I
wore a pale tan Aloha shirt with a muted pattern of white cranes, light tan gabardine trousers and a new pair of dress leather sandals to Kimo's party. I brought two bottles of wine, a La Crema Pinot Noir and a Kendall-Jackson Reserve Chardonnay. For Kimo I brought six bottles of Edelweiss Dunkel. And I brought Felix and David. Felix came because he had to. David came because he knew Donna Wong would be there.
They buried the pig at dawn and the beast had baked underground all day. We arrived just as the crew finished shoveling out the last of the sand from the carcass. The tart aroma of cooked pork carried across the yard by the gentle onshore breeze made my mouth water.
“Welcome!” Kimo called to us. He wore a brilliant green Aloha shirt graced with orange parrots. A smudged white apron almost wrapped around his girth. A tall white chef's hat perched on top of his head. He looked about eight and a half feet tall.
“Here,” I handed him an Edelweiss. “You look naked.”
Kimo beamed. “Thanks.”
“You don't seem surprised.”
“You didn't bring it, you would have had to go home to get it.”
“Make house! Make house!” Tutu Mae embraced each of us, individually and warmly. “Welcome, John Caine, and your
friends, too.” She took David by the hand. “Come! Come! Donna is in the kitchenâlet's bring her outside.”
She dragged David into the house. He went unreluctantly.
Felix grabbed the wine and wandered off to open the bottles.
“Hello, Mr. Caine.” Karen Graham kissed me on the check and held me at arm's length. “It's nice to see you.” Karen was a former client. And a good friend.
“You look terrific,” I said. And she did. Slender and bronzed from the sun, her blue eyes accenting her marvelous tan, she wore a red sarong wrapped tightly around her body. She was a woman who had only recently discovered the power of her sexuality.
“I know,” she said, her eyes smiling. “I'd like you to meet Kirk.” She presented a chubby-soft young man, who self-consciously shook my hand.
“Please to meet you, Mr. Caine,” he said.
“As am I, Kirk,” I said, feeling parental. Somewhere in the back of my mind I understood that this was a serious meeting, that Karen had orchestrated it, and wanted my approval. “Do you live here?”
“No. Yes. I mean, I live in Kailua.”
“He is the assistant manager of the Parkside in Waikiki,” offered Karen.
“Across the street from the Ala Wai?”
“You know it?”
“I do,” I said, having once followed a subject to the place.
“Kirk was a customer, and then he asked me out.”
“How's the flower ranch?”
“It a
farm.
And it's wonderful. Those additional acres we added have just started producing, and sales are really up.”
“Have you seen her farm, Mr. Caine?”
“I have,” I said. “Impressive.” From where I stood, the riotous colors banked up the shallow hills behind Kimo's compound like a grounded rainbow.
“She's done well for herself,” said young Kirk. “For a woman alone.” He explained her operation to me in painful detail, telling
me facts I had known for years. Then he launched into a long history of his short life, ignoring Karen, ignoring me.
“How do you like Julia?” I asked when he took a breath. It bothered me more that Karen just stood there, accepting it. But then Karen always was an accepting soul.
“Sweet kid.” He said it so fast it sounded rehearsed.
“Kirk just loves her,” said Karen, hugging him, her face glowing.
I would have felt better had Kirk said it.
“Go get me another drink,” he told her. It was less a request than an order.
“I'm glad you've apparently found happiness, Karen,” I said, using only the one qualifier. She would have disappointments in love, but I'd like to see her meet at least one good young man on her way through life. At the very least I hoped that Kirk wasn't as bad as her former husband. Having Kimo toss one husband into Pearl Harbor was enough for one lifetime. But it seemed like Kirk was heading in that direction. This time it would be my turn.
“Hey, John!” Charles Kahanamoku, Kimo's youngest son, waved to me from the fire pit.
“Excuse me.” I leaned over and kissed Karen's cheek and escaped to the company of the young men cutting up the pig.
“Got the duty again, I see,” I said, observing the young man down in the pit, grease up to his elbows, ashes and soot smeared all over him.
“I get it every year,” he said, grinning. “It's either because I'm the youngest or I do it the best.”
“In whose opinion?”
“Everybody thinks I'm the youngest,” he said innocently.
“Keep up the good work, kid.”
“Hey, Mr. Caine, I heard you were sailing to the Big Island. It's summer. I'm not going to summer school. Need a crew member?”
Charles had crewed almost eleven hundred miles of North Pacific with me a few years before, and he knew
Olympia
as well as anyone alive.
“Did you ask your mother?”
“Dad saidâ”
“Did you ask your
mother
?”
“No, butâ”
“Ask your mother. If she says it's okay, then I'd love to have you along.”
“You mean it?”
I nodded. “You're a good crewman. They're hard to find.”
“Just a
good
crewman?”
“You're young yet. Still wet behind the ears.”
He grinned. “I'll go ask her.” He started to climb out of the pit.
I pointed to the pig. “Hungry.”
“What?”
“Everybody's hungry. You, who claim to be the best at carving this beast, must first complete your job. Then, when everyone's been fed, you may go ask your mother.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said, and bent to the task.
I saw Kimo standing next to his wife, one huge arm around her waist. They stood apart from the festivities, just observing, content, it seemed, to be near one another. They were in every sense of the word a couple. Each was only a part of the whole. When I saw them together, as they were now, the big beefy kanaka and his tall, elegant wife, it made me envious. Kimo had many things I never would. He had a home, surrounded by family; soon he would have grandchildren. Most important, he had his Neolani.
“They sure are a handsome couple, eh?”
Tutu Mae stood beside me, an Edelweiss in her hand. It seemed that she had materialized out of nowhere.
“You reading minds these days, Auntie?”
“I'm reading faces. Yours. I see what you think. Your thoughts are almost hanging off your face.”
“Oh.”
“Sometime you come here, bring plenty money, and we'll play poker. Howzat?”
“I'd never play poker with you, Tutu Mae.”
“Not with a face like you got. You lose your shirt.”
“Only if we're playing strip poker.”
She laughed and slapped my shoulder. “You wanna play strip poker with an old lady?”
Donna Wong and David Klein walked up just as Tutu Mae slapped me. Donna laughed, putting her hand in front of her mouth. David's color rose a few notches.
“Hi!” I said. “Tutu Mae and I were just planning this evening's entertainment.”
Tutu Mae hit me again.
David blushed furiously and Donna giggled. I noticed that they held hands.
“I think Auntie changed her mind.”
“John Caine, you are a wicked, wicked man.”
I looked wide-eyed and innocent at David. “What'd I say?”
“I don't want to know.”
“Mr. Caineâ” Donna said.
“Call me John.”
“I know, but you're too old for me to call you by your first name. It's too familiar.”
“Monica called him Bill.”
“And also the Big Creep. Would you prefer that?”
“Now you speak of that old scandal?” Tutu Mae looked shocked, perhaps a little tipsy. “Do you have a diseased mind?”
“I think we've established that,” said David.
“I was just standing here, minding my own business ⦔
“Planning strip poker.”
“No, butâ”
“And presidential scandals. Didn't you get enough already?”
“Butâ”
“Stay away from the young children, John,” said David. “You're a bad, bad influence.”
“Mr. Caine, can you be serious for just one moment?”
“Of course, Donna.”
“We need to leave tomorrow. Can you do that? I'm worried that there won't be enough time, and every day that goes by is
another opportunity lost. I can have all my gear down at your dock by six. Would that be all right?”
“The earlier the better.”
“Six is fine. David's going. And your Felix?”
“He's a bodyguard.”
“Can he dive?”
“He dived the
Mahi
.”
“We may not need him, but it would be good to have him along.”
“Just in case, you mean.”
She nodded.
“He'll be a good addition, anyway. He can help sail. How about your sisters?”
“Anything on water. Or in.”
“My kind of people.”
“So six?”
“Six it is.”
David and Donna walked off, hand in hand, speaking only to each other.
“Another happy couple,” said Tutu Mae.
“Seems to be contagious.”
“I wish all the couples here were happy.”
“Karen and Kirk?”
She peered up at me through her thick lenses. “Sometimes you're less stupid than usual,” said Tutu Mae.
“That was a compliment?”
“Only an observation.”
“But a correct one.”
“That little girl just can't seem to find a decent man.”
“Are there any decent men?”
She looked at me again, giving me the slow once-over. “Yeah,” she said, “but they're either too old for her or too young for me.”
“Caine, got a minute?”
Kimo took my arm and led me away from the group. From
where we stood I could see a corner of Karen's flower fields, and the sugarcane and the ocean beyond. A gentle onshore breeze brought the fresh sweet scent of the cane.
“Good party,” I said.
“Yeah. It's your fee. That was good work, finding those former students of his.”
“It wasn't much.” The truth was that it probably cost me five hundred dollars in telephone charges, and took me over a hundred hours of pure grueling spadework. Even with the Internet. But I'd never tell that to Kimo. Let him think that I was smarter than I really was.
“We will win with that information.”
“Win?”
“Tenure committee. We filed the suit and the complaint on the same day. This afternoon. Tala thinks she can get the injunction very quickly, and that we can prevent him from publishing.”
“Does anybody ever win these things?”
“Remember Petrocelli and OJ?”
“Touche.”
“Read this.” Kimo handed me a baby blue flyer, one of those computer-generated things with crude graphics and punctuation to match.
“It's a proclamation of independence,” I said. “Who is this Hina Hina Kanaka Maoli?”
“Another activist group. This one hates all haoles, white or black. Hates the Chinese, the Japanese, the Filipinos, Portagee. Want the island for themselves.”
“Turn the clock back to the Stone Age?”
“Something like that.”
“So from now on this place belongs to the Kanaka Maoli?”
“So they say. I think there are some people who feel fairly strongly in the other direction.”
“Maybe I'd better start calling you
Mister
Tonto, just in case.”