But would he want me? I’d seen his face when he described Derek Pang as mahu. He didn’t want a gay son any more than Tommy Pang had. “E, Kimo, you gone away somewhere?” my father asked.
I looked up. “Sorry, Dad. It’s been a long day.”
“Time for dinner,” Aunt Mei-Mei said, standing up. “Lokelani and me, we have dinner ready chop chop.”
When the women had left the room, Uncle Chin said, “I ask many people about my son. What he do, who hate him.”
I looked at my father. He said, “I knew Tommy was Chin’s son. I helped him get his papers.”
I guessed my father was willing to stay and listen, so I said to Uncle Chin, “What did you find?”
He picked up a silver harmony ball from the table next to him and rolled it in his palm. “He was hard man, like I tell you, but no one know anyone who kill him. He was smart, my son. Not like his father like that.”
“You’re plenty smart, Chin,” my father said.
Uncle Chin smiled. “Good to have friends, no?” Then his smile faded. “My boy not have many friends. Not many enemies either, but not many friends. Many women, lots of money.”
“What kind of stuff was he doing, Uncle Chin? I know about the legitimate businesses-the bar, the pack and ship, the lingerie shop. But he must have been doing some illicit stuff too. Smuggling? Gambling? Prostitution? Drugs?”
“Hate drugs,” Uncle Chin nearly spit out. I remembered Robert, his death. Uncle Chin had always been adamantly against the drug trade. “Stupid business,” I remembered him telling me once. “Get customers, then kill them. How make life like that?”
“Did Tommy deal in drugs?” I asked gently.
Uncle Chin nodded. “Bad business. I told him many times, stop. Drugs kill his brother, he not care. Truth, I think he resent Robert’s memory, Robert born here, have advantages he no have. Even though I tried make up to him.”
“Was Derek involved in any of Tommy’s businesses?” I asked. “I know about the bar. How about the others?”
“Sounds like,” Uncle Chin said. “Two boys, Derek and friend. They collect money sometimes, carry messages. Like learning business.”
“The drugs, too?”
Uncle Chin shook his head. “No. Tommy said. Derek no in drugs. I make him promise.”
“He gets all the businesses now?” I asked. “Derek?”
Uncle Chin looked disturbed, like he was seeing where I was going. “Wife gets, but Derek runs. You think Derek kill Tommy?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. You think Derek could kill his father?”
“I’m a contract builder,” my father said unexpectedly. “You hire me, I work for you. There are men like that, who kill.”
I wondered again about the relationship between my father and Uncle Chin, how much my father knew about Uncle Chin’s business, how closely he was connected. “Could that be?” I asked Uncle Chin. “Could Derek have hired someone to kill Tommy?”
Uncle Chin looked very sad, very old. “Don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “Don’t know.”
Just then my mother came in. “Come for dinner, now,” she said. My father stood and offered his arm to Uncle Chin, who struggled up from his chair. He murmured something to my father, who laughed. I wondered if Harry and I would end that way, still friends, helping each other over the rough places in our lives.
We didn’t talk any more about Tommy Pang. At dinner, Aunt Mei-Mei and my mother kept a light banter going, my father occasionally making jokes. I was happy they could all be together, support each other. Uncle Chin had aged a lot over the last few days, and it surprised me to consider that he must have loved Tommy Pang very much, even though he had called him a hard man. I knew that my father loved me and my brothers very deeply, in a way that often could not even be expressed, and I was sure he would be as crushed as Uncle Chin if one of us were to die.
I think your attitude toward your parents changes as you get older. You’re more able to see them as human beings who have made choices and handled their lives as best they could. I didn’t always agree with the decisions my father had made; I would rather he had worked less when I was a kid, and spent more time with us. I thought we could have had a few less toys, eaten more rice and poi and less steak, and in return had more of him, but it was the fifties and sixties then, and that’s what fathers did. I’m sure my mother, born poor and determined never to be poor again, had a lot to do with that, too, but again, you couldn’t fault her for doing what she thought was best for her family.
It was saddening to know that I would never have more family than this, and that I would lose them eventually. I wouldn’t have a wife, though I hoped someday I would find a partner. I would never have children and have to make choices on how to raise them; never see their first steps or first day at school, nor their graduations or weddings. I would never have a luau to celebrate the birth of my child, and never have grandchildren to swarm over me the way my nieces and nephews did to my father.
I would always be a part of my brothers’ lives, or hoped I would, be Uncle Kimo to Jeffrey and Ashley and their brothers and sisters, and that would have to be enough. Like my parents, I took the hand I was dealt and tried to make the best of it.
I looked at my watch. It was already late; I had to drive back to Waikiki and pick up Tim, and then go out to the Boardwalk and see if anyone could identify Wayne or Derek. I made my excuses as my mother and Aunt Mei-Mei were clearing the dessert dishes. “So late, you have to work?” my mother asked.
“I have to check out a suspect’s alibi. He was there late, I have to go there late.”
She shook her head. My father said, “Be careful, Keechee.”
“I will be.” To Uncle Chin I said, “I am very sorry, for you, about Tommy. I’ll do my best to catch whoever killed him.”
Uncle Chin smiled at me. “You my son, too, Kimo,” he said. “ He kanaka pono ‘oe, lokomaika‘i ‘oe.”
I looked down. “You flatter me, Uncle Chin.” He had told me I was a powerful person, and good-hearted as well.
“He says the truth,” my father said. “Your mother and I are very proud of you.”
How proud would they be, I thought, as I drove back down to Waikiki, if they knew who I really was?
The Boardwalk looked nondescript from the outside, stuck near the end of a strip mall, with nothing but a wooden walkway over the concrete sidewalk to distinguish it from the Karate school and beeper store on either side. Tim said, “This is it?” when we pulled up in my truck.
“This is it.” We walked up to the front door, and stepped through a beaded curtain into a dark vestibule. I heard the pounding beat of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” as we turned right and stepped through another curtain into a pile of sand.
At least that’s what it felt like. It was a long, narrow sandbox that I guess those in the know stepped over. As it was we both stepped in it, and then as we walked farther in, the sand sifted out of our shoes.
The room was dark, but spotlights washed places on the rough wooden walls. It was as kitschy as the Rod and Reel, but in a different style. This was early beach bum, with fishing nets hung from the ceiling, and tattered pin-ups of boys in skimpy bathing suits on the walls. The centerpiece was a long bar that ran the length of one wall. Instead of a polished top its surface was made of rough wood planks, like a beachfront boardwalk, and at about the middle a well-muscled Hawaiian boy in his early twenties strutted and danced in a jockstrap, reaching in often to fondle himself. At the far end, in his own pool of light, an equally well-muscled, dark-haired haole boy of about the same age practiced his own posturing.
“They have bars like this back in Boston,” Tim whispered. “But I never went to one.”