Damned in Paradise

Ida slapped his chest and the thump echoed in the night. “You hear our side, okay?”

“Huh?”

His voice was so quiet, the sound of the breakers on the reef almost drowned it out. “We not gonna fuck you up. We ain’t gangsters like haole papers say. We just want you hear our side.”

Tentative relief trickled through me. “I, uh, don’t mind talkin’ to you boys—but isn’t there someplace a little less cozy…?”

“Yeah.” Ida nodded, smiled, and there was something unsettling about the smile. “I know a good place. We take you for a ride….”

To a guy from Chicago, that phrase had a certain unhappy resonance.

But I couldn’t see trying to make a break for it; at least one of these guys, brawny Ahakuelo, was a top athlete, a boxing champ and a star of the local variety of football, which was played barefoot. What were my odds of outrunning him?

Besides, I was feeling increasingly not in danger. Melodramatic as this stunt may have been, luring me by way of an Oriental siren to this weed patch in the boonies between Waikiki and Honolulu, this didn’t seem to be about harming me. Scaring me, yes. Harming me—maybe not….

Ida was gesturing around him. “This is where Massie woman say we bring her and screw her and beat on her.”

Henry Chang said bitterly, “You think I got to force a woman? You think Benny here gotta force a woman?”

What was I going to do, disagree?

“This doesn’t seem like too tough a town to get laid in,” I granted them.

“We can kill you,” Ida said. “We can beat shit outa you. But we ain’t gonna.” He turned to Takai. “Mack, get the car.”

The lean Japanese nodded and headed out of the clearing onto the blacktop.

Ida said, “You know what the cops do? When they not find my tire tracks here, they bring my car out and drive it around and make tracks. But they not get away with it.”

“I heard,” I said. “But I also heard you’ve got supporters in the department.”

Ida nodded and so did Ahakuelo; Chang was studying me with apparent hatred.

“Lemme tell you how far that help go,” Ida said. “That just means when some cop is doin’ things to frame us, another cop warn us.”

Nearby, an auto motor started up. In a few moments, headlights came slicing into the clearing as Takai pulled up and, leaving the engine running, hopped out of the tan Ford Phaeton, its top down.

“The infamous car,” I said.

“Come for ride,” Ida said.

Soon our little group had piled into the Phaeton, Takai, Chang, and Ahakuelo in back, Ida behind the wheel in front with me in the rider’s seat.

“We didn’t rape on that woman,” Ida said over the gentle rumble of the well-tuned Model A engine. We were tooling down Ala Moana smoothly, but for the occasional pothole.

“Why don’t you tell me about that night, Horace?”

“My friends call me Shorty,” he said.

So we were pals now?

“Fine, Shorty,” I said. I turned my head to look back at the three unfriendly faces in the backseat. “You guys call me Nate.”

Takai pointed to himself. “They call me Mack.” He pointed to dour Henry Chang. “He’s Eau.” It sounded like he was saying, “He’s you.” But I figured it out after a second.

Ahakuelo said, “Call me Benny.”

And I’ll be damned if he didn’t extend his hand. I reached around and shook with him. No similar offer came from the others.

“That Saturday night last September,” Ida said, “I was just fooling around. Go to Mochizuki Tea House, no action. Try a Filipino speak over in Tin Can Alley, run into Mack and Benny. Some beer, some talk.”

The lights of Honolulu were up ahead, and the nearly jungle-like area was thinning out. The ocean was visible at left, endless black glimmering gold, stretching to a purple starry sky overseen by a golden moon.

“Benny knew about a wedding luau we could crash,” Ida said.

Behind me Benny said, “We weren’t invited but the son of the host, Doc Correa, he’s a friend of mine.”

“We had beer, some roast pig. We run into Eau and Joe Kahahawai at the luau. Then things got kinda slow, and somebody say, how ’bout we go to dance at Waikiki Park?”

We were passing by a Hooverville, a city of shacks fashioned from flattened tin cans, scrap sheet metal, crates and boxes…nothing uniquely Hawaiian about this squatter’s town, except that it was oceanfront property.

“We get to dance at eleven-thirty. We don’t wanna pay for tickets ’cause we know at midnight, it pau, over. So we bum a couple ticket stubs off some friends who was leaving the dance, and Joe and Eau take the stubs and go in, I wait in parkin’ lot.”