Mahu Blood (3 page)

“I can walk to the beach from my apartment,” I said, only half joking. “You want me to give that up?”

I’m no lightweight; I weigh a hundred-eighty dripping wet.

But Mike picked me up in his arms as if I weighed nothing and said, “You bet your life I do.”

There were arguments pro and con. If we lived together, we’d sleep side by side every night. We could have sex without making appointments, eat together as a routine rather than a special occasion.

18 Neil S. Plakcy

But I loved my apartment, with its picture window that looked down Lili’uokalani Street to the ocean. I could roll out of bed and be in the surf within minutes. I was in walking distance of my favorite gay bar, and there was a convenience store at the corner that sold a Japanese candy I loved. And I didn’t want to move into his house because I thought his parents didn’t like me.

We considered selling his place and buying something else, but even with our combined incomes and savings, the cheapest house we could find was miles farther from the beach and from our jobs. After some soul-searching, I gave up my lease and borrowed a truck from my brother Haoa. I loaded it up with my clothes, my books and my athletic equipment, then drove it up to Mike’s house.

It was an easy move but a tough transition. By Statehood Day, things were tense between Mike and me. I didn’t feel like there was a single corner of the duplex that belonged to me. My books were still in their boxes, and though Mike had carved out space in the closet for my clothes, they were cheek by jowl against his, often getting mixed up.

Sometimes I thought I’d made a huge mistake, and other times I couldn’t see myself anywhere but by Mike’s side for the rest of my life. For the most part, I tried not to think about the situation. And between the demands of my job and keeping track of my family, that wasn’t hard to do.

While I was stuck in traffic on the H1, I called my mother to make sure she and the boys had gotten home. Once the ban on using cell phones in a moving vehicle went into effect, Mike and I both bought Bluetooth earpieces with voice dialing, which we kept in the car. I stuck mine in my ear and said “Call parents.”

When my mother picked up, I heard my father raging in the background, and though she told him to be quiet, I heard a tremor in her voice. “No more demonstrations for a while, okay, Mom?” I said. “I don’t need to worry about people shooting you.”

“Now you know how I feel about you being a police officer,”

she said, and I was glad to hear her feistiness returning.

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Traffic eased, and I climbed the hill to Mike’s house. When I got there, I shucked the rest of the uniform and took a long, cool shower. By the time Mike got home, I was standing in the living room in a pair of clean boxers, with a fan blasting cool air at me and a Longboard Lager in my hand.

“You get caught up in that riot at the march?” he asked, peeling off his aloha shirt while crossing the living room toward the kitchen.

“And how.” I followed him, leaning against the wall as he got himself a beer. I told him about the flash on the roof, how the crowd had reacted after the gunshots.

“How close was your mom to the shooting?”

“Too close.” We walked back to the living room, where he stripped to his y-fronts and stretched out on the sofa. “As soon as I could I rounded her and the boys up and got them out of the way.”

He patted the sofa next to him, and I sat. Have I mentioned how handsome and sexy he is? Six-foot-four of muscle, body hair and sly grin? He has a dark mustache, and green eyes that look just a bit Asian.

“We didn’t even know someone had been shot until dispatch called.” I shook my head. “This poor woman.” I could still see her, splayed out on the ground, blood flowing from her wounds.

Mike took my hand in his. “You’ll find the guy who did it,”

he said.

I smiled at him. “Overtime tomorrow. Ray’s psyched, as usual.”

“We’ll just have to make the best of tonight, then.” Mike leaned over and kissed me. We ordered a ham and pineapple pizza, Mike’s favorite, and then vegged out in front of the TV.

I hadn’t been surfing as much as when I lived in Waikīkī, and I promised myself I’d surf the next morning and work off the calories from the pizza and beer.

Around nine o’clock, Mike asked me for a foot rub, and I sat
20 Neil S. Plakcy

at the end of the sofa, his feet in my lap, rubbing them with shea butter. After ten minutes or so, he said, “I feel some slack key guitar coming on.”

That was our little code. I swayed my hands in some vague hula-like movements, and he flipped a Keola Beamer CD in the player, trying to keep his parents on the other side of the wall from hearing what we were up to. We went into the bedroom and got a head start on working off those calories.

y y y

As I got home after my morning surf session, I saw Mike’s parents getting into their car. We waved at each other but didn’t speak. Because of the way Mike and I split up that first time, his father sees me as the guy who broke his son’s heart and drove him to drink. His mother is more polite, but there’s still a chill in her attitude.

I picked up the
Honolulu Star-Advertiser
from the driveway, and over a quick breakfast I read the first-page article on the shooting, the march and the mayhem that ensued after the shots were fired. There were the usual quotes from civic officials, who assured everyone that it was safe to walk the streets, as well as an outraged squawk from Maile Kanuha, a spokesperson for KOH, sure the shooting was motivated by the movement’s enemies.

Mike woke up as I was finishing. We kissed, and he poured himself some cereal as I went into the bathroom. After a quick shower, I left for headquarters. He was at his computer researching a case of his own, and I promised I’d make it home for dinner.

Ray and I divided the sign-in book and the tenant lists Gary and Lidia had assembled between us. We cross-referenced them to anyone who’d been involved in Hawaiian nationalism based on group membership, letters to the editor of the
Star-Advertiser
and so on. It was slow, tedious work.

A woman on the office building’s third floor had contributed to several groups, but Ray found she had a handicapped permit for her car based on a leg injury that required her to use a cane.

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A guy at the advertising agency on the fourth floor had done pro bono work for one of KOH’s rivals. He had no listed home number, so I jumped through a few hoops and found his cell number. When I reached him, he said he was on vacation in California, had been there for nearly a week. A friend of mine at Hawaiian Airlines verified his outgoing flight and his return reservation.

Every possible suspect either had an alibi or something else that ruled him or her out. By noon we were ready to get out of the office and drove out to Papakolea for background on Edith Kapana.

The address on her ID card was a ramshackle house on Hawaiian Homestead land—not a reservation for native people, like on the mainland, but something close. Civic leaders would tell you it was a way of preserving the land for descendants of its original inhabitants, but one of my teachers at Punahou, the private high school President Obama had also attended, had called it a modern-day ghetto, citing the socio-economic issues, including drug abuse and alcoholism, that were rife there at the time.

As we climbed toward the Cemetery of the Pacific, the houses around us shifted from well-kept gated properties to ramshackle structures clinging to the side of the mountain. Beat-up cars were parked by yards where hibiscus and bougainvillea ran wild.

Though the government was taking steps to improve conditions, those initiatives hadn’t reached the house where Edith Kapana lived.

It was only a single story, but it looked like several sections had been added on at different times, because the roof angles didn’t match and the paint on each section was at different stages of fading. There was no doorbell, so we knocked.

A teenage girl came to the door, carrying a squalling baby on her hip. She was thin, with mocha skin, slack dark hair, and bags under her eyes. I introduced us and asked if she knew Edith Kapana.

“Aunty Edith? She
wen maki
.”

22 Neil S. Plakcy

“Yes, we know she’s dead. That’s why we’re here.”

The girl shivered. “I wen get all chicken skin when I heard.”

As usual, Ray was baffled by the pidgin reference to goose bumps, but he nodded along. “How’d you know Edith?” I asked.

The girl, who told us her name was Leelee, shrugged. “She da kine
hanai tūtū
. Maybe year ago, her house on the Big Island get buss up, she come live here.”

I could see Ray getting frustrated. “A
hanai
relative is one you adopt,” I said to him. “Or maybe somebody you always think of as a sister or a cousin. So Aunty Edith’s not her real grandmother.”

“She real
kahiko
,” Leelee said. “Always want to sit around, talk story.” She hefted the baby on her hip. For a moment, he stopped crying and stared at us.

Leelee gave us permission to take a look around the room where Edith had lived, in what had once been the garage. “What was that she called her, kahiko?” Ray asked when we were alone.

“Old-fashioned. Someone who likes to do things the old way,”

I said, snooping around the piles of newspaper clippings and photocopies of legal documents on the desk. There was nothing much else in Edith’s room other than some cheap furniture, a few books about Hawai’i, family snapshots thumb-tacked to the walls and a couple of photo albums.

“Doesn’t look like anyone killed her for her money,” Ray said.

I agreed. When we went back to the living room, Leelee said the house belonged to her uncle, but he was often drunk and didn’t come home much. Her boyfriend, Dex, was at work, leaving her with the baby. I asked Leelee for Dex’s full name, as well as her uncle’s name.

“What you want that for?”

“We need to talk to them. My boss will look at stuff like that.

You know how it is with paperwork. He wants every ‘’ dotted and every ‘t’ crossed.”

Leelee looked like punctuation wasn’t her specialty. She toed the carpet for a while, then said, “My uncle don’t live here no MAhu BLood
23

more.” She met my eyes. “But you can’t tell da kine people from the OHA. Me and Dex, we don’t qualify for homestead.”

The Office of Hawaiian Affairs controlled housing on homestead land. “Don’t worry, Leelee, we won’t rat you out.”

Her body relaxed. “Trale. Dexter Trale.” She spelled it for us, though I could see it was an effort.

“Here’s my card, with my cell number. You have Dexter call me, all right?”

She took the card, and the baby started crying again. I wondered if Leelee ever changed him—because he smelled ripe when we arrived, and he still did when we left.

“How old do you think she is?” Ray asked, as we walked down the driveway.

“Fifteen, sixteen.”

“She looked pretty overwhelmed.”

“I’ll bet Aunty Edith helped her with the baby. She’ll have to get some other aunty to help out now.”

“You think we ought to call social services?”

“The baby didn’t seem to be in any danger. Sure, Leelee’s a kid herself. But half the people on this homestead are probably related to her. They’ll help out. Hawaiians take care of their own.”

We drove around the neighborhood, stopping to talk to anyone on the street, in yards or on porches. We didn’t get the warmest reception; most of the time when the cops come to Papakolea, they’re looking to arrest someone. People tried to ignore us, and when they spoke, it was only to me. Ray’s white skin rendered him invisible.

It took a lot of persuading, but a few people admitted knowing Aunty Edith. Leelee’s uncle was either Edith’s nephew, her cousin or her husband’s grandson, depending on who you talked to. There was general consensus that she had lived on the Big Island, somewhere on the slopes of Kilauea, until her house had been swallowed up by the
pahoehoe
.

24 Neil S. Plakcy

“A kind of lava,” I told Ray, as we walked back to the Jeep.

“Real smooth, billowy. The rocky stuff is called
’a’a
.”

“You’re a fountain of information,” Ray said. “They don’t know how she’s related, but they all knew what kind of lava knocked out her house.”

“What can I say? They’re Hawaiian. You know how the Eskimos have all those words for snow? We have a bunch for lava.”

“I know the difference between anthracite and bituminous coal,” Ray said. “And the name of the three rivers that come together in Pittsburgh.”

“Good to know. In case it ever comes up.”

We stopped at the community center, where posters for the KOH rally were plastered on the walls. Many of them read ‘
Ku
I Ka Pono
: Justice for Hawaiians.’ It was hard to disagree with a slogan like that—unless of course, you were not ethnically Hawaiian and that justice would come out of your pocket.

The community center was a simple two-story building with a set of steps up to the front door and a zigzag handicap ramp. We parked in the lot and took the stairs up, pausing outside to look at some pictures posted there.

Little kids performed at a hula recital, neighbors picked up trash along Tantalus Drive and senior citizens peered at computers. It looked like the center provided a lot of service to the community.

Inside, a group of elderly men and women drank coffee, nibbled on malasadas and talked story, with what sounded like the classic Hawaiian music of Alan Akaka playing in the background.

Everybody shut up when we walked in; just the music kept going.

I wondered if I should have left Ray in the car, but we were partners, and I’d had enough of being considered second-class myself, because of my sexual orientation. I wasn’t going to do that to anyone else.

“Aloha,” I announced to the room. I introduced myself and Ray. “We’re investigating the death of Aunty Edith Kapana. Can MAhu BLood
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