Mahu

by Neil S. Plakcy

  Until 1962 it was actually illegal to give a kid a Hawaiian first name. My father had always gone by Al, though his actual first name was Alexander, and my mother’s first name was actually Reiko, though she had always been known by her middle name, Lokelani, which meant Heavenly Rose in Hawaiian. Our names were Louis John, called Lui; Howard Frederick, called Haoa; and James Kimo. In my case, Kimo was simply the Hawaiian pronunciation of James, which was the name of my Montana great-grandfather. I always wanted to know why I didn’t have two English names, why my first and middle names were essentially the same. It was one of those things the youngest always picks on, to wonder why he is different from his brothers.

  I was different. I used to hide from Lui and Haoa, taking books and scrambling away into the woods, where I’d find a quiet safe place and lose myself in the pages of another world. Because they were so much older than I was, I was spoiled sometimes, often treated like the baby, and then from the time I was nine and Haoa left for college, I was the only child.

  Of course I was different in other ways too. My big brothers would come home from college, or from their lives as young studs on Waikīkī, and talk about their girls, and I would wonder if I’d ever feel the way they did. It wasn’t until I was sixteen that I realized I probably never would.

  I was browsing in a used bookstore off Fort Street on a rainy afternoon when I found a stack of all-male porno magazines. I had never known such magazines existed. My heart sped up and my arms and legs began to feel like jelly as I flipped through the pages. I particularly remember a naked guy walking out of the ocean, on a beach somewhere in California. I got so hard it hurt. There were stories as well as pictures, and ads for talk lines and dirty books. I had to buy at least one of those magazines.

  I picked the one that had the tamest cover and casually walked up to the register, carrying a paperback I wanted as well. I was glad I didn’t have to speak, because my throat was dry and hoarse. The proprietor, an old man, merely looked at the prices and rang them up on his register. I handed him the money, and he put the book and magazine in a brown paper bag and handed them to me.

  It was one of those moments after which your life is never the same. I finally understood what I had been feeling in gym class, and not feeling on dates with smart girls from Punahou who wore wire-rimmed glasses and serious expressions. And imagine, it only took me sixteen years to get from that bookstore to the food court at Ala Moana Mall where I bared my soul to Akoni.

  I let myself in the front door with my key. “Hey, Mom, you here?” I called as I closed the door behind me.

  Surprisingly, it was my father who appeared first. Usually, like Uncle Chin, he holds court from his recliner in the living room. “Hello, Keechee,” he said. It’s always been his nickname for me, and when Lui or Haoa had tried to tease me with it he’d come down hard on them. He had a nickname for each of us, a special name that was between the two of us alone. Lulu was Lui, of course, and Howgow was Haoa. “Your mother will be pleased to see you.”

  “And you? Is this torture for you, seeing me?”

  “You have always been the wicked son,” he said, smiling. My mother came out of the kitchen then and leaned up to kiss my cheek. The Kanapa‘aka boys were also lucky to inherit their father’s height; my father never quite reached six feet, stopping at five-eleven and three quarters (and he was always so precise in his measurements that he could never give himself the extra quarter of an inch) but the three of us all hovered between six foot and six two. Me, I was six foot and a half inch, and the difference between me and my father was that I told people I was six one.

  My mother was barely five six, though, and already she had started to shrink. She’s sixty-five, my father sixty-eight, though he swore he would never retire. He had been working a lot with Haoa lately, though, joint construction and landscaping projects, and I could tell he wanted my brother to take over more of the business. He even wanted me to take over for a long time, and tolerated my years of surfing because he believed I would come back and build with him, eventually. I think one of the biggest disappointments of his life, though I was totally unaware of it at the time, was when I came back from the North Shore and announced I was entering the police academy. Like my moment at the bookstore, he must have lost some illusions then, and seen the future in a clearer light, though he was probably unwilling to admit it.

  We went immediately to the dinner table. “You went to see Uncle Chin,” my father said, as my mother passed a platter of roasted chicken toward me. “Tell us about your case.”

  Uncle Chin’s associations have always been an unspoken matter between my father and me. When I was a child, I didn’t know what tongs were, and thought criminals were those guys on TV with bad hats and guns. When I became a cop, and I started seeing Uncle Chin’s name on the police computer system, I never actually confronted my father. Uncle Chin had always been a nice man to me, with crack seed or some other treat for me as a kid, and I wasn’t about to change my opinion of him because he had a record. But I think my father was a little afraid of my disapproval of his friend, which was an interesting position to be in with your father.

  “A homicide,” I said, taking chicken and passing the plate to my father. “We can’t seem to get a handle on it. A Chinese guy, owned a bar on Kuhio Avenue. The body was found in an alley behind the bar last Tuesday night.”

  “What bar?” my father asked.

  I took a forkful of roasted potato to my mouth and said, “The Rod and Reel Club.”

  “I know that place. Māhū club,” my father said, using the Hawaiian for homosexual. “I did renovation there couple months ago.”

  I put my fork down. “You know Tommy Pang?”

  “A little. A friend of Uncle Chin. A referral.” He looked at me, and I could see the wheels working behind his head. “Tommy Pang dead?”

  “That’s him. Interesting, isn’t it? Uncle Chin said he hardly knew the man.”

  “No more work talk at the table,” my mother said. “So, Kimo, who you dating this week?”

  “After dinner,” I said to my father. “You and I are going to have a talk. All right? Maybe we’ll even go back and visit Uncle Chin.”

  “My association with Tommy Pang was entirely honorable.”

  “Have you been surfing a lot?” my mother asked.

  I put my fork down and looked at my father. “I’ve never had a reason to doubt your honor,” I said. “You’re entitled to have your own friends and conduct your business as you see fit. I’ve never said anything to you, have I?”

  “Your Uncle Chin is a good man.”

  “I know.”

  My mother was starting to sound desperate. “How is Harry?” she asked. “Does he like teaching at the University?”

  I turned to her. “He seems to like it well enough. It’s going to take him a while to become Hawaiian again.” I made a face. “A little too much Boston in him now, not enough Waikīkī. But I’m working on him.”

  We talked about my brothers and their wives and my nephews and nieces. “They all come here much more often than you do, Kimo,” my mother said. “What’s the matter? You don’t like your old mother and father anymore?”

  I pushed my plate away and wiped my mouth with my napkin. “When I come here you try and make me fat. What kind of surfer will I be, fat?”

  “Oh,” my mother said, getting up to clear the table. “You fat? That would be a sight.”

  She took a stack of dishes to the kitchen and my father said, “It’s a difficult time for the contracting business now. Hard to get work. Take business where you find it.”

  “Did he ask you to do anything illegal?”

  My father looked horrified. Even in an aloha shirt, his hair graying at the sides and receding at the top, he looked like a proper businessman. “Of course not.”

  “Did you have any reason to believe he was going to use the premises for illegal purposes, or that his money came from some illegal source?”

  “No. Not at all.�
�

  “Then you’ve got nothing to worry about. Just tell me, from the start, what you know about Tommy Pang.”

  “Let’s go into the living room,” he said, standing.

  My mother hovered in the doorway of the kitchen. “No dessert?”

  “Maybe later,” my father said.

  He sat on his recliner and I sat on the sofa. “About six months ago,” he began. “February, March. I was finishing a big job with Haoa, beach cabanas at that resort in Hawai‘i Kai. We had nothing new lined up together; he was starting that contract with the Mandarin Oriental. Uncle Chin sent this man, Tommy Pang, to talk to me.”

  “Where did you meet, your office?” My father had a small office in an industrial building on the Ewa side of downtown Honolulu, near Salt Lake.

  “Yes, he came to my office. He wanted to change the image of the club, make it more like a real fishing lodge. Your cousin Mark did the drawings and I pulled the permit. We started work about four months ago and finished the punch list in July.”

  I got a pad and pen and came back to the couch. “Did you meet anyone else who worked for Tommy Pang?”

  My father thought. “I met his son. Nice boy. Dick? Danny?”

  “Derek.”

  “Derek.” He frowned and sighed a little. “It’s very difficult to be a father, you know that, Kimo?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Some fathers, it seems like their sons can never please them. Work hard, bow low, no matter. Fathers never satisfied.”

  “Tommy Pang was like that?”

  He nodded. “You could see, all he wanted was his father’s approval, but Tommy could never give that to him.” He shook his head again. “Unhappy people. Now his father is dead, and they can never make up.”

  He looked up at me. “I’m not like that with my boys, am I, Kimo? You boys know I love you. I accept each of you for what you are.” He sat up a little straighter. “I wanted one of you to work with me. To pass my business on to you. But more than that, I want you to be happy. You, and Lui, and Haoa.”

  “I know, Dad.” I wondered how well he knew each of us, if he knew our secrets or suspected them, and if his love was strong enough to overcome them. I once saw Lui at a Waikīkī nightclub, right after his first child was born, kissing a young Chinese prostitute in a tight cheongsam. I worked with Haoa one summer and knew he padded invoices he was supposed to pass along to clients at cost. None of us were perfect, not even my father, though I still retained an image of him as an honorable man, the kind I would like to grow up to be. Someday.

  He knew nothing else of Tommy Pang’s business, and had been paid in full. The checks had been drawn on Hui 812, the same business that owned the club.

  My mother tried to get us to eat dessert or have coffee. “I must call Uncle Chin,” my father said. I didn’t want to overhear him so I went into the kitchen with my mother.

  “It’s good that you come to see your father,” she said, sitting at the kitchen table with a deck of cards in front of her. She held them up to me. “You want to play?”

  I shook my head. She shuffled and began to deal herself a complicated solitaire game. “He misses his boys. He’s starting to retire, you know. Smaller jobs, more time between them.”

  “How is that for you?”

  She didn’t look at me as she played. “Your father and I married for love. Not like some women I know, married only for money or power. I still love your father. Sometimes I can’t stand him, but I still love him. So we’re all right.”

  My father came into the kitchen. “You should go past Uncle Chin’s again on your way home.”

  I kissed my mother’s cheek and said goodbye. My father walked me to the door.

  “You want to come?”

  “Some things it’s better friends not know.” He watched me walk down the driveway. “Come home more,” he called, as I opened the truck door. “We miss you.”

  My eyes stung as I swung up into the cab.

  Uncle Chin was still out on the porch with the birds and the flowers, though it was dark all around him and there was only a small light on by the doorway. I sat down across from him in the semi-darkness. “I apologize, Kimo,” he said, as my eyes adjusted to the gloom. “Should have been more honest with you.” He spread his hands open. “Sometimes know too much, just as bad as know nothing. Have nothing to say.”

  “You knew Tommy Pang. Tell me about him.”

  “He wore diamonds. Diamond pinkie ring, gold bracelet with diamonds. He said he was hard, like diamond. He was.”

  I waited. “There is a way to do even dishonorable business with honor,” Uncle Chin said finally. “Tommy not like that. Everything his way, no changes. Hard, like diamond. Don’t want to cross Tommy. Three men, I know he killed. I didn’t see, no, don’t know for sure one hundred percent, but I know. The world not miss Tommy Pang.”

  But his son will, I thought. His son, who wanted only to please his father, but never could.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” I asked gently. “I know who you are, Uncle. I am a policeman, after all.”

  “But you only know me as old man,” he said. He waved a hand at me. “Yes, you have memories, when you were boy. But before, even, when I still lived China, I was young man once. Wild, disrespectful, concerned only with myself. I did many bad things. Stole money, hurt people, went with many women. One woman had child, she said was mine. I left, go Hong Kong, met Aunt Mei-Mei. We come here.”

  A parrot squawked in the darkness and I shifted on my chair.

  “Aunt Mei-Mei no can have more children, after Robert. You remember Robert?” I nodded, and he smiled. “After Robert die, I think of my child in China. When he is young man, I get him Hong Kong. Then Hawai‘i. I think, he my son. I give him what I have.” He shook his head. “He no want. I tell you, Tommy Pang, he hard man.” He looked straight at me. “Like his father when young.”

  The shock knocked me back a little in my seat. A dozen ideas suddenly ricocheted around in my brain. I’d always had this image of Uncle Chin as basically harmless, an old friend of my father’s who’d always been kind to me, even when my own father raged. When I was a kid and my father was angry, yelling and chasing one of us around with his belt, only Uncle Chin could calm him down. Now I saw that Uncle Chin was full of his own secrets, his own fury.

  On the drive back to Waikīkī, I wondered about my father. When I was a kid, he worked most of the time, often doing the work of his subcontractors on weekends. He would disappear on Sunday mornings, and return in the evening, daubed with paint or sheet rock dust, and then turn around on Monday and go back to being the general contractor. I only wanted to be with him, to know that he loved me, to seek in his arms protection from my bullying brothers. Too often, though, he brought anger home with him from those construction sites, and he brooded or yelled or disappeared instead of spending time with his boys.

  The latest studies said that homosexuality was genetic, that it was imprinted on me at birth. But as I drove under the starlit sky down to Waikīkī, I wondered if I was still looking for my father’s love, and I felt sorry for Derek Pang, who had lost the chance to gain his father’s love, and for Tommy Pang, who would never know that his father sat among his birds and flowers and cried for him.

  SURFING PRACTICE

  Friday morning I told Akoni most of what I had learned the night before. It didn’t seem relevant to the case, for example, that my father had recently renovated the Rod and Reel Club. But the rest of it might have a bearing on our case.

  I had asked Uncle Chin to see if anyone in a tong had a grudge against Tommy Pang. His parentage, it turned out, was an open secret among the tongs, Tommy’s connection to Uncle Chin being his ticket in. “Be careful,” I had warned as I left his lanai.

  Uncle Chin had smiled. “To be old man in my business must be careful. No worry about me, Kimo.” He stood up quickly, and I was surprised at the vigor he could generate when he wanted to. “He was hard man, but he was my son. I f
ind out what I can.”

  “Great,” Akoni said. “First we get your geek friend to help us break into the dead guy’s computer, now we’ve got some old used-to-be tong guy checking out leads for us. We’re a great pair of investigators, you know that?”

  Just the fact that Akoni still referred to us as a pair made me feel good. “This is a case that is not getting solved,” Akoni said. “These tong guys, they bring in a hit man from Hong Kong to do this kind of thing, and he’s already on a plane out of here by now.”

  Peggy Kaneahe finally returned my call, and I went over to her office to work on a subpoena for Tommy’s cell phone records. She was having a bad week, it was clear, and she snapped at me three times during the hour we spent together. Her skin was pale and waxy, like she wasn’t getting any sun, and her nails had been bitten down to the quick. She wore a black business suit with a white silk blouse, and no jewelry, not even a ring or earrings. Her watch was a simple Timex, and her hair was almost as short as mine.

  “I’m not your punching bag, Peggy,” I said after the third snap. “Tell me what’s wrong, or I’m going back to the station and we’ll finish this when you’re in a better mood.”

  “I feel like I don’t know you anymore, Kimo.” She got up from behind her desk and walked over to the wall of law books. “When I came back to Honolulu, I wasn’t sure I even wanted to see you. I was still mad at you. Then we worked together on the Davis case, and I remembered the things that had made us friends, back at Punahou. But now, I think I’m right back where I started. I just don’t know what goes through your head.”