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!"
19 Crime of Passion
The simplified news items in small-town papers are charming and untranslatable to outsiders, but wonderfully evocative to the small-town reader: the townie can decode anything local. Just the names are telling enough — family names are like a whole language of revelation. In such a place, everyone knows the background to the latest news, and the innuendo in the reporting itself. In this respect, the local news story is often like a concentrated tale by that subtle enchanter from Argentina, Jorge Luis Borges, much of whose work was just that — news from Buenos Aires. Graceful and graphic, such a story was a coiled clinging beauty, a tiny trailing narrative, the sort of vine that suited its name, vignette.
In the small town of Honolulu, the headline in the Advertiser, MAN HELD IN KAILUA DEATH, was understood to be intentionally circumspect, because Madam Ma was one of the paper's most popular columnists. The rival Star-Bulletin was more teasingly explicit: JOURNALIST'S SON ARRESTED IN FLORIST'S MURDER. Yet what had happened was obvious, and the facts in both stories were the same: a quarrel was mentioned, with a hint that it had been a lovers' quarrel; the men were said to have been friends; and Chip was identified as "a leader in the campaign advocating same-sex marriage in Hawaii." That said queer as "florist" said queer, and Madam Ma was well known for being a prima donna. It was colorful but no