waikiki to surf, offering to lend me his truck, to wax my board for me. But I was so caught up in my own internal struggles that I paid no attention to them.

  After hanging around my parents’ house for a while, I saw a notice in the Advertiser that the Honolulu Police Department was looking for new recruits. Intuitively, I knew it was the right thing for me, so I entered the police academy. It was, after all, the most macho thing I could think to do. I thought if anything could save me from being gay, being a cop would be it.

  I wanted to be a pro surfer when I was twenty-two, and I let fear of being gay stop me from chasing that dream. Dario Fonseca had been a big part of that fear, but I was ten years older and out of the closet, and I couldn’t let fear of anything keep me from finding out who killed Pratt, Zamora and Chang. I couldn’t avoid the Next Wave, if going there would help solve the case, just to avoid Dario.

  Dario had probably known I was gay within about five minutes of meeting me, if it took that long. I knew there was this thing called gaydar, a kind of gay radar that you developed the more comfortable you were with being yourself. It helped you figure out who was gay and who wasn’t. Mine wasn’t that well-attuned yet, but obviously, ten years ago Dario’s had been in full bloom.

  Back then, I didn’t like the
way he always found himself next to me when we were out drinking, the way he often rubbed his leg against mine-or the way my body reacted when he did. I was damned if I’d be dragged out of a closet I wasn’t even sure I was in.

  I hadn’t seen him since that day I’d walked out of his shack on the beach, but he hadn’t changed much. When I walked into The Next Wave that evening, he was standing next to a display of bodyboards explaining the principles of the sport to a customer. By then I’d been on the North Shore for six days and I was tired, sad, horny and frustrated. Beyond figuring out that Mike Pratt’s shooter had probably camouflaged himself as a photographer, I hadn’t been able to come up with a single lead on the case that took me beyond what I had read in the dossiers.

  Dario had clearly followed everything that had happened to me over the last few weeks. “Well, look what the cat dragged in!” he said, coming up to me as if it had been ten days since we’d seen each other last instead of ten years.

  He hugged me and kissed my cheek, and I hugged him back. I’d never been comfortable with too much physical contact with other guys before, always afraid I’d do something that would reveal my secret self. Now I figured I had nothing left to reveal.

  “You look good, Dario,” I said. “Must be all that clean living.”

  He was probably thirty-five, but he’d hardly put a pound on his skinny frame, his face had no lines, and his hair, though thinning at the top, was still full enough. “Flattery will get you everywhere.” He winked at me. “And I do mean everywhere,” he said, in a low voice.

  His voice returned to normal as he said, “Now, why don’t you take a look around while I finish up with this customer, and then we’ll go in back and get all caught up.”

  He went back to the girl he’d been showing bodyboards to, and I walked around the store. The Next Wave was located just off Hale’iwa Road, overlooking Waialua Bay. The buildings in the neighborhood were all one and two stories, simple wood-frame places often with fading paint and a motley collection of clunkers, Jeeps and pickups parked outside. Most people on the North Shore were there because they loved to surf, and high-paying jobs in the area were non-existent. People spent their money on expensive gear rather than on fancy homes or tricked-out cars.