Mahu Blood Read Online Free PDF

Jeep.
    “Real smooth, billowy. The rocky stuff is called ’a’a .”
    “You’re a fountain of information,” Ray said. “They don’t know how she’s related, but they all knew what kind of lava knocked out her house.”
    “What can I say? They’re Hawaiian. You know how the Eskimos have all those words for snow? We have a bunch for lava.”
    “I know the difference between anthracite and bituminous coal,” Ray said. “And the name of the three rivers that come together in Pittsburgh.”
    “Good to know. In case it ever comes up.”
    We stopped at the community center, where posters for the KOH rally were plastered on the walls. Many of them read ‘ Ku I Ka Pono : Justice for Hawaiians.’ It was hard to disagree with a slogan like that—unless of course, you were not ethnically Hawaiian and that justice would come out of your pocket.
    The community center was a simple two-story building with a set of steps up to the front door and a zigzag handicap ramp. We parked in the lot and took the stairs up, pausing outside to look at some pictures posted there.
    Little kids performed at a hula recital, neighbors picked up trash along Tantalus Drive and senior citizens peered at computers. It looked like the center provided a lot of service to the community.
    Inside, a group of elderly men and women drank coffee, nibbled on malasadas and talked story, with what sounded like the classic Hawaiian music of Alan Akaka playing in the background.
    Everybody shut up when we walked in; just the music kept going.
    I wondered if I should have left Ray in the car, but we were partners, and I’d had enough of being considered second-class myself, because of my sexual orientation. I wasn’t going to do that to anyone else.
    “Aloha,” I announced to the room. I introduced myself and Ray. “We’re investigating the death of Aunty Edith Kapana. Can MAhu BLood 25
    we ask you some questions about her?”
    The room remained silent. I went up to a grizzled old kupuna and said, “How about you, Uncle? You know Aunty Edith?”
    Grudgingly, he nodded. He said his name was Israel Keka’uoha. “Aunty Edith, she good people, she like the kahiko way.”
    Yeah, I wanted to say, we heard that from Leelee.
    “You watch,” he said. “Wen Hawaiian people take over again, da kine police gon work fo’ us.”
    At that, the room erupted in noise. Everybody agreed with the old man. They all wanted to complain about the sad state of Native Hawaiian rights, about past police abuse, about how we would have to look out when the Kingdom of Hawai’i was restored.
    Patiently, Ray and I went around the room, listening to their litany of complaints. I told a few of them about the victim advocate’s office, and I used my cell phone to get updates on a couple of cases.
    The youngest person in the room was a forty-something woman with jet-black hair and matching fingernails. She was the caretaker of an elderly woman in a wheelchair, who spent most of the time we were there asleep. She said her name was Ellen Jackson and that the woman was her mother. “Nobody else will tell you,” she said to me, in a low voice, “but Aunty Edith was making lots of pilikia .”
    I whispered “trouble,” to Ray, then asked Ellen, “Pilikia for who?”
    She looked around to make sure no one else was listening.
    “These boys, they sell pakalolo ,” she said, using the island word for marijuana. “They raise it up on the mountain. Aunty Edith threatened to call da kine police on them.”
    “You know their names?”
    She shook her head. “But you can see them, hanging out on Tantalus ‘round sunset.”
    26 Neil S. Plakcy
    I wrote down her name and phone number, and we continued talking to the kupunas. By the time we got back around to Israel, the mood in the center had thawed. I had a feeling there were a lot of hidden secrets out there, buried along the slopes of Tantalus along with the bodies of so many war dead. Just as the cemetery’s caretakers protected