Mahu

by Neil S. Plakcy

  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 slack 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.”

  “I’m on the way to picking mine up,” I said, reaching out for her hand. “Come on along, we can pick up yours on the way.”

  AN ASSEMBLAGE OF TREASURES

  While I was getting ready for bed I turned on the TV news, Lui’s station. I was just in time to see part three of their series on gay cops. Lucky me.

  But as I watched, I got more and more interested. There were police forces around the country that had incorporated gay officers into their regular patrols. They primarily worked neighborhoods with large gay populations, and they were more sensitive to issues like gay bashing and regulating gay clubs than straight officers were.

  It was a surprisingly well-balanced piece. I didn’t know if that kind of enlightenment would ever come to Honolulu, but seeing such a piece on my brother’s normally scandal-packed station was a nice change.

  The next morning the phone rang at eight-thirty, just as I was getting ready to go out for a late swim. It was Lieutenant Yumuri. “Can you come over to the station this morning?” he asked.

  “Sure. What for?” I thought maybe he wanted to talk about the case, ease up on the pressure. Maybe this was the first step toward getting my badge and my weapon back. There were a couple of discrepancies I wanted to talk to him about, mostly centered around Evan’s suicide, which I was now sure was faked.

  To his credit, Lieutenant Yumuri sounded uncomfortable when he spoke.
“Officer Greenberg is getting his shield. I want to put him at your desk. I’d appreciate it if you’d come by and pick up your personal belongings.”

  I couldn’t speak for a moment. It was all over. My career as a cop, as a detective. And this was how it ended. Finally I said, “Sure. I’ll be over in a little while.”

  “Thank you.” He hung up his end, and I held my receiver there for a minute, listening to nothing, until a female voice came on the line and said, “If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and dial again.”

  I pulled on a pair of khakis and an aloha shirt and walked over to the station. As I was about to walk in, Lidia Portuondo came out in uniform. “Kimo,” she said.

  “Lidia.”

  I started to walk past her, and then she said, “Look, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I never should have told anybody what I heard in that interview.”

  “I guess you shouldn’t have. I thought you could keep a secret.”

  She shook her head. “Couldn’t even keep my own. The lieutenant found out about me and Alvy. So he gets a promotion and I get transferred to Pearl City.”

  “I heard he got his shield,” I said. “He’s taking over my desk.” I hesitated for a minute. “Are you two still…”

  “For now.” She gave me a forced smile. “Who knows, I might meet some handsome guy out in Pearl City.”

  I gave her my hand. “Good luck.”

  “You, too.”

  I nodded at the desk sergeant and started to walk back to my old desk. He said, “Sorry, Kimo, I’ve got to call the Lieutenant before I can let you back there.”

  “I understand.”

  I cooled my heels in the waiting area for a few minutes until Akoni came up front. “I can take him back,” he said to the desk sergeant.

  “Hear you’ve got a new partner,” I said as we walked back.

  “We’re working a new homicide, behind the Royal Hawaiian Hotel,” Akoni said. “He’s got a lot to learn.”

  “Be nice to him, all right?” I asked as we got back to our desks. “What happened to me has nothing to do with him.”

  I started to pack up my desk. I could see Alvy Greenberg had already been sitting there. “I punched him yesterday,” Akoni said. I looked up. “He was talking stink about you. I kept telling him to stop and he wouldn’t, so I hit him.” He had a kind of sheepish grin on his face, like a kid who knows he’s done wrong but can’t help bragging about it.

  “Don’t make a habit of it, all right?” I asked. I smiled at him. “It doesn’t make for good relationships between partners.”

  It didn’t take me long to box up my stuff. A favorite coffee mug, some pictures of my nieces and nephews, a miniature surfboard I won in a contest once and kept around for good luck. It hadn’t brought me much luck lately, and I could have just tossed it, but I didn’t want to tempt fate any worse.

  “See you around,” I said, sticking my hand out to Akoni.

  “Be careful, Kimo.”

  “I won’t take you down with me,” I said. “Anything you say that takes any part of this on you, I’m denying it.”

  “Just tell the truth. If I’ve got anything coming to me I’ll take it.” He looked at me hard. “I’m serious, Kimo. You lie to the bosses, it makes you no better than the criminals who lie to us. It makes our jobs worth nothing.”

  “I’ll tell the truth. And the truth is I made all my own trouble.”

  By the time I got back home it was time to leave for Terri’s house in Wailupe. If the department was giving me an enforced vacation, I might as well enjoy it.

  Danny was glad to see me, and the three of us squeezed into my truck for the ride out to Makapu’u Point instead of taking one of Terri’s cars. “Makes it more like an outing,” I said. We put the picnic stuff in the back along with my surfboards.

  When we arrived, Danny ran down to the shoreline to poke around and I helped Terri lay out lunch for us. “He hardly talked this morning,” she said. “I was worried we were going right back where we were.”

  “Give him time. I’m sure he hurts just as much as you do, but he doesn’t know how to channel it. The good thing is kids heal a lot faster than grown-ups.” I spread a big blanket for the three of us and sat down on it. While Terri put out the food, I said, “I had a case last year, multiple homicide in a crack house on a side street off Kuhio Avenue. This woman was dealing, and she had her four little kids in the house with her. These two guys from the mainland came in and shot the woman and the kids and stole the crack.”

  “How awful,” Terri said.

  “Long way from Punahou, isn’t it? One kid survived, a six-year-old girl. She was smart way beyond her years. I mean, from her hospital bed she told us exactly what happened, described the two guys so that an artist could draw them, everything we needed. She even remembered the street name of one of the guys. We picked them up within hours.” I shook my head. “Then it was like she shut down, totally. Went into cardiac arrest, though the doctors couldn’t figure out why. They had to shock her twice to bring her back. And you know what? We had a follow-up hearing last month, and I saw her. She’s living with foster parents, going to school, and she looks like just the sweetest, happiest little seven-year-old you’ve ever seen. You’d never know anything happened to her.”

  I opened the bag of potato chips and took one. “Of course, you don’t know what’s going on inside her head, how it all marked her, but she’s surviving. Danny will survive, too. It just might take a while.”

  She called Danny back to eat, and he brought with him an assemblage of treasures—an odd-shaped rock, an iridescent shell fragment, and the bleached claw of a sand crab. I admired them each in turn and he sat down next to me to eat, his little foot pressing into the side of my leg, making the physical connection.

  I think the hardest thing for me about accepting my sexuality and all its implications was thinking that I would never have children of my own. I know it’s theoretically possible, but it wouldn’t be the way I’d always imagined it. I really wanted to be a dad, and I thought I’d be a good one. I think my parents did a pretty good job of raising me, though I did feel my father worked too much, that he didn’t give enough of his time to me and my brothers. I wanted to make up for that with my own kid, to see a little part of me reflected in him, to marvel at the perfection of his tiny fingers and toes and then watch him grow up in the world.

  Akoni didn’t want to have kids. He said he’s seen so much horror in the world, so many awful things that people do to each other, that he couldn’t imagine having, as he calls it, “a hostage to fate.” I felt just the opposite. Sure, I’ve seen just as much misery and tragedy, but I always saw the way people recovered, the way the human species was designed to go in the face of almost insurmountable odds. It gave me faith that a kid could actually survive.

  After we finished eating, we sat around on the beach. Danny and I tried flipping pogs, but the sand was too unsteady a base. Instead we just lay together in a haphazard mass, Terri’s feet touching my leg, Danny’s head resting on my chest, and dozed. Then the sun passed behind a cloud for a bit and the coolness in the air woke us up.

  I carefully shifted Danny’s head to the blanket next to me, and stood up and stretched. “I think I’ll surf for a bit, if you don’t mind,” I said to Terri.

  “Go ahead. This is nice, just lying here relaxing.”

  Danny woke up then and said, “Can I go with you, Kimo?”

  “Tell you what, Danny, let me check out the waves, okay? Then I’ll come back for you and give you a little lesson.”

  “Okay.” He pulled his legs up close to him, wrapped his arms around them, and sat there watching me as I walked down the beach.

  I worked on my turns for a while, surfing back and forth along the beach, watching Danny, and then came to pick him up. “You’re sure it’s okay?” Terri asked anxiously. “The surf looked pretty strong out there.”

  “I’ll take care of him. Come on, Danny.” He took my hand, and we walked
carefully into the water. The bottom was rough there, and the undertow was strong, but he held my hand until we got a few feet out, and then I lifted him and sat him on my board.

  We didn’t go very far out, just beyond the first line of shallow breakers. I stood him up on my board, me standing in the water next to him, and held him as the board crested over the light waves. It was just the way I’d been taught to surf when I was a kid, learning to keep my balance on the board. Since he’d boogie boarded before, he understood the waves, and pretty soon all I was doing was acting as his safety, my arms in a broad arc around him in case he fell.

  Finally I said, “I think it’s time to go in, champ,” and picked him up off the board. I carried him in past the rough part, and then swam back out for my board, floating on the tide. “Did you see, Mommy?” he called out as he ran up the beach. “I was surfing!”

  “I saw,” Terri said.

  She started to clean up the picnic things, but Danny was antsy and couldn’t sit still. “Tell you what, Terri,” I said. “Why don’t Danny and I take a little walk while you clean up?” I leaned down to Danny’s level. “You want to do that, champ? We can walk along the water line and see what else we can find for your collection.”

  “Yeah,” he said eagerly, and he reached up for my hand. We started down the shore, looking out at Rabbit Island, and Danny pointed there and said, “My dad always promised to take me out there.” He looked down at the ground. “We never went.”

  “I can take you out there sometime,” I said. He didn’t say anything, but held on tight to my hand. “Danny, what happened the day your Dad died?”

  He was silent.

  “It’s important,” I said. “Knowing would make your Mom feel a lot better.”

  He stopped walking, and I sat down on a piece of rock and made a place next to me for him. He sat close to me and said, “I was taking a nap, and I heard these men yelling.”