Saving Paradise – Excerpt

COLD AND BEAUTIFUL

IT WAS ANOTHER MAGNIFICENT DAWN on Oahu, the sea soft and rumpled and the sun blazing up from the horizon, an offshore breeze scattering plumeria fragrance across the frothy waves. Flying fish darting over the crests, dolphins chasing them, a mother whale and calf spouting as they rolled northwards. A morning when you already know the waves will be good and it will be a day to remember.

I waded out with my surfboard looking for the best entry and she bumped my knee. A woman long and slim in near-transparent red underwear, face down in the surf. Her features sharp and beautiful, her short chestnut hair plastered to her cold skull.

I dropped my board and held her in my arms, stunned by her beauty and death. If I could keep holding her maybe she wouldn’t really be dead. I was already caught by her high cheekbones and thin purposeful lips, the subtle arch of her brow, her long slender neck in my hands. And so overwhelmed I would have died to protect her.

When I carried her ashore her long legs dragged in the surf as if the ocean didn’t want to let her go, this sylphlike mermaid beauty. Sorrow overwhelmed me – how could I get her back, this lovely person dead in my arms?

Already cars were racing up and down Ala Moana Boulevard. When you’re holding a corpse how bizarre seems the human race – where were all these people hurrying to in this horrible moment with this lovely young woman dead?

I did the usual. Being known to the Honolulu cops I had to call them. I’d done time and didn’t want to do more. Don’t believe for a second what anyone tells you – being Inside is a huge disincentive. Jail tattoos not just your skin; it nails your soul. No matter what you do, no matter what you want, you don’t want to go back there. Not ever.

So Benny Olivera shows up with his flashers flashing. If you want a sorry cop Benny will fill your bill. Damn cruiser the size of a humpback whale with lights going on and off all over the place, could’ve been a nuclear reaction – by the way, why would anyone want a family that’s nuclear? Life’s dangerous enough.

So I explain Benny what happened. He’s hapa pilipino – half Filipino – and doesn’t completely trust us hapa haoles, part white and part Hawaiian. To a kanaka maoli, a native Hawaiian, or to someone whose ancestors were indentured here like the Japanese or in Benny’s case Filipinos, there’s still mistrust. Didn’t the haoles steal the whole archipelago for a handful of beads? Didn’t they bring diseases that cut the Hawaiian population by ninety percent? And then shipped hundreds of the survivors to leprosy colonies on Molokai? While descendants of the original missionaries took over most of the land and became huge corporations that turned the Hawaiians, Filipinos, Japanese and others into serfs? These corporations that now own most of Hawaii, its mainline media, banks and politicians?

I’m holding this lissome young woman cold as a fish in my arms and Benny says lie her down on the hard sidewalk and the ambulance comes – more flashing lights – and she’s gone under a yellow tarp and I never saw her again.

Couldn’t surf. Went home and brewed a triple espresso and my heart was down in my feet. Sat on the lanai and tried to figure out life and death and what had happened to this beautiful woman. Mojo the dachshund huffed up on the chair beside me, annoyed I hadn’t taken him surfing. Puma the cat curled on my lap but I didn’t scratch her so she went and sat in the sun.

I’d seen plenty of death but this one got to me. She’d been young, pretty and athletic. Somehow the strong classic lines of her face denoted brains, determination and hard work. How did she end up drowned in Kewalo Basin?

Benny’s bosses at the cop shop would no doubt soon provide the answer.

House of Sharks

AS MENTIONED, I’ve seen lots of dead people. A tour or two in Afghanistan will do that for you. I sat there with my feet up on the bamboo table and tried to forget all this. Mojo kept whining at the door wanting to hit the beach but I didn’t. Once the sun moved past her spot Puma jumped back in my lap and began kneading her claws into my stomach.

By afternoon the surf was looking good, and when you’re under that thunderous curl you don’t even think about Afghanistan. Or about Sylvia Gordon, age 27, KPOI reported, a journalist for The Honolulu Post, dead in the surf this morning near Ala Moana Beach.

But I had a raunchy feeling in my stomach like when you eat bad sushi so I quit surfing and went down to the cop shop on South Beretania to see Benny and his friends. Benny was out cruising in his nuclear Chrysler but Leon Oversdorf (I swear that’s his name), Second Lieutenant Homicide, wanted to see me.

“Look, Lieutenant,” I said, “I been cool. I don’t drink or smoke weed or indulge in premarital sex or habituate shady premises –”

“So how the fuck you find her?” Leon says by way of opening.

I explained him. How it happened. All the time he’s looking at me under these gargantuan eyebrows and I can tell no matter what I say he won’t believe me. Just because I been Inside. I could tell him Calvin Coolidge is President and even then he wouldn’t believe me.

“So she drowned,” I said after a while, looking to leave.

Leon watched me with his tiny sad eyes. Him that helped put me Inside. “No,” he said.

And what he said next changed my life. “She was drowned.”

“I didn’t do it,” I said right away.

Leon leaned forward, meaty palms on his desk. “Pono,” he chuckled, “you think we don’t know that?”

“Know what?” I said, covering my bases.

“She was dead six hours before of when you found her.”

The thought pained me horribly. This lovely person floating in the cold uncaring sea. When I could’ve held her, kept her warm.

“She was dead,” Leon said matter of factly, “from being held underwater till her lungs filled up with good old H20.”

“How do you know she was held?” I risked. “Even if she just normally drowned there’d be water in her lungs –”

Leon scanned me the way the guy with the broadaxe smiles down at you when you lay your head on the block. “This water in her lungs ain’t ocean, it’s fresh.”

“Fresh?”

“Like from a swimming pool or something. You get it?”