she tossed her cigarette in a sparking arc, then snuggled awfully close for a first date. Was Thalia Massie’s little maid attracted by my he-man charms, or was she tricking on the side?
I wanted desperately to think that this curvy little chop-stick cutie was irresistibly attracted to me; I hated to think she might be a hooker who knew a horny mainlander when she saw one. I was certainly irresistibly attracted to
We didn’t say much, for a while. Just strolled arm in arm through a crowd of mostly locals, a yellow woman on the arm of a white man no big deal in this melting pot. Other than the racial hodgepodge, this could have been the midway of the Illinois State Fair—very little of the park seemed uniquely Hawaiian. The merry-go-round with its seahorse mounts, the giant clapboard Noah’s ark with its gangway up to a petting zoo, had vague ocean ties; and there was an ersatz Island flavor to the hula dolls and paper
We had cotton candy—shared a big pink wad of it, actually—as she guided me toward a sprawling two-story clapboard shed.
“I can’t believe it,” I said.
“What?”
“No bugs. No gnats or skeeters, no nothin’.”
She shrugged. “They leave when swamp drained.”
“What swamp?”
“Swamp where Waikiki is now.”
“Waikiki used to be a swamp?”
She nodded. “Go down to Ala Wai Canal, you wanna find some bugs.”
“No, that’s okay….”
“Years ago, they drain Waikiki to make room for more sugarcane. All the swamps and ponds, all the little farmers and fisherman, gone. The beach and all this tourist trade, that was just happy accident.”
“Like the bugs that left.”
She nodded. “No snakes in Hawaii, either. Not even down at Ala Wai.”
“They got driven out, too?”
“No. They never here.”
I gave her a little smirk. “No serpents in Eden? I find that hard to believe.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Just human kind. They everywhere.”
She had a point. The building we were heading to was jumping with music and kids. The closer we approached, the more the night throbbed with a very American jazz band version of “Charley, My Boy”—with the strum of a guitar and some steel guitar thrown in, to make it nominally Hawaiian style. Kids yellow, white, and brown stood out front and along the side of the clapboard pavilion, sharing snorts of hooch from flasks, catching smokes and smooches. I was definitely overdressed in my suit and tie—the boys wore silk shirts and blue jeans, the girls cotton sweaters and short skirts.
I paid at the door (35 cents admission, but couples got in for half a buck), got a ticket stub in return, and we squeezed past the packed dance floor and found a table for two. Up on an open stage, the band—the Happy Farmers (according to the logo on the bass drum head), Hawaiians in shirts almost as loud as their music—had segued into a slow tune, “Moonlight and Roses.” The sight of these couples—here a yellow boy with a white girl, there a brown girl with a white boy, locked together in sweaty embrace under a rotating mirrored ball catching flickering lights of red and blue and green—would have given a Ku Klux Klan member apoplexy.
“You want a Coke?” I asked her.
She nodded eagerly.
I went off to a bar that served soft drinks and snacks, got us two sweaty cold bottles of Coke and a couple glasses, and returned to my beautiful Oriental flower, who was zealously chewing gum.
Sitting, I sneaked my flask of rum from my pocket and asked her, “Can we get away with this?”
“Sure,” she said, pouring Coke into her glass. “You think Elks don’t like their
I poured some rum into her glass of Coke. “This is an Elks Club?”
She stuck her gum under the table. “Naw. But local fraternal orders, they take turn sponsoring dances. It was Eagles, that night.”
By “that night” she meant the night Thalia Massie was assaulted.
“This is the joint where the rapists went dancing,” I said, making myself my own rum and Coke, “before they snatched Thalia.”
She looked at me carefully. “You really think that?”
I slipped my flask away. “What do you mean?”
“Why do you think I ask you here?”
“My blue eyes?”
