Just then my mother came in. “Come for dinner, now,” she said. My father stood and offered his arm to Uncle Chin, who struggled up from his chair. He murmured something to my father, who laughed. I wondered if Harry and I would end that way, still friends, helping each other over the rough places in our lives.
We didn’t talk any more about Tommy Pang. At dinner, Aunt Mei-Mei and my mother kept a light banter going, my father occasionally making jokes. I was happy they could all be together, support each other. Uncle Chin had aged a lot over the last few days, and it surprised me to consider that he must have loved Tommy Pang very much, even though he had called him a hard man. I knew that my father loved me and my brothers very deeply, in a way that often could not even be expressed, and I was sure he would be as crushed as Uncle Chin if one of us were to die.
I think your attitude toward your parents changes as you get older. You’re more able to see them as human beings who have made choices and handled their lives as best they could. I didn’t always agree with the decisions my father had made; I would rather he had worked less when I was a kid, and spent more time with us. I thought we could have had a few less toys, eaten more rice and poi and less steak, and in return had more of him, but it was the fifties and sixties then, and that’s what fathers did. I’m sure my mother, born poor and determined never to be poor again, had a lot to do with that, too, but again, you couldn’t fault her for doing what she thought was best for her family.
It was saddening to know that I would never have more family than this, and that I would lose them eventually. I wouldn’t have a wife, though I hoped someday I would find a partner. I would never have children and have to make choices on how to raise them; never see their first steps or first day at school, nor their graduations or weddings. I would never have a luau to celebrate the birth of my child, and never have grandchildren to swarm over me the way my nieces and nephews did to my father.
I would always be a part of my brothers’ lives, or hoped I would, be Uncle Kimo to Jeffrey and Ashley and their brothers and sisters, and that would have to be enough. Like my parents, I took the hand I was dealt and tried to make the best of it.
I looked at my watch. It was already late; I had to drive back to Waikiki and pick up Tim, and then go out to the Boardwalk and see if anyone could identify Wayne or Derek. I made my excuses as my mother and Aunt Mei- Mei were clearing the dessert dishes. “So late, you have to work?” my mother asked.
“I have to check out a suspect’s alibi. He was there late, I have to go there late.”
She shook her head. My father said, “Be careful, Keechee.”
“I will be.” To Uncle Chin I said, “I am very sorry, for you, about Tommy. I’ll do my best to catch whoever killed him.”
Uncle Chin smiled at me. “You my son, too, Kimo,” he said. “ He kanaka pono ‘oe, lokomaika‘i ‘oe.”
I looked down. “You flatter me, Uncle Chin.” He had told me I was a powerful person, and good-hearted as well.
“He says the truth,” my father said. “Your mother and I are very proud of you.”
How proud would they be, I thought, as I drove back down to Waikiki, if they knew who I really was?
The Boardwalk looked nondescript from the outside, stuck near the end of a strip mall, with nothing but a wooden walkway over the concrete sidewalk to distinguish it from the Karate school and beeper store on either side. Tim said, “This is it?” when we pulled up in my truck.
“This is it.” We walked up to the front door, and stepped through a beaded curtain into a dark vestibule. I heard the pounding beat of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” as we turned right and stepped through another curtain into a pile of sand.
At least that’s what it felt like. It was a long, narrow sandbox that I guess those in the know stepped over. As it was we both stepped in it, and then as we walked farther in, the sand sifted out of our shoes.
The room was dark, but spotlights washed places on the rough wooden walls. It was as kitschy as the Rod and Reel, but in a different style. This was early beach bum, with fishing nets hung from the ceiling, and tattered pin-ups of boys in skimpy bathing suits on the walls. The centerpiece was a long bar that ran the length of one wall. Instead of a polished top its surface was made of rough wood planks, like a beachfront boardwalk, and at about the middle a well-muscled Hawaiian boy in his early twenties strutted and danced in a jockstrap, reaching in often to fondle himself. At the far end, in his own pool of light, an equally well-muscled, dark-haired haole boy of about the same age practiced his own posturing.
“They have bars like this back in Boston,” Tim whispered. “But I never went to one.”
“There’s a first time for everything,” I whispered back.
There was another smaller bar in a back room, through a wide archway, and on the other side of the room there were four pool tables, each lit by its own fake stained-glass lamp. There were two or three guys at each of the tables, and maybe a dozen by the bar.
I hadn’t changed from the clothes I’d worn all day-a maroon polo shirt and jeans. Tim had taken off the tie I guessed he’d worn to work, but was still wearing a white oxford cloth button down shirt, and a pair of neatly pressed khakis. The guys around us, who ranged in age from what I guessed to be late teens to mid-fifties, were all dressed similarly, though there were a few in t-shirts and another couple in leather pants with chains attached to the pockets.
We walked up to the bar and tried very hard to avoid the boy thrusting his crotch toward our heads. I ordered beers for both of us, and then when the bartender, a guy who looked half Hawaiian and half Chinese, brought them I showed him my ID. “Yeah?”
I’d deliberately chosen a place where one of the spotlights washed a section of bar. I pulled out a picture of Wayne I’d found on a club page of the Yale website, and asked, “Have you seen this guy?”
The bartender looked at it and shrugged. “I think so.”
“You remember when?”
He laughed. “You gotta be kidding.”
“Think a little harder,” I said. “I’ve got some friends in the department who don’t like underage drinking very much. I could send them over here.”
He didn’t like that. He picked up Wayne’s picture, looked at it again, and then closed his eyes. “Not for a couple of weeks,” he said when he opened them again. “He’s got a friend, doesn’t he?”
I showed him a picture of Derek I’d found at the same place. “Yeah, that’s him,” he said. “They’re usually together, though sometimes the haole cruises by himself.”
“So they weren’t in here a week ago Tuesday, the sixteenth?”
He shook his head. “No. I know that for a fact, because we were closed that night.” He looked at me. “Your friends in the department were here the Saturday before. They said they were looking for drugs, but they didn’t find anything. And I don’t serve anybody under twenty-one. Still they decided they didn’t like the idea of a fag bar, so they closed us down. It took us a full week to get it cleared up and reopen.”
I nodded. He walked away to serve somebody else down the counter. If the police didn’t like fags getting together at a bar on the edge of town, they certainly weren’t going to like one on their force.
For an hour or so we stood around and watched the guys playing pool, me leaning back against Tim, feeling the contact my shoulders made against his chest, his arms around my waist. Every time his fingertips grazed my skin I felt shock waves rolling through my chest and down into my groin. I was hard almost the entire time.
We drank our beers, and swayed to the rhythm of the music on the jukebox, and every now and then we turned around and kissed. Around us, men moved through the shadows and the light, talking in small groups, flirting, or silently cruising the bar waiting for sparks to fly. A Thai or Vietnamese boy who couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen chatted at the bar with a haole man in his fifties, and as I watched, the man stroked the boy’s cheek in a gesture of unexpected tenderness.
Tendrils of smoke drifted through the wash of a light near us, and the air smelled of cigarettes, beer and testosterone. At a table in the back, two men who looked like brothers alternately kissed and sat back and stared at each other with wide smiles. Near the door, three men had a heated discussion, one of them gesturing wildly and repeatedly pointing his finger at his head as if he was shooting himself. There was a rotating stable of six guys who danced on the bar, all of them young, well-muscled and well-hung.
It was interesting to be out in public with Tim and not care about anybody else. And nobody seemed to care
