THEY DRAGGED UP chairs and the waiter came and they all ordered beer.
“What about it?” the slanty eyed guy said to Skidmore.
Skidmore looked at me but talked to the punk. “I don’t know,” he said. “There’s something here we didn’t know about. It will have to be checked out.”
“What has to be checked out?”
Skidmore waited until the waiter brought the beer and went away. These punks didn’t like him any more than they liked me. But they disliked him—hated him—for the wrong reasons. They hated him because he didn’t believe in their cause, was cynical about their fucking cause, was doing it just for the money. Looking at him, I began to see Bridges’ point of view. It wasn’t fair to me, but I began to see it.
Skidmore repeated my story and waited for a reaction.
“That’s what he told me, Huhu,” Skidmore added.
Later I was to learn that huhu means “angry” in Hawaiian. I’m sure it wasn’t this fucker’s given name, but they’re like that, these so-called revolutionaries. Unable to do much in the way of real revolution, they play with their names and so Mike Schmutz becomes Amerika 2 or, if the guy is black and is maybe called James Gordon, he begins life anew as Mecca Mohammed, and never mind that his ancestors were sold into slavery by Arab slave traders.
“Sounds like a crock of shit to me,” Huhu, the angry one, said. “If the cops are looking for this guy, why haven’t we heard about it? It’s your job to know what’s going on, Skid. Why haven’t you heard about it?”
Skidmore’s pale eyes grew dangerous. The man was a racist from way back. I had seen him in Africa and knew what he was like. He used to say if you weren’t English, Irish or Scotch, then he wanted no part of you. I don’t know what he had against the Welsh, but he left them off the short list of his favorite people. His term for a guy like Huhu would be “mongrel.”
“Don’t you talk to me like that,” he warned. “Not you.”
Huhu looked at his freedom fighting friends. “What’s that supposed to mean: not you? Hey man, you’re working for us, remember? You’re making heavy bread, working for us.”
Skidmore’s big hands looked like hams when he made a fist of them. The man was a bred-in-the-bone racist, and he tried to control it, but it was hopeless. One of these days some mongrel like Huhu was going to put him in his grave.
“I don’t take my orders from you,” he said. “If you ask me questions, ask them right. Rainey says the cops are looking for him. I believe him. But I’ll check it out and then we’ll all know for sure. Now listen to me, Huhu. Rainey will have to stay with you, but I don’t want him fucked over, you understand? Fuck him over and I’ll fuck you over.”
George Skidmore, my hero! As a man he was a bit of a monster, and Huhu should have been afraid of him, but backed by five other punks, he wasn’t.
He said angrily, “Suppose we did fuck him over, what’s it your concern?”
In the tidewater South they say alligators smile when they come up out of the sea marshes to carry off a tethered watchdog they have had their eye on for a long time. I think the smile Skidmore gave Huhu was like that.
He said calmly, “Because we were mercs together. Not friends, just mercs together. That counts for something, but you wouldn’t understand, would you?”
Huhu had no come-back for that and he didn’t try for one. The poor guy, he had to settle for, “You don’t check him right, you take the responsibility. Fuck him over? Why should we fuck him over? Think about this though. This guy turns out to be a plant, a lot of people are going to get fucked over.”
Skidmore picked up a double scotch the waiter had brought without being told. And I thought again: one of these days some mongrel like Huhu is going to put him in his grave. Skidmore would have laughed at the notion. Nevertheless, it was going to happen.
“Nobody is ever going to fuck me over,” Skidmore said. Then he turned to me. “Better let me have the forty-five. Go with these Hawaiian gentlemen now. Be patient. Wait for good news from Uncle George. I’ll be back before you know it.”
I gave him the forty-five and it was like parting with my oldest and dearest friend.
Huhu took the forty-five from Skidmore and stuck it in his belt. A good thing they couldn’t run a ballistics test on that piece. Because of Old Slabsides, four brothers up in Kaliki Heights would plant no more bombs.
I hoped nothing happened to Skidmore while he was checking me out. He was an experienced army investigator, and knew how to do it, but things happen. Look at me. I had come to Honolulu for a brief vacation and ended up running from the police.
We all went out together. Skidmore went his way and I was left with the punks. I didn’t ask where we were going. It turned out to be the basement of an old stone building just off University Avenue, on the edge of the campus. A sign said it was slated for renovation under some historic buildings program; work had not begun yet.
I wondered why their comings and goings hadn’t attracted the attention of the campus cops. That was before I saw the bunch of tagged keys Huhu had. Apparently he was some kind of caretaker; maybe he was on a landmarks preservation committee.
They had the basement fixed up nice, with army cots, refrigerator, TV set, shortwave radio. It smelled of pot. No revolutionary posters and no weapons. But there was a telephone. One guy stayed upstairs. The building was very old and the basement, or cellar, looked like a cave. No sounds except for the ones the punks made.
Huhu pointed to a cot with army blankets on it. “You can sleep there. The John is in there. Make trouble and we’ll kill you, okay?
I nodded.
“Where do you know Skid from?”
“Africa. He told you. We were mercenaries in Africa.”
“Killing blacks, huh?”
I couldn’t tell if Huhu loved or hated blacks. You never can tell with these guys. The Black Panthers hated Jews. I once knew an Alabama redneck Communist, a veteran of the Thirties labor wars in Birmingham, who hated Catholics because he saw them as reactionaries.
“Most people in Africa are black,” I said. “You fight there, you’re going to kill black soldiers.”
“Wiseguy,” Huhu said. But he gave me a beer when he went to the refrigerator to get one for himself. He sat down on another cot and stared at me.
Finally he said, “What do you think of the job we did on the hospital?”
“I think it was a rotten, disgusting, demented thing to do.”
His almond eyes flickered with uncertainty. “Yeah, I was against it,” he said. “It was a policy thing, a means to an end. If we’re going to win this war, we must be ruthless. What’s the difference if a few hundred kids die. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of kids die of starvation every year. You been in Africa, you must have seen it.”
“A lot of it,” I agreed.
“Half of those kids would have died anyway,” Huhu said. “Okay, maybe not half. A good percentage.”
I drank some beer. San Miguel, imported from the Philippines. These freedom fighters went first class. Maybe they drank cheap wine up in Kaliki Heights: down here in the city they drank the best.
“You have plans for any more hospitals?” I asked him.
“Is that supposed to be funny?”
The four other punks hadn’t said a word during all this. They sat around drinking San Miguel, blank-faced and silent. One of them was gnawing on a thin stick of hard salami.
I said, “No, it wasn’t supposed to be funny. Did it sound funny?”
“Hey malihini,” Huhu said. “Better watch your mouth, okay? You heard what I told Skid. Sometimes that guy forgets who he’s working for. It’s us, we the people, the HLA. You don’t even work for us yet, so watch your mouth. That hospital crack, for instance. You think somebody just said, ‘Hey guys, let’s waste a hospital, kill a few hundred kids.’ No way it happened like that. It was given serious thought, it was discussed in depth. Only then did we go ahead with it, dig?”
“I hear you,” I said.
Huhu was getting mad. It wasn’t hard to get him mad. “I don’t think you do, man. You think we’re a bunch of fucking crazies. You think you can make some money off these crazies, then split and maybe go back to killing blacks or the poor people of El Salvador. Let me tell you something, you fucking soldier of fortune, it isn’t like that at all. We’re not crazy and we’re going to win this war because it’s right. You don’t know one fucking thing about Hawaii, its people, its culture, its history. What are we to you but a lot of brown pineapple blacks. Take me. You probably think I’m some kind of Chink half-caste. Wrong. I’m a Hawaiian because my roots are here. My great-grandfather came here as a contract laborer when sugar was the big thing. Contract laborer, my ass! That old man was a slave in all but name. Forget that. I just want you to know how far back I go in these islands.”
There was a chorus of “Right ons” as Huhu paused to refresh himself with Manila beer. My thoughts were with Skidmore. It would be a pisser if he got arrested or killed. My life depended on the work of a man I didn’t like.
Huhu resumed the attack. I knew everything he said had been said many times before. If these guys fought as fiercely as they talked, they’d take over the world in no time.
“Americans are shits,” he said.
“Hey man!” one of the two white guys protested.
“Not Americans like you guys,” Huhu said. “You’ll have Hawaiian citizenship just like the rest of us. But it won’t be like it is now. Whites will have no special privileges. Oh sure, we’re all Americans now. My ass we are! There was a time not so long ago when a native Hawaiian couldn’t join one of their fucking clubs. Not that getting into country clubs is our goal. Shit on that! I’m talking to you, malihini. You and the rest of the Mainlanders stole our country, dirtied it, exploited its native people, destroyed its culture. Once we had a caring, loving society. Now we have Waikiki with the fucking high rises. We have Don fucking Ho kissing the tourists’ ass in the clubs. We have Jack Lord and his stiff hair giving orders to that fat Chinaman on Hawaii Five-O. That’s what we have in place of our ancient culture.”
Everybody laughed at the Jack Lord part. It was pretty funny and I might have smiled if some guy said it in a bar. Coming from a child-killer, it didn’t quite make it.
If Skidmore didn’t get back I would have to start making plans. What plans? Six of them and one of me; how was I going to get around that. Don’t jump the gun, I told myself. Skidmore knows what he’s doing. I sincerely hoped he did.
I was trying to figure out the structure of the HLA, if it had one. Obviously Huhu was some kind of group leader. Were the groups small, made up of five men and one leader? How many groups? The lesbian who warned me off in her bar was in publicity. She hadn’t been so eager to get into a shooting war. Did that mean there were soldiers and civilians? Where were the mercs I had been hearing about? And where the hell were Kenji Ohara and the German?
It seemed to me there had to be some camp, some rural hideout or headquarters, where all this was being put together. If nothing else, there had to be some isolated place where these bastards were being trained to use weapons. Oahu was one of the most densely populated islands in the world. Firing automatic weapons and lobbing grenades couldn’t be done anywhere on Oahu. Some of the small islands to the north were uninhabited, so the HLA headquarters and training camp could be there.
Huhu was saying, “We will drive out or kill the exploiters and turn the high rises, the hotels, into free housing for the poor. There is poverty here and you don’t have to go far to find it. Right here in Honolulu there are people eating dog food. You can bet your ass the poodles in the high rises don’t eat dog food. They eat steak. The poor eat dog food. They eat chicken backs. They eat ...”
The phone rang. One of the white guys answered it and nodded to Huhu.
“Yeah,” Huhu said. Then he listened for a while. “What!” he yelled. “You sure of what you’re saying? Jesus Christ, man! Are you sure? Okay. All right. Yeah. Yeah. I hear you.”
Huhu replaced the receiver and when he turned his face was a mask.
“Somebody killed four of our people up in Kaliki Heights. Happened nearly a week ago. They just released the story. Fucking bastards! Four of our people are dead a week and now we hear about it. Turn on the radio.”
All week there hadn’t been a word about the Kaliki Heights killings. Bridges and his bosses had been sitting on it, using their emergency powers authority to suppress news. Now it was out in the open and I wondered why. Maybe it was none of their doing. Could be the work of some hardnosed reporter who wouldn’t play ball.
The news of the massacre, as they called it, came on the half hour. It was a repeat. The words came tumbling out as the fast-talking newscaster read from prepared copy:
“... bloody massacre in the Kaliki Heights section of the city ... police have identified the four victims as members of the so-called Hawaiian Liberation Army ... a quantity of automatic weapons was found ... most shocking incident in recent years ... police refuse to speculate on the reason for the killing, although it is believed to be the work of some rival faction ... however, vigilante action has not been ruled out ...”
The newscaster read off the names of the dead. My pals! I felt good when I thought about it. Now if I could only do the same for this little group.
Huhu sat down heavily. “Leave it on,” he said, meaning the radio. “Shit! All they were supposed to do was wait up there in Kaliki. There should have been no danger up there. It was a safe house. How did they get onto it?”
“The pigs killed them,” one of the punks said. This guy, more Hawaiian looking than the others, wore a Miss Piggy tee-shirt and a straw sombrero. “You know the fucking pigs killed them.”
Huhu consoled himself with a bottle of San Miguel. “Yeah, the pigs killed them,” he said quietly. “So be it. They died for the cause. They won’t be forgotten.”
The Miss Piggy fan was all fired up to do something. “I think it’s time to kill some pigs, Huhu. I mean, kill them now, today.”
There was a murmur of agreement, but Huhu stilled it by raising both hands, palms outward, like a speaker addressing a too-enthusiastic audience.
“Not yet,” he said firmly, the tough but disciplined commander. “Wait. We have to wait. Why do you think the pigs did this? I’ll tell you. To provoke us into premature action. Get us out there in the streets before we’re ready. Then they could kill all of us. But we’re not going to play into their hands. When the killing time comes it will be on our terms and they’ll be the ones to die. For every one of us, ten of them.”
“A hundred!” the Miss Piggy fan shouted. “A thousand!”
“Keep it down, Kanaka,” Huhu said. “You’ll get your chance when the time comes. You,” he said to me. “You know how to use an M-79 grenade launcher?”
That was a switch from the kill-the-pigs talk, or maybe it was still part of it.
“Sure,” I said. “There’s nothing to it if you know how. One man can turn himself into short range artillery with an M-79. It takes some training though.”
“Yeah, I know that. I like the M-79. Hit a cop car with an M-79, no more cop car. Nice weapon. Light. Portable. You want something to eat? Cold cuts and stuff in the fridge.”
I said just a beer. Huhu got it for me. I looked at my watch. Skidmore had been gone for more than an hour and a half,
They were well armed if they had M-79’s. It was a hell of a weapon in the hands of the wrong people. You could do more than zap a police car with an M-79. It was break-open weapon and you loaded it like a shotgun. Any outfit with grenade launchers would have other heavy stuff: And a training area where the HLA punks would be trained to use it.
Bored, the punks switched on the TV set and watched an old movie, a western called The Big Country. Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston were duking it over Carroll Baker, and that shows how old it was. Huhu retired into gloomy silence. Greg and Chuck were fighting all over the prairie, by moonlight. I sipped my beer and waited for Skidmore to show. It was getting late and checking on me might not be so easy that time of night.
Two movies later Skidmore came down the stone steps to the basement. It was five o’clock in the morning and some of the punks were asleep. Huhu had spent the night studying a weapons manual. He had the blank stare of the insomniac.
“He checks out,” Skidmore said, going to the refrigerator to get a beer. “The cops are going crazy trying to find him. I told you he was telling the truth.”
“How did you check?”
“Posed as a reporter, bribed a cop,” Skidmore said. “In a cop bar near headquarters. I bought the guy drinks, slipped him a twenty. No big deal.”
Huhu stared at him, not liking Skidmore’s breezy manner. “It took you all night to do that?”
Skidmore didn’t like beer; it was all there was. “No, that took less than an hour. I talked to some real reporters. I called the cops and said I had information about where Rainey was. They put me right onto this Captain Bridges. The call woke him up. He didn’t mind. I hung up. I’m telling you Rainey is wanted bad.”
Huhu wasn’t quite ready to buy it. “You find out why they don’t have an APB on him?”
Skidmore said, “Cop I talked to wasn’t sure. Well he’s just a cop.”
“I hope he wasn’t a traffic cop or a family court cop.”
“A headquarters cop. A communications cop. That good enough for you? He says Bridges has fifty men out looking for Rainey. About the APB, he says they’re trying to keep everything quiet. Bridges must think he knows what he’s doing. That’s all I can tell you.”
Huhu put a place marker in his weapons book. “It wasn’t quiet up in Kaliki Heights.”
Skidmore sat down with his beer. “Yeah, I heard about that. There’s something not right there.”
Huhu said, “The pigs did it.”
“That won’t play. The police didn’t do it. There was no shootout. For Christ’s sake, there are no death squads here. You have pigs on the brain. Whoever did it, it wasn’t the police.”
“Not some SWAT team?”
“Huhu, the cops didn’t do it,” Skidmore said. “Right wing vigilantes, maybe, but even if they existed, how would they know where to look? And why there? Why not here if they know things? I don’t get any of it.”
“You think you can find out?”
“I don’t know. Meanwhile, what about Rainey? He can’t go north unless you approve. It’s your responsibility.”
So it’s in the north, I thought.
“It’s my decision based on your recommendation,” Huhu said. “You’re sure?”
“A hundred percent,” Skidmore said. “This is no put-up job. The cops are not faking the hunt for Rainey. It has the smell and the feel of the real thing.”
“Then, okay. Rainey is in. He can go north tomorrow. Shit! It’s tomorrow now. I’ve got to try and get some sleep.”
Huhu rubbed his eyes and looked at me. “You better be all right. You’ll be sorry if you’re not all right.”
“I hear you,” I said.
Soon Skidmore and I were the only ones awake.
“I hate fucking beer,” he said. “I should have tried to buy a bar bottle. Well you can’t say I didn’t go to bat for you. Two grand a week ain’t hay.”
“I appreciate it.”
“I think I’d like to see five hundred dollars, my boy.”
I took out my wallet and gave him five hundred-dollar bills.
“That’s the ticket,” he said, putting the money away. “So anyway, how does it feel to be a soldier in the Hawaiian Army of Liberation?”
“I don’t have to be sworn in?”
“No siree! But you’re bound by something stronger than any oath.” Skidmore looked at the sleeping punks. “These guys may be jitterbugs, but they’ll kill you quick if they think you aren’t true blue. Don’t sell them short. Anyway, not too short. We’re different than they are. We kill for money and that makes sense. Don’t pay us and we don’t kill. These guys don’t get paid and their killings don’t have to make sense. Of course they haven’t killed anybody yet.”
“They killed those kids.”
“Yeah, I’m forgetting that. I meant in combat.”
“What’s this going north business?”
Skidmore gave me a quick look. “You want to get right to work, don’t you?”
“I’d like to get out of Honolulu, give Bridges time to call off his dogs.”
Skidmore laughed. “Not dogs—pigs! Get with it, Rainey. You know I’ll never get used to the way they call cops pigs. My old man was a beat cop, did you know that? A mean old guy, I liked him all right. He was so proud when I got to be an officer. I’m glad he didn’t live to see me kicked out of the service.”
I said, “You’re doing okay.”
Skidmore liked that. He was a vain, cocky bastard. “Bet your right ball I am. Two grand a week and who knows what the future has in store. We’ll start hitting banks when we get the word.”
“Who gives the word?”
“Now. Now. Don’t go so fast. You’ll find out when you go north. We have a nice set-up there. How does a private island grab you? Way off at the end of Molokai.”
“The leper island?”
“Yeah, that’s the place. See, even you heard of it. It’s not like it was, but people are still afraid of it. Who can blame them? Leprosy! Jesus! The main island is poor, mostly uninhabited. One shitty little town, tin-roofed houses, and so on. A spooky place when you think about its past. Hardly anybody goes there. So our little island couldn’t be more secure.”
“What will I be doing? Training guys?”
“Right on. Intensive weapon training. Some of the mercs you keep talking about are already there. Don’t worry. It’s not like being sent to a punishment post. I hear they got everything up there.”
“Will you be going with me?”
“Sure thing. There’s going to be a strategy conference. High level stuff. Don’t be fooled by what you see here. The people behind the HLA are serious. Wait and see, that’s all I can tell you. I’m going to get some sleep.”
“You live in this place?”
“I live in lots of places. But tonight I’m going to sleep here. You do the same. Tomorrow we’ll be winging north. Damn! I’m glad I made this connection. And to think of all the years I spent screwing around with piddling bush wars. This is where the action is. You want anything before I sack out?”
“Yeah, I’d like to get my forty-five back. That’s okay, isn’t it?”
Skidmore hefted the big semiauto before he handed it to me.
“Old Slabsides,” he said affectionately, using the army term. “It’s a bitch to shoot, but the man who masters it has himself a real killing machine.”
He looked at me and grinned. “I don’t know about you, Rainey, but I’m an ambitious guy and I mean to go places in this organization. What these people plan is no pipe-dream. It can be done. Hawaii is so far from the States, it really isn’t America. Take it from me, it can be separated, it can become independent. How would you like to be a bigshot in a new government in a new country?”
I put the forty-five in my belt after checking the clip. A comforting feeling to have it back where it belonged.
“I’ll settle for the two grand a week.”
Skidmore stretched out on a cot, taking off nothing but his shoes. “Well have it your own way. Forget the five hundred, though I thank you for it. I came through for you and consider you still owe me. I’d like to think of you as my back-up man.”
“You got it,” I lied.
“I’ll sleep better knowing that,” Skidmore said, and the odd thing is, I think he liked me. “It’s good to have a guy around who knows what he’s doing. I get kind of lonesome with these kids. I can’t talk to them. A different frame of reference. Goodnight, Rainey.”
“Sleep tight,” I said.
“I wish I could,” Skidmore said. “But beer doesn’t do it. I think I’ll have scotch and eggs for breakfast.”
I sat there drinking beer while my fellow soldiers slept. And I thought of the monstrous things they planned and how I was going to stop them, if I could.
I opened another beer and wondered how I was going to kill so many people.
It got to be morning.