brother. I’d seen them at parties, always gravitating toward one another. He seemed incomplete when he was not around her.
“What did she do?” my mother finally asked.
Haoa looked down at the table. “I told her what happened, basically. She was pretty pissed off, but we were getting past it. I told her I was sorry, that I’d been crazy.” He looked up at us. “She’s been crazy herself sometimes. You don’t know her like I do. I thought she owed it to me to forgive me, and she was going to.” He paused. “Then the mahu called her.”
“What?” I asked.
“The mahu we beat up.” He sighed deeply. “My luck. I take a punch at the first mahu I see, it turns out to be her hairdresser.”
I laughed. “You mean that guy, what’s his name, your kids call him Uncle something?”
“Uncle Tico. I didn’t recognize him. I mean, Christ, it was dark, he was coming out of this faggot bar, giggling or some shit.” He looked straight at me. “It was like he was you. I wanted to punch you. Jesus, I wanted to kill you. So I took it out on him.”
I closed my eyes. How many more innocent people were going to be dragged into this awful vortex my life had become?
“And?” my mother said finally. “What did Tatiana do?”
“She threw a vase at me. Bounced off the side of my head. Hey, Ma, you got any aspirin? My headache’s coming back.”
Our mother went to get him a pill. When she came back, he continued. “She said she could almost forgive me if it had been a stranger, but not Tico. I had to have known it was him, I had to have been acting out against her. You believe it? Acting out against her. She reads too many goddamn books.”
He took the aspirin with a swig of cold water from the refrigerator door. “Anyway she kicked me out. I could have gone to Lui’s but I didn’t want to face Liliha. You know she and Tatiana are like this.” He held up two fingers, intertwined. “If I’d known he was going to be here, I’d have gone there anyway.”
“Such discord in my house,” my father said. “Husband against wife, brother against brother, man against strangers.” To his credit, Haoa lowered his head again. I thought my father was about to launch into another tirade, but instead he looked at the clock. “It’s late,” he said. “We all need our sleep. In the morning, we’ll see how things look.”
My mother hurried upstairs to get out fresh sheets for Haoa’s old bed. “All the chickens come home to roost,” my father said as he shut off the kitchen light behind us.
I did not talk to Haoa as we climbed the stairs. I went into my room, he to his. All I could think of was Robertico Robles, out for a little fun on a Friday night, running into my brother’s wrath. I realized Haoa hadn’t even said how the man was.
It was dark in the hallway. The lights were out in my parents’ room and in Haoa’s. I walked to his door, which was ajar, and pushed it open a little more. “Haoa?”
“What is it?”
“How is he? The man you hurt. Uncle Tico.”
In the dim moonlight I could barely see Haoa in bed across from me. “He’ll survive,” he said, and then softened his tone. “I think he might have broken a couple of ribs. Maybe a slight concussion, too. But he was certainly well enough to call Tatiana and rat on me.”
Just who was the rat, I thought, as I pulled the door to behind me, was still open to speculation.
BROTHERHOOD
I slept better that night than I had for the last two, and didn’t wake until almost eight. I put on an old bathrobe and walked downstairs, where my father was in the kitchen making scrambled eggs and bacon for Haoa.
My father looked unaccountably cheerful for a man with two sons in various degrees of trouble with the law. “Morning, Keechee,” he said. “Sit. I’ll make you eggs.”
“Morning,” I said. I nodded at Haoa, who gave me a cursory nod in return.
“It’s nice to have two of my boys back home,” my father said, emptying Haoa’s eggs onto a plate and passing it to him. The bacon was already draining on paper towels. I got up and poured orange juice for all three of us while my father scrambled my eggs. I wondered if he got up this way every morning, made himself a solitary breakfast while my mother slept in.
Haoa buried himself in the Advertiser, reading the sports section first. I scanned the front section, then the metro, looking for familiar names. And there they were, surprisingly anglicized, our real birth names, James and Howard Kanapa‘aka, though fortunately the two articles, a page apart, had been written by different writers who hadn’t made the connection between us. My story was brief, a simple paragraph about an internal disciplinary action by the Honolulu Police Department. The only person quoted was Hiram Lin, the dried up prune, who said “No comment.” Right on, Hiram.
Haoa’s story was two paragraphs concerning a fight between several men in front of a Kuhio Avenue bar. The bar wasn’t named, and the whole gay-bashing context was missing. Haoa’s name was there, along with the names of two of his workmen, as well as Roberto Robles and two other men I assumed were the leather boys who intervened. I wanted to seek them out and congratulate them. Instead I casually mentioned, “You made the paper this morning, Haoa,” and passed the section to him.
Our father looked at me, then at Haoa, but didn’t say anything. We both finished eating at about the same time. He got up and took his plate to the sink, ignoring mine. As he turned the water on to rinse it, I stood up and carried mine to the sink as well.
He positioned himself to block me and I tried to slip through, but he hip-checked me. I pushed him to the side and put my dish down in the sink. He pushed me back.
“Don’t push me.” I slapped his chest with the palm of my hand.
“It’s your fault. All this trouble.” He pushed hard against me with both hands.
“Haoa! Kimo! Stop this right now!” our father said, and we backed away from each other, sullenly.
“Spoiled baby,” Haoa said. “Dragging everybody else into his problems.”
“You get drunk and beat up a poor helpless hairdresser and blame it on me,” I said. “Big brother. Great example.”
“I mean it,” our father said. “No more fighting.”
“You’re such a loser even your wife doesn’t want you around,” I said. “Have to run home to Mommy and Daddy.”
“You bastard,” he said, and he came at me, swinging.
I lunged at him. All my anger and fear and desperate sadness welled up in me with a terrible strength, and I remembered every time Haoa and Lui had picked on me as a kid, when I hadn’t been strong enough to fight back. Now he was forty and fat and even though he often did physical labor I was strong and I knew I could take him. I got in first with an uppercut to his chin that knocked his head back. He gave me a strong punch to the solar plexus that had me doubled over, and then we were all over each other, grunting and punching and trying to rip each other’s heads off.
“Boys! Stop! I’m ordering you!” It did no good. We were beyond paying attention to our father, each of us working out fights that were too strong for reason. Then he waded in to us, trying to separate us, and he was between us and we both hit him, and then realized what we had done, and fell back in horror.
“My god! What are you doing!”
The three of us turned at the same time to see our mother in the doorway of the kitchen in her bathrobe, her face aghast. I looked at my father. His glasses hung from one temple, and he looked disoriented. I had opened the wound on Haoa’s forehead again and blood dripped down the side of his cheek. My own jaw ached and I felt like Haoa might have cracked one of my ribs.
“Go to your rooms,” my mother said to us. She hurried over and sat my father down on his stool “Go on. I’ll talk to you later.”
