Erskine didn’t know the name of the two kids with Verna that night. One was Ledward Ho, the other Junior — most people knew, I certainly did — Ledward a meth addict with rotten teeth as a result, and Junior had more acid in his system than a car battery. Big-wave surfers gone bad.
They brought something — pills, meth, batu, crack, speed, pakalolo. Kids! And she would have obliged. Two at one time was something new, but I wasn’t really surprised.
What surprised me at first was that he didn’t blow them all away. Then I thought, He’s law-abiding — what he did was by the book. You don’t shoot unarmed suspects in the back on this island.
Only the gun not going off was also kind of appropriate for Erskine, like a symbol. He was on the plane too fast for me to tell him I’d take care of the kid.
Never mind Erskine called me “shelter dog” and kept his big plastic gun by the bedside. He bailed me out of that awful trailer up at the landfill, and I didn’t even tell him that for a while up in Lihue we lived in a container in the industrial area near Nawiliwili Harbor.
My stepmother, Jen, grew up speaking Hawaiian on Niihau, called herself a functioning alcoholic, and was afraid of mirrors. “We never have one meer anyhow.” I gave her one from the thrift shop and she screamed like it was a trick. “It’s a present!” I screamed back. “Take it down!” And why? “Because there’s probably some babooze behind it?” She had the idea that all mirrors were two-way: you were being spied on by a freak on the other side.
“That’s not funny. You call that funny? It a meer!”
She made me afraid of mirrors, which annoyed Erskine. When he looked at me it was that face he made when he was checking his cell phone, noting the number, the “Howzit?” look. Then he’d always turn away with that shouldery big-dog walk, Officer Serious.
Everyone thought they knew about my father, that he was good at everything, saved scrap, had all the answers. “I cockroach that fuel pump from an old Honda.” Several things they didn’t know. That he was afraid of flying and had not visited a neighbor island since the passenger barges stopped in 1972. So my one wish was to take flying lessons, to see my father’s face when I got in the cockpit and took off down the runway — maybe say, “Want to hop in?” beforehand. They thought he was a bully because he spanked me. But he liked to spank me — or anyone, and maybe I deserved it for being wild and quitting school.
“You panty,” I would say, to pretend I wasn’t afraid.
Or he told me I was adopted and that he’d give me back to the orphanage if I didn’t behave. I believed him.
The container we lived in for a while had no windows and was like an oven in the summer when the trade winds dropped.
I smoked cigarettes. Jen said smoking is a filthy habit and to give it up. No smoking or drinking on Niihau. But smoking relaxes you, and anyone who doesn’t know that has never smoked. I needed to be relaxed. I smoked pakalolo. It was easy to get; everyone grew it, and that too was relaxing. “Don’t knock it,” I’d said to Jen, who would have been mellower with Dad if she used just a skosh of weed, and I told her so.
“Just a skosh,” she said, wily old auntie, and, “Here, why you no help me bake some cookies?”
She had me sift the flour and mix in the sugar and shortening and butter, and when it was smooth, the cup of chocolate chips. She could tell that I was enjoying the mixing.
“Your ma wen never show you how for make cookies?” she asked, pretending to be amazed.
Which was cruel, because my real mother was dead from riding in the back of a pickup truck that was rear-ended on Kokee Road.
“Not yet,” Jen said, snatching the spoon I was going to lick.
And then she took me out to the yard and got a stick and poked it into a twist of dog doo, and back in the kitchen she dipped the stick into the golden cookie dough and stirred it.
“Now taste um.”
She knew what I’d say, so I didn’t say it.
“Just a skosh!” she screamed. “Same wid djrugs!”
But when he brought home the key of coke from that Moniz cousin my life was changed, and I don’t care what anyone says: it is the greatest feeling in the world, and not addictive like meth if you’re smart, no more than candy, in fact just like candy. I wanted to be a functioning coke sniffer.
“It’s spendy,” the chief used to say. But he found some more, maybe the same key, and he made me pay for it in my own way.
He couldn’t blame me for wanting more. Junior got some in Maui from his surfing buddy Ledward, and said, “Now what are you going to do for me?”
Erskine was always working, at the station or on calls. What was I supposed to do — and his boss the chief always hanging around?
“What you good at?” the chief asked.
“Nothing. I so junk.”
That made him laugh.
“The junkest.”
Having Kanoa didn’t make him happy either. The chief held him more than Erskine did at the baby luau.
Junior was always around on the day Erskine was in Hanalei. When he said, “I want to try something insane,” I knew I’d have to say yes, and met Ledward.
I knew Erskine wouldn’t shoot.
When we met on the Big Island, all Erskine talked about was how unreasonable his ex was — demanding, petty, immature — and I was totally on his side. He did not miss his little boy Kanoa at first, but after we were settled and he moved from highway patrol to a desk job in Hilo, he said he wanted to get custody, that his ex was a bad influence.
Around that time I was thinking: Cop, killjoy, straight arrow, spanker, scold — what kind of kid would want to be in the same house with him?
I could just about stand him. He was a righteous bully, never wrong, knew all the answers, knew the law (“that’s a Class-A felony”). I felt sorry for what he’d been through, but I didn’t want to go through it myself. He was making plans to fly over to Kauai to visit the kid.
I called Verna. I said, “You don’t know me.”
“Who’s this?” she asked.
“Noelani. But listen up. I just want you to know that Skinny is coming over to talk to you about joint custody.”
“That’s all I need.”
And I heard a man in the background squawking and thought, Another one.
After that, Erskine said, “Every time I go over there she’s not at home, the kid’s not there, and no one knows where they went.”
“Maybe at her parents’ place.”
Erskine said, “She doesn’t have anyone in the world except me,” and went silent.
That was more and more the case with me. My friends didn’t like Erskine for his strictness. They enjoyed a little smoke now and then, they watched football, they drank beer at the beach. And Erskine frowned at them the whole time.
“Dis guy nothing but stink-eye.”
He had no doubts. He was the law, and even on a neighbor island where things weren’t so strict he enforced the pettiest law: no dogs on the beach, no ball games, no open containers of alcohol — even confiscated pakalolo and brought it home and maybe was testing me because he made a big show of locking it in a desk drawer.
In the pictures he showed me, his kid looked so different and so poi-dog I wanted to say, “You sure he stay yours?”
Not only the kid’s different features but the kid’s smile — Erskine never smiled. Plus the fact that after the first few times, Erskine seemed to lose interest in me. I was a lot older than Verna — closer to Erskine’s age — but even so, I seemed to have more in common with her, this ex-wife, than the man himself.
And she began confiding in me, saying how she’d let him down.