Neil Plakcy - Mahu

“I collected a few favors over the years. Once in a while I use them.” He held up his hand. “Wait, wait, I know you. You want to complain. You want to do everything on your own, no help from anybody else. Well, you’re not the first of my sons I had to ask a favor for.”

He sat back in his chair and put his feet up on the coffee table. “Your brother Lui was not a good student, you know. He barely graduated from UH. And then he couldn’t find a job. I knew he was a hard worker, just not a student. You remember my friend Milton Gardner?”

I nodded. Gardner had once owned the TV station Lui manages. “I agreed to build a family room on his house, at cost, if he’d give Lui a job. I had to do most of the work myself, nights and weekends.” My father smiled. “Lui never knew about it. And if you tell him, I’ll deny it.”

“I know how to keep a secret.”

“Yes, I know.” He paused again. “You never knew Haoa was arrested, did you?”

“You mean before last week?”

“When he was seventeen, he and some of his friends from Punahou, from the football team, stole a car and went for a joyride, and crashed it. There was no question Haoa was the ringleader. Even the police could see that, from the way he acted with the other boys.”

“I never knew this.”

“We didn’t tell anyone. I knew old Judge Fong-I used to take care of his yard, when I was a boy. I rounded up the other fathers, and we made a deal. The boys worked that summer, for free, cleaning up the beach, and the other fathers and I chipped in and bought a new car to replace the one that was destroyed.” He shook his head. “It all came out all right in the end, but Judge Fong never thought the same of me.”

My father smiled. “I have three sons. Each of them so different, yet each of them so much like me. Or like a part of me. You know, when I was younger, before I met your mother, I had a bad temper. Like Haoa. Chin and I used to run together, we’d get in fights, make mischief.” He shook his head. “Ai, ya, I’m glad I grew out of that. I hope one day your brother will. And then Lui, well, Lui is the businessman in me. I knew some influential people in my time, the men who made things happen in this state. I was privileged to call a few of them my friends. Lui’s the same way, with his own generation.”

“And me?” I asked. “What part of you is in me?”

He smiled. “You’re my dreamer. You know, when I was a boy, I used to climb up to the roof of our house and watch the stars. Just like you. And I loved to be out in nature, swimming and surfing like you.”

My mother came back in then, with three glasses of iced tea on a silver tray. My father picked up his glass and raised it to me. “To you, Kimo. Keep dreaming.” He and my mother smiled and we all clinked glasses. I knew he would never tell me the deal he had made on my behalf, what it had cost him in money, or work, or the regard of his fellows. And the funny thing is that it didn’t matter. I understood that he did these things for us as a matter of course, because he was our father, because he was the man he was.

After I left my parents I drove to Lui’s office downtown. It was just after five, but I knew he often stayed around until after the six o’clock news. I signed in with the guard, who recognized me. “Your brother’s in his office,” he said. “You can go right up.”

“Thanks.”

“Can I tell you something?” He was an older guy, haole, maybe in his late fifties.

“Sure.”

“I’ve got a nephew that’s gay. Sweetest kid you ever want to know. He worked for this department store on the mainland, and they fired him when they found out. He sued the bastards, and won. Got enough money to set up his own little store, he sells used clothes, vintage stuff.” He looked up at me. “You do your job, nobody should be able to stop you just because of who you are.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Where’s his store, on the mainland?”

“Sausalito. Little town just north of San Francisco.”

“I know it. I ever get over there, I’ll stop by.”

“You do that.” He smiled. “You can take the first elevator, goes direct to the executive floor.”

I found Lui in his office with the door open, and knocked on it. “Kimo,” he said. “Come on in.”

I stuck out my hand to shake his, and instead he grasped me in a big hug. I hugged him back, surprised, because it was the second time in a week he’d hugged me.

I told him about the hearing, and that I thought our father had pulled some strings on my behalf. “I wanted to tell you I appreciate that series you ran,” I said. “About gay cops. I didn’t catch all of them, but I’m sure that they helped convince HPD that they weren’t exactly blazing new trails.”

“It wasn’t easy to convince the powers that be about that one.” He looked a little embarrassed. “We started out with a sensational angle. You know that’s the kind of stuff we do around here.”

I smiled. “I know.”

“But then as the guys did the research, they found all this positive stuff. So we kind of snuck it past, and I think the viewers liked it. We actually did some pretty good numbers because of that series.”

My father was right, Lui was definitely the businessman in the family. “You stuck your neck out for me,” I said. “I appreciate it. If the numbers had gone the other way you’d have been in trouble.”

“TV news is ephemeral.” He snapped his fingers. “You blink and the segment’s over. Nobody even remembers it twenty-four hours later.”

I looked around his office. One wall was filled with photos of Lui talking, shaking hands, sharing drinks with most of the movers and shakers in Honolulu. “I want you to know I appreciate everything you did for me,” I said. “Everything. The series helped, but I know it took more than that for me to keep my job. Dad knows a lot of people, sure, but even he admits you know more of the people who make things happen nowadays. I’m sure you put a word or two in on my behalf.” I nodded my head in the general direction of the photos.

“I might have called in a few favors.”

“That must have cost you.”

“Nothing I can’t afford.”

That night I called Akoni at home. He’d already heard, from Yumuri, the basic outline of what had happened. “Are you going to take the job?”

“I worked hard to get to homicide. I’m not going to give it up. There are guys who aren’t going to like me, but that’s their problem. I’ve got to be who I’ve got to be.”

“You’re the first homosexual I’ve known.” Akoni paused. “It’s made me think a lot, you know. Changed my attitudes. I mean, I’m not saying I don’t still have a long way to go. But it isn’t even a place I ever thought of going until you-came out, I guess.”

“So?”

“So I’ll bet there’s lots of other guys, cops and other people, too, who could start changing the way they think. That’s an important job, changing the way people think.”

“That’s the part of the job I don’t like,” I said. “I’m not all that comfortable with being gay yet. I want people to think of what I can do, not who I am. I’m worried people are going to see me as the gay cop, and they’ll only see the gay part, not the cop part. And that’s not who I am.”

“I think it is,” Akoni said quietly.

“What?”

“You’re not just a cop anymore, Kimo. Like it or not, you’re a gay cop. True, people are going to see you that way, just like if you went to the mainland they’d see you as a Hawaiian cop, or some kind of mixed-race cop. You better get accustomed to it.”

“Maybe I should just quit the force. I could be a security guard or an insurance agent or something.”