Mahu Surfer Read Online Free PDF Page B

that I was in danger. I had grown up around guns; they were as much a part of our family life as luaus and slack key guitar music. Another father might have given his son a book, an heirloom watch or an embroidered ball cap. Mine gave me a gun.
     
    He’d kept it lovingly polished and oiled, and I had tried to take as good care of it as he had. At that moment, it was locked in the glove compartment of my truck—which of course he had handed down to me, too. I believe you don’t draw a weapon unless you are ready to fire it, and you shouldn’t be ready to fire it until you have exhausted every other opportunity. I’d never fired either the Glock or my service revolver at anything more than a paper target, though I had killed a man with his own gun only a week before. The memory of that incident still haunted my dreams, but I had done it to save my brother Haoa’s life, and I did not regret it.
     
    “Good,” he said, smiling across at me. “You know I worry about you.” He took a forkful of eggs and Spam, and smiled at the taste. “Just don’t tell your mother.”
     
    “Don’t tell me what?” my mother asked, coming in to the kitchen in her white terrycloth robe, a gift from a spa vacation my father had treated her to the year before.
     
    My father’s eyes widened. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you he had Spam for breakfast,” I said. “You know how you worry about his cholesterol.”
     
    I was surprised at how quickly the lie came to my mouth. I try and believe I am an honest person, but years of harboring secret desires, lying to myself as much as others, had made the habit easier. So much for my new honesty; like the position I thought I was getting at District 1, it had evaporated quickly.
     
    “You shouldn’t eat like that, Al,” she said, taking the half-eaten plate from him and scraping the Spam into the garbage. “You know what the doctor said.”
     
    “He said, don’t eat anything that tastes good,” my father grumbled to me.
     
     
     

Let’s Go Surfing Now
     
    I left them a little later, taking the Kamehameha Highway up through the center of the island, past pineapple plantations and tourists in rented cars. It was a sunny day, clear skies and gentle breezes ruffling the papery blossoms of wild red and purple bougainvillea along the highway, and I rolled down my windows, turned the volume up on an early Hapa CD, and tried to relax.
     
    It had been a rough couple of weeks, emotionally and physically, and I knew it would take me a long time to process everything that had happened. But now I had to focus on the case, and solve it quickly so I could get back to Honolulu and get on with my life.
     
    My cell phone rang about halfway up the Kam. It was my second brother, Haoa, the one who had the hardest time with my coming out. “Eh, brah, howzit?”
     
    “Heading for the big waves,” I said. “How you doing?”
     
    Both my brothers had helped me put away the case that had been the cause of my coming out, and Haoa had nearly been shot. That experience seemed to have shaken my big, solid brother, and I was sorry I was leaving Honolulu when he might need me.
     
    “Keeping busy. We’re redoing all the planting for an office building out in Kahala.” Haoa’s landscaping company had continued to grow, and he sometimes worked with our father on projects. I was a little jealous of that.
     
    I asked about his wife, Tatiana, and their kids, and heard all their news. Then there was an awkward silence. I thought for a moment the connection had been broken and checked the phone’s display to make sure the call hadn’t dropped. Finally, he said, “How you sleep, brah? Going through everything you do?”
     
    “I get nightmares. And sometimes my nerves keep going and I can only doze. But then whatever’s bothering me passes, and I sleep again. For a while.” I held my breath, waiting for him to say something, and when he didn’t, I said, “You will, too. Give it