“You just can’t keep your ass out of the wringer. They give you a simple job and you screw it up.” I smiled. “I appreciate it, brah. But I couldn’t quit, even if I knew they had real grounds against me.”
He drained the last of his beer. “I ought to get going. Mealoha will be waiting dinner for me.” He stood up and put his arm on my shoulder, and I remembered when he’d flinched away from me when he first found out I was gay. I was making progress, I thought. Slowly, one person at a time, but it was progress nonetheless. “Take care, Kimo. Watch out for yourself.”
“I will,” I said. “And give Mealoha a kiss from me.”
He grinned. “I can do that.”
After he walked away I stayed on the chair for a while, holding my empty beer glass. I wanted a waitress to come by and get me a refill, because I didn’t have the energy to go up to the bar myself. I wasn’t sure I could even get up from the chair. All my fatigue kicked in as I thought about what Akoni had said. They had no professional grounds to fire me. They just didn’t want me around anymore.
It was a hard realization. Guys I’d thought of like brothers, men, like Yumuri, I had respected, had made a decision about me based on one fact, and that had turned them against me. I could be the best detective ever, I could outperform anybody on physical tasks and written tests, and they still didn’t want me on the force with them.
Darkness fell around me, and the noise of the bar diminished in the background. I sat back on the chair and looked up at the stars. It was hard to see much right above me, because I was too close to the bright lights of Waikiki, but out over the ocean I could see stars and patches of clouds. The wind was still strong, though I was sheltered in a grove of trees and didn’t feel its effect much. But the clouds moved fast across the sky, covering and then revealing the stars, and I wondered which one would grant my wish, and what that wish should be.
PLATE LUNCHES
I woke early Friday morning in a fit of nerves, startled out of a dream involving Wayne Gallagher. It began when I was surfing on Waikiki, holding Danny Gonsalves above my head as my board knifed the water. On the beach, Terri was crying, Tico Robles there comforting her, promising I would never hurt her son.
Then I was back in my room at my parents’ house, making love to Wayne on my narrow twin bed, when my father came into the room. He was disappointed, he said, because he and Uncle Chin were lovers and he wanted me to have picked Derek over Wayne. That’s when I woke up.
I looked for the newspaper but it hadn’t arrived yet, so I began cleaning my apartment, putting away books, organizing the laundry. I didn’t want to think about my hearing, and what I would say. I was entitled to have a lawyer present, but I’d made no moves toward hiring one. I thought idly of asking Tim Ryan to defend me, but I knew that was a bad idea.
Finally I heard the thunk of the paper on the concrete outside, and I brought it in and read it sitting up in bed. I made myself chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast, with coconut macadamia syrup, and then cleaned up all the dishes and pans. I was trying to figure out what to do next when the phone rang.
“Good morning, Kimo,” my father said. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”
“I’ve been up for hours.”
“I remember when you were a boy you could sleep until noon. I used to tell your brothers to drag you out of bed, and one would take one leg and the other the other leg.” He laughed. “You’d hold on to the sheets, and everything would end up a big mess.”
“I remember,” I said dryly. “What’s up?”
“Did you get a chance to speak to Chin’s grandson?”
“I did.” I told him about my meeting with Derek the day before. “He acted like a jerk. I don’t want to see Uncle Chin get hurt.”
“Chin is a grown man. He can take care of himself. Come here for lunch today, and you can tell him.”
“I’ve got a lot to do,” I said, even though I couldn’t think of one thing I had to do before I showed up at the Boardwalk as a decoy.
“No matter, you’ll make the time. Be here at noon.”
I was annoyed. Usually he let my mother make such calls, relied on her strength to enforce what he wanted. Couldn’t they keep their roles straight? “All right.”
At least then I only had to kill the morning. I kept walking around my tiny apartment wondering what I could do, and then caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I could use a haircut, I thought, so I called Tico Robles, and he said he could squeeze me in if I could get to his salon in half an hour.
The first strip shopping center my father built was on Wai‘alae Avenue, at the base of St. Louis Heights, not far from our house. Though he’s had many offers to sell it, over the years, he has held on to it for what I consider purely sentimental reasons, though I have to admit it’s always fully leased and the parking lot there is usually jammed. About three years ago Tatiana, unbeknownst to Haoa, bankrolled Tico in a salon of his own, out of money her parents had left her. She convinced my father to rent him a small space in the Wai‘alae Avenue center, at a bargain rate, and he prospered.
The center was so busy I had to park my truck on a side street, and then walk almost the full length of it to the salon, passing a dry cleaner, video rental store, lawyer’s office, real estate agency, pack and ship place, and greeting card store before I got to Tico’s salon, Puerto Peinado. They’d huddled over the name for weeks, finally coming up with a tribute to Tico’s homeland of Puerto Rico and the Spanish word for hairdo. They’d hired a young artist Tico was dating to paint tropical murals in bright colors on the walls, exotic visions of a Puerto Rico that looked suspiciously like Oahu, and when I walked in there was fast Latin music playing and Tico was doing a merengue with an elderly Chinese woman.
He looked totally recovered, except for a slight bruise on his forehead just below the hairline, almost completely covered by a swoop of brown hair I suspected he had gelled in place. “Kimo! Sweetheart!” he said when I walked in. He dipped the old lady, then expertly swung her into a chair and plopped the old-fashioned hair-dryer down over her head. He tripped lightly across the salon floor and gave me a big hug. “I’m so glad you came in! I’ve been dying to see what I could do with your hair since you came to see me in the hospital.”
He ushered me to a chair in front of a basin at the back of the salon, talking the whole time. “Now wasn’t that a dismal place,” he said. “I mean, really, who decorates those places? They should be shot! I was so eager to get out of there.”
“Maybe that’s why they decorate them that way,” I said, as he swirled a plastic cape around my shoulders. “So you’ll want to get well and leave quickly.”
“Lean back,” he commanded. He washed my hair quickly and expertly, leaving it smelling faintly of coconut and strawberries, and then led me to his chair, in the front window of the salon. “Now I will work my magic,” he said. He leaned down and whispered in my ear, “When I’m finished with you, the boys will fall all over you!”
“Just one boy in particular,” I said, thinking of Wayne Gallagher.
“Oh, Kimo has a boyfriend,” he said as he started to cut. “Dish, baby. Tell Uncle Tico all about him.”
“Not a boyfriend, a suspect. Although he is cute, even though I know he’s bad all the way through.”
“Oh, they’re the worst,” he said. “My weakness. I love a bad boy.” In the mirror I saw him shake his head. “Except eventually they end up being bad to you. But while it works, it can be so wonderful!”
We went on to talk about Tatiana and Haoa and their children. “They’re angels,” Tico said. “Every last one of them. Angels from heaven. They all take after Tatiana, you know that.”
“I thought you weren’t mad at my brother anymore.”
“Oh, I forgave him. Do you know, yesterday he came to my house and planted a whole row of hibiscus bushes, just for nothing? I tried to thank him and all he said was, ‘You needed a hedge out front to shelter the yard.’ I mean, do you believe it? He just can’t say he’s sorry, but he means it.”