Hotel Honolulu

18 The Return of Amo Ferretti

At first I found it sad that visitors to Hawaii snapped pictures with cheap cameras of each other smiling, or of things I saw every day: the palms on Magic Island, the big banyan in the park, the rack of surfboards at the beach, and sometimes the battered monkeypod tree at our entrance. Sometimes it wasn't pictures but old, soft white people from the mainland walking sorrowfully with their heads down and stooping to pick up broken shells and junk coral. But in time they ceased to be sad. Those white old folks weren't sorrowful; they were a lesson to me to look harder.

What I noticed had nothing to do with Hawaii. It was my daughter and her tetchy moods. Whenever something was going wrong, she seemed to sense it beforehand. Her little friends got screechy too, in the same way, when they were with her at tense times in the hotel. Bright, high-strung children seemed to me keenly receptive to whispers of trouble, which reached them as a whine of gossip that traveled at a frequency different from broader and more vulgar murmurs and gave them a kind of clairvoyance. So new to the earth, Rose lived close to the ground.

She had been very cranky lately. What had she heard?

"Nothing!" she said, and was so exasperated by my question she began to cry.

"I can't do anything with her," Sweetie said. "She's wired."

Wired was the precise word. Madam Ma had been in and out looking haunted, and Rose, who often followed her, staring at her powdered face and smiling so as to get the woman to show her false teeth, now avoided her. Madam Ma, who had made a habit of complaining about Rose, now ignored her and just seemed numb and clumsily furtive. What had she done? What had she seen? Where was Chip? I suspected something serious. I had seen Madam Ma's tantrums, I had listened to her rants. But this was the first I had known of her silence, and it terrified me. I would not have seen it without Rose's detecting it first.

Guilt shows clearest on the faces of older people, whose skin is so full of detail. There is a certain face that an aged woman has when she is stricken and heavily made up. Intending to look like a doll, she ends up looking like a corpse — the lipless cheese-white face, rouge splotches on the sunken cheeks, bony teeth, blank eyes, sparse hair, the sort of mask you see propped up in coffins. From across the room Madam Ma turned this face on Rose, and Rose was out the door. It was a face with guilt showing in all its contours.

There was also a twang of truth, a dying vibration in the air that only little Rose sensed. Her instinct was not to give me information but to protect me. She said she didn't want me to be Madam Ma's friend anymore, which was odd, because when the news got out, it was Chip who had the problem, not his mother.

"Chip's in big trouble," Sweetie said. She had heard the gossip in the kitchen, where it had been gathered in the Paradise Lost bar. "You know his Portugee friend. .?"

"Amo Ferretti."

"He wen mucky."

In times of the most solemn emotion, Hawaiians slipped into Pidgin English, gabbling sententiously, and though they found this lingo more neighborly — more tragic for its realism — it just made me smile and say, Oh, cut it out. But Sweetie found bad news more bearable in Pidgin.

Soon after, in Paradise Lost, I saw Captain Yuji of the Honolulu Police Department and got the story from him.

"This Chip business is the strangest case I ever handled so far. More worse than the Hotel Street pickup."

"What was that all about?"

"Woman cruising Hotel Street looking for a lesbian goes into a bar and picks up this woman. Only it's her husband, dressed up in women's clothes. Their car is stopped on suspicion and it gets into the newspaper. The man is a state rep. Big disgrace. They went to the mainland."

As always, the word "mainland" sounded to me like "Planet Earth."

"Maybe that's what Chip should do."

Captain Yuji looked serious and said, "Chip's in jail." I must have reacted sharply to this, because he grew stern again and added, "It's real bad. One of these gay things. They never know when to stop. It's okay maybe when some gay guy is decorating your house or doing your wife's nails, but when a gay guy commits murder it's a mess."

This perhaps explained Rose's mood, and it certainly explained the hollow-eyed somnambulism of Madam Ma.

"How did they solve the crime?"

"That's the interesting part."

The argument between Chip and his lover had begun at the hotel, apparently, and continued at Chip's apartment in Harbor Tower. Amo had fled when Chip got violent. Chip searched for him in the gay bars in Waikiki and then found him in Kailua, where he was hiding in his bungalow with his wife and two children. Amo's life had been complicated, but until that night it had worked. He had not lived steadily with Chip, but as Chip's lover he had shuttled back and forth between Harbor Tower and his own place in Kailua.

"Amo is my time-share lover," Chip used to say.

Madam Ma had encouraged them. They joined her at Sunday brunch on the lanai, cadaverous Ma, hairy Amo, smooth Chip, a comic threesome always somewhat overdressed for the heat — the men in plantation hats, long-sleeved shirts, white shoes, and kukui-nut leis. Buddy Hamstra loved them for the atmosphere he said they gave the hotel, especially when they were drinking, and sloshed — which was often — and "Lush Life" was being played in the lounge, Hawaiianized by Trey and his band, Sub-Dude.

The night of the attack, Amo had cowered with his wife, but Chip confronted him, screaming. Perhaps (so Captain Yuji conjectured) not wishing for his secret — what secret? — to be divulged, Amo hurried out the back door. Chip heard his lover drive away and gave chase.

On this small island the only continuous road was on the coast, so the only escape for Amo was to drive west in a circle along the shore, Kamehameha Highway. It was eleven at night, very few cars were on the road, and as the road was narrow and curving, it was easy for Chip to shadow him. For five miles or so he kept Amo's red taillights in view, but passing the Crouching Lion Inn, Amo's car grazed the guardrail on the cliff side and sped up and out of sight as it approached Kahana Bay.

Chip drove into darkness as he slipped around the bay, but passing the beach park and seeing no cars ahead, he reasoned that Amo must have swung off the road and killed his lights. Chip swerved, and seeing Amo's car, he braked hard and blocked the entrance to the beach park with his own car. Amo was trapped. He stumbled from his car and tried to run, but Chip was faster, and he caught Amo and pounced. Impatience and pent-up anger from the car chase burst forth as an unstoppable fury. In a violent parody of lovemaking, Chip seized Amo from behind in a strangling embrace, then punched him to his knees. Still clinging, and kneeling himself, using one hand for balance, he grasped a lump of lava rock that just fitted his fist and smashed it into Amo's face and head, tearing his lover's scalp. Amo was stunned, went down heavily, and seemed to snore.

Chip, calmed by the violence but out of breath from the shudder that had run through him, got to his feet. He rocked back and forth, sucking air, not noticing that Amo was stirring. The injured man revived, thrashed around, made the mistake of going for Chip. He hugged Chip's legs and began biting. This provoked Chip to rage again. He had not let go of the chunk of lava rock. This time, standing, less like a rapist than a man fighting off a rapist, he pounded at Amo's reaching arms and on Amo's skull — much too hard, far too many blows, any one of which could have been fatal.

Yet no sooner had the man slumped than Chip attempted to revive him. There was something especially awful about that blood, so black, so sticky in the darkness. Chip could not see it clearly but he could feel it. Everything he touched was wet with it and Slippery and had that bad fish blood smell. It was the man's life leaking into the sand of the beach park this hot, moonless night.

Chip dragged Amo to his car and lifted him into the back seat. He thought of leaving him there in Amo's own car, but he knew the body would be found much too soon — it was illegal to park in the lot after sunset, and the Kahuku police patrolled the area. With Amo folded in half, Chip drove toward Punaluu with a sentence repeating in his head: The body was found in a cane field. It was a common statement on the nightly news. Corpses were dumped in cane fields because such fields were labyrinthine and dense with cane stalks. Bodies were not found for weeks, months even, until the cane was cut. Sometimes they were not found at all, for wild pigs with big tusks ate them, bones and all, leaving only rags and rubber sandals. The cane harvest was weeks away; Chip could be on the mainland by then, in hiding.

If he dumped Amo into the sea, off Kawela or Waimea, the body would turn up on some beach — everything washed ashore. Even bodies that were dumped from ships far from land found their way to the beach, with the torn nets and floats and plastic bottles.

A cane field was the right place, but the deepest fields were at Waialua, in the great expanse beyond the big rusty sugar mill. It was hardly midnight, a dim sliver of moon still rising, the occasional car on the road. Chip drove fast through Kahuku and up the hill to Pupukea, where he parked at the Boy Scout camp at the end of the road and waited, too tremulous to drive more. This was a good place to hide for a few hours but not a good place to leave a corpse.

He slept, he woke, he said aloud, "Yes?" He thought he heard muttering — more than muttering, distinct words whispered quickly. That odd voice startled him. What he took to be the lights behind the hill of Wahiawa was the first glow of daylight. Too late to hide the body! He got his beach blanket from the trunk and covered the body, then drove down the hill. He washed his face at Sharks Cove and bought a new T-shirt and a cup of coffee at Foodland Supermarket.

Driving in circles, he reminded himself that he would have to leave the islands that day if he was to be safe, fly to the mainland and lose himself there, not even tell his mother where he was. A cane field was no longer an option. He set his face toward the part of the road that was distorted and watery-looking with rising heat and spoke out loud.

"I have to think of something."

"Yes," came an answering voice from the back seat, though it sounded like Yarsss.

"Mo-Mo?"

The pet name for his lover was one he used when he wanted to console the man.

The Yes sound came again — mocking lips and the flatulent bubble- words trailing off like a deflating balloon, just air and ambiguous syllables.

"What did you say, Mo-Mo?"

The silence seemed calculated to annoy Chip, as Amo often fell silent when an answer was expected. But Chip had not gone half a mile before he heard Amo Ferretti's voice, jeering at him.

"Stop it!" Chip said. He was hot, perspiring. Even the air through the open windows scorched his face. "I said I was sorry."

That was a lie. He had never said he was sorry; he had only thought it. He was panicky — eager, too, for Amo wasn't dead and now instead of being relieved, his anger returned at the sound of Amo's contradictions. He wanted to pull over and smash Amo's face again. Or should he try to revive him? When he heard the voice again, much louder, he became unnerved and began to scream. He drove screaming around the northern part of the island as the dying man in the back seat mocked him in a foolish failing voice.

Chip was hysterical, calling out, "He's still alive! I didn't hurt him!" when he entered the station house in Wahiawa. He had chosen this small police post so as not to attract attention. He was still saying, "He's alive!" as he was led to a cell.

Captain Yuji said to me, "It's kind of funny. You know what happens to human remains in the heat. Like balloons. And the gas gets out any way it can, right?"

I had not said a word, yet that night when I put her to bed, Rose shrieked, "Don't tell me!"