The Tattoo

by Chris Mckinney

  Koa didn’t quit. I can’t really blame him. It had nothing to do with strength or willpower — Koa had a lot of both. Instead it just always came down to the fact that he did not give a fuck. “Where da fuck am I going?” he’d say. Where I would see my future beyond the Koolau mountains, always looking for a tunnel of escape, he never even really looked toward them. I had something to run from, he always felt he had what he needed and all that he was going to get. Kahaluu, Puana Castle, it was his kingdom to inherit, his land to rule. It was what the haoles had left him, and he was going to make sure that the haoles would never snatch a piece of it while he still breathed.

  Koa, it was kind of strange, how cool he was until it came to haoles. I mean, he was a nice guy, a guy who, like his parents, had this tremendous heart. Sure, he was a born trouble-maker, a fucking rascal, but this guy loved people unconditionally. This was the guy that took me in and made me, an otherwise outsider, a knight in his kingdom. He would do anything for me and anyone else he called friend. He’d give his last dollar with a smile. He was always smiling. Anything he had was for the giving when it came to those he cared about. But, man, when it came to haoles, he became a fucking blood-thirsty animal. He hated all of them. I never asked him why. It always seemed obvious. They’d taken his land. They killed his culture and therefore they’d taken his humanity. Well, if they wanted an animal, Koa was going to give them one they’d never forget. A fucking Grendel, a Skylla and Charybdis all rolled up in one.

  So sometimes we’d drive to Kailua, the closest place where there was a guarantee that some haoles were around. The Marine base was in Kailua, so there was always some fucking jarhead walking around Kailua town. We’d hunt at night, cruise around some of the Kailua bars, stalking with patience. Half the time we wouldn’t see anyone worth fighting, so we’d kill time with some beer, some coke. That’s one of the things about coke, why I figure it’s so addicting to most. The feeling it gives you, it’s like heightened awareness. Your body feels awake, primed. Sometimes you feel like your eyes can see farther, that your ears can grasp sounds out of the air with lightning quickness. You feel like a rubberband, stretched out at maximum. The tension, the band is thin and smooth, the rubber is suspended to the point where just pulling a centimeter more will cause cracks to surface, lesions to appear. But it feels like it’s not hard to keep the rubberband steady. You feel in control, like forcing the band to snap is a conscious decision which only you can make. I still can’t believe how easy it was for me to quit.

  So we’d wait. Most of the time it wasn’t just me and Koa. Most of the time we went on the hunt with six or seven. The last thing we wanted was to get mobbed by a group of haoles too big for us to handle. We were a regular posse, a bunch of teenagers looking for white faces to punch. We were just a bunch of poor kids from the Windward side with the abbreviation SYN tattooed on our hands. We hoped we’d send the haoles packing back home. Like my grandpa told me the Tokugawas did: chop off their heads, spike them on the beach, and tell the others never to come back.

  To our credit, we never picked easy fights. We never hunted old men or people who walked alone. We made sure that it was a group of tough haoles (actually it was good enough if they walked around thinking they were tough), usually Marines, jarheads with their shirt sleeves rolled up, often revealing tattoos. We wanted the craziest fucking semper fi mother-fuckers, a group of them about equal in number to ours. We wanted to show the haoles that these guys can’t protect them from us .They aren’t as tough. Hell, these were adults, we were just teenagers with “SYN” tattooed on our hands. I was about seventeen when I had started, not even full grown, but five years of boxing, two years of weights, and about ten years of hate had me prepared. Some of the others weren’t much help at times, but there was always Koa leading the charge, all two hundred and eighty pounds of him, and there I was following in his wake.

  The first time I hit a haole, I broke my left hand. The second time, I broke my right. Both of them went down, but at a price. The second time I broke my hand was during my senior year, my last season of football. I missed half the season, blew any chance of making All-State and receiving a scholarship from the University of Hawai‘i. So by the third time, I was pissed. This time it was only me and Koa. We had started losing confidence in the others, thought sometimes they didn’t pull their weight. We cruised the main road, didn’t see anything, so we went to Kailua Beach Park.

  When we got there, it seemed like a typical Friday night, some guys drinking, others with boyfriends or girlfriends walking on the beach. Just about all of them were locals, Kailua High School people, just cruising at midnight. It seemed all of the Marines had decided to stay on base that night, and we were getting anxious. It’s funny how when you expect something and it doesn’t materialize, you want that thing even more.

  Suddenly a red Camaro pulled up in the beach parking lot. I saw it in the rear view mirror, then looked over at Koa, who smiled. We sat quietly in my car, sipping beers, waiting to see what they would do. They jumped out of the car, two of them, one blond, the other with black hair. Both were shirtless, revealing the dog tags hanging from their necks.

  “Hey, I neva even taut about dat before,” Koa whispered. “Fuck, when we kick dea ass, we go fuckin’ take da dog tags, you know, like one trophy.”

  I looked over at Koa and saw this huge grin on his face. His eyes were red from the beer, and I could see that he was probably having delusions of grandeur, thinking something like if we did this every weekend for the next two years, we’d have over a hundred dog tags. The fucking Marine Corps would go absolutely nuts having to re-issue all these dog tags to these black-eyed, busted lip Marines who’d come walking in, quietly saying, “I lost my tags.” I think Koa was probably figuring that he could single-handedly get the Marines to leave Kaneohe Bay. He never said it, but I laughed out loud anyway.

  He just looked at me and whispered, “We go get dose dog tags.”

  I looked out my window and watched as the two Marines threw their empty beer bottles into the bushes. I could feel Koa burning. Then the improbable happened. They came walking toward my car. Before I could get out, the blond leaned over with a cigarette hanging from his lips and asked in a Southern drawl, “Hey, you gotta light?”

  I pressed in my car lighter. “Hold on,” I said, “it’ll be a minute.” While I held the knob of the lighter, I saw the other marine walk to Koa’s side. When he looked in, his head involuntarily jerked back. He was probably surprised at Koa’s size. I saw both of the Marines looking at each other through both open windows and my hand started to shake.

  The blond one broke the stare and asked me, “Hey, you got a couple of extra beers?”

  I looked at Koa, who held the rest of the cold pack in his lap, and turned to the blond and said, “No.”

  They looked at each other again, then the other one said, “What’s that in your lap?”

  Before Koa could say anything, the blond added, “Hey, you guys are a little young, yeah? Maybe you should hand the beer over to us before you get busted by the cops.”

  We were at an extreme disadvantage because we were sitting in the car. They could get clean shots at us, while trying to hit them while sitting down would have been stupid. We couldn’t believe it. These guys were starting shit with us. The car lighter popped out. I pulled it out and looked at the orange glow of the coils. I told the Marine, “Here, I’ll light it for you.”

  When he leaned in I shoved the lighter right into his left cheek. He screamed and jumped back. His partner on Koa’s side of the car froze in shock. Both of us quickly jumped out of the car. I heard hitting on Koa’s side of the car, but didn’t look back. The Marine on my side was holding his burnt cheek and yelling, “You fuckin’ Jap! You mother-fuckin’ Jap!”

  The moment he dropped his hand from his cheek, I hit him with a right hook. I was relieved that my hand didn’t break. After a few more hits, he went down, and I looked over at Koa and saw that he was slamming the car door on the dro
oping body of the black-haired Marine.

  I yelled, “Let’s get da fuck out of here!” He pulled the dog tags off, and threw the Marine to one side.

  As I reversed out, I felt my sweaty hands shake on the steering wheel. I shifted into first, peeled out on the loose gravel, and made tracks to the street. Just as I started to feel like we’d made it out, I heard the siren and saw the glow of the blue light flashing in my rear view mirror. I heard Koa say, “Ditch ‘um,” so I pressed the gas down as far as it would go and started mapping out a possible escape from a town whose roads I wasn’t that familiar with.

  It was the first time I was arrested for something scary. I’d got busted once for shop-lifting, and twice for violating curfew. But this time around, in one fell swoop, I was charged with assault, driving under the influence, underage drinking, driving with an open container, reckless driving, and resisting arrest. Koa got assault and possession of narcotics. Since we were seventeen, we were not tried as adults. In juvenile court, my school record helped me, so I was sentenced to only eighty hours of community service. Koa’s school record sucked. In fact his grades were so bad that it didn’t look like he was going to graduate, so he got twice as much. All in all, it was a good deal, but to this day what burns me up is that those fucking Marines probably didn’t get shit. This “who threw the first punch” idea is bullshit. They would’ve hit us first if we hadn’t hit them, and I’ve always refused to wait for someone to punch me. Koa was happy, though. He managed to hide the tags under my seat, and nobody said anything about them. They probably thought the tags simply got lost in the fight.

  I knew I had to slow down after this one. Koa seemed to know it, too. He started to spend more time with his girlfriend, Kahala, and we started to surf and dive again. As we neared graduation, things seemed to be smoothing out, but then I began thinking it would be safer on the other side of the mountain. So I started looking for that tunnel even harder, and my father seemed quite willing to lend me a magnifying glass.

  When he picked me up from the Kailua police station that night, he wasn’t happy. It was about three in the morning when I had finally finished getting processed, and when I walked out to the main office, and saw my father standing there with his devil eyebrows hovering over blood-shot eyes, I turned to the sergeant and said, “I don’t suppose there’s any chance of letting me back into the cell.”

  It wasn’t a quiet ride home. For twenty minutes he screamed. “What da fuck is dis fuckin’ shit! You like die? Fuckin’ drinkin’ and drivin’, das pretty stupid, but trying fo’ outrun one cop? You mus’ be da biggest fuckin’ dummy in da world! You lucky you neva had drugs on you, too. If you had drugs, I would’ve fuckin’ walked right into dat cell an I would’ve fucked you up! Mother-fuckin’ kid. What your madda would say?”

  This one slowed him down. He rarely mentioned her, but when he did, he always seemed to get calm. After a long pause his voice had calmed from lunacy to anger. “You lucky she no stay around. You would make her so fuckin’ sick. She would probably disown you, you fuckin’ fuck up. Fuck, I taught you fo’ box not so you can be one fuckin’ punk, but so when somebody fuck wit’ you, you can defend yourself.”

  Before I could seal my lips, the sarcastic chuckle escaped. I felt a hard slap on my head, and looked over. The devil arch was going crazy, it seemed that if it got any sharper, his eyebrows would have pushed up and put two parts in his hair. He looked over at me. “So you tough now, ah? Get wise wit’ me. You lick one fuckin’ haole so you tink you can get fuckin’ wise wit’ me. O.k. When we get home, we goin’ find out how tough you stay.”

  I wanted to laugh again. I couldn’t believe that he had the audacity to say that his “training” of me was motivated by this idea of defense. Maybe I’d bought it as a kid, but after a while I realized that he didn’t teach me shit when I was getting picked on, he had just told me, threatened me to fight back. That first day I came home with a fat lip, he didn’t teach me shit. By the time he began to teach me how to fight, I had already become someone who didn’t have any problems at school. I was already someone respected by my classmates. The boxing, all that did was turn me into a more dangerous animal, an animal who was conscious of this new weapon, a cock quite aware that these were lethal knives being tied on me. Defense, please. I heard what he was saying and noticed that he never even mentioned the assault charge in his initial verbal attack. He hated haoles too, especially haole military guys. He only mentioned it when he brought up my mother, not because he disapproved of the charge but because he knew she would. He was more pissed about having to pick me up at three in the morning than anything else. Sure the running away from the cop was stupid, and the drinking and driving, too. I could accept his gripes about those things. But never did he disapprove of my fighting. He would only disapprove if I lost. Even though the sword was still in his care, he was the one who had taught me how to use it. And nothing as razor sharp as a katana is used for defense.

  I thought about the sword on the ride home, thought about how it was kept in a glass case. I realized the purpose of the glass wasn’t to keep people from touching it. Fragile glass was the wrong material for that purpose. Glass was used for display purposes. The Hideyoshis wanted people to see it in all its glory, especially family. It represented strength and danger, it was to be passed down from father to son. This prideful display was also bait. They wanted the sons to gaze at it, long to hold it, desire it enough to break the glass, unsheathe it, and wield it. Not for defense; defense, how silly, but for offense.

  While the truck neared the house, I thought about that night when my father caught me and Koa with the sword. I realized that he wasn’t angered because I took the sword out, or let it be taken out. He was enraged because I’d used the sword to butcher a dead animal when I should have known that the sword was only meant to be used on live humans. My temptation was pure, but my action was blasphemy. After thinking about it, I knew the glass display was a mistake, and that my father would pay for it, as would the entire Hideyoshi ancestry. I knew that if it ever became mine, and I still had the strength, I would conceal it.

  When we got home, nothing happened. He told me to get to bed. He was tired. I waited until his bedroom light was off, then I walked outside and looked at the heavy bag hanging from a wooden beam in the garage. For the first time I noticed how old it had gotten. I saw stains that I had never seen before, I saw tiny threads sticking out at the seams. It was weathered from the salt air, beige from the canvas material absorbing highway exhaust and time. I hit it with my bare hand and it felt soft.

  I walked back into the house and found myself standing in front of the glass case. How easy it would be to blast my hand right through the glass and grab the sword. I concentrated on the katana, like I always did, then found myself looking at the short sword, the one the samurai used for seppuku, the one they used to gut themselves in ceremonial suicide. I opened the case and grabbed the katana first. I unsheathed it and examined the blade. I noticed a small speck of dried blood on it. The long sword felt good in my hands, light and easy. I replaced the sheath and put the sword back. I grabbed the much smaller one. For some reason it felt heavier. I took off the sheath. Suddenly my stomach turned and I felt an urge to throw up. I quickly put the smaller one back and closed the case. Standing there, I felt myself shiver. After it passed, I walked back to my room and closed the door. I didn’t sleep that night.

  So a month before I graduated, I planned to get out. I had decided I’d had enough of the Windward side, and I wanted to try town out. The problem was I didn’t know how I was going to do this. Sure, I had a couple of thousand dollars hidden in my room from selling coke. Like an idiot, it amazed me how much more money I was making when I stopped using. I figured I could go to Kapiolani Community College or something. U.H. was out because I’d never bothered to apply. But tuition would cost money, and if I were really going to leave, I’d have to start paying rent and stuff. I figured I could get a job, but the thought of the kind of job I w
ould end up getting depressed me. High school diploma, no experience. I’d probably end up washing dishes at some low-grade restaurant. I thought about selling drugs, but that felt unsavory, too. The last brush I’d had with the law had spooked me, and besides, all of my connections, my customers, were on the Windward side.

  For a while, I felt stuck, and I just tried to take my mind off it. I’d enjoy surfing and diving with Koa once a week. As we came closer and closer to graduation, I didn’t see him very often. It was cool, though, I liked Kahala, cool chick, fine. I tried to talk about my situation with him once or twice, but he just kept telling me I should stay on this side. He’d say, “Why da fuck you like move town for? Only get townies and haoles on dat side. Stay dis side wit da boys. Everybody know you dis side. Da chicks dig you, in fact Kahala like set you up wit Cheryl. Fuck, she mean. You should rush.”

  He was right, Cheryl was fine. But I was tired of just about everything on the Windward side. For the first time I examined my life and saw the obvious. This place was no good for me. So, knowing that, I figured it would be easy to leave, but it wasn’t. It was tempting to stay because he was right, all I knew was on the Windward side. It’s hard to leave home no matter how fucked up home is. Home is your comfort zone. It’s the place where you can walk the street with your head up. It’s where you’re somebody, it’s where all the things that you hate and love exist together. Once your roots dig deep within the hard soil and wrap themselves around underground rocks, they are difficult to unearth.

  This was when Koa told me how both B.Y.U. and U.H. had offered him football scholarships even though he hadn’t played his senior year. He told me, “No sense, unless you can turn pro.” I knew why he’d turned down B.Y.U. — Koa would never live in the mainland. But his rejection of U.H. seemed odd. That’s when it hit me that Kahala was probably pregnant.