Mahu

by Neil S. Plakcy

  I took my big board with me and dragged it out into the surf past the orange lifeguard station, where there were flags posted warning against the heavy wind. The surf was cresting at four to six feet, high for Waikīkī, and I plunged into the water with enthusiasm. At least, I thought, as I ducked and paddled my way through the breakers, I was getting some good surfing in, at the North Shore, at Makapu’u Point, and now here.

  I forgot everything that waited for me back on shore and concentrated on the waves, and it was, as always, a magnificent release. Every time I thought of Wayne Gallagher’s hand on my butt, or Derek’s greediness, or all the dead or the living people I’d hurt, I willed myself into focusing on the surf.

  The rough water gave me a beating, knocking me down over and over, but the struggle was exhilarating. By the time I was finished I ached in a dozen places, but they were good aches, the result of pushing myself to my limits. I finally gave up and dragged my board through the surf and up over the sand. As I was waiting for the light to change so I could cross Kalākaua, I looked Ewa and saw Akoni coming towards me.

  “Hey, brah,” I said as he approached. “Am I allowed to talk to you in public?”

  “It’s okay. I’m on a mission from Yumuri. You free for happy hour?”

  “Give me a chance to shower and change,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “I’ll tell you at the Canoe Club, all right?”

  “Sure.” He turned back to the station and I crossed Kalākaua. I wondered what was up, but couldn’t figure it out. I took a quick shower and pulled on a pair of jeans and a polo shirt, and walked over to the Canoe Club, where I found Akoni at the bar, sipping slowly on a draft beer.

  I stepped up next to him, ordered a draft for myself, and said, “So what’s up?”

  He nodded toward the outdoor patio. “We’ll get a table.”

  “Not at happy hour,” I said, as the bartender slid my beer across the bar and I dropped a couple of singles on the wood. “Look around.”

  Inside the bar was crowded, but outside you could hardly move. We struggled through the crowd on the porch, and went down the stairs to the beach level. Businessmen in aloha shirts talked in small clusters, some smoking cigarettes, a few with fat cigars. Yuppies in polo shirts cracked wise with each other and made eyes at their female counterparts, sizing up opportunities for later in the evening. Small clusters of office friends sat at the tables comparing war stories or gossiping about absent coworkers.

  Akoni led the way down toward the beach, and the farther we got from the lights and music the less crowded it was. Finally we found a sheltered spot and pulled two lounge chairs together. “So what gives?” I asked as we sat down.

  “We had a meeting today,” he said. “Preliminary for your hearing. Me, Yumuri, Hiram Lin, and your girlfriend from the DA’s office.”

  “I’m not sure she’s exactly my girlfriend anymore.”

  “We went over every line in the file on Tommy Pang’s murder and Evan Gonsalves’s suicide,” he said. Akoni smiled at me. “They didn’t find a single thing wrong beyond your first mistake.”

  “Not calling the body in under my shield number?”

  He nodded. “And even Yumuri had to concede that wasn’t a big deal.”

  “So?”

  “So the ADA wouldn’t accept it. She kept saying there had to be something else in the file we could hang you on.”

  “I haven’t treated her very well,” I said. “I should have called her from the very start and told her what was going on. But I wasn’t sure myself for a long time.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if she was the one who called the media on you. Just something she said. She mixed it up pretty good with old Hiram, too. I was surprised to see the guy had a backbone. He told her it was his mission to root out bad cops. You believe that, his mission? But he also said it was his mission to protect the good ones. And as far as he could see, you were a good one.”

  I nodded. “Nice of him.”

  “You bet. Even Yumuri had to admit we’d done everything by the book, and that the worst he could see doing was placing a mark on your sheet.”

  “So the hearing’s off? I’ve got my job back?”

  Akoni looked down at his glass of beer, which was almost empty. “There’s still the gay thing.” He looked back up at me. “Yumuri doesn’t want you back. He wants you to resign and then you can avoid all the scandal of the hearing. Your record will be clean. You can get a job somewhere else, maybe even join a force on the mainland.”

  “But you just said they had no grounds to dismiss me. Why should I resign?”

  He looked sheepish. “Actually I wasn’t supposed to tell you they didn’t have grounds,” he said. “Yumuri wanted me to come out here, as your friend, and give you some kind of snow job, get you to back off before the hearing. I couldn’t do that.”

  “You just can’t keep your ass out of the wringer. They give you a simple job and you screw it up.” I smiled. “I appreciate it, brah. But I couldn’t quit, even if I knew they had real grounds against me.”

  He drained the last of his beer. “I ought to get going. Mealoha will be waiting dinner for me.” He stood up and put his arm on my shoulder, and I remembered when he’d flinched away from me when he first found out I was gay. I was making progress, I thought. Slowly, one person at a time, but it was progress nonetheless. “Take care, Kimo. Watch out for yourself.”

  “I will,” I said. “And give Mealoha a kiss from me.”

  He grinned. “I can do that.”

  After he walked away I stayed on the chair for a while, holding my empty beer glass. I wanted a waitress to come by and get me a refill, because I didn’t have the energy to go up to the bar myself. I wasn’t sure I could even get up from the chair. All my fatigue kicked in as I thought about what Akoni had said. They had no professional grounds to fire me. They just didn’t want me around anymore.

  It was a hard realization. Guys I’d thought of like brothers, men, like Yumuri, I had respected, had made a decision about me based on one fact, and that had turned them against me. I could be the best detective ever, I could outperform anybody on physical tasks and written tests, and they still didn’t want me on the force with them.

  Darkness fell around me, and the noise of the bar diminished in the background. I sat back on the chair and looked up at the stars. It was hard to see much right above me, because I was too close to the bright lights of Waikīkī, but out over the ocean I could see stars and patches of clouds. The wind was still strong, though I was sheltered in a grove of trees and didn’t feel its effect much. But the clouds moved fast across the sky, covering and then revealing the stars, and I wondered which one would grant my wish, and what that wish should be.

  PLATE LUNCHES

  I woke early Friday morning in a fit of nerves, startled out of a dream involving Wayne Gallagher. It began when I was surfing on Waikīkī, holding Danny Gonsalves above my head as my board knifed the water. On the beach, Terri was crying, Tico Robles there comforting her, promising I would never hurt her son.

  Then I was back in my room at my parents’ house, making love to Wayne on my narrow twin bed, when my father came into the room. He was disappointed, he said, because he and Uncle Chin were lovers and he wanted me to have picked Derek over Wayne. That’s when I woke up.

  I looked for the newspaper but it hadn’t arrived yet, so I began cleaning my apartment, putting away books, organizing the laundry. I didn’t want to think about my hearing, and what I would say. I was entitled to have a lawyer present, but I’d made no moves toward hiring one. I thought idly of asking Tim Ryan to defend me, but I knew that was a bad idea.

  Finally I heard the thunk of the paper on the concrete outside, and I brought it in and read it sitting up in bed. I made myself chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast, with coconut macadamia syrup, and then cleaned up all the dishes and pans. I was trying to figure out what to do next when the phone rang.

  “Good morning, Kimo,” my father said. “
I hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “I’ve been up for hours.”

  “I remember when you were a boy you could sleep until noon. I used to tell your brothers to drag you out of bed, and one would take one leg and the other the other leg.” He laughed. “You’d hold on to the sheets, and everything would end up a big mess.”

  “I remember,” I said dryly. “What’s up?”

  “Did you get a chance to speak to Chin’s grandson?”

  “I did.” I told him about my meeting with Derek the day before. “He acted like a jerk. I don’t want to see Uncle Chin get hurt.”

  “Chin is a grown man. He can take care of himself. Come here for lunch today, and you can tell him.”

  “I’ve got a lot to do,” I said, even though I couldn’t think of one thing I had to do before I showed up at the Boardwalk as a decoy.

  “No matter, you’ll make the time. Be here at noon.”

  I was annoyed. Usually he let my mother make such calls, relied on her strength to enforce what he wanted. Couldn’t they keep their roles straight? “All right.”

  At least then I only had to kill the morning. I kept walking around my tiny apartment wondering what I could do, and then caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I could use a haircut, I thought, so I called Tico Robles, and he said he could squeeze me in if I could get to his salon in half an hour.

  The first strip shopping center my father built was on Wai‘alae Avenue, at the base of St. Louis Heights, not far from our house. Though he’s had many offers to sell it, over the years, he has held on to it for what I consider purely sentimental reasons, though I have to admit it’s always fully leased and the parking lot there is usually jammed. About three years ago Tatiana, unbeknownst to Haoa, bankrolled Tico in a salon of his own, out of money her parents had left her. She convinced my father to rent him a small space in the Wai‘alae Avenue center, at a bargain rate, and he prospered.

  The center was so busy I had to park my truck on a side street, and then walk almost the full length of it to the salon, passing a dry cleaner, video rental store, lawyer’s office, real estate agency, pack and ship place, and greeting card store before I got to Tico’s salon, Puerto Peinado. They’d huddled over the name for weeks, finally coming up with a tribute to Tico’s homeland of Puerto Rico and the Spanish word for hairdo. They’d hired a young artist Tico was dating to paint tropical murals in bright colors on the walls, exotic visions of a Puerto Rico that looked suspiciously like Oahu, and when I walked in there was fast Latin music playing and Tico was doing a merengue with an elderly Chinese woman.

  He looked totally recovered, except for a slight bruise on his forehead just below the hairline, almost completely covered by a swoop of brown hair I suspected he had gelled in place. “Kimo! Sweetheart!” he said when I walked in. He dipped the old lady, then expertly swung her into a chair and plopped the old-fashioned hair-dryer down over her head. He tripped lightly across the salon floor and gave me a big hug. “I’m so glad you came in! I’ve been dying to see what I could do with your hair since you came to see me in the hospital.”

  He ushered me to a chair in front of a basin at the back of the salon, talking the whole time. “Now wasn’t that a dismal place,” he said. “I mean, really, who decorates those places? They should be shot! I was so eager to get out of there.”

  “Maybe that’s why they decorate them that way,” I said, as he swirled a plastic cape around my shoulders. “So you’ll want to get well and leave quickly.”

  “Lean back,” he commanded. He washed my hair quickly and expertly, leaving it smelling faintly of coconut and strawberries, and then led me to his chair, in the front window of the salon. “Now I will work my magic,” he said. He leaned down and whispered in my ear, “When I’m finished with you, the boys will fall all over you!”

  “Just one boy in particular,” I said, thinking of Wayne Gallagher.

  “Oh, Kimo has a boyfriend,” he said as he started to cut. “Dish, baby. Tell Uncle Tico all about him.”

  “Not a boyfriend, a suspect. Although he is cute, even though I know he’s bad all the way through.”

  “Oh, they’re the worst,” he said. “My weakness. I love a bad boy.” In the mirror I saw him shake his head. “Except eventually they end up being bad to you. But while it works, it can be so wonderful!”

  We went on to talk about Tatiana and Haoa and their children. “They’re angels,” Tico said. “Every last one of them. Angels from heaven. They all take after Tatiana, you know that.”

  “I thought you weren’t mad at my brother anymore.”

  “Oh, I forgave him. Do you know, yesterday he came to my house and planted a whole row of hibiscus bushes, just for nothing? I tried to thank him and all he said was, ‘You needed a hedge out front to shelter the yard.’ I mean, do you believe it? He just can’t say he’s sorry, but he means it.”

  “Tell me about it. What he did to you last week, he did to me for at least ten years, until I got big enough to fight back. He and Lui would just whale on me whenever they thought they could get away with it. And even when our parents caught them, red-handed, they didn’t care. They’d take their punishment, and start right in on me again.”

  “Poor baby.”

  “Sometimes I don’t understand why I love them so much.”

  “Your family will always be with you,” Tico said. “When you have no one else to turn to, you can always go to them.”

  I nodded, and he pulled my head back up straight. “I saw that this week, for sure.”

  He worked for a while longer, then styled and combed and moussed and by the time he was done even I was surprised at how handsome I was. I’d never been that vain about my looks—I figured it’s all genetics. I was lucky to get the best features my Irish, Hawaiian and Japanese ancestors had, and to have them put together in a way that people found attractive. I kept up my body and I stood up straight, and I didn’t worry about the rest. But what Tico had done had pulled something out of me I’d never thought I had.

  “If I were twenty years younger,” Tico said. “You’d have to beat me off with a stick.”

  “I might still have to. You’re not ready for Social Security yet.”

  Tico laughed. “The man I see is fifty-one. Two years younger than I am. On Saturday nights we go out to the clubs to watch, not to dance. By midnight we’re yawning and we go home and go to bed.” He grinned. “Though not right to sleep.”

  I tried to pay for the haircut but he wouldn’t let me. “Lock up a bad guy for me,” he said. “Then I’ll consider us even.”

  From Tico’s I drove up to my parents’ house, feeling stronger and readier for action than I had in weeks. When my mother saw my truck pull up in the driveway behind Uncle Chin’s Cadillac, she came out to greet me. “Ai ya!” she said. “My handsome son! You got a new haircut.”

  “Yeah, looks good,” I said, leaning down to kiss her.

  “You make me feel like such a frumpy old lady. My handsome husband, my beautiful sons, and me.”

  “You’ll always be the most beautiful woman in the world to me.” I nodded toward my father, who stood in the doorway. “And I know someone else who thinks so.”

  She blushed. “You boys. How did I raise such boys as you? Come on inside, lunch is almost ready.”

  My father led me back to the porch, where Uncle Chin and Aunt Mei-Mei sat drinking iced tea, and we made small talk while my mother put the finishing touches on plate lunches, the kind of food her mother had prepared for her father as he worked in the fields. Tender, spicy teriyaki steak and two scoops of rice, and fruit salad with fresh pineapple, mango, papaya and melon.

  At the table we talked lightly, about the project my father was bidding on, a Chinese wedding the Chins had attended the night before, my mother’s orchids. “And tonight all my grandchildren come for barbecue,” my mother said proudly. “Ai ya, all afternoon I have to cook. Each one likes something different, and each one wants his favorite. Tūtū Lokelani, why you no make
those sweet potatoes I like? You don’t love me anymore? Tūtū Lokelani, you no make mango bread for me? Your mango bread so ono.” She shook her head. “It’s easier to do the cooking than listen to them complain!”

  Uncle Chin and Aunt Mei-Mei nodded in agreement, and I felt sad for them that they had no children of their own, no grandchildren, and all they could have now would be Derek Pang, who would certainly not bring little children of his own into the world. Aunt Mei-Mei helped my mother clear the table, and then they retreated into the kitchen to clean up and cook for dinner.

  “Your father tells me you met with my grandson,” Uncle Chin said, sitting back in his chair.

  I nodded. “I’m sorry to have to say he’s not a very nice person. Not really a proper grandson for such a kind grandfather as you.”

  Uncle Chin smiled. “Many people Chinatown tell you I not so nice, either,” he said. “Say apple not fall far from tree.”

  I said, “You know his name is Derek, and he’s twenty-five years old. He and his,” here I hesitated, not sure what term to use, “partner are running the Rod and Reel Club now. I told him about you, and he remembered meeting you, but his father never told him your relationship. He said he’s willing to meet with you.”

  Uncle Chin smiled, and I could see the relief in his face. Derek Pang didn’t deserve him as a grandfather. But then again, Derek hadn’t gotten much fathering from Tommy, and maybe Uncle Chin might be a good influence on him. And, I had to admit, Uncle Chin was probably a much worse criminal than I knew, and maybe their joint malfeasance would be a place of intersection for them. Derek might end up with a record longer than his father’s or his grandfather’s.

  I passed on Derek’s phone number. “Too soon I call him tonight?” Uncle Chin asked. “Give him more time think, maybe?”

  The wheels clicked in my brain. Putting Uncle Chin and Derek together tonight would leave Wayne free to meet me at the Boardwalk. “Tonight would be good,” I said.