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.