Mahu Fire Page 16

  The air was heavy with auto exhaust and the faint, lingering smell of smoke, not a cloud in the bright blue sky. There had been another arson the day before, a wildfire in Waipio, and I wondered if Mike had been out there to investigate it. I was just thinking of him when Eli said, “It isn’t normal. It isn’t what God wanted when he created marriage.”

  I realized that the conversation had turned to gay marriage. “They’re jealous of us, you know,” Fran said to Kitty, holding on to Caitlin, who was only four, as she struggled to run away and play with her brother and some of the other kids. “What Eli and I have, what you and Kimo have. Marriage. A place in the world. The sense we’re good, God-fearing, normal people.”

  “We aren’t married,” Kitty said, holding up her ringless left hand. “But you never know what God’s plan is for you until he reveals it.”

  She smiled at me, and I reached over and squeezed her hand.

  “We had to pull Cole and Caitlin out of the public school,” Fran said. “They had this teacher there that was a homosexual, and he was teaching them all this terrible stuff about deviants. I went in and complained, and the principal made it seem like I was the crazy one!”

  “And don’t forget the little girl with the two mommies,” Eli said. As he raised his arm to wave goodbye to someone, the right sleeve of his shirt slid up a bit to reveal the bottom of a tattooed cross on his bicep.

  Fran nodded. “Cole came home from school one day and said that this one little girl in the class had two mommies. We thought, well, all right, the parents are divorced and she has a mommy and a step-mommy. But no! It turns out there are these two lesbians and she calls them both Mommy! Do you believe that?”

  Neither Kitty nor I knew what to say, so we just smiled. “So of course we couldn’t keep Cole and Caitlin there,” Eli said. “Fran got a home school course through a church on the mainland, and we use that now.”

  We chatted for a few more minutes, and then the Hardings left. Kitty and I walked down along the storefronts, trying to put as much distance between us and any stray members of the church who might be around to overhear. “What did you think?” Kitty asked.

  “I don’t like the rhetoric,” I said. “And the reference to the bombing is pretty suspicious.”

  “What can you do? Can you get a search warrant for the church? Maybe they’ve been making bombs out in the back.”

  “Not so fast,” I said. “You need to assemble evidence before you can ask a judge for a warrant.” I told her that I thought Jeff White looked a lot like the sweaty guy who’d been seen near the bathroom at the Marriage Project before the bomb went off. “But we don’t even know that the sweaty guy is the bomber,” I said. “He could have just been some guy who happens to look a lot like Jeff White, who got a bad shrimp from the caterers and got sick.”

  “It’s so frustrating,” Kitty said. “I just know there’s something wrong about that church. But how do you prove it?”

  “Welcome to police work.”

  I thought about that on the drive back to Waikiki. Under normal circumstances, I’d grab my board and head out to the water. Surfing freed my subconscious mind to find just those connections that might allow us to pin something on the Whites and the Church of Adam and Eve.

  But my back was still red and sore, so I knew I couldn’t expose myself to salt water. I decided to get on my bike and ride instead.

  I headed down Kalakaua Avenue, through Kapiolani Park. For a while the street was roofed over by tall trees, like riding through a grotto, almost religious in its way, and I realized how much more spiritual nourishment I got from nature than from organized religion. Then I came out along the base of Diamond Head itself, riding along the ocean, past the lighthouse and the Kuilei Cliffs.

  I tried to focus on what I knew for sure. Jeff and Sheila White were the lay ministers in charge of the Church of Adam and Eve. They lived in Makiki, next door to a gay couple. They preached against gay marriage, while their neighbors were strong proponents of the issue. That was an incendiary situation.

  A search warrant for their home and church might turn up evidence. But I needed something more than speculation to get such a warrant. I decided to put Harry on their trail, see what he could dig up on the Whites. They were malihinis, newcomers to the islands, and often our newest residents bring with them the baggage of their mainland years. If either Jeff or Sheila White had a criminal record, especially using incendiary devices, I could use that as a toehold.

  As I came out to the coastal road, there was a single cloud over Rabbit Island, but no real hope for rain to break our drought and extinguish the wildfires. The hard-core surfers were out beyond Diamond Head, of course, as I probably would have been if my back hadn’t prevented it. I rode past the motley assortment of cars parked along the road, waving to a couple of surfers I recognized changing out of rash guards.

  I kept going back to my conversation with Terri. What would motivate someone to preach so strongly against an issue like gay marriage? What would motivate someone to protest, to bomb a party? I knew how tough it was to live in the closet—yet despite all my angst I’d never chosen to take out my frustration on anyone else. I’d beaten myself up instead.

  I rode out Kahala Avenue for a while, then circled back on the mauka, or mountain, side of Diamond Head Road. Heading homeward through Kapahulu I pushed myself hard, as if I could sweat away my worries and fears, and all the guilt I felt over what had happened to people I loved.

  WORKING WITH MIKE

  I was feeling so good on my bike that I instead of returning home, I kept going through Waikiki, all the way to The Queen’s Medical Center. By the time I got there, both my brothers and their families were there, standing down in the courtyard waving up at my mom and dad, who were looking out the window at them and waving back. My nieces and nephews were holding up cards with big words printed on them, obviously a group effort. Only Jeffrey and Ashley were feuding, and wouldn’t stand next to each other, and nobody had thought to change the cards they were holding. So the message my parents saw was “Get soon Tūtū Al well.”

  After a lot of kissing and hugging and so on, my sisters-in-law bundled the kids away to go to McDonald’s, and my brothers went upstairs with me. It struck me that I had done a lot of kissing and hugging in the recent past, under very different circumstances. I wondered if my relationship with Mike would last, if I would ever feel as close to him as I did to Lui and Haoa.

  “The doctor was here again, and he says your father can go home tomorrow,” my mother said, when we came in.

  “He gets a cut, you know,” my father grumbled. “These doctors and these hospitals, they all work together. For every day he keeps me here, the hospital gives him money.”

  With a straight face, Lui said, “Wow, that’s interesting, Dad. I’ll have to get a reporter on that story.”

  I couldn’t look at either of my brothers because I was afraid I’d burst out laughing. My father is the most upright businessman I’ve ever come across; despite the graft that’s often rampant in the construction business, he’s always been a hundred percent honest. That didn’t stop him from accusing everyone else around him, though.

  It was kind of strange, hanging out with my entire nuclear family. Usually when I see my parents, either I’m alone with them, or at least one of my brothers and his family is there. The last time I could remember the five of us together was right after I’d come out, when I’d been hiding at home, and both Haoa and Lui had come home as well, as a result of various problems.

  With my father sitting up in bed, my mother in the chair next to him, and the three of us ranged against the wall like suspects at a lineup, we talked, we boys trying to get our father to promise to take better care of his health.

  I kept looking at my watch. I wanted to call Mike Riccardi, just to check in with him, but I wasn’t going to use the phone by my dad’s bedside, and I’d left my cell phone at home when I’d gone out for my bike ride.

  “We holding you up?”
Haoa asked. “You got some place you need to be?”

  “Little brother’s busy,” Lui said. “Don’t you watch the TV news?”

  “Little brother’s bigger than you are,” I said to him.

  “Not bigger than I am,” Haoa said.

  “You know, they’ve got this thing called Weight Watchers,” I said. “If you’re at all concerned about being so big.”

  “Boys!” my mother said. “Ai ya! When will you ever grow up?”

  The three of us burst out laughing. “Never, as long as you and Dad are around to keep us in line, Ma,” Haoa said.

  “Speak for yourself,” Lui said. His cell phone tweedled, and he flipped it open. “Yes, sweetheart. We’re almost done here. Be there soon.” He closed the phone and glared at me and Haoa, daring us to say anything. We didn’t.

  A woman in a blue smock delivered my father’s dinner tray, and after another round of kissing, the three of us left. “You want McDonald’s?” Lui asked as we waited for the elevator. “Fun time in the play zone with all your nieces and nephews.”

  Haoa said, “You’ve been married too long, brah. Can’t you tell? Kimo’s got a date.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, but Haoa said, “You can’t fool me, brah. I know that look, when you keep looking at your watch that way. It’s not some crime scene that’s calling to you.”

  “I don’t have a date,” I said. We stepped into the elevator, and both my brothers looked at me. “I just want to make a phone call.”

  “To make a date,” Haoa said triumphantly.

  “It’s not like that,” I said, aware that I probably ought to just shut up. “He’s a fire investigator. We’re working on the bombing case together.”

  “And you need to check with him on Sunday night?” Lui asked. “Have you got a lead?”

  Haoa said, “Lui, you are dumber than dirt. Didn’t you ever say you and a girl were ‘studying’ together?” He waggled his fingers around the word studying, making the quotation marks in the air. “Kimo’s ‘working’ on the case with this guy.”

  I must have blushed, because both my brothers started laughing as the elevator doors opened on the ground level. “Have fun, brah,” Haoa called as he and Lui turned toward the garage, and I walked over to where I’d parked and locked my bike. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” Lui laughed, and then Haoa said, “Wait, check that.”

  I laughed for the first couple of blocks back toward Waikiki. When I got home, Mike Riccardi’s truck was parked in front of my building, and he was sitting in the front seat listening to the UH volleyball game on the radio. “Bump, set, spike!” I heard the announcer exclaim.

  “Hey, who’s winning?” I asked, coming up to his open window. He was wearing an aloha shirt and board shorts and looked handsome enough to be on a calendar.

  “Does love always have to be a game to you?” he asked. “Is one of us always going to be the winner and one the loser?” I had to look closely before I saw the edges of a grin spreading on his face.

  “What a goof. So, what’re you doing here?”

  “You want to go for a ride?”

  “I’ve just been,” I said, pointing to my bike. “I need a shower now. Want to come upstairs?”

  “Sure.” I wanted to hug and kiss him right there in the street, in front of all my neighbors and the tourists in their rental cars and the birds in the trees, but I didn’t. I locked my bike in the rack and led him up to my apartment. I’d barely gotten the lock open when his arms were around me and we were kissing and squeezing each other.

  “God, I missed you,” he said, breathing into my neck. “You don’t know how much I wanted to go out with you last night.”

  “I know. Remember, if I could, I’d still have at least one foot in the closet. I may be out to the world, but in my heart I’m still figuring a few things out.” I pushed away from him a little. “I’m all scuzzy and sweaty. Let me jump in the shower for a minute.”

  He lifted an arm to sniff his pit. “I could probably use a little cleanliness myself.” There was that grin again, spreading across his face. It must have been contagious, because I could feel it spreading across mine, too. I started unbuttoning his shirt.

  We left a trail of clothes on the floor from the front door to the shower, the two of us finally naked as we stepped inside it. I turned the water on high and stood there in the hot, steamy spray, my body pressed against his, kissing him, sucking on his lips, his hard dick pressed against mine. He kneaded my shoulders and I thought I might dissolve there in the water, swirl away down the drain in a flood of lust and ecstasy.

  We lathered each other up, rubbing the soap all over our bodies. It was like a scene from some X-rated video except that more of the pleasure seemed to be coming from my heart than my groin. Not to say that part wasn’t terrific; considering that neither of us had that much experience at gay sex we managed just fine. But I didn’t just want to suck him because he had a dick; I wanted to suck him because he was Mike, this guy I really liked, and I wanted to give him the same pleasure I got from just being with him.

  By the time we were finished we were both exhausted, and we flopped down together on my bed, letting our body heat dry each other. “I was miserable last night,” Mike said. “I wanted to see you. But it scared the shit out of me, thinking about going around to those bars with you, worrying that somebody would see us together.”

  “We don’t have to go out if you don’t want to.” I held my hand up. “No, I don’t mean it like that. I mean we can have dinner, and go to the movies, and go for bike rides or roller blades or stuff, and as long as we don’t hold hands or kiss in public nobody has to know what else goes on between us. Hey, do you surf?”

  He shrugged. “I have in the past. I’m not real good.”

  “I can teach you. And then afterwards we can come back here, or go to your place, and we can have fun in private.”

  “My place could be a little problem.”

  I sat bolt upright in the bed. “Shit, you’re married, aren’t you?”

  He laughed. “No, I’m not that fucked up. It’s just—well, I kind of live with my parents.”

  “Jesus! You’re over thirty and you still live with your parents? What kind of messed up case are you?”

  “I don’t actually live with them. We own a duplex together. They live in one half, I live in the other.”

  “And you never thought that maybe, being gay, you might want to be able to bring a guy home now and then without your mother looking out the window to see who’s with you?”

  He sat up and brought his legs up to his chest. I loved the way he was so comfortable in his nakedness. “In some strange, fucked up way, it was a way of keeping myself from doing anything. You know, if I had the freedom, maybe I’d act on it, and that would be scary.”

  “For a guy who’s willing to go into burning buildings you’re kind of a chicken.”

  “And I know how much you like chicken.”

  “You’re never going to let me forget that the first time you saw me I was carrying the stinking remains of a dead chicken.”

  “It’s what first attracted you to me.”

  “Go on.” I pushed at his shoulder, loving the silky feel of the dark hair there. “So how’d you get involved in this duplex anyway?”

  “My parents have lived in their half for years. When I came home from college I moved back in with them while I figured out what I wanted to do. Even though my dad’s a doctor, he works at Tripler, with all the security you get from working for Uncle Sam.”

  He shrugged. “I’m an only child, so I guess my parents spoiled me. You combine that with the whole sexual orientation thing, and I was kind of a fuck up in college. I drank a lot, never studied, just made it through on good looks and native intelligence. There was no way I was going to medical school, not even to nursing school like my mom.”

  It was a lot like my story. I’d fooled around myself in college, concentrating more on surfing than on English literature, which was
my major, and the only way I’d graduated was that I loved to read, and I could write papers in my sleep. Now that I look back on it, I realize that a lot of my ambivalence about a career had to do with my unwillingness to face my sexuality.

  I wondered how many more kids were out there like Mike and me, failing to realize all their potential because of their internal conflicts. It made me see how important my work at the Gay Teen Center was, not just providing a safe haven and a solid role model, but helping those kids come to term with their lives.

  “Earth to Kimo,” Mike said. He turned on his side, facing me, and his semi-hard dick flopped sideways.

  “Sorry. Guess I drifted off.”

  “I didn’t realize my life story was so boring.”

  “Go on. You were a fuck up in college, your parents didn’t know what to do with you.”

  He frowned at me. “My dad wanted me to get a government job, you know, so secure and all. I finally decided to become a fire fighter, and I kept on living with them while I went through training. Then when I was making money, and I wanted to move out, the people in the other half of the house were ready to sell.”

  He relaxed and let his long legs stretch to the edge of the bed. I started tickling my hand around his groin and watched his dick react.

  “You know how expensive it is to buy anyplace these days. We knew everything about the house already, and because we did the deal direct I even saved on the real estate commission.”

  “What a bargain.” I leaned down and took his dick in my mouth. His whole body shook.

  We fooled around for an hour or more, kissing and hugging and rolling around on the bed. Mike got up to go to the bathroom, and while he was in there I called Harry and asked him to see what he could dig up on the Whites and the Church of Adam and Eve.

  “Sounds like fun,” he said. “I love a good puzzle. Arleen just took Brandon home, so I’ll see what I can find.”