Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

In the silence like a buzzing fly, not a single word, even as I leveled the gun. But the very act of aiming, and the silence, concentrated my mind and made the whole encounter so serious I saw clearly I could not do it.

I holstered my gun, walked out of the house, drove to my office, slept there that night, and the next day went to the chief’s office.

“Eh, here my badge.”

Chief Moniz said, “Skinny, I won’t let you do that,” and handed the badge back to me.

“I quit, brah. Pau already.”

“’Sap to you,” he said. But he made a disagreeing face. Then he praised me. “You one real shtrick buggah but you real shtrong.”

And he begged me to ask him why. I told him everything.

“Ho, hamajang, brah! Dey no more shame or what. No even close da light!”

I remembered that one of the men was wearing a baseball cap backward, and I mentioned that too because it bothered me. The chief just shook his head. He said he’d transfer me to the Big Island. Why should I lose my whole pension over a messy domestic?

Next day the house was empty. I picked up some things and flew to Hilo.

I had known about the whole shibai for a year or more. I was relieved when Erskine gave the reason he was turning in his gun and his badge, because I expected something a lot worse: I’d braced myself for him killing his wife and our losing him, probably the straightest cop we’d ever had. I hadn’t told him about Verna, because it seemed to me that it would send him over the edge, and we’d lose him, or he might go at anyone for telling him.

“I geevum dirty lickings!” kind of thing.

I’d hired Erskine when he was a young man, not knowing if a haole could do police work on an island like this. His father, from the mainland, was a hell-raiser. Erskine was closer to his mother. He might have turned out to be a hell-raiser himself — some of them do, from those households — but he was the opposite; and as the years passed he became more and more severe. He even gave the mayor a speeding ticket once. I said, “Skinny, why you so shtrick?”

“To serve and protect. No exceptions.” And his eyes went dead. “Bodda you?”

I kind of laughed, but it was a moving violation and the mayor’s insurance company was not too happy. Mottoes are scary expressions, and so is No exceptions.

I had complaints, not because he was lazy, like the others, but because he was so straight. No exceptions meant a citation to a float with a bad brake light in the Kamehameha Day parade; it meant a night in jail for the man who flipped him the bird, and that man had fought in Vietnam, two tours.

“Brah, da buggah just bool-liar,” I said.

“Disorderly conduck,” Erskine said.

No TV at his house. “If I get, I smash um already.”

“Why you worry about one TV?”

“Tings,” he said.

“What tings? Humbug tings?”

“Stuffs,” he said.

He was still living at home, his father having had a seizure, face turned black, and died. His mother lived another ten years, and she died — lupus. At the age of fifty-two Erskine married Verna, who was barely twenty, and she was a local wahine.

The exception in his life, from Kekaha way, near the landfill, Verna had grown up in a trailer, her father calling himself a scrap dealer, which meant rusty cars in the front yard. She was wild and didn’t make it through high school.

Erskine must have met her at her dad’s trailer, one of the many domestics he’d been called there for, or might have seen her at Barking Sands, where the kids hung out. Verna was a handful, but Erskine was not fazed by any situation, and she might have had father issues, since she had affairs with older men. They got drugs and alcohol for her in return for favors. I know that to be a fact.

She was a little lolo, but “a little lolo” often describes a passionate woman. She was living in Erskine’s family home, sleeping in the bed where Erskine’s mother died, no TV, and eventually a keiki, Kanoa. But aimless, as she said — futless.

“You futless?”

“I stay so futless awready.”

The story was, the kid wasn’t Erskine’s. Erskine didn’t do his homework, or wasn’t doing it very well, because it got around that anyone who knocked at the door when Erskine was at the station would get a friendly welcome, no matter who. And if they had something on board, like killer buds, Verna was like, “Eh, we burn.”

Drugs are the sickness of this island. Everyone either has them or knows where to get them. It didn’t help that when Erskine and my nephew Barry had seized some controlled substance after hours, Erskine stored it at home, because Erskine didn’t trust his fellow officers. Verna knew that. The famous key of coke floating in Hanalei Bay ended up at his place.

The key of coke was the start of it all. But Verna would also be happy with a couple of OxyContins ground to powder and used as a suppository, don’t ask me how I know. No TV! One futless wahine, who would say to me, “Skinny think my okole too big. What you tink?” There is only one answer.

Erskine didn’t know the name of the two kids with Verna that night. One was Ledward Ho, the other Junior — most people knew, I certainly did — Ledward a meth addict with rotten teeth as a result, and Junior had more acid in his system than a car battery. Big-wave surfers gone bad.

They brought something — pills, meth, batu, crack, speed, pakalolo. Kids! And she would have obliged. Two at one time was something new, but I wasn’t really surprised.

What surprised me at first was that he didn’t blow them all away. Then I thought, He’s law-abiding — what he did was by the book. You don’t shoot unarmed suspects in the back on this island.

Only the gun not going off was also kind of appropriate for Erskine, like a symbol. He was on the plane too fast for me to tell him I’d take care of the kid.

Never mind Erskine called me “shelter dog” and kept his big plastic gun by the bedside. He bailed me out of that awful trailer up at the landfill, and I didn’t even tell him that for a while up in Lihue we lived in a container in the industrial area near Nawiliwili Harbor.

My stepmother, Jen, grew up speaking Hawaiian on Niihau, called herself a functioning alcoholic, and was afraid of mirrors. “We never have one meer anyhow.” I gave her one from the thrift shop and she screamed like it was a trick. “It’s a present!” I screamed back. “Take it down!” And why? “Because there’s probably some babooze behind it?” She had the idea that all mirrors were two-way: you were being spied on by a freak on the other side.

“That’s not funny. You call that funny? It a meer!”

She made me afraid of mirrors, which annoyed Erskine. When he looked at me it was that face he made when he was checking his cell phone, noting the number, the “Howzit?” look. Then he’d always turn away with that shouldery big-dog walk, Officer Serious.

Everyone thought they knew about my father, that he was good at everything, saved scrap, had all the answers. “I cockroach that fuel pump from an old Honda.” Several things they didn’t know. That he was afraid of flying and had not visited a neighbor island since the passenger barges stopped in 1972. So my one wish was to take flying lessons, to see my father’s face when I got in the cockpit and took off down the runway — maybe say, “Want to hop in?” beforehand. They thought he was a bully because he spanked me. But he liked to spank me — or anyone, and maybe I deserved it for being wild and quitting school.

“You panty,” I would say, to pretend I wasn’t afraid.