Mahu m-1

by Neil S. Plakcy

  After dinner I called Akoni at home. Mealoha answered and we talked awkwardly for a minute, her asking how I was and me saying I was doing okay. “Hey, brah, howzit?” I asked when Akoni picked up the receiver.

  “Okay,” he said. “How’re you doing?”

  “I’m getting by. Yesterday I went shopping with my mother, and today I went to the office with my dad. I don’t know who’s going to get me tomorrow.”

  “You’ll get through this.”

  “I read about the fingerprint match in the Advertiser. You really think Evan could have killed himself out of guilt?”

  “I don’t know. Shit, you were my partner for a long time and I didn’t know you. How’m I going to speculate on Evan Gonsalves? Hey, by the way. We got notification that the girl in that drug bust, Luz Maria, she went back to Mexico.”

  “You ever get to interview her?”

  “Nope. Just saw the paperwork. And you know there’s no way we’ll talk to her now. If she knew anything about Tommy Pang she took it back to Mexico with her.”

  We said our goodbyes and hung up. I was edgy, worrying that my case was still going on and I couldn’t work on it. What was I going to do? I ought to go home, I supposed. There wouldn’t be anybody hanging around my doorway, and it was a step toward getting my life back together. It was something. I packed my suitcase and assembled all my equipment-the roller blades, surfboards, all the other stuff I’d brought.

  I carried it downstairs, and walked into the living room, where my parents were watching TV. “I want to go home,” I said. “I think it’s time.”

  My mother looked at my father, and he nodded. “Why don’t you take my truck,” he said. “Your mother can bring me by to pick it up tomorrow.”

  “Okay.” I started for the door, then stopped and turned back around. “Thanks,” I said. “For everything.”

  Then I turned back to the door and went out into the night.

  WHAT HE LEFT BEHIND

  I was happy to be back in my own apartment. It was the first step toward regaining a life of my own. Before we’d left, my mother had plugged the phone back in and turned on my answering machine, and the red light blinked furiously. I left it for the morning light and went to sleep.

  I woke up refreshed, and felt even better after a good long morning on the waves. I came back to my apartment around ten and switched the answering machine to play while I fixed breakfast. Eating my father’s cooking had awakened in me a desire to return to the comfort foods of my youth, and I watched the eggs carefully to keep them runny, so they would soak into the toast.

  Most of the messages were from reporters who wanted to talk to me. There was a call from Harry in there, from Friday, I guessed, before he’d figured out I was holed up at my parents’ house. The last two calls, unexpectedly, were from Terri Clark Gonsalves, and she sounded upset.

  “I need to talk to you, Kimo,” she said. “About Evan. Please call me.”

  The second message was more urgent, and then the answering machine kicked into automatic rewind. What did Terri want from me? I wondered, as I ate my soggy toast and eggs. Maybe I should have gone to the funeral after all. Did she think her friends were abandoning her because of the scandal over Evan?

  I washed my dishes and called Terri. There was no answer, but I left a message on her machine, that I was back, that she could call me any time. I left her my cell number, too. I began putting away the things I’d taken to my parents, and then answering the mail, paying the bills, cleaning the apartment again.

  There was a knock on the door. I walked up to the peephole and saw Terri.

  She looked terrible. Her face was red and puffy, and she’d pulled her hair back into a hasty ponytail. She was wearing a navy t-shirt, white shorts and espadrilles. More than anything else, she looked sad, and beaten down.

  She looked at me and started to cry again. “Oh, Kimo,” she said, and I took her in my arms and we rocked back and forth.

  “I’m sorry, honey. I wish it could have come out any other way.” We separated and I led her to the couch. I went to the refrigerator for some juice, but all I had was a pog-a pineapple, orange and guava mix unique to Hawai‘i. I opened the pint carton and poured it into a glass for her.

  “Have something to drink.” I handed her the glass, and she drank it thirstily.

  “Remember we used to get these at school when we were kids?” she asked. “Always on field trips, too. Danny drinks them now.”

  “I remember.” I sat on the couch next to her. “How’s Danny holding up?”

  She looked like she was going to cry again, but she held herself back. “He’s not talking,” she said. “My mother’s with him now. He cries, and he stays in his room, but he doesn’t talk. I don’t think he’s said a word since Evan died.”

  “Suicide can be pretty traumatic for a kid. You don’t know, he might have seen Evan do it, or at least heard the shot and seen the body.”

  She looked up at me. “I just don’t believe Evan killed himself. I mean, we were getting over our problems. He looked better last week than he had in months. He was home more, he paid more attention to me and Danny.”

  “I guess he’d been working for Tommy Pang,” I said. “When he killed Tommy, it was probably a big relief for him. So he would have felt better for a while, he could have been more relaxed.” I took a breath. “But killing somebody is a big deal. I could see how it could get to him after a while.”

  “I’ve thought about that. Endless hours, all night long, I’ve wondered how Evan could have killed him, and I think I understand it.” She sat back on my sofa, dried her eyes with a tissue, and said, “I think I pushed him toward it. You know, how I told him he had to stop what he was doing. God knows I didn’t mean for him to kill anybody.”

  I put my arm around her and she leaned her head against my shoulder. I could smell her perfume, something light and floral, and her hair was soft where it touched my bare arm. “You can’t think like that,” I said. “It wasn’t your fault. Evan got involved with Tommy Pang all by himself.”

  She nodded. “I know. But I should have made it clearer that the money didn’t matter to me. He never understood that all I wanted was him. I always had enough money for both us.” She balled the tissue up in her hand and sat up again. “That’s something I’ll always live with. I know he made the decision to get involved with that man, and then he decided to kill him. But at least part of the blame is mine.”

  “You have Danny to think about,” I said. “You need to go on from here.”

  “But I can’t, not yet. I understand everything up until the minute he pulled the trigger. I knew my husband, Kimo. I knew his moods and his feelings, and I knew when he was doing something wrong. And I know he loved Danny more than anything else in the world, and he’d do anything to keep him from being hurt. If he was going to kill himself, he’d never do it in the house, and never when Danny was around.” She opened her purse and pulled out an envelope. “He left this note for me. I found it in our safe deposit box this morning.”

  She handed it to me. On the outside was written, “To be opened in the event of my death.” It gave me the shivers to know what Evan had expected had come true.

  Dearest Terri,

  If you are reading this now, then something bad has happened, and I’m dead. I want you to understand why, and to apologize. I only wanted to give you the best, sweetheart. I know I never should have gotten involved with Tommy Pang, but when I first met him, I wanted to get you a great present for your thirtieth birthday, and between my car payments and the money for the house, I was really strapped. He gave me $5,000 just to warn him when Import-Export Control was going to run those surprise sweeps through the airport.

  He always wanted more, though. It was never anything very big, just information. And he always paid me well. Then I had to tell him we were about to intercept a drug deal he was involved in, and I knew I couldn’t go on working for him. I went to his office two weeks ago to tell him I quit.

&n
bsp; I didn’t kill him, though. I left the club after he gave me the bracelet I gave you for your birthday, but I had only gotten as far as the alley when I heard Tommy yelling. Then I heard a crack! like the sound of a bat hitting a ball. I saw somebody-a big guy, I couldn’t see anything clearer than that-drag Tommy down the alley. He drove away and I couldn’t resist, honey. I knew Tommy wore a lot of jewelry and I picked it off his body and took it to a fence out by the Aloha Bowl.

  There’s one more thing I want to do, and that will give me enough money to put aside so I won’t have to deal with scum anymore. If you are reading this, you know that I didn’t succeed. Please give this letter to Kimo-maybe it will help him track the bastard down.

  I love you and Danny with every ounce of my heart, my dearest Terri. Please don’t be angry with me. I only did what I did because I wanted to give you and Danny the world.

  The words Love, Evan were scrawled at the bottom of the page. I looked up at Terri. “I know something happened at my house on Friday,” Terri said. “I think there was somebody else there while I was away.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I can’t say for sure. I feel like things might have been moved around a little-I know, the police were in the house for a while, but this is different.”

  She reached out for the glass and I handed it to her, and she finished the juice. “You’re the only one I can talk to, Kimo. I can’t tell my parents anything. It’s already on the tip of my mother’s tongue to tell me it was a mistake to marry Evan in the first place.”

  I remembered the imperious Mrs. Clark. Though I got points for going to Punahou, and even for my haole grandmother, I was still a native boy to her. “Do you think Danny might have seen anything? Maybe I can get him to talk.” We agreed that I’d follow her out to Wailupe and see if I could talk to Danny.

  She got up from the sofa and started for the door. Then I had an idea. “Actually, you go on. I’ll be a couple of minutes behind you.”

  I scrounged around my apartment looking for pogs. I could only come up with a handful. I put them in the pocket of my shorts, grabbed my sunglasses, and walked over to my grocery store. “Hey, Kimo,” the clerk said. “Been out yet today? The surf is awesome.” His hair was just as long and scraggly as usual, and it seemed he was wearing yet another earring, though I couldn’t be sure.

  It was great. At least somebody didn’t see me through the prism of my sexuality, or my job troubles. “I surfed for a couple hours this morning,” I said. “I caught a killer break off the marine stadium. I actually got a full turn in on it.”

  We talked waves for a couple more minutes, and then I saw what I wanted. An economy-sized bag of assorted pogs. There weren’t going to be any spectacular ones in there, but they’d do for my purposes. I paid for the pogs and walked back to my truck.

  On the way out to Wailupe I tried to think of what I could say to Danny. I loved my own father so much, and I was so lucky that he was still around to look out for me when I needed him. How could I help Danny, whose father seemed to have abandoned him in the cruelest way possible?

  I finally decided, as I pulled into the Gonsalves’s semi-circular driveway, that I didn’t have to say anything much to Danny. I just had to be there, and eventually he’d be ready to talk. Mrs. Clark came out of the house just as I parked. She looked as I remembered her-tall and proud, wearing a white cotton blouse and black skirt that were vintage Clark’s, circa 1965. Her hair was grayer than it had been when I was a teenager, but it was immaculately put together, as usual. “Hello, Kimo,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” I started to say, just as she said the same thing to me.

  “It’s been a bad week, hasn’t it?” she said, and smiled. “So many things for everyone to be sorry about. Will you tell your mother I sent my regards? Sometimes I long for those days when you and Terri were at Punahou, and your mother and I worked together on the PTA, and everything was so much simpler.”

  “It just seems like it was because we’ve gotten past it,” I said. “I’m sure we gave you plenty of problems back then.”

  She nodded. “You’re probably right.” She took my hand in hers. “Take care of yourself, Kimo. And see if you can help my daughter. She has so much ahead of her.”

  “I will, Mrs. Clark.”

  “Well, I must be off. William retired last year, you know, and he’s very particular about his lunch. If I’m not there to make sure everything is fine, he gets very upset.”

  What a luxury, I thought, as I watched her walk to her champagne-colored Mercedes. To worry about lunch. Then I went inside.

  Terri and Danny were sitting at the kitchen table, and she was trying to get him to eat a grilled cheese sandwich. He didn’t speak, and he didn’t eat either. Terri looked up at me. “I don’t know what to do with him.”

  I walked over to the table and sat down. “Hey, Danny.” He looked at me, but didn’t say anything. “You know, it’s a beautiful day. You want to go hang out with me, outside?” Again, there was no response, so I said, “Come on, come with me, okay?” I took his hand and he got up from the table. We walked together out to the front half moon of lawn, between the driveway and the road, and sat down, me talking and him not saying anything.

  I lay down on my back and looked up at the sky. Danny sat next to me Indian style. “So what do you think that cloud looks like?” I pointed up to the sky. “A sheep? See, there’s its woolly body, and there’s even a lump at the top like its woolly head.”

  I babbled on for a few more minutes about clouds, but I wasn’t getting anywhere. There was a cool breeze there, so close to the water, and I remembered what it was like being a kid, just smelling the fresh-cut grass, listening to birds, hearing the thump of a basketball on a driveway down the street. So I just lay there, and eventually Danny lay down next to me, and rested his head on my arm, and we lay like that for a while, and then he started to cry.

  I held him close to me and stroked his head. “It’s okay, Danny. It’s okay to cry. Sometimes bad things happen, and they make us feel like crying. You go ahead and cry.”

  He cried for a few minutes, and then he was calm for a while, and then I sat up. “You know what?” I asked. “I remember you have some really neat pogs. Can I see them?”

  He nodded. Well, that was a start, I thought. He got up and ran inside, and I got the bag of pogs from my truck, and when he came out again with his I had mine lined up in neat piles. “You want to flip some?” I asked.

  He nodded again and sat down across from me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Terri standing in the front door, but then she went back inside. “I’m warning you, I haven’t flipped pogs for a long time,” I said. “I might have forgotten how.”

  “I’ll show you,” he said. “You make a stack like this,” and he piled up ten of his pogs, all face up. “And then I flip my shooter at them, and the ones that stay face up are still mine, and the ones that go the other way are yours.”

  He flipped, and the pile toppled. Eight of them stayed right side up, and he pushed the other two over to me. “Now you do it,” he said.

  We flipped back and forth for a long time, and pogs seemed to migrate from my side over to his. I guessed you had to be six years old to be a champion pog flipper. Some dark rain clouds blew in off the ocean, blocking the sun, and then Terri came to the door and said, “Who’s ready for some supper?”

  “Will you play with me again?” Danny asked.

  “Of course.” We gathered up our pogs and went inside.

  “Go put your pogs away and wash your hands,” Terri said, and Danny went off toward his room. “Any progress?”

  “He’ll come around,” I said. “He did talk a little, but don’t say anything to him.”

  Terri had made meatloaf and mashed potatoes. We sat at the kitchen table, under a montage of old hapa haole sheet music covers Terri had collected and framed. In the twenties and thirties hapa haole music, or half-white music, was popular in the islands. It featured the ukulele and the sl
ack key guitar, and often was about the romance between a haole and a native, under the Hawaiian moon.

  She cut meat loaf for each of us. “Would you like some potatoes?” she asked Danny.

  “Yes, please.”

  She raised her eyebrows to me and smiled.

  After dinner Terri and I sat on the overstuffed couch, her with her feet tucked under her, mine stretched out onto the coffee table. Danny sprawled on the floor and didn’t speak again, but this time his silence was calmer, less pained. We didn’t make a big deal about it. Terri and I talked easily about old classmates, things we’d done at Punahou, while the big-screen TV played in the background.

  When Terri announced it was Danny’s bedtime, I asked, “I know tomorrow’s only Wednesday, and it’s normally a school day, but I was wondering, would you guys like to go on a picnic tomorrow? We could go down to Makapu‘u Point. I could bring my board along and give Danny a surfing lesson.”

  “He already loves his boogie board,” Terri said.

  “Please, Mom? Please?”

  “All right. Now go take a bath and then get into bed. I’ll come and tuck you in.”

  “Can Kimo come too?”

  “Sure,” I said. I reached out and ruffled his hair. “I wouldn’t miss it.”

  Terri waited until he had left the room to speak. “I don’t know what you did, but it worked. I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “This is just a start. Give me a little while, and I’ll talk to him about what happened to his dad.”

  “God, you know, I’d almost forgotten. Just for a minute or two there. It was like we were just sitting around watching TV, and our worlds hadn’t fallen apart.”