Neil Plakcy - Mahu Surfer

“Good,” he said, smiling across at me. “You know I worry about you.” He took a forkful of eggs and Spam, and smiled at the taste. “Just don’t tell your mother.”

“Don’t tell me what?” my mother asked, coming in to the kitchen in her white terrycloth robe, a gift from a spa vacation my father had treated her to the year before.

My father’s eyes widened. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you he had Spam for breakfast,” I said. “You know how you worry about his cholesterol.”

I was surprised at how quickly the lie came to my mouth. I try and believe I am an honest person, but years of harboring secret desires, lying to myself as much as others, had made the habit easier. So much for my new honesty; like the position I thought I was getting at District 1, it had evaporated quickly.

“You shouldn’t eat like that, Al,” she said, taking the half-eaten plate from him and scraping the Spam into the garbage. “You know what the doctor said.”

“He said, don’t eat anything that tastes good,” my father grumbled to me.

Let’s Go Surfing Now

I left them a little later, taking the Kamehameha Highway up through the center of the island, past pineapple plantations and tourists in rented cars. It was a sunny day, clear skies and gentle breezes ruffling the papery blossoms of wild red and purple bougainvillea along the highway, and I rolled down my windows, turned the volume up on an early Hapa CD, and tried to relax.

It had been a rough couple of weeks, emotionally and physically, and I knew it would take me a long time to process everything that had happened. But now I had to focus on the case, and solve it quickly so I could get back to Honolulu and get on with my life.

My cell phone rang about halfway up the Kam. It was my second brother, Haoa, the one who had the hardest time with my coming out. “Eh, brah, howzit?”

“Heading for the big waves,” I said. “How you doing?”

Both my brothers had helped me put away the case that had been the cause of my coming out, and Haoa had nearly been shot. That experience seemed to have shaken my big, solid brother, and I was sorry I was leaving Honolulu when he might need me.

“Keeping busy. We’re redoing all the planting for an office building out in Kahala.” Haoa’s landscaping company had continued to grow, and he sometimes worked with our father on projects. I was a little jealous of that.

I asked about his wife, Tatiana, and their kids, and heard all their news. Then there was an awkward silence. I thought for a moment the connection had been broken and checked the phone’s display to make sure the call hadn’t dropped. Finally, he said, “How you sleep, brah? Going through everything you do?”

“I get nightmares. And sometimes my nerves keep going and I can only doze. But then whatever’s bothering me passes, and I sleep again. For a while.” I held my breath, waiting for him to say something, and when he didn’t, I said, “You will, too. Give it time.”

“Yeah. I hope so.” He yawned. “Gotta make a living. You take care, brah.”

“You, too.”

I hung up, feeling like shit yet again. Add Haoa to the list of all those I owed. I should never have involved civilians in a case, least of all my own family, but I hadn’t had a choice; I had been suspended at the time and knew the only way I could get back to the force was to solve the case myself, however I could.

Thunderclouds moved overhead, and began to spit, then shower me. I turned on the wipers, flicked on the headlights, and kept going. I drove directly to Hale’iwa, where the bodies had all been found, passing the big carved sign with the surfer catching a wave right in the middle. Every time I go through that arched bridge over the Anahulu River, I get excited, because it means I’m going surfing, and there’s nothing better.

There are no motels anywhere in the area, so I stopped at Fujioka’s Supermarket, where all the visiting surfers check out the bulletin boards for rooms in private homes, for shacks with no plumbing but great ocean views, even for just a stretch of concrete floor with room enough for a sleeping bag and a surfboard.

Though any of the above might have served when I was 22 and broke (and many did), I could afford to be a little pickier at 32, with a credit card in my pocket and some money in the bank. I copied down information from half a dozen listings, and might have copied one more, from a flyer being posted by a heavyset Filipina with too much eye shadow and lipstick like a bloody gash across her mouth. But she saw me looking, recognized me, and put the flyer in her handbag instead.

I turned down one place where the landlady eyed me like a rib roast in the refrigerated meat case, another where I would have shared a bathroom with half a dozen surfer dudes in their twenties, a third that was the size of my closet back in Waikiki, and a fourth that was so close to the Kam Highway that I could almost reach out the door and touch the trucks heading up from Honolulu.

Fortunately the last place I tried was a wood-frame home called Hibiscus House, that had been added onto like a crazy quilt. The main house faced the street, but the driveway ran up alongside it, and the owners had built a series of rooms, one after the other, each with their own entrance and bathroom. It was as close to a cheap motel room as I was going to find, so I paid $500 for a week in advance (in cash, thank you, requiring a quick trip back into Hale’iwa to find an ATM), and set about getting my feet wet in the cool Pacific.

That first day I didn’t get into the ocean until late afternoon, after the rain clouds had passed over, and the sinking sun welcomed me back with water temperatures in the high 70s and light trade winds. There was still a line of cars parked on Ke Nui Road, but I snagged a spot, then dragged my board off the roof rack of the truck and headed down the sand.

People were starting to pack up, pulling off their wetsuits, coiling up their leashes and shouldering their boards, but I made my way down the hard-packed sand and felt the frothy water swirl around my ankles. I dropped my board into the surf, paddled outside the breakers and rode my first wave, a mid-sized one that broke to the left. It felt good to be back on the water.

My room at Hibiscus House came equipped with a miniature refrigerator (the tiny freezer compartment was fused solid with ice that looked like it had been there since before statehood) and a working toaster, so I swung past Fujioka’s on my way home and picked up bottled water, barbecue flavored Fritos, and brown sugar and cinnamon Pop Tarts. Not exactly hitting all the food groups, but I did also get some take-out sushi and chocolate-chip cookies for dessert, and then retreated to my room like an animal holing up in its burrow.

There had been water damage by the window, a brown stain the color of dried blood dripping from the sill to the floor. The twin mattress was bowed in the middle and smelled like generations of men had jerked off into it. The water in the bathroom was rusty and the bulb in the overhead light flickered like something from a bad movie. But it was home, at least until I earned the right to go back to Waikiki.

The next morning I went back to Pipeline, but before I got into the water I visualized the scene, based on what I’d read in the case dossier. Someone had been able to bring an M4 carbine to the beach, take careful aim, and shoot a surfer off his board. An M4’s not the kind of gun you can stash in the waistband of your shorts; it can be close to three feet long, and can be fitted with a dizzying array of scopes, lights, magazines and other apparatus. How the hell could you bring something like that to a beach and set it up?

After strolling casually up and down the beach a couple of times, making occasional eye contact, smiling and saying aloha, I saw a guy pulling his board out of a foam-lined neoprene bag, and had one of those Eureka! moments. Lots of surfers actually transport their boards in bags; with a little creativity you could probably fit a rifle in there, too.