Mr. Bones: Twenty Stories

Neighbor Islands

This was all twenty-some-odd years ago. What I remember is the sound from my front door, which was shut, just off the lanai, the underwater murmur of voices from a TV set inside the house, and my thinking, We don’t have a TV set.

I’d been making the run to Hanalei to see my deputy there, on a weekly basis, always on the same day, a Thursday. He was an officer named Barry Moniz, the chief’s cousin, the one who had fished the key of coke out of Hanalei Bay. Usually we talked sports and went over his paperwork. But his voice sounded strange.

“Ho, get flu, brah. No can talk.”

So I was home three hours early. From where I stood, hearing those gurgly voices, I could see across the sitting room that Kanoa’s door was shut, the kid probably asleep. Even though I’m trained to be suspicious, I was at my own front door, which smacked when I closed it. The voices stopped. Normally I slipped off my shoes to enter the house, but instead I took out my service revolver.

The house was very quiet with a holding-your-breath stillness, and the ticking of Verna’s auntie’s old clock was like timing the silence. I kept to the carpet for stealth reasons and walked through the sitting room to our bedroom door, which was not completely shut but ajar, just a crack of light showing.

I waited about eight seconds, hearing nothing, considering my options, then took a defensive position by the doorjamb and kicked the door open. There on the bed was Verna with two individuals, both men, all of them naked, and they froze like statues.

The overhead light made their skin very pale, except the men’s forearms, indicating to me they were employed out of doors. This was also a warning of their physical strength, in the event of resistance. They were half hiding their faces in fear, but I could see — studying them, because I had the gun — that they were a lot younger than Verna.

With those stacked-up bodies of this crazy pile, like kids, and my Glock on them, I could have let off one round and gotten all three, like a 9-millimeter toothpick, right through the human sandwich, all hamajang, except that was my wife in the middle.

Not a sound came from them. They were barely breathing. I didn’t say anything — didn’t have to. I was aiming at them and in my uniform, even wearing my hat, thinking, This is at least fifteen years in Halawa maximum security before all my appeals are heard and I finally explain my way out. And who are these guys? I’d have to take out all three, unless I separated them and killed them execution style, an idea that was going through my head, with my story, “I saw the hapa-haole guy move his hands in a manner consistent with going for one weapon,” but their nakedness weakened the alibi.

And I loved this woman. She was weak, always saying “I so kolohe,” such a fool, and younger than me, but up to that time my best friend.

In police work, in a tight spot, with no backup and not sure of your ground, or don’t want to hurt bystanders, you shout, curse, threaten, “Let me see you hands, you fricken lolo!” and all that. But I was not in a tight spot. I was home, looking at my naked wife with two naked men, and smelled — what? — dope smoke and that sex smell of funky sashimi. Since I had the gun, and they were silent and I wasn’t talking, I had time to think.

In the silence like a buzzing fly, not a single word, even as I leveled the gun. But the very act of aiming, and the silence, concentrated my mind and made the whole encounter so serious I saw clearly I could not do it.

I holstered my gun, walked out of the house, drove to my office, slept there that night, and the next day went to the chief’s office.

“Eh, here my badge.”

Chief Moniz said, “Skinny, I won’t let you do that,” and handed the badge back to me.

“I quit, brah. Pau already.”

“’Sap to you,” he said. But he made a disagreeing face. Then he praised me. “You one real shtrick buggah but you real shtrong.”

And he begged me to ask him why. I told him everything.

“Ho, hamajang, brah! Dey no more shame or what. No even close da light!”

I remembered that one of the men was wearing a baseball cap backward, and I mentioned that too because it bothered me. The chief just shook his head. He said he’d transfer me to the Big Island. Why should I lose my whole pension over a messy domestic?

Next day the house was empty. I picked up some things and flew to Hilo.

I had known about the whole shibai for a year or more. I was relieved when Erskine gave the reason he was turning in his gun and his badge, because I expected something a lot worse: I’d braced myself for him killing his wife and our losing him, probably the straightest cop we’d ever had. I hadn’t told him about Verna, because it seemed to me that it would send him over the edge, and we’d lose him, or he might go at anyone for telling him.

“I geevum dirty lickings!” kind of thing.

I’d hired Erskine when he was a young man, not knowing if a haole could do police work on an island like this. His father, from the mainland, was a hell-raiser. Erskine was closer to his mother. He might have turned out to be a hell-raiser himself — some of them do, from those households — but he was the opposite; and as the years passed he became more and more severe. He even gave the mayor a speeding ticket once. I said, “Skinny, why you so shtrick?”

“To serve and protect. No exceptions.” And his eyes went dead. “Bodda you?”

I kind of laughed, but it was a moving violation and the mayor’s insurance company was not too happy. Mottoes are scary expressions, and so is No exceptions.

I had complaints, not because he was lazy, like the others, but because he was so straight. No exceptions meant a citation to a float with a bad brake light in the Kamehameha Day parade; it meant a night in jail for the man who flipped him the bird, and that man had fought in Vietnam, two tours.

“Brah, da buggah just bool-liar,” I said.

“Disorderly conduck,” Erskine said.

No TV at his house. “If I get, I smash um already.”

“Why you worry about one TV?”

“Tings,” he said.

“What tings? Humbug tings?”

“Stuffs,” he said.

He was still living at home, his father having had a seizure, face turned black, and died. His mother lived another ten years, and she died — lupus. At the age of fifty-two Erskine married Verna, who was barely twenty, and she was a local wahine.

The exception in his life, from Kekaha way, near the landfill, Verna had grown up in a trailer, her father calling himself a scrap dealer, which meant rusty cars in the front yard. She was wild and didn’t make it through high school.

Erskine must have met her at her dad’s trailer, one of the many domestics he’d been called there for, or might have seen her at Barking Sands, where the kids hung out. Verna was a handful, but Erskine was not fazed by any situation, and she might have had father issues, since she had affairs with older men. They got drugs and alcohol for her in return for favors. I know that to be a fact.

She was a little lolo, but “a little lolo” often describes a passionate woman. She was living in Erskine’s family home, sleeping in the bed where Erskine’s mother died, no TV, and eventually a keiki, Kanoa. But aimless, as she said — futless.

“You futless?”

“I stay so futless awready.”

The story was, the kid wasn’t Erskine’s. Erskine didn’t do his homework, or wasn’t doing it very well, because it got around that anyone who knocked at the door when Erskine was at the station would get a friendly welcome, no matter who. And if they had something on board, like killer buds, Verna was like, “Eh, we burn.”

Drugs are the sickness of this island. Everyone either has them or knows where to get them. It didn’t help that when Erskine and my nephew Barry had seized some controlled substance after hours, Erskine stored it at home, because Erskine didn’t trust his fellow officers. Verna knew that. The famous key of coke floating in Hanalei Bay ended up at his place.

The key of coke was the start of it all. But Verna would also be happy with a couple of OxyContins ground to powder and used as a suppository, don’t ask me how I know. No TV! One futless wahine, who would say to me, “Skinny think my okole too big. What you tink?” There is only one answer.

Erskine didn’t know the name of the two kids with Verna that night. One was Ledward Ho, the other Junior — most people knew, I certainly did — Ledward a meth addict with rotten teeth as a result, and Junior had more acid in his system than a car battery. Big-wave surfers gone bad.

They brought something — pills, meth, batu, crack, speed, pakalolo. Kids! And she would have obliged. Two at one time was something new, but I wasn’t really surprised.

What surprised me at first was that he didn’t blow them all away. Then I thought, He’s law-abiding — what he did was by the book. You don’t shoot unarmed suspects in the back on this island.

Only the gun not going off was also kind of appropriate for Erskine, like a symbol. He was on the plane too fast for me to tell him I’d take care of the kid.

Never mind Erskine called me “shelter dog” and kept his big plastic gun by the bedside. He bailed me out of that awful trailer up at the landfill, and I didn’t even tell him that for a while up in Lihue we lived in a container in the industrial area near Nawiliwili Harbor.

My stepmother, Jen, grew up speaking Hawaiian on Niihau, called herself a functioning alcoholic, and was afraid of mirrors. “We never have one meer anyhow.” I gave her one from the thrift shop and she screamed like it was a trick. “It’s a present!” I screamed back. “Take it down!” And why? “Because there’s probably some babooze behind it?” She had the idea that all mirrors were two-way: you were being spied on by a freak on the other side.

“That’s not funny. You call that funny? It a meer!”

She made me afraid of mirrors, which annoyed Erskine. When he looked at me it was that face he made when he was checking his cell phone, noting the number, the “Howzit?” look. Then he’d always turn away with that shouldery big-dog walk, Officer Serious.

Everyone thought they knew about my father, that he was good at everything, saved scrap, had all the answers. “I cockroach that fuel pump from an old Honda.” Several things they didn’t know. That he was afraid of flying and had not visited a neighbor island since the passenger barges stopped in 1972. So my one wish was to take flying lessons, to see my father’s face when I got in the cockpit and took off down the runway — maybe say, “Want to hop in?” beforehand. They thought he was a bully because he spanked me. But he liked to spank me — or anyone, and maybe I deserved it for being wild and quitting school.

“You panty,” I would say, to pretend I wasn’t afraid.

Or he told me I was adopted and that he’d give me back to the orphanage if I didn’t behave. I believed him.

The container we lived in for a while had no windows and was like an oven in the summer when the trade winds dropped.

I smoked cigarettes. Jen said smoking is a filthy habit and to give it up. No smoking or drinking on Niihau. But smoking relaxes you, and anyone who doesn’t know that has never smoked. I needed to be relaxed. I smoked pakalolo. It was easy to get; everyone grew it, and that too was relaxing. “Don’t knock it,” I’d said to Jen, who would have been mellower with Dad if she used just a skosh of weed, and I told her so.

“Just a skosh,” she said, wily old auntie, and, “Here, why you no help me bake some cookies?”

She had me sift the flour and mix in the sugar and shortening and butter, and when it was smooth, the cup of chocolate chips. She could tell that I was enjoying the mixing.

“Your ma wen never show you how for make cookies?” she asked, pretending to be amazed.

Which was cruel, because my real mother was dead from riding in the back of a pickup truck that was rear-ended on Kokee Road.

“Not yet,” Jen said, snatching the spoon I was going to lick.

And then she took me out to the yard and got a stick and poked it into a twist of dog doo, and back in the kitchen she dipped the stick into the golden cookie dough and stirred it.

“Now taste um.”

She knew what I’d say, so I didn’t say it.

“Just a skosh!” she screamed. “Same wid djrugs!”

But when he brought home the key of coke from that Moniz cousin my life was changed, and I don’t care what anyone says: it is the greatest feeling in the world, and not addictive like meth if you’re smart, no more than candy, in fact just like candy. I wanted to be a functioning coke sniffer.

“It’s spendy,” the chief used to say. But he found some more, maybe the same key, and he made me pay for it in my own way.

He couldn’t blame me for wanting more. Junior got some in Maui from his surfing buddy Ledward, and said, “Now what are you going to do for me?”

Erskine was always working, at the station or on calls. What was I supposed to do — and his boss the chief always hanging around?

“What you good at?” the chief asked.

“Nothing. I so junk.”

That made him laugh.

“The junkest.”

Having Kanoa didn’t make him happy either. The chief held him more than Erskine did at the baby luau.

Junior was always around on the day Erskine was in Hanalei. When he said, “I want to try something insane,” I knew I’d have to say yes, and met Ledward.

I knew Erskine wouldn’t shoot.

When we met on the Big Island, all Erskine talked about was how unreasonable his ex was — demanding, petty, immature — and I was totally on his side. He did not miss his little boy Kanoa at first, but after we were settled and he moved from highway patrol to a desk job in Hilo, he said he wanted to get custody, that his ex was a bad influence.

Around that time I was thinking: Cop, killjoy, straight arrow, spanker, scold — what kind of kid would want to be in the same house with him?

I could just about stand him. He was a righteous bully, never wrong, knew all the answers, knew the law (“that’s a Class-A felony”). I felt sorry for what he’d been through, but I didn’t want to go through it myself. He was making plans to fly over to Kauai to visit the kid.

I called Verna. I said, “You don’t know me.”

“Who’s this?” she asked.

“Noelani. But listen up. I just want you to know that Skinny is coming over to talk to you about joint custody.”

“That’s all I need.”

And I heard a man in the background squawking and thought, Another one.

After that, Erskine said, “Every time I go over there she’s not at home, the kid’s not there, and no one knows where they went.”

“Maybe at her parents’ place.”

Erskine said, “She doesn’t have anyone in the world except me,” and went silent.

That was more and more the case with me. My friends didn’t like Erskine for his strictness. They enjoyed a little smoke now and then, they watched football, they drank beer at the beach. And Erskine frowned at them the whole time.

“Dis guy nothing but stink-eye.”

He had no doubts. He was the law, and even on a neighbor island where things weren’t so strict he enforced the pettiest law: no dogs on the beach, no ball games, no open containers of alcohol — even confiscated pakalolo and brought it home and maybe was testing me because he made a big show of locking it in a desk drawer.

In the pictures he showed me, his kid looked so different and so poi-dog I wanted to say, “You sure he stay yours?”

Not only the kid’s different features but the kid’s smile — Erskine never smiled. Plus the fact that after the first few times, Erskine seemed to lose interest in me. I was a lot older than Verna — closer to Erskine’s age — but even so, I seemed to have more in common with her, this ex-wife, than the man himself.

And she began confiding in me, saying how she’d let him down.

“Don’t beat yourself up,” I said.

Though I rarely went to a neighbor island, I went over there to see what she was really like. She was young enough to be my daughter, and that’s how I felt toward her. She gave me a big hug, and we had coffee.

“Ma, I want do shee-shee!”

The kid Kanoa was just awful and looked local. But he was very well dressed, new shirt and slippers and surfer shorts. I felt sorry for Verna, but I didn’t want him. So I kept tipping her off whenever Erskine was on his way over. I thought I was doing everyone a favor.

On that one and only visit I met her new guy, Junior, and recognized him from what Erskine had told me: hapa-haole, tribal tattoos, Raiders hat on backward, a big laid-back moke who worked an excavator. But I could also see the attraction. He was like, “Whatever,” and that was not Erskine’s way.

What ended it was this visit. I began to think: She’s been through a lot, made a few bad choices and lost her looks living with this blalah, and was making the best of it. But time passed, and I lived with Erskine and got to know him better and became like her. He made me that way, and I knew exactly why she two-timed him.

If I stayed with Erskine that’s how I’d end up, as a stoner and probably cheating on him and getting blamed, and so I fired him and went back to my own island, Lanai, and stayed in touch with Verna.

The last thing Erskine said to me was “I’ll probably stay single. I’ll be okay. I can’t handle hooking up with a new wahine, telling her all my stories, listening to all her stories, and then there’s dealing with her stuffs. I’m married to my job.”

I put it down to Erskine was a haole from the mainland, raised by his mother, and didn’t always understand what he was looking at. Like the tourists who sit on the beach and don’t see those upside-down bowls in the shore-break are turtles feeding on the rocks and far out the puff of mist is a whale blowing, and when the tourists turn their backs the turtles stick their heads up and the whale breaches, slapping itself down sideways. Or they see monster surf and say, “Hey, cool.”

Such a know-it-all giving out speeding tickets is one thing. But when he busted me for possession, and I was still a kid: I couldn’t work for the state or join the army or get back to Maui. So I negotiated a key of coke from some dealers in Oahu, but it ended up in the harbor. Barry Moniz knew, and told his uncle, the chief, and that was the end of my hopes.

When he came home early that night and caught us naked, all in the bed, the overhead light on, his gun pointed at us, I went dead all over, first chicken-skin, then just numb. And afterward I didn’t believe he’d really gone. I thought he was waiting for us to come outside so he could ambush us.

“Buggah wen go or what?” Ledward asked in a whisper.

We sneaked out by the back door.

“Junior. I tink we makeh-die-dead,” he said in the pickup.

I heard that Erskine was transferred to Hilo, and with him on a neighbor island, things quieted down. It was Chief Moniz who told me. He made a few visits to Verna, gave her some money, like he felt sorry for her.

“She no can get food stamp,” he said to me. “Wass the happs?”

The happs was I never smoked another joint from that day and I got a job digging, working an excavator, but because of my police record, not at the landfill, a state job, where I could have made more money. Ledward said she could have gotten us killed, but I said, “It was our own fault. We were the ones that set her up.”

“Because she wen ask for da kine chrabol.”

I was annoyed that he was blaming her. I saw things I’d never seen before, that Verna was in a bind, and after a while I married her on the beach at Hanalei, her kid Kanoa there in a little aloha shirt, a luau, the sunset, a green flash. I never saw Ledward again, because he went to Molokai.

And Verna would get a call from time to time, I guessed from Erskine, she didn’t say, and we’d go stay with my cousin in Kapaa until Erskine gave up and went back to the Big Island. He wanted custody. But I would have said, “Tough. You left her. I married her. This is my hanai kid now.”

Ledward used to say, “Yes, I want to catch waves in a foreign country, maybe Brazil, if I can snort coke there and have sex on the beach.”

He is in Kaunakakai, maybe shaping boards, maybe hanging out. And Verna talks about taking flying lessons, which will never happen. Kanoa is on Oahu, where Chief Moniz retired, and got him apprenticing as a roofer. Kanoa still doesn’t see much of his father, and never knew how his mother almost got shot one night. Erskine’s ex, Noelani, sends Christmas cards and sometimes a pineapple.

I’m glad Erskine just walked away. He did the right thing by not shooting us. Yet he wasn’t innocent. I’d never be able to convince him, but he was responsible. Instead of revenge I ended up with Verna. She makes pickled mango, one of those older women on a back road, selling it in jars, and you’d never guess from her smile the things that have happened to her.

But what was it after all? It was island style, a period of drugs and freaky sex and getting out of hand that all people go through before they settle down, especially on the neighbor islands. Then it passes. But it was all dog luck, because I would have shot me.