“Uncle Chin, look who has come to see you,” Aunt Mei-Mei said. Uncle Chin woke out of his light sleep and seemed instantly alert. He must have been in his late seventies, but his eyes were still keen, and his smile was broad.
“I will bring tea,” Aunt Mei-Mei said. “You sit.”
I sat. We talked first about my parents, my father’s heart troubles, my mother’s garden club successes. I heard about his plants and his parrots, and we discussed my brothers, especially Haoa and Tatiana’s new baby. Keikis always seemed to make Uncle Chin a little sad; I guess he remembered his own son, whose difficult birth had somehow prevented Aunt Mei-Mei from being able to have any more children.
His name was Robert, I knew, and he was a few years older than my brother Lui, so always a remote presence to me. He died when he was twenty-one, a drug overdose of some kind, and according to my father Uncle Chin had never been the same since.
But Uncle Chin had enjoyed the luau, and was glad to see us all at a happy occasion. “And what about you? No wife yet?”
I shook my head. “Not yet.”
He wagged a finger at me. “You not young forever,” he said. “Must make choices for life. Soon!”
“Yes, Uncle. I know.” Aunt Mei-Mei brought cups of sweet-smelling Chinese tea and then disappeared again.
Finally Uncle Chin said, “Your work. It goes well?”
“Interesting cases,” I said. “Always interesting.” I paused. “A man killed behind the bar he owned in Waikiki. Maybe you know him. A man named Tommy Pang.”
For a moment, the light seemed to go out of Uncle Chin’s eyes. Then he seemed to have returned, and considered, massaging the paralyzed nerve in his face with the fingers of his left hand. “I know him, but not well,” he said, finally. “Not important man.”
“No, it doesn’t seem so. Yet someone found him important enough to kill.”
“Ah, importance relative, no,” he said. He thought for a while. “I no can help you, Kimo. I not know who could have found this man important in way you suggest.” For the first time since I had known him, Uncle Chin looked old. He was older than my father, though I remembered him best when I was a child and he was tall and imposing and yet somehow not frightening at all. Now he had become an old man, retired among his flowers and his birds.
We finished our tea and Aunt Mei-Mei came back in. “You will go to see your parents now,” she said. “You are so close to them.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m tired. It’s been a long day.” I looked at my watch. It was nearly seven o’clock. Not enough daylight left by the time I got back to Waikiki for surfing, or even swimming. A quick dinner, and then maybe a book. A quiet evening.
“Oh, no, your mother will be so disappointed. She has already put out a place for you at the dinner table.”
Of course, I thought. While Uncle Chin and I talked on the porch, Aunt Mei-Mei had been on the phone to my mother, announcing my presence in St. Louis Heights. There was no way out now.
The streets in St. Louis Heights are steep and narrow, and all the houses are very close to each other. We were lucky that my father had decided early he wanted to live in the neighborhood, and had built a simple fifties-style ranch on a lot that backed onto Waahila Ridge State Recreation Area. As a consequence, our backyard is several thousand steeply pitched acres of pine and ravine, and on an island where real estate prices are high, such a huge empty space is now nearly priceless. Though both my brothers have beautiful homes, I know they covet my parents’ property.
My parents had the main level of the house, street level. The master bedroom suite, the kitchen, living room, and dining room were all there. My brothers and I shared the basement, three bedrooms, one bathroom, and a big playroom that spilled out to a patio my father had built into the hillside. It was a wonderful place to grow up-when my brothers picked on me, as big brothers always do, I could sneak out into the underbrush, climb the hill, and set my sights on the ocean. The other wonderful thing about our house’s situation was that if you climbed to the roof, as I did sometimes, you could see all the way from Diamond Head to downtown Honolulu, and the vast ocean between them. Sometimes my father would disappear for a few hours at a time, usually after a fight with my mother or after the three of us boys were making too much trouble. I knew he went up to the roof, but I never told.
I wondered if my parents would ask, like Aunt Mei-Mei, when I was going to settle down, add to their brood of grandchildren. They were baffled by my frenzied dating, the endless parade of one-night stands and tourist wahines that their friends saw me with all around Waikiki. My new situation would probably confuse them even more. That is, if I ever told them. I sat in Uncle Chin’s driveway for a while, thinking, before I turned the key in the ignition.
NEVER THE SAME
I pulled my truck up in the driveway, right behind my father’s. He could afford a Mercedes if he wanted. Instead he bought new trucks every few years, and handed down the old ones to his sons. The four Kanapa‘aka boys, driving around Honolulu in Ford pickups in various states of disrepair. Oh, and then there’s my mother, who drove a maroon Lexus with gold trim, and her two daughters-in-law, who were much the same.
My brothers and I were alike in many ways, and then of course very different too. From our father, we inherited a love of the outdoors, the land and the sea, of working with our hands, stubbornness, and a tendency to laugh easily. From our mother, who was born poor on a plantation on Kaua‘i, the daughter of a Japanese workman and a young Hawaiian girl, we seemed to have inherited a certain kind of strength that my father was missing. He had always been successful, but my mother was the one who pushed. It was because of her that we all went to Punahou, and on to college.
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 Waikiki, 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.