Neil Plakcy - Mahu Surfer

“Yup, in Honolulu. For a while when I was a kid, we belonged to this native Hawaiian club after school, where we practiced speaking Hawaiian. We made leis out of kukui nuts, we surfed, we learned to paddle. A little hula, too, but don’t ask me to dance for you.”

She laughed. “I won’t.” She sized me up. “You want to try the back of the canoe?”

“Sure.” I knew that’s where they put the biggest and strongest guys. I joined a team of six in pushing an outrigger into the water, and then we all jumped in and started paddling out to sea.

I sat in the fifth seat, behind a slim Hawaiian guy with incredible biceps and triceps, and in front of a stocky haole guy. I noticed that his right leg, from the knee down, was prosthetic, but he was able to move around easily on it, and use his awesome upper body strength in the outrigger. Whenever I lost the rhythm of the oars, I felt his jabbing me in the back. I never heard him whoop or yell as the others did when we crested the wave. He approached his rowing as if he were on work-release from prison, with a grim determination that sapped some of my fun.

We got a good workout, paddling out beyond the surf, then turning around, catching a wave, and paddling like hell to catch it. We did some quick races as well, and then returned to the beach. The Hawaiian guy introduced himself to me as we dragged the canoe back up on the sand. “I’m Tepano. You rowed before?”

“When I was a kid. How about you, you been doing this for a long time?”

“Couple of years. It’s a great workout.” The rest of the team streamed off around us, leaving me walking up toward the parking lot with Tepano. “Everybody’s pretty friendly, too.”

“That guy behind me didn’t seem so friendly,” I said, referring to the haole with the prosthetic leg.

“Rich? He’s okay. He just doesn’t like surfers.”

The sun was fully up, and there was a nice breeze coming in off the ocean. It was going to be a beautiful day. “Some awful surfboard incident in his childhood?”

Tepano laughed. “Not exactly.” His face got serious then. “He was a pretty good surfer, once. Then the Army sent him to Bosnia and his leg got blown off. That prosthetic is state of the art, but he can’t feel a board under him, so he could never surf again. Made him a little bitter.”

“I guess.” I could only imagine how I’d feel if I couldn’t surf any more.

“Plus he has this job, security guard for this crazy old guy who owns a stretch of beach. He’s always chasing surfers away.”

“I’ll keep my distance.”

“Probably a good idea.” He gave me a shaka, the Hawaiian two-fingered salute, and said, “Hope to see you here again some time.”

“You probably will.” As I was walking the last bit to my truck, Melody was walking past with another woman, Mary, who was, like Melody, in her late twenties or early thirties, and very fit. Mary’s skin was tanned dark, and her glossy black hair was pulled into a long ponytail.

Melody asked me, “You going to be around for a while? We could use some strength on our B team.”

“A few weeks,” I said. “I can’t commit to anything, but I’d like to drop by practice again some time, if that’s okay?”

“Sure.”

Mary said, “Gotta go, Mel. See you later,” and kissed Melody on the mouth. It seemed like a pretty intimate gesture to me, and I noticed that Mary wore a yellow gold wedding band. I wondered if they were lesbian partners, but Melody did not wear a band at all.

As Mary walked away, Melody turned back to me. “What brought you out today?”

I shrugged. “I’ve been surfing the last couple of weeks, saw your poster.” I decided to take a gamble. “I remembered that a surfer I knew recommended you. Jersey guy named Mike Pratt?”

Melody’s face fell. “I guess you didn’t hear. Mike died about a month or two ago.”

“No!” I said. “Surfing?”

“You could say that. He was on his board at Pipeline, and somebody shot him. Dead by the time he washed up on the shore.”

Tears began forming at the corners of Melody’s eyes. “Gosh, I’m sorry. Was he a friend of yours?”

“Yeah, I guess. He was on our A team for a while. Really strong guy. You probably saw, we’re like a family here. Mike’s death hit us all pretty hard.”

“They catch the guy who did it?”

She shook her head. “Not a clue. The police came around, but they didn’t know anything.”

“I’m surprised anybody would even talk to them,” I said. “Surfers and cops don’t usually get along.”

“If they’d known the right questions to ask, we might have talked,” Melody said. She looked at me strangely. “Hey, do I recognize you?”

“Kimo Kanapa’aka,” I said. “Formerly of the Honolulu PD.”

“Oh, my God, I read about you. That is so totally unfair, what they did to you.” I could see the wheels turning behind her eyes. “Say, maybe you could look into what happened to Mike. I could make some introductions here for you.”

“I don’t know. The police aren’t exactly eager to hear from me-or my lawyer-these days.”

“But you could show them. Find out what happened to Mike, prove you should be a detective again.”

I knew the friends and family of victims were eager to see murderers caught and punished, but I’d never seen this side before, this view that the police were clueless and needed the help of someone outside the force to solve crimes.

“You think people here know something the police don’t?”

“I’m sure of it,” Melody said. “You got time for a cup of coffee?”

Conversations

Melody and I met a few minutes later at the Kope Bean, a little coffee shop in a strip center on the Kam Highway. A lot of surfers were getting a caffeine fix before hitting the waves, and a bunch of clearly Honolulu-bound business types were doing the same before hitting the H2 down toward the city.

The place was decorated in a style I can only describe as island Starbucks; the walls were painted with murals of coffee beans, called kope in Hawaiian, growing on bushes on the slopes of what looked like Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea. There were two groups of overstuffed arm chairs, and a number of blond wood tables and chairs for the laptop set.

Melody ordered a tall vanilla soy latte and I got their signature macadamia mocha latte in the longboard size, their largest. We snagged a pair of the comfortable chairs and settled down. She was dressed for work by then, a light yellow linen dress and sandals, a lei of shiny brown kukui nuts and a sports watch her only jewelry. With her tanned skin and her sun-bleached blonde hair, she could have been an advertisement for healthy summer living.

Mana’o Company was playing low in the background, encouraging us to “Spread a Little Aloha” around the world, and in one corner of the room a bust of King Kamehameha surveyed us, an electric blue plastic lei around his neck.

“So how long did you know Mike?” I asked, when we were settled.

“About three years. He came to the halau right after he got to the North Shore, as part of his strength training.”

Though most people think halau means a place you can learn to hula, it also means a long house for canoes. “How well did you know him?”

Melody sipped her latte and considered. “Better than an acquaintance, not as well as a friend,” she said finally. “We talked a lot, and I heard all about his background, but I didn’t see him socially. Of course, you can’t help running into people up here; it really is a small world.”

“I’ve heard he was a dedicated surfer.”

“Fierce. It was what he lived to do. Everything else revolved around surfing. How he trained, who he hung out with, how he supported himself.”