He laughed slightly, as if noticing my covert inspection. Embarrassed, I tried to remember what he’d asked me about. “Well, I’m used to very strong Tanzanian coffee, so Kona’s a bit mild for my taste.”
He looked at me for a second and I had the sense I’d said something very wrong. Then he burst out laughing-a deep, merry laugh that seemed to boom around the store.
“What’s funny?” I asked cautiously.
“You a tourist, huh? I didn’t realize at first, ’cause when I saw you talking to Charisse, I thought you just another hapa chick.”
“Well, I am hapa,” I said, recalling that this was the common term in Hawaii for a person of mixed ancestry. In Japan, the same expression existed, but it was said slightly differently: hafu. In English, it means half. Half a person, not the real thing. Hapa was better; it almost sounded hip.
The hunk interrupted my linguistic analysis. “Yeah, but I asked you howzit, which means, how are you? I wasn’t asking for an opinion on my coffee.”
“Your coffee?” I asked. He wasn’t wearing an apron at his waist like Charisse had. He certainly didn’t look like an employee.
The man laughed again. “I’m Kainoa Stevens, and yes, that cup you’re drinking comes from my cousin’s coffee plantation on the Big Island. I own this place.”
I shook hands reluctantly, because I expected a man who looked part Samoan to have a crusher grip. But the handshake was just firm enough, and he followed it up by pulling a business card out of his baggy shorts pocket. The card, still warm from his body heat, was decorated with twin palms, his name, and the phrase ‘Coffee and Construction’. At the bottom were four phone numbers. Out of habit, I held the card the way one does in Japan, reading everything before carefully before putting it down. Now, I was obligated to introduce myself: I told him my name.
“Yeah, Charisse said you staying at Kainani. How did you ever find your way here?”
“I chanced upon it, when I was jogging through the wilderness area.”
Kainoa laughed. “Had to be something like that, because the road here is pretty indirect. But you gotta understand that it wasn’t wilderness you crossed. It’s all part of the Pierce Holdings, and if you trespass again, you better watch out that the luna don’t catch you.”
“I had no idea I was trespassing. I didn’t see any keep-out signs.”
“That’s probably because you ran through the middle of the fields. There are warning signs on the fence along Farrington Highway.”
“So, what’s a luna?” I asked.
“In plantation time, it was the guy who oversaw the workers. No sugar workers anymore, so Albert Rivera just oversees the security of the land. People around here call him the luna because that’s the job his father worked, and his grandfather, too.”
“Hmm. I guess I’ll have to put together a nice apology for him in advance, because I don’t know how to return to Kainani any other way.”
“That regular route here is via Farrington Highway, but it’s probably four miles longer than the route you took. I’d say, take a chance if you want run over for coffee again-which I’m not even sure you do.” He smiled at me, but I sensed a challenge behind the straight, shining white teeth.
“It’s good coffee, Kainoa, just not as strong as I normally have it. I probably should just order a double shot in my latte.”
“At my cousin’s plantation, he experiments with new varieties all the time. I think I’m gonna tell him, grow me a super-strong bean for strong mainland chicks.”
“Really, don’t go to the trouble!” I suddenly had a sense he was flirting with me, and I didn’t want to encourage him. Kainoa was not only half a decade younger than me; he was not Michael.
“Or better yet, I could sell this place to Mitsuo Kikuchi and make my own coffee plantation on the Big Island. What you think of that?”
“I was reading about Kikuchi’s plans in the paper, as you probably noticed. Are you actually in favor of the development?”
“Sure.” Kainoa’s tone was casual. “I have a construction sideline business, you know, so I’m for most kinds of development. And as far as this business goes, hell, I’d much rather have two roads that come to my shop than a bunch of old shacks going to waste. When I was a kid growing up, sure I liked to hang out there, smoking pakolo with the mokes. Now that I’m a property owner, I don’t want that kind of stuff over here.”
“But you wouldn’t be a property owner with anything to gain if you sold to Kikuchi.”
Kainoa leaned so close that I edged back slightly. “Hey, I’d love to stay where I am. But when Kikuchi has an idea, he gets what he wants. You know the true reason that he built Kainani?”
“To make money?” I hazarded.
“More than that. He built it to have a hiding place for his lolo son. People in Japan or Honolulu ask what the son’s doing, and he likes to say Jiro’s running the resort. In reality, this do-nothing Jiro lives in a townhouse with a round-the-clock head shrink supposed to keep him out of trouble. I know because I see the two of them together constantly-at the movie theater, the Safeway, in bars. Jiro even comes in here couple of afternoons a week, trying to pick up Charisse, who’s so simple and friendly she don’t understand.”
“What do you mean about Charisse?”
“She’s a great kid, but a chatterbox! She’ll talk to anybody, go with anyone. Even a creep.”
If Jiro was getting around as much as he did, he sounded as if he was doing pretty well. I said, “So you’re telling me that Mitsuo Kikuchi is making sure his son gets good care within the grounds of a beautiful place, and he doesn’t want people to know his son doesn’t have a job? That doesn’t sound so terrible, especially if you look at the norms of Japanese behavior.”
“Well, to build this pretty holding place for his son, he screwed everybody,” Kainoa said fiercely. “There was a local community there, about sixty or seventy homes. I grew up in that place.”
“Is leasehold like renting?”
“Not exactly. It was something the kamaaina landowners use to profit from selling their land repeatedly.”
Kamaaina, I recalled, meant child of the land. It generally meant local and Hawaiian, with the exception of the Hawaii-born descendents of the British and American missionaries, many of whom mixed their bloodlines with daughters of the Hawaiian chief class: strategic marriages that resulted in the acquisition of more land.
“Our parents and grandparents helped each other buy homes as early as they could, and in those days they only had the right to be on the land for a period of time. Usually, the leasehold had a time period that sounded long-sometimes fifty, eighty years, like that.” Kainoa looked down for a minute. “When my daddy turned seventy, he had twenty years left to live on the property. He was anxious about whether anyone would want to buy the place, with twenty years or less left on the lease before re-negotiation. He’d have to sell for almost nothing, to get someone to take it.”
“That’s awful!”
“Yeah. So here comes Kikuchi, and he offers everyone on-the-spot money for their homes, but that’s if they all agree to leave. And at the same time, Pierce Holdings leaks the information that they may be shortening the lifespan of the leaseholds.”
“But how could they back out on a lease, legally?”
“Pierce Holdings is the second largest landholder on the Leeward Side. Its CEO can force the state government to cooperate with them because if they don’t cooperate, the company won’t build a school, or a police station, or a road.”
“You mean the Pierces actually pay for government buildings?”
“Sure. For the tax credit, and the power it gives them. If the government here wants to add a road they have to get permission from the big landholders or the military, who own the land where the road would pass.”
“How did you become owner of this coffee shop, since all the surrounding land belongs to the Pierces?” I asked.
Kainoa gazed around with an almost wistful expression. “I took over this building after my father died. He bought it from the Pierces back when Ewa Sugar shut down. The sale was a kind of favor, because my grandfather ran the general store for over forty years, which is why my family would look like stink at me if I sold it.”
Again, a kind of paternalism from the Pierces, but at least the store had stayed in working people’s hands. I said, “Your store is the last living part of the old plantation village. I understand why you wouldn’t want to sell off
