“No, loving you doesn’t make me sad—usually.” She smiled again, a little less wanly. “But that wasn’t what I was thinking. Not just that, anyway.”
“Then tell me,” he said. He wondered if she’d say, “I was thinking Peter Pukui did it.” That might explain her sadness. But crime was his preoccupation, not hers. They’d met randomly during his first week in Hilo, when he’d found and returned her snatched purse. Even then she didn’t care much about the theft. What intrigued her was a Hawaiian guy moving from Seattle to the Big Island instead of in the opposite direction—and to Hilo, even. Plus those hazel eyes and that smile and everything that went with them. She’d wanted to learn more.
“Well,” she began, “First I was thinking about Hawai‘i. About what’s been lost—everything, really. Everything’s lost. I wondered if Kamehameha should have killed the haoles instead of relying on them and their guns. He probably couldn’t have conquered the other islands. He didn’t need the haoles for anything else, really. But that could’ve been okay, each island with its own royalty.”
Kawika started to speak, but she spoke for him. “Then I realized, of course, the haoles could have found another chief on another island, or he could have found them. They would have armed that chief, who would’ve achieved the same result. And the haoles would still have come.”
“So Hawaii had no escape? That’s what’s making you sad?”
“No escape from haoles,” she replied. “Of course that makes me sad. But what’s the point? We’re practically all hapa now; even you and me, hapa haole. And nothing could have been done about it. Not really.”
“No,” he agreed.
“Still, the haoles could have done a better job here. Everything else aside, still, all this development—all this tourism, real estate, resorts, shopping centers—it’s all gone too far, Kawika. Way, way too far. It doesn’t have any boundaries. None. It’s pushing us into the sea.”
She got up, pulled on a short robe, gathered and pinned her shining hair. Her movements briefly exposed her leg tattoo, the dark black ala niho running from ankle to hip, the tale of her life in permanent ink, from her ancestry all the way to her future, the ala niho ending in symbols for land, ‘āina, and restoration. Kawika loved that black tattoo. He considered it part of her beauty, both visually and symbolically. He could have gotten one himself. But after his night with Patience, an ala niho stood on the other side of a Hawaiian cultural chasm he didn’t know how to cross now, didn’t know if he was worthy to cross.
“It’s not just the environment that’s been destroyed,” Carolyn continued. “Not just the scenery, the native species—even the native people. It’s the way people act that’s wrong now. Development—all the money, the greed, the corruption, all the reaction and the radicals on power trips—it’s ruined the society, Kawika. Turned everyone into phonies and crooks and sluts and scumbags.”
“I can see how all that might make you sad,” Kawika said, forcing a small laugh. “The end of Hawaiian civilization. That’s a lot.”
“But for me, it was just the beginning,” she said, laughing at herself a little now too. “Because then I started thinking about your work. You and your work, really.”
“Me and my work?”
“Crooks and scumbags are who you spend your days with, Kawika. And you’re going to do it for the rest of your life.”
“Whoa,” Kawika protested. “Someday I’m going to retire.”
She smiled but didn’t slow down. “For the rest of your working life, okay? And that’s a long time. Unless you get killed.”
“Uh … did you dream about a whacked-out kanaka taking a shot at me?”
She nodded solemnly. No trace of a smile now. “Yes, but I’ve thought about that before. You’re a cop, you take risks. I just never thought about the scumbag part—not until yesterday with S&R.”
“I’m not a scumbag,” he said, worried that a one-night stand in South Kohala might have just made him one. “And I don’t spend all my time with scumbags. C’mon, Terry’s not a scumbag.”
“No, but Terry has his Japanese roots and culture to anchor him or hold him up—otherwise he might be a scumbag too. You’re not Japanese, Kawika. What’s a lifetime of this work going to do to you? A professional lifetime, I mean.”
She paused, looking at him mournfully. He couldn’t say what he knew she needed to hear: You anchor me; you hold me up. A few days earlier it would have been easy.
“Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas—that what you mean?” he tried. “Tanaka’s got flea powder and I don’t?”
“Something like that,” she said, turning away.
“Wow, babe. That’s heavy-duty stuff. On top of civilization coming to an end.” He was still trying to jolly her out of it, and not succeeding. He put his arms around her, but she drew away gently, wrapping herself in her own arms.
“That’s not all, Kawika. Thinking about your work got me thinking about my work.”
“And?”
“Kawika,” she pleaded. Her eyes brimmed. “You have no idea how much I just want to get my degree, switch to forestry, get over there to Kaho‘olawe, start planting trees. Can you even imagine how much I want that, Kawika? I need an escape from the scumbags. There’s some sort of purity in planting things. Restoring something, saving something.”
“I know, I know. I understand. I support you—you know that.”
“You don’t understand,” she insisted. “I don’t want to be alone, Kawika. And there isn’t any police work on Kaho‘olawe. There aren’t any people on Kaho‘olawe.”
“Hey, there’s bomb disposal work,” he joked. The island had long been a Navy bombing range. That’s why it needed restoration—and why restoration would be difficult.
In frustration, she hit him on the arm—not hard, but not in jest either: Take me seriously.
“Okay,” he said, deciding to spin out a future they hadn’t discussed, and now might never discuss. “We’ve got options. We can live on Maui or O‘ahu. You
