Mahu Box Set Read online

  I nodded toward the kitchen. “In the cabinet over the sink.”

  While I packed my suitcase, my father poured brandy into juice glasses for the three of us. When I was finished we lifted our glasses together and my mother said, “You are our son, and you always will be. We love you.”

  My father drank his brandy in one shot, and so did I.

  You Can Go Home Again

  I randomly picked out aloha shirts and polos, shorts and khakis, and bathing suits I would probably not get to wear to the beach. I took my uniform, and the one suit I owned, a simple navy one that served for funerals and weddings and family command performances.

  I scooped a haphazard pile of books I hadn’t yet read into a knapsack, and placed it by the door with my short board and my long board. I always carried extra books with me when I traveled, afraid of landing in some distant place without something to read. What else to take? My roller blades? The half-eaten box of chocolate-covered Oreos from the kitchen? My pocket knife, camera, a deck of playing cards for solitaire? I took them all, without discrimination. By the time I was finished there were four bags by the door along with a pile of sporting equipment.

  “I’m ready,” I said finally.

  My mother went around the room, turning off lights, checking the windows and the burners on the stove. “The reporters will still be there,” she said.

  I took a look around my apartment. It was only one big room, with the kitchen off to the side, but it was my home, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to leave it, even though I knew it would be easier to stay at my parents’ house, where at least I could move from room to room, talk to people when I wanted to, even sneak out into the backyard when I wanted to feel the sun and the wind.

  Iacta ilea est, I remembered from some long ago history class. The die is cast. I slung my knapsack over my back, put my boards under one arm and grabbed my roller blades with the other. “I’m ready to go,” I said, and walked out into the glare of flashbulbs.

  My mother drove us home in her Lexus, and I knew the TV crews would find us soon enough. It was just sunset and the day had turned beautiful, as it often does on this island of microclimates. You could start in Honolulu, head Diamond Head and beyond, to the windward shore, travel along the coast as far as Laie, land of Mormons, ride along the North Shore, then head back through the central valley and pass a dozen different types of weather along the way. Stay in one place, and the weather changed around you, often gorgeous, but with passing showers, winds, and clouds alternating with brilliant sunshine.

  If I hadn’t been dogged by reporters, I might have spent the afternoon at the beach. The morning clouds and rain would have brought stronger waves; I remember often waking, when I was surfing in earnest, hoping the morning would bring rough weather and with it rough surf, and being disappointed at another gorgeous day.

  The weather seemed to me also to symbolize people’s lives. Somewhere on the island people enjoyed the sun, baking away the troubles of the week on the beach or washing them away in the cool Pacific. It happened every day in Hawai’i. And somewhere someone was having a bad day, like me, full of emotional storms and cloudy thoughts. Microclimates, both natural and emotional.

  I wondered what kind of day Tim had experienced, if he’d seen my name in the paper, on the radio or the TV. Would he try my phone, not realizing I had unplugged it? When would I find a few private minutes to call him?

  Once home, my mother took a casserole out of the oven and we had dinner, all the time not talking about anything that mattered—a job my father was bidding, some antics by Ashley and her sister, even, God help us, the weather forecast. My troubles were like an unwelcome guest at dinner, one we had to feed but tried hard to ignore. There was no word from either of my brothers.

  Finally we were finished. I stood up to help clear the table, then paused. “I don’t know how this is going to end,” I said. “I’m gay. I can’t change that. But I don’t think I did anything wrong, and I don’t deserve to be suspended. I want to fight, but I don’t want to do anything that will hurt you.”

  “I think you should give this up,” my father said. “There are other things you can do where they won’t care about you. Be a decorator. A hairdresser. Something like that, that mahus do.”

  “I don’t want to be a decorator. I want to be a cop.”

  “Well, you can’t be,” my father said, yelling. “They don’t want you. They can’t be any clearer than they have been.”

  “I won’t back down,” I yelled back. “What I do on my own time doesn’t make a goddamned bit of difference when I’m on the job!”

  “Please, no more yelling,” my mother said. “Now, Kimo, bring those dishes to the kitchen. Al, go into the living room and sit down.”

  We watched a couple of silly sitcoms together, the tension between me and my father simmering, my mother always ready to jump into the breach between us. The occasional calls that evening were from family friends, some close, some merely curious. My mother or my father would answer, give a brief explanation, and then beg off.

  We watched the eleven o’clock news together in the living room, Lui’s station, of course. The reporter who had harassed me did a live shot in front of the Waikiki station, all professional and business-like. All he had to say, really, was that the department had uncovered improprieties in my handling of an important case, the murder of a prominent Honolulu businessman. The official department statement said that was the cause of my suspension. “But our own inside sources say Kanapa‘aka was suspended because of the discovery of his homosexuality,” he said. “Starting Monday, a new series will investigate gay cops, here and on the mainland. Stay tuned!”

  My parents and I went to bed soon after the news, still without hearing anything from Lui or Haoa. I thought it was very strange, though I imagined Lui might be working. Haoa ought to be home with Tatiana and the children, and even if he didn’t want to call I was sure Tatiana would make him.

  I was back in my childhood room, Town and Country Surf posters on the wall, long forgotten books on the shelves. I picked up a few—a couple of Punahou textbooks, some Ursula K. LeGuin and Ray Bradbury from a brief flirtation with science fiction, two dozen paperback Agatha Christie mysteries, a handful of novels by second-rate writers I’d stumbled on in the course of trying to discover my own literary tastes. Even a half-dozen oversized children’s books, bright colors and not too many words. I remembered Babar, King of the Elephants, his monkey friend and the withered old lady who was his teacher.

  I slipped under the covers with Babar, trying to lose myself in the innocence of childhood. I read all the way through the book, smiling at the rhinoceros in his three-pointed hat and the monkey Arthur dressed up for skiing. When I started yawning, I put the book down, but I still could not fall asleep for a long time. I kept going over what I had done, trying to see if I could have done anything differently, and how that might have affected what happened. No matter what I thought I could do, however, the end was always the same.

  My room was right over the front door, and I woke to the ringing of the doorbell, adrenaline coursing through me. I looked at the clock; it was almost three a.m. Who could it be? Surely even the television crews went home to sleep at night.

  I put my robe on and walked down the hall to my parents’ bedroom, where the light was on. My parents both had their robes on, and my father led the way out into the hallway. “Who do you think it is?” I asked.

  “There’s only one way to find out,” my father said. I followed him down the stairs, my mother behind us. The bell rang again before we could get to it. “All right, all right. Keep your pants on.”

  He looked through the peephole first, then pulled the door open. It was Haoa, looking tired and disheveled, like he’d been in a fight. There was an ugly red bruise under his left eye, and though the night air had turned chilly, he wore no jacket, just a t-shirt with the name of his landscaping firm on it, and a pair of drawstring pants in a wild zebra pattern.

  “
What’s the matter!” my mother said. “Haoa, come in.”

  My father stepped aside, and my brother came in, not looking at me. My mother took him by the hand and led him to the kitchen, where he sat in the harsh light of the overhead fluorescents as she started to minister to his bruised face. “What happened to you?” she asked. “Have you been home? Does Tatiana know where you are? You should call her. She’s probably worried sick.”

  “She doesn’t care where I am. She told me.”

  “Did she do this to you?” my father asked. “Tatiana?”

  He shook his head. “This is not her fault.” He nodded toward me. “It’s his.”

  My parents both looked at me. I held my hands out. “I’ve been with you.”

  “You’ve been with men,” Haoa said. “That’s your problem. Mahu.”

  “Haoa,” my father said. “This is your brother.”

  “He can say what he pleases. So who did this to you? Another mahu?”

  Haoa sneered, and the act of turning his mouth up caused him to wince with pain. “Hold still,” my mother said. She dabbed at his wound with cotton dipped in hydrogen peroxide, and he winced again.

  “Tell us what happened,” my father said.

  “We finished the landscaping around the pool at the Mandarin Oriental,” Haoa said. “I took the crew to a bar in Waikiki to celebrate.” He paused while my mother applied mercurochrome with a q-tip. It looked like he was being decorated with war paint, preparing for a big battle. I wondered if she could do the same for me.

  “The news came on while we were in the bar, and one of the guys recognized Kimo. ‘Hey, Howard, it’s your brother,’ he said. We all watched. It turned my stomach.”

  I looked at him, and he held my eyes for a long minute and finally he had to look away. I wondered how I could feel so connected to him, through bonds of blood and familial love, when he seemed to hate me so much.

  “We had some more to drink,” he said. “I got angrier and angrier. The guys teased me. Somehow we got the idea to go out and beat up some fags.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “We raised you better than that,” my father said. “A hooligan. A common criminal.”

  “It wasn’t my fault. It got out of control. We went to this bar, the Rod and Reel Club. We hung around outside and waited to see who went in or came out. This mahu came out and, I don’t know, a couple of us must have started to hit him.”

  “He hit you back,” I said.

  “Not him. A bunch of them spilled out of the bar. Big guys, mean-looking, wearing leather and chains. One of them hit me.”

  “You have more bruises?” my mother asked.

  He shook his head. She started to pack up her first aid kit.

  “Then?” I asked.

  “The police came. They hauled us down to the station. I wanted to stick up for my men. Some of those guys, they don’t have much. A couple of them already have records. So I said it was all my doing, that I conned them into joining me.”

  It was funny, but I believed him. I remembered as a kid how he and Lui used to stick up for each other, even as they picked on me. He was capable of loyalty, and of kindness, too. He treated his employees well, giving them bonuses and advancing them wages, and even giving them good recommendations when they quit.

  “You came here from the police?” my mother asked.

  “I called Lui. He came down and bailed me out, and drove me back to Waikiki so I could get my truck. I went home, must have been about midnight.”

  There had to be more, I thought. “So what are you doing here?”

  “Tatiana,” he said.

  My parents looked at each other, and then at me. Haoa had married for love, this beautiful, exotic, Russian-American hippie who had floated down from Alaska and bonded to my big Hawaiian-Japanese-haole mixed-up brother. I’d seen them at parties, always gravitating toward one another. He seemed incomplete when he was not around her.

  “What did she do?” my mother finally asked.

  Haoa looked down at the table. “I told her what happened, basically. She was pretty pissed off, but we were getting past it. I told her I was sorry, that I’d been crazy.” He looked up at us. “She’s been crazy herself sometimes. You don’t know her like I do. I thought she owed it to me to forgive me, and she was going to.” He paused. “Then the mahu called her.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “The mahu we beat up.” He sighed deeply. “My luck. I take a punch at the first mahu I see, it turns out to be her hairdresser.”

  I laughed. “You mean that guy, what’s his name, your kids call him Uncle something?”

  “Uncle Tico. I didn’t recognize him. I mean, Christ, it was dark, he was coming out of this faggot bar, giggling or some shit.” He looked straight at me. “It was like he was you. I wanted to punch you. Jesus, I wanted to kill you. So I took it out on him.”

  I closed my eyes. How many more innocent people were going to be dragged into this awful vortex my life had become?

  “And?” my mother said finally. “What did Tatiana do?”

  “She threw a vase at me. Bounced off the side of my head. Hey, Ma, you got any aspirin? My headache’s coming back.”

  Our mother went to get him a pill. When she came back, he continued. “She said she could almost forgive me if it had been a stranger, but not Tico. I had to have known it was him, I had to have been acting out against her. You believe it? Acting out against her. She reads too many goddamn books.”

  He took the aspirin with a swig of cold water from the refrigerator door. “Anyway she kicked me out. I could have gone to Lui’s but I didn’t want to face Liliha. You know she and Tatiana are like this.” He held up two fingers, intertwined. “If I’d known he was going to be here, I’d have gone there anyway.”

  “Such discord in my house,” my father said. “Husband against wife, brother against brother, man against strangers.” To his credit, Haoa lowered his head again. I thought my father was about to launch into another tirade, but instead he looked at the clock. “It’s late,” he said. “We all need our sleep. In the morning, we’ll see how things look.”

  My mother hurried upstairs to get out fresh sheets for Haoa’s old bed. “All the chickens come home to roost,” my father said as he shut off the kitchen light behind us.

  I did not talk to Haoa as we climbed the stairs. I went into my room, he to his. All I could think of was Robertico Robles, out for a little fun on a Friday night, running into my brother’s wrath. I realized Haoa hadn’t even said how the man was.

  It was dark in the hallway. The lights were out in my parents’ room and in Haoa’s. I walked to his door, which was ajar, and pushed it open a little more. “Haoa?”

  “What is it?”

  “How is he? The man you hurt. Uncle Tico.”

  In the dim moonlight I could barely see Haoa in bed across from me. “He’ll survive,” he said, and then softened his tone. “I think he might have broken a couple of ribs. Maybe a slight concussion, too. But he was certainly well enough to call Tatiana and rat on me.”

  Just who was the rat, I thought, as I pulled the door to behind me, was still open to speculation.

  Brotherhood

  I slept better that night than I had for the last two, and didn’t wake until almost eight. I put on an old bathrobe and walked downstairs, where my father was in the kitchen making scrambled eggs and bacon for Haoa.

  My father looked unaccountably cheerful for a man with two sons in various degrees of trouble with the law. “Morning, Keechee,” he said. “Sit. I’ll make you eggs.”

  “Morning,” I said. I nodded at Haoa, who gave me a cursory nod in return.

  “It’s nice to have two of my boys back home,” my father said, emptying Haoa’s eggs onto a plate and passing it to him. The bacon was already draining on paper towels. I got up and poured orange juice for all three of us while my father scrambled my eggs. I wondered if he got up this way every morning, made himself a solitary breakfast while my mothe
r slept in.

  Haoa buried himself in the Advertiser, reading the sports section first. I scanned the front section, then the metro, looking for familiar names. And there they were, surprisingly anglicized, our real birth names, James and Howard Kanapa‘aka, though fortunately the two articles, a page apart, had been written by different writers who hadn’t made the connection between us. My story was brief, a simple paragraph about an internal disciplinary action by the Honolulu Police Department. The only person quoted was Hiram Lin, the dried up prune, who said “No comment.” Right on, Hiram.

  Haoa’s story was two paragraphs concerning a fight between several men in front of a Kuhio Avenue bar. The bar wasn’t named, and the whole gay-bashing context was missing. Haoa’s name was there, along with the names of two of his workmen, as well as Roberto Robles and two other men I assumed were the leather boys who intervened. I wanted to seek them out and congratulate them. Instead I casually mentioned, “You made the paper this morning, Haoa,” and passed the section to him.

  Our father looked at me, then at Haoa, but didn’t say anything. We both finished eating at about the same time. He got up and took his plate to the sink, ignoring mine. As he turned the water on to rinse it, I stood up and carried mine to the sink as well.

  He positioned himself to block me and I tried to slip through, but he hip-checked me. I pushed him to the side and put my dish down in the sink. He pushed me back.

  “Don’t push me.” I slapped his chest with the palm of my hand.

  “It’s your fault. All this trouble.” He pushed hard against me with both hands.

  “Haoa! Kimo! Stop this right now!” our father said, and we backed away from each other, sullenly.

  “Spoiled baby,” Haoa said. “Dragging everybody else into his problems.”

  “You get drunk and beat up a poor helpless hairdresser and blame it on me,” I said. “Big brother. Great example.”

  “I mean it,” our father said. “No more fighting.”