Robert Jones - Blood Tide

No more LSMRs in the navy now, and he’d read somewhere that native Hawaiian activists wanted the island back. They’d found rock drawings, fishing shrines, and even a temple—what they called a heiau —on Kahoolawe, and the navy was shaking up the ghosts of their ancestors. That would be some war, Culdee thought, the ghosts of the old time Kanakas against a ghost squadron of rocket ships. No telling who might win.

Lanai and Molokai fell astern, and Oahu rose dead ahead. A million memories. By midafternoon Culdee could make out the spume from the Halona Blowhole, under Makapuu Point on the east end of the island. Looking closely through the glasses, he thought he could make out the steep stairway that led down from the highway to Halona Cove. He’d snorkeled there often in the old days. They’d rent masks, fins, and girls in town, buy a bottle of rum and a can of pineapple juice, then take a cab out to Halona. You had to stop to buy ice in Hawaii Kai, because if you brought it all the way from Pearl, it would be melted by the time you got to the beach. Cabs weren’t air-conditioned in those days. You would take the girls out in the water to boff them if there was a crowd on the beach. He remembered one afternoon—right after Korea it must have been—when he took a hot little hapa-Portagee out there on the reef, and he looked down and saw her foot near a sea urchin. He yelled something and grabbed her away, and she nearly climbed up on his head.

“Did you step on it? Did you step on it?” he yelled.

“What? What?”

She was squirming all over his chin.

“The urchin.”

“Oh,” she said, and slid back down into the water. “I thought you said shark.”

Miranda shortened sail as they neared Honolulu, and Culdee unhoused the anchor. Helicopters scuttled back and forth against the Pali, shiny as tropical bugs. They whiffed the land smell as the wind bounced back from the island—sweet and heavy, blossom and mud. As the harbor opened up, Miranda took bearings—Diamond Head, Fort DeRussy, the Aloha Tower—and shouted course corrections to Culdee at the wheel. By the time she lowered the sails and anchored off Ala Moana, the sun was down.

“I’ll take the dinghy ashore and handle things,” she said, walking aft. “Harbor master, stores, and I want to see if any of my old shipmates are in town. If not, I’ll try to hire some kid for an extra hand. Watch and watch is a killer.”

“Mmmnh.”

They swayed the dinghy over the side, and Culdee watched her row toward the yacht basin. Lights glowed along Waikiki, and the land breeze brought him the sound of honky-tonks. In it he imagined he could smell whiskey, women, and fresh blood. Damn her! He brought a book and a lantern up from the saloon and tried to read. From the yachts anchored nearby he could hear laughter and the clink of cocktail glasses. He got up and went forward to check the anchor. They weren’t dragging. He’d known it before he’d gone. He grabbed a hunk of small stuff and threw some knots, but it didn’t help.

He’d never once missed a liberty in Wahoo, even if he had to swap a month of midwatches for a standby from one of the choirboys in the crew. It was a great liberty port, one of the greatest in the whole wide watery world. Back in the whaling days they’d called the red-light district Cape Horn, because the old-time white hats hung their consciences on the horn when they came around her. With Cape Stiff behind them and two or three years on the offshore grounds to look forward to, they had their work cut out for them in Honolulu. When the missionaries went to translate the Ten Commandments into Hawaiian, they got stuck on “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” There was no such word in the Polynesian language. The best the long necks could come up with was “Thou shalt not commit mischievous sleeping.” But that was the best kind.

Over on the beach Culdee heard the whoop and howl of men raising hell.

Okay.

Liberty call.

He stripped off his shoes and clothes, rolled them into a bundle, and was about to slip over the side when he remembered his hand. He ran below and came back with a long Ace bandage and a roll of tape. Then he swam breaststroke to the yacht basin with his clothes bundle belted to his head. He dressed quickly and wrapped the bandage tight over his many-times-broken right hand (a souvenir of too many drunken liberties), taped it down, then hiked west along Ala Moana toward Chinatown. Fuck Waikiki—too rich for his blood, with its tourists and gay bars and hundred-dollar hookers. Hotel Street was home. He could find it blindfolded just from the smell of Chinese herbs, rotting vegetables behind the open-air markets, dried shark fins and sea-slugs and sailor puke. He turned maiku —“toward the mountains”—up Nuuanu Avenue, crossed King Street, with the Iolani Palace and the gold statue of King Kamehameha lighted up to starboard and the reek of Nuuanu Stream to port, and there it was, just like he’d left it—scuzzy, shopworn, dimly lighted except for the neon of the dirty book stores and “hostess bars” lining both sides as far as the eye could see.

Some things don’t change.

Drunken white hats and dogfaces staggered blindly, warily past one another, expecting a sneak attack at any minute. The Glade was gone, where all the faggots used to hang out, poor cocksuckers, but Wo Fat’s was still in business, the oldest restaurant in the islands, 106 years old, the sign said, twice as old as Culdee (a dismaying thought). If he’d had any money, he would’ve ducked in for a bowl of ja jeung mein —old sailors swore that noodles and hoisin sauce limbered the joints for love. But he had harsher business pending.

He went into the first bar he came to. Hilo Fattie’s, the sign said. Rock pulsed from the juke, colored lights through the smoke. B-girls sinuated through the crowd like destroyers through a wolf pack. He found a spot at the end of the bar and bellied up. A girl eyed him, but he shrugged her off.

“What’ll it be, Pops?” The bartender, a plump young hapa-haole with a scraggly Yasir Arafat beard and a ring in one ear, smiled at him with the easy contempt of the young for anyone over forty. Culdee pretended to study the bottles ranked behind the bar, then stepped back frowning and hitched mock-painfully at his groin, as if he had the clap and wasn’t allowed to drink.

“Better make it da kine ice-water,” he said, slipping automatically into Hawaiian pidgin. “Gotta take it easy awhile yet. Otherwise it’s auwe when I go to take a leak.”

The bartender laughed. “Then, what’d you come here for, Pops? The ambience?” No pidgin for him, he was too hip for that crap. But he brought Culdee a glass.

Culdee studied the faces along the bar, then the hands. Over near the door sat a guy about forty, crew cut, eyes flat as razor blades, half-loaded already, it looked. He was wearing a flowery Harry Truman aloha shirt, and his bare forearms were braced across the bar, a glass of what looked like straight rum cupped in his hands. He had a globe and anchor tattooed on one forearm. Sure enough a jarhead. Culdee drank down his ice water and eased over.

“The Crotch sucks,” he whispered.

“Wha’?” Razor Eyes focused on him. “Aw, fuck off, Gramps.”

“Whatsa matta, brah?” Culdee leaned over even closer, eyeball to eyeball. “You get stink ear? Not hear so good no more? I said the Marine Corps sucks.”

“And I said ‘Fuck off, Gramps.’ So fuck off.”

“Come outside and say that, you jarhead mahu .” Mahu means “faggot” in pidgin. That did it.

In the rain-swept alley beside the bar, Culdee faked a right, slipped the marine’s counterpunch, left-hooked the man to the belly, and followed across as he folded with a sharp left elbow to the marine’s jaw. When your hands are busted, you use the next best weapon. The marine fell and got right up again, blinking his eyes against the rain. He waded back in, head low, all shoulders and thumping fists.