When people asked my Aunt Elizabeth about Uncle Mike, she would tell them, “Oh, he’s at HCC,” hoping they would think he was teaching classes or something at Honolulu Community College, when in reality, anyone who knew anything about him would know she really meant the Halawa Correctional Center. He was serving a four-year sentence in minimum security for fraud—“simple fraud,” he would remind me every visit—for impersonating a nakahodo, or traditional Japanese matchmaker, who had died ten years earlier on an outer island. Uncle Mike had been really good at handicapping grooms, brides, families, and occupations the way he used to handicap jockeys, horses, trainers, and track conditions. By transforming his extensive bookmaking knowledge with its probabilities and percentages and leveraging the reputation of the real nakahodo, he had created a clientele and a growing reputation for himself on Oahu. Up until the day he was arrested, he would say he owed all of his success to Elizabeth, the woman who had “taught him the bonds of true love.”
Aunt Elizabeth was my real aunt, deeded by blood and my mother’s only sister, whereas Uncle Mike had only married in. However, not unlike the sympathy engendered between wary neighbors when faced by a common enemy, I always felt close to the men who became our uncles by marriage to Elizabeth. I could not imagine marriage with Aunt Elizabeth, the most grown-up person I knew. She was pretty—“pretty like the serpent in the Garden of Eden,” as my mother liked to say—and the only woman in our family who wore high heels all of the time. Never once had I seen her in the flats our mothers had retired to long ago. She smoked like a movie star, elegantly and continuously, through long black holders to avoid leaving smears of lipstick on the cigarette, a sight she found vulgar. And like many great personalities, she habitually spoke of herself in the third person, a tendency I discovered at the age of five, when I brought her my favorite board game. She looked down at me, arched her perfectly plucked eyebrow into a talon and said, “No one has explained it to you, have they?”
I shook my head.
“Aunt Elizabeth doesn’t do this shit,” she said, “She doesn’t play Chutes n’ Ladders.”
She paused to blow smoke in my face. “Do you understand?”
I nodded, “Aunt Elizabeth is no fun.”
“Good boy,” she said patting my head like a puppy. “Now run along and find that useless uncle of yours so he can get Aunt Elizabeth a drink.”
So Uncle Mike and I grew close, drawn by our completely opposite yet similarly intense feelings for Elizabeth, and it seemed natural when he recruited me to be his assistant. Business had really picked up at that point, with Uncle Mike attending anywhere from six to ten weddings a weekend, and when he looked at me, he saw a branch office, an expansion of his matrimonial services. At first, he tried to involve me in every aspect of the business, explaining the arcane ranking system he plugged into the elaborate equations he had developed for producing lasting marriages at a 93% success rate, the highest of any nakahodo in the islands, and far above that of his namesake. But after a few months, it became apparent to both of us that I was not worthy of the profession. “Matchmaking is a matter of patient observation,” he would say. Clearly, at fourteen, I was neither patient nor observant enough. The women I judged too ugly he would relabel as kind and point out my oversight: her second toe was longer than her big toe—a sure sign of intelligence. The guys I okayed as husband material he would just groan and point out they came straight to the interview from a hasty shower with hair still wet, an indication of a hidden family history of mental retardation (wet hair = soft head). “You can’t rush to judge,” he told me once. “It’s like picking a melon.” By the end, I was involved only in the purely clerical aspects of the business—setting up the client meetings, routing photos to parents and prospectives, updating the rosters of potentials, and keeping his calendar of appointments—areas at which I excelled by keeping careful and comprehensive notes. Notes that turned out to be quite helpful to state prosecutors.
Still, after he was convicted (“not by the clients, did you notice none of them testified for the prosecution?”) and sentenced (“even the judge admitted that on balance I had probably produced more happiness in the world than pain”) and publicly disavowed by Aunt Elizabeth (“that crack about men being unreliable income hurt worst of all”), Uncle Mike continued to keep up a relationship with me, much to the dismay of the family. For the four years he was locked up, and I moved from freshman to senior in high school, he sent me letters and packages regularly. They were a great embarrassment to my mother and her sister because they smelled like the ashtray of a hotel lobby and were stamped all over in red ink: “NOTE: This correspondence has been sent by an inmate of the Halawa Correctional Center.” Mother would burn with shame and apologize to the mailman profusely every time he delivered a package from Uncle Mike, but I suspect the mailman looked forward to these deliveries as much as I did. He would always ask me about them the next day, and I would show him the latest prison handicraft Uncle Mike had created: an American flag made from strips of pornographic magazines with cigarette filter stars, a portrait of Jesus made from cigarette ash and hair from the prison barbershop, iridescent black earrings and matching necklace made from cockroach carapaces, and an evening bag made from the silver foil of used cigarette packs which I was to give to the “girl who had eyes, well, eye for me.”
That was his little joke. Sara, the girl, did not even know I existed. But throughout his incarceration he had seen my growing interest in members of the fairer sex and was the only one in my family who seemed genuinely interested in my burgeoning romantic life (“no one longs for romance more than a prisoner”). So I had told him about my attraction to a girl in my class who terrified me with her haughty demeanor and fatal vanity. Most of the other guys in school called it a defect, but as I explained to Uncle Mike, Sara’s eye, not the plain right eye but the left one with its languid eyelid, drooped so seductively that she simultaneously wore an expression of schoolgirl innocence and the Madame’s world-weary disdain. While her regular eye stood as naked as the day she was born, Sara favored the other eyelid with shadow in dramatic hues of blue and green, applied with a heavy hand. She was like no other girl in school, and that eye summoned all my young blood. When residual tremors worked her eyelid into a perpetual coquettish half-wink, it was like a flashing beacon to me, a green light in my age of stumbling adolescence.
For years I admired her from afar, sitting in our English classes, watching her read from the misanthropic admonitions of Frost at the front of the class. As she tilted her head back to expose her alabaster neck, the good eye opened wide like a gun fighter sighting along the barrel, while the other fluttered like a gaudy butterfly wing, as if to wink at everyone in the room at once. I purposefully sabotaged my own math tests and quizzes, just so I could remain in her classes and sit close enough to watch her tackle word problems, the frustration of which sent her lips pouting till they were like a couple of well-fed caterpillars, a sight that stirred my lust-addled imagination and sent my heart racing.
All might have remained this way until the end of my senior year had Uncle Mike not been paroled early for what he would tell everyone was “good behavior”—a term defined by the authorities to mean, as he confided to me on our drive home from HCC, that he had been released in return for scuttling his jailhouse lawsuit suing the State for prison overcrowding.
“You see,” he told me as we pulled into the driveway of my mom’s house, where she had taken in Aunt Elizabeth, “everything in life can be negotiated as long as both parties can be convinced that they are really both headed in the same direction.”
“Like the early release of a troublemaker,” I said, killing the car.
“Like love,” he said as he watched Aunt Elizabeth lean over the railing of the porch to peer into the car. We watched her face go from slack to horror before it finally hardened into disgust. She skipped over Uncle Mike to shake her head pointedly at me while mouthing a profanity before throwing up her hands and marching back into the house.
It took me three days of pleading before they let him stay. All my arguments about Uncle Mike — this man, one of the most celebrated unionists of our time, the likes of which we may never see again, the man whom couples all over this island were still giving prayers of thanks to, yes, this great man had literally no place to live — fell on the deaf ears and dead coral hearts of my mother and Elizabeth.
“Ugh, that man,” Aunt Elizabeth said in a voice loud enough to be heard by the neighbors and Uncle Mike, who sat in my car waiting out my negotiations. “He’s like a warm pile of something I stepped in and need to scrape from the bottom of my shoe.”
On day two, I turned to logic, arguing that with Dad long dead and I just a mere lad of 17, we had a perfect and temporary substitute for the man about the house.
“Yes, we do,” my mother said sweetly, “That’s what Elizabeth is for.”
On day three, when they saw I was going to follow through on my threat to let Uncle Mike live in my Volkswagen, and had brought home a plastic wading pool and a gentler sprinkler head to rig up as a bathtub, they relented.
“If I must be humiliated,” Aunt Elizabeth said to me, with a glare so fierce she could stare down Medusa, “at least keep him tied up in the backyard where the neighbors won’t see him.”
And so, Uncle Mike moved into the garden shed and out of my car so I could air out the interior from three days of cigarette smoke and unwashed funk. After I told him what Aunt Elizabeth said—“the man has been in prison, you think he can live without rules?”—I laid down the terms she dictated: He must remain fully clothed at all times (“Ahh, she remembers how uncomfortable pants used to make me”); he was not allowed to come out of the shed until Aunt Elizabeth has left for work (“That’s okay, she has a tendency to talk too much in the morning, anyway”); he was not allowed in the house at anytime for any reason and must go to the YMCA to take care of his “personal habits” (“Only your aunt would call going to the bathroom a ‘habit’”); and he could only return to the shed after dark. This last one gave him pause.
“Like an illicit lover,” he said finally.
I shook my head, “C’mon, I’ll help you move some of this junk.”
While I arranged bags of grass seed and fertilizer to fashion him a bed, Uncle Mike explained to me how he had spent many nights in prison thinking about the similarities between my situation with Sara and his with Elizabeth.
“You see, a woman’s heart is like a still, quiet pond in a lonely meadow. And you and me, we men, are like dragonflies beating our wings above that pond,” he explained, flapping his arms for illustration. “Only when we beat our wings longly and strongly enough will the ripples of love appear on the surface of that pond.”
Uncle Mike leaned back and sucked on his cigarette. I waited for more but since nothing was coming, I just nodded to myself for a time and acted as if I understood what he had just uttered.
“Does that mean you’re going back to matchmaking?”
He shook his head. “A condition of my parole.”
I nodded.
“Not for anyone else, anyway,” he added.
“She told me when it came up to say, ‘Not a chance in hell.’”
Uncle Mike just chuckled.
But Aunt Elizabeth, she was taking no chances. That first Saturday after Uncle Mike moved in, she informed me that I was to cancel any plans I had that day and drive her way out on the North Shore side to pick up some boxes. When I protested the late notice and total disregard for my social life, she said, “Since when have you had a social life?” When I retorted something about my private life, she just snorted and laughed so hard she had to put down her cigarette. I waited for her to catch her breath.
“I wouldn’t call those titty magazines under your bed a private social life,” she managed to say before breaking into another round of laughter. She wiped her eyes with one hand and with the other jerked her thumb over her shoulder in the direction of the backyard. “Besides, you owe me for letting you keep that stray.”
I put on my coat and stalked off to wait in the car.
Of course, neither of us had been that far in the country before, and so I spent the entire morning driving around the unmarked streets of the North Shore while Aunt Elizabeth repeated over and over, “There’s only one goddamn main road out here, how can we be lost?” I knew enough about Aunt Elizabeth to not answer the question, unlike the helpless gas station employees we left in our wake whose ears are probably still ringing from the abuse she heaped upon them and their “idiotic and illiterate” landmark directions (“you’ll go past six yellow poles on the left, and then turn right before the chain-link fence…”) Even now, I’m sure there are at least a few people on the North Shore whose nightmares begin with a pair of determined high-heeled shoes stepping out of a beige Volkswagen Beetle.
It wasn’t until early evening when we eventually found the place, Queen’s Ranch, more by having been everywhere else than by accurate directions. Aunt Elizabeth pointed me toward a dirt path that led to a small house. As we drove down the path, I still expressed my doubts about the place because I had not seen a sign or marker.
“No, I’m sure of it,” she said as she pointed out the window. “The owners said something about a yard full of boxes.”
On both sides of the driveway stood stands of white wooden boxes, stacked waist high and arranged in rows as orderly as a cemetery. We filed past these silent sentries till we reached the house, where I was instructed to wait in the car until she called for me. I watched Aunt Elizabeth march onto the porch and look down to smooth out her skirt, before knocking on the door. I was too far away to hear their conversation, but she started talking as soon as the door opened, and they must have been going at it awhile because the next thing I knew, I was jolted awake by Aunt Elizabeth pounding on the windshield.
“Why in the Christ’s sake do you have your keys in your ear,” she asked. “No wonder you couldn’t hear me!”
I reached up and pulled the keys out of my ear. One of the first things Uncle Mike had shown me was how he learned to clean his ears in prison. The secret to cleaning your ears with a key, he said, was using the flat top part of the key, not the jagged bottom part, to scrap around in there. With enough practice, it was possible to channel the wax into the grooves of the key, which was how the inmates competed with each other. Quantity was king, and Uncle Mike had won many a cigarette by being able to pack the grooves on both sides of a key. At first I tried it out of curiosity but once I got the hang of it, cleaning my ear this way produced a soothing soporific effect on me, almost like hypnosis, which coupled with daydreams of Sara must have lulled me to sleep, mid-swab. “I was…” I said as I stumbled out of the car, “That is, Uncle Mike taught me…”
“Ugh, some disgusting habit, I’m sure. I do not want to hear it.” She pointed to a stack of white boxes on the end of the porch. “Just go pick those up and put it into the car.”
As anyone who has ever owned a Beetle remembers, the roomiest spot in the car is the passenger seat, where anything big, bulky, or in my case, boxy, had to sit. Even if something could fit in the backseat, it had to get past the bottleneck of the folded-down front seats, an acrobatic struggle usually not worth the effort. I managed to wedge one box at the foot of the passenger seat and stack the remaining three onto the seat, where they would stay if held them up with my shoulder and my head as I drove. That left Aunt Elizabeth clutching two small plastic boxes, standing outside the vehicle shaking her head at me.
“Of course, you couldn’t buy a car where you could tie something on the roof,” she said.
I shrugged and waited for her to take off her high heels before helpfully shoving her into the back seat. As we drove away with my head pressed up against the stacked boxes like a lover, I could hear Aunt Elizabeth’s discontented mumbling grow into an angry hum in the backseat.
Once we got back home, Aunt Elizabeth immediately ordered me to stack two of the boxes in the backyard near one side of the house and stack the other two in the back on the other side of the house while she “finds some way to escape from this ridiculous backseat with some dignity.” I took my time about it, picking the spots deliberately, tamping down the area with my shoes so that it would be level, and then carefully stacking the boxes with exaggerated precision, hoping that by concentrating, I could silence the reverberations echoing in my brain from the drive where my head struck like a clapper on the side of the wooden box at every road imperfection.
“Get out of the way,” Aunt Elizabeth said as I was making minute adjustments to the stack. “I’m putting her in.”
I stepped back as Aunt Elizabeth slid the top of the box off and placed the smaller box inside. She fiddled for a couple of seconds inside the box before quickly sliding the top back on. “Again,” she said and I followed her to the other side of the yard where she repeated her movements on that stack of boxes. After sliding that top back on, she turned and paused just long enough to side-eye the shed (where Uncle Mike was presumably watching all of this) before saying, “Follow me.”
I trotted out of the backyard following her like an obedient manservant, around the front to the porch, where she slapped a thick leather-bound book onto my chest and slipped a $20 into my palm before rolling my fingers into it and crushing my hand for emphasis.
“Every week you keep them alive, you’ll get another $20.”
She turned and entered the house before I looked down at the book. The gold embossing on the cover winked at me as I read its title: The ABC’s of Bee Culture.
For $20 a week, I did surprisingly little. Sure, I worried about our couple hundred new boarders for the first two weeks, coming home after school and pouring a solution of two parts sugar and one part water over the comb frames every other day, but after they started building new combs, I closed the hive cover and left them alone. Since I knew that Aunt Elizabeth detested pets (“if I needed someone to sit next to me on the couch and leave its hair all over the floor, I’d just find another man”), I figured that she was going to put the bees to work like she did everybody else. But she seemed indifferent to the idea of a late summer harvest of honey, and I knew I could really stop studying the “Honey Extraction” section when I finally learned the real reason for keeping the bees.
“Yep, I’m allergic to bees,” Uncle Mike said merrily. “Like a death sentence with my allergies.”
One sting, he claimed, was all it would take, but the possibility seemed to make him giddy, something I could not understand.
“No wonder you’ve not gotten anywhere with Sara,” he said. “Women like Sara and Elizabeth court love, and love is a coy mistress.”
“Coy mistress?” Aunt Elizabeth was the poster child of the uncoy. If coy was a delicate flower growing between the cracks of a sidewalk, then Aunt Elizabeth was the speed demon that jumps the curb to barrel over it.
“Sure,” he maintained. “She really wants me to approach her, charm her again, like the old days. But she is going to make it as hard as humanly possible for me to do it.”
“And that’s a good thing?”
“Sure, it shows she cares.”
“Or that she hates you.”
“No, if she really hated me, would she have put me out here where she can see me every night while she is washing dishes?” Uncle Mike then turned toward the kitchen window and smiled while nodding his head. I looked just in time to see Aunt Elizabeth roll her eyes and close the curtains, before yelling something to my mother about buying a shade for the window.
“It’s second nature to women,” he whispered confidentially, “to be really good at exploiting men’s weaknesses.”
I thought about that for a moment. “You mean like when Sara is chewing gum, and she looks over at me and that gum and her eye seem to be working in tandem, and at the very apogee of that motion, she creates a kind of smirk, a knowing snarl, almost, that seems to know the racing of my heartbeat and everything I am feeling at that moment?”
Uncle Mike was silent and looked at me quizzically for a long time. “Sure, like that. I guess.”
I just nodded and we both leaned against the shed and ruminated on our private fantasies for a long time.
There was one thing Uncle Mike knew he needed to prove before Aunt Elizabeth would take him back. He knew he had to become “reliable income.” Luckily, in prison he had a lot of time to think about it, and in minimum security, there were many well-educated, white-collar criminals to give him advice. He had come out of prison with a philosophy: that identity cons, like the one he perpetrated, were limited because he was basically selling his time, which meant that he could only make money when he was in front of the mark. And while not really remorseful (“because really, all I did was make people’s dreams come true”), he did understand that he took advantage of people like himself, local people trying to get by. What he needed to do was turn his attention to the endless spring of opportunity that flowed into Hawaii by the minute: the tourists. So he imported bags of paste shells from the Philippines, strung them together on a lei, spray painted them in whatever colors were on sale at the hardware store, and spent his days going door-to-door in Waikiki convincing store owners to carry his rare leis made from the discarded shells of nearly extinct land snails who lived only on the steepest pali cliffs of Hawaii.
“By creating objects of fraud that can be sold at anytime,” he told me, “you can make money even when you are sleeping.”
He was an instant success. His labor costs (me) were cheap, his overhead (the shed) was free, and he could take most of the markup when he sold to the middlemen, just like he had planned it in “P-school,” as he called his business school education. And I? I was getting rich. By collecting $20 a week for doing basically nothing for Aunt Elizabeth and getting 25¢ a piece for finished leis, I was topping out at almost $200 a week with no time to spend it.
So it came as a surprise one Thursday after school when, after months of emptying shoe boxes of baseball cards and filling them with cash, our weekly delivery from the Philippines didn’t arrive. It was my job to open the 100-pound bags of fake shells where they dumped them in the driveway and transport them, bucket by bucket, to the cleaning station (garden hose) before emptying the shells onto the drying rack (picnic table). When I ran to tell Uncle Mike the news, I found him sitting in the yard in the shade of his shed, his back leaning against the wall. He acknowledged that the delivery had not come, and in fact would never come again, because he had decided to call it quits.
“Why?”
“Women like men who take chances,” Uncle Mike said by way of explanation.
“What?”
“Women like men who take chances,” he repeated. Then when he saw I wasn’t getting it, he sighed and shook his head. “Look at your aunt over there.”
I looked over to where he pointed and saw Aunt Elizabeth watering the flowers in her backyard garden. Ever since the bees had arrived, she had taken a renewed interest in her garden and was unusually gentle watering the flowers to avoid the flower centers and inadvertently wetting a bee.
“Do you know why she is happy?” he asked.
I suddenly imagined Uncle Mike grabbing his neck and hitting the ground as if he had been shot and Aunt Elizabeth rising behind him, holding a straw and a fistful of bees. “Yes, I think so…”
“She’s happy because I have no place in the world,” he said. “Women need a man they can look up to, because sometimes in the end, that’s all both of them can hold onto, his place in the world.” He paused to yank out some blades of grass that seemed to offend him. “And what am I? I make trinkets. A shell peddler. Who would look up to that?”
I shrugged my shoulders and turned my attention to Aunt Elizabeth. She put the hose down to flood her garden and seemed to be talking to the bees as they wandered from flower to flower. “My precious darlings,” I thought I heard her say, so I stepped closer and heard her say it again before I believed it. Although I was her favorite among all the nephews and nieces, she had never uttered a single endearment to me unless you count the time she had called me “Old Shit-for-brains” after I tried to disprove the comedy routine of slipping on a banana peel. I had raced my bike toward a pile of banana peels and stopped suddenly after hitting the first ones, which not only caused my bike to slip out from under me but lubricated the skid that sent me careening into a neighbor’s stone wall, where I hit so hard I lost some teeth, got two black eyes, and ended up with an oozing scrape on the side of my face the shape of California. Aunt Elizabeth was the first adult on the scene and, as always, the first with an unforgettable comment. Since most of us were too young to swear openly at that time, all the kids abbreviated and called me “Old SFB” that entire summer.
“C’mon, admit it, don’t you miss the old glamour and excitement? Working with real people, real emotions?” he asked.
“I’d rather not have to go to court again,” I said.
“Then help me out with something,” he said. “A business opportunity.”
“What is it?”
“I can’t say yet,” he said, standing up. “But having changed marriage in these islands, I want to move on to a greater challenge.”
“Greater challenge?”
“I can’t do it without you,” he said.
I thought about it. It sounded bad. Getting people married was one thing, you could always erase that by getting a divorce. But something greater sounded ominous. Irreversible. People hardly had a sense of humor about what was supposed to be the happiest day of their life. And they still threw Uncle Mike in jail for it. I couldn’t imagine something greater that wouldn’t end up with me in jail as well. All my good sense was telling me no. No way. Out of the question. Old Shit-for-brains had learned his lesson. “Okay.”
“Good,” he said, clapping me on the back. “Now, I’ll need a couple of those shoe boxes.”
“Okay.”
“And I’ll need you to sell your car.”
“What?”
Two days later, in the middle of Sawada’s math class, during a test that was supposed to challenge our understanding of sine, cosine, and tangent as it applied to the construction of a problematical bridge, though I had spent most of my time watching Sara nibble vexedly on the eraser of her pencil, horrified by the fact that as the eraser disappeared, she appeared to spit none of it out and was, in fact, literally eating her pencil, while simultaneously fighting my arousal over a fantasy I had created in which she was a vampiress and I, a willing victim, Uncle Mike showed up at the classroom door. Of course, he couldn’t just discreetly slip into the class and ask the teacher for permission to see me like anybody else would have done. No, he stood in the doorway and shouted at Miss Sawada, “Hey, didn’t I marry off your sister, several years ago?”
Everyone stopped and turned toward the door. Except me. I just closed my eyes.
“Yes,” said Sawada, “That was my cousin.”
“I remember you from the wedding party,” Uncle Mike said. I could imagine him with a big grin across his face, surveying the classroom. “I remember looking at the wedding party and thinking, ‘I would have had an easier time pairing up you, the pretty one.’”
The class erupted into laughter. I just groaned. It was his standard line when he was in the business: No matter how ugly, or in this case, old and crotchety the person was, he would say “the pretty one.”
“Anyway, I’m here for my nephew,” he said,. “Says he sits next to the prettiest girl in school…”
Suddenly all eyes were on me and in my panic, I stood and made the mistake of taking a quick glance at Sara. All eyes then turned to her, and they all saw what I did, her one unfettered eye wide in wonder and surprise, while the special one, my beloved one, trembled in a palsy of outrage and disgust. I rushed toward Uncle Mike, hitting him square in the chest like a lineman and pushing him out the door, but not before he was able to point and say, “Is that her?”
Laughter followed me out of the classroom. I pushed him backwards all the way down the hall as he just laughed and told me to calm down. I stopped when we got all the way to the stairwell, and only because he owed me four shoe boxes full of money.
“Listen, she will love you soon enough.”
“Not with that stunt,” I fumed. “What do you want?”
“I need the car. I found a buyer.”
“In two days?”
“Yeah, I know this guy, actually, I don’t really know him but he’s the cousin of the hanai brother of the guy in the cell across from mine…”
“Okay, okay, never mind,” I said, turning to go back to the classroom. “Take the car.”
“No worry,” Uncle Mike said to my back. “You needed a warning shot. Garans ball barans she cannot help but notice you now.”
When I got back to class I went straight back to my seat, but everyone continued to sit there and look at me with stupid grins and expectant looks on their faces. It was as if I had just arrived with the punch line of a joke they had been waiting for all day, and I knew life would not return to normal until I served up a suitable ending to this anecdote that would be all over school before lunchtime.
“He needed the car, my car,” I explained to Miss Sawada, loud enough for the whole class to hear. I heard a few people chuckle, and by the time I returned to my seat, most everyone was back at their tests. Everyone, that is, but Sara, who was staring at her paper though I could tell she was not really concentrating because she had not resumed eating her pencil. The whole thing made me sigh, and just when I started reading the first problem, I heard a “Psst! Psst!”
Everyone looked up, and there was Uncle Mike at the door acting out an elaborate pantomime of trying to start a car, but horrors! He has no key! He searched his pockets and patted himself down in an elaborate parody of guard searches in prison, except he lovingly lingered near his crotch, feeling himself down with a kind of hip-swiveling action that got some of the girls in class giggling.
“Hey, brah,” some joker said. “He need the car key!”
I stood up, reached into my pocket and threw the car keys as hard as I could at Uncle Mike. He caught them without a problem and then pantomimed an elaborate thank-you before slipping out of the doorway. The room was silent for a moment before someone said, “What, he no like borrow your shoes, too?”
And while everyone was laughing, I sneaked a peek at Sara, who was laughing also, and for the first time, had both eyes on me, unblinking.
When I got home from school that day, a black hearse was parked on the lane in front of the house. The car was so long it blocked the width of the entire front yard, and I marveled at the tinted windows and gawked at the polished silver adornments on the sides until I suddenly remembered Uncle Mike’s allergy and his lethal neighbors. With fear sinking like a rock in my gut, I raced around the house to the backyard, but instead of seeing a crowd of medical and police officials standing around the prone body of Uncle Mike, I saw him standing alone with his back to me in one corner of the yard, relieving himself.
“Just watering the grass,” he explained as he zipped himself up.
“The car…I thought…”
“You like it?” he said, as he put his arm over my shoulder and guided me around to the side of the house. “I traded that Volkswagen for it.”
“You what?”
“You’re right,” he admitted. “I wish I had gotten a deal that good. I had to give him some cash, too.”
By that time we had arrived in the front and were standing directly in front of the vehicle. “You bought a hearse?”
“It’s our company car.”
“An old hearse?”
“It’s a Cadillac,” he said as he walked beside it, petting it in measured strokes as if he were sizing up a racehorse. “A Brougham Special Limousine.”
“It’s a hearse! You traded in my car for a hearse!”
“Now calm down,” he said. He brought his petting hand to his face and started stroking his chin. He did it when he was surprised or nervous. It was his only tell. “I did say this was our company car, didn’t I? Which means it is half yours…”
“Half a hearse? What am I going to do, drive this thing to school?” I couldn’t even imagine the ridicule I would receive from every social strata in high school when I pulled into the school lot. And all of it, all of it, would be deserved.
“No, not to school, because I need to use it during the day,” he said. “But you could use it on dates with that Eye-girl or going to the football games or something.”
I just shook my head and sat down. I buried my face in my hands. “I’m going to date Sara in a hearse.”
“Really, it’s a kind of limousine.”
I looked up at him. “Yeah, a limousine for dead people!”
He nodded and sat down next to me. “But not anymore. We’re not going to be carting around dead people.”
“We’re not?”
He shook his head. “Promise.”
“Then what did you…”
“…we…”
“Then what did WE buy a limo…I mean hearse…hearse for?”
Uncle Mike smiled at my little slip. “You see, that’s the way to get with the program.”
Mom waited till Aunt Elizabeth got home before she took her out onto the porch and gave Aunt Elizabeth my explanation: that I now owned a hearse with Uncle Mike and that we were going to park in front of the house like this since it was too long and much too wide to go into the carport, and frankly, I didn’t see a problem because other families had to park on the lane as well. There was a moment of silence before Aunt Elizabeth roared out my name. I slunk out to the porch.
“You don’t think there is a problem parking a hearse in front of the house,” Aunt Elizabeth said in the kind of calm that never failed to remind me of the phrase “the calm before the shit hits the fan.”
“Limousine,” I corrected. “Limousine.”
Aunt Elizabeth looked at me for a long time, then looked at my mother, who shrugged. “It’s a hearse.”
“It’s a Cadillac,” I tried. “A Cadillac Special something something Limousine.”
“Okay, deaf ear,” she said. “You don’t think there is a problem parking a damn something something limousine, a former meat wagon for the make-die-dead, in front of our house?”
She waited for my response. “No?” I finally answered.
“Hopeless,” she said, shaking her head. “Just hopeless.”
I looked down at my feet and pretended to be studying the floorboards of the porch. By now both Aunt Elizabeth and my mother were shaking their heads.
“Go inside and get me an empty bottle from under the sink,” Aunt Elizabeth said.
When I returned with the bottle, Aunt Elizabeth waved her hand toward the backyard. “Now go put a few bees in that thing.”
I stood there. “What?”
“Make sure they are the stinging kind,” she said. “I need the stinging kind.”
“They all pretty much sting…”
“But not the males, right? The…what are they called?”
She seemed to know a little too much about this. “Drones.”
“Right, the drones. None of them.”
She must be reading the ABC’s of Bee Culture on the sly. “There aren’t that many drones, anyway.”
“Good, get me a jar of stinging females,” she said.
“Now,” said mom.
I retreated to the backyard where I saw Uncle Mike peeking from around his shed. He was looking for a report, but I just waved him off and walked over to the hive boxes. That sent him back into his shed, and I waited until I heard the shed door close before I lifted the top cover of the hive. I set the jar down, pulled out one of the comb frames, and in a quick, fluid motion, swept the bees from one corner of the comb into the open jar. I screwed the jar tight, slid the comb frame back into the hive, and covered the hive.
When I returned to the front porch, mom was gone and Aunt Elizabeth was smoking her cigarette, looking across to the hearse as if contemplating her future in the reflection of the black chassis. I handed her the jar and stood there, wanting to say something.
“You’re not going to…” I managed, before visions of Uncle Mike in agonizing and gruesome death prevented me from continuing.
She put her hand on my shoulder. “No, don’t worry,” she said with a smile, “I’m just going to practice.”
Uncle Mike was as good as his word. When he promised not to use the hearse to cart around dead people, apparently, his promise didn’t include stiffs.
At least that’s what he called all the bodies he bought from the Waikiki Wax Museum bankruptcy auction. I helped Uncle Mike unload the bodies, stacked like a cord of wood from floorboard to ceiling in the back of the hearse, in the middle of the night, about a week after getting the car.
“Don’t lay them on the ground,” he whispered to me. “They might get wet.”
So we stood the wax figures up in the front yard: a trio of haole missionaries in black cassocks and wire-rimmed glasses, a couple of Chinese coolies fresh off the boat, some not unattractive topless Hawaiian maidens, a gang of drunken whalers with squinty expressions caught in mid-jig, three of The Big Five Captains of Industry (Brewer, Davies, and Castle), a six-pack of swaddled royal babies (some moribund, some not), a random assortment of royal attendants and warriors complete with ceremonial capes and kahili standards, and even a couple of the lesser Kamehamehas, IV and V. It was sort of a motley crew, a collection of history’s second-string players, and seeing them congregated like that in the moonlight inspired a gut-twisting pain and a sense of doom in me.
“Where’s Kamehameha the Great or Liliuokalani?” I looked around the crowd that my shoe boxes of money had helped purchase. “I’d even settle for King Kalakaua.”
“Most of the royals got bought up by other wax museums in private deals before the auction. Even the Smithsonian bought a couple,” he explained. He gestured over to the Kamehamehas. “As it is, I was lucky to get Alexander Liholiho and Lot.”
Uncle Mike walked over and put his arm over Lot’s shoulder. “Howzit, braddahs,” he said to them, making shakas and trying to get them to high-five. When he saw I wasn’t laughing, he patted the stomach of Alexander Liholiho and said, “No wonder you make early. You need for eat, brah. What kind Hawaiian you?” Uncle Mike looked over at me again and sighed. “Tough audience,” he said.
He walked over to the hearse and opened the passenger door. “I saved these two for last,” he said as he ducked into the car.
Uncle Mike slid out the first stiff, and I grabbed it by its white shoes, followed by white pants and a white tunic jacket, and topped with a head of immaculately groomed white hair. “Duke,” I said. “It’s Duke Kahanamoku.”
“Meet the Ambassador of Aloha,” said Uncle Mike as he slipped a canoe paddle into his hand.
“Why is he holding that thing like a microphone? He looks like an idiot trying to speak into the handle of a paddle.”
“I don’t know, that’s the way they had him at the museum,” he said. “The tourists must have liked it that way.”
Uncle Mike returned to the car and slid out another stiff in white shoes. As I helped him lift it out, I noticed that this one also had white pants and a white jacket, but the outfit was more fashionably extreme: an all-white tuxedo with orange pinstriping and flares in the bell bottoms and wrists that could hide a small dog. Uncle Mike stood him up and then looked at me. I shook my head. Then he slipped a microphone into the stiff’s hand.
“Don Ho!” I said.
“The Ambassador of Waikiki,” said Uncle Mike.
“Mr. Aloha,” I said.
“Hawaii’s Ambassador of Love,” said Uncle Mike.
We chuckled. I scooted Don next to Duke.
“He looks sort of short,” I said.
“Yeah, but at least he’s not drunk!”
We chuckled again. Uncle Mike looked Don and Duke over, carefully brushing off their immaculate white suits. “Had to pay a little extra to save these two.”
“Save these two? Save them from what?”
“Who knows? Degradation, ridicule, mockery from some anti-establishment type,” he said as he straightened the flaring collars of Don Ho’s ruffled blouse. “There were a lot of shady characters at that auction.”
I let the irony pass. Then a thought occurred to me. “If the wax museum in Waikiki couldn’t make money with all those tourists, then how are we going to?”
“That’s a very good question,” Uncle Mike said, starting to stroke his chin. “One that I have been thinking a lot about.”
I could tell by the way he was pacing and the long silence he gave the question that he was thinking about it for the first time. “Well, I don’t know, exactly,” he said finally. “But I bought these on speculation…no, speculation is too strong a word, on …”
“Potential?”
“Yes, on potential. Because you know me,” he slapped his chest. “When the opportunity presents itself, and it will, it always does. When it presents itself, I will not be like the hundreds or thousands of other men who pass it by unseeing, I will see it with my keen business eye for what it is and grab it! That you can bank your money on.”
“I think I already have,” I mumbled.
Uncle Mike ignored me. He started buffing Don and Duke’s white shoes with the bottom of his shirt. He took his time about it, leaving me to ponder his business acumen. “Okay,” he said finally, “Let’s get them into your room.”
“My room?”
“Yeah, I was thinking maybe you could move a few things and fit them into your closet…”
“What do you mean, my room? What’s wrong with your house?”
“My house? The shed?” He looked at me with profound disappointment as if I had just given the wrong answer to the $64,000 question. Then he started poking me in the head with his finger. “Think, think! Even if there was room, these are from a wax museum, which means they are made of wax, and that shed gets really hot during the day…”
“…which melts the wax. Okay, I get it.” I tried to think of some other solution, but like the hearse for my dates, I was once again stuck with an Uncle Mike solution. I picked up one of the topless wahines and carried her over my shoulder. “I better put this one in the closet before mom sees it.”
Getting them into my bedroom was no problem. Since he wasn’t allowed in the house, Uncle Mike lined the stiffs outside the front door, and I just carried them over my shoulder into the bedroom like a fireman in reverse, rushing victims back into an unfortunate situation. In no time, almost all the denizens of the wax museum were off the lawn and gathered in my bedroom, waiting like impatient diners to be situated.
“Better lock your bedroom door,” Uncle Mike whispered helpfully as he gave me the last one.
“Yeah, thanks,” I said heavily, but Uncle Mike didn’t hear me. He was already off the porch and on his way back to his shed.
After emptying my closet and throwing all the clothes under my bed, I stood two of the stiffs up at the ends of the closet and laid the rest of them down, stacking them precisely, fitting knobby elbows and knees into nooks and niches like how I imagined the wall of a log house was constructed. But even after I closed my bulging closet door, I was still left with about a dozen stiffs blocking every pathway in my bedroom. I needed at least a clear path to the bedroom door, so I lined them up like sentries next to my bed, discovering that one of them would have to share the bed with me if I wanted to open the door. Apprising my options, I disarmed Duke of his paddle and laid him on the bed since he was skinnier than Don. Despite having a cold, unfamiliar body next to me in bed and an audience standing over me like admiring stalkers, I somehow managed to fall asleep.
The next morning, mom pounded on my bedroom door like she usually did to wake me up for school, but instead of opening the door and shouting her usual greeting, “You’re late,” all she could do was jiggle the knob.
“What is this,” I heard her say from the other side of door. “Why is this locked?” I heard her rattle the doorknob again. “I don’t like this.”
I was sitting up in bed and wide awake by this time, trying to think of some reply, when I heard Aunt Elizabeth walk by the door in her high heels.
“It’s his private social life,” she said. “Evidently, he has one now.”
“Ohhh,” Mom said understandingly. She stopped trying the knob. “Well, your father…I mean, if he were here, bless his heart, he could talk to you…”
“Mom, no…that’s not…”
“That’s okay,” she said, “You don’t have to explain it to me.”
I could hear Aunt Elizabeth snickering.
“No really, Mom, it’s just…”
“No, I understand. It’s normal. I just want you to know if you have any…”
“Issues,” Aunt Elizabeth offered.
“Yes, or…”
“Questions,” she offered again.
“Yes, then I want you to feel free to ask me,” Mom said.
I buried my face in my hands.
“Or your Aunt Elizabeth,” Aunt Elizabeth said.
“Okay?”
“Uncle Mike…” I began, as I tried to explain one more time.
“Yes, he’s okay as well,” Mom said.
I gave up and lay back down. “Okay.”
“Good,” Mom said. “I’m going to leave now.” I heard her pad her way into the kitchen. There was a moment of silence and then Aunt Elizabeth said softly on the other side of the door, “We know what you’re doing in there.”
I looked over at Duke. “I wish,” I told him.
While Uncle Mike spent his days driving the hearse around with his “keen business eye” looking for his “opportunity,” Aunt Elizabeth was storming around the island on bus, practicing her stinging. At first, she stung old Chinese ladies, immigrants from the turn of the century, who referred each other to her for help with their arthritis or rheumatism. With as many as a dozen stings per hand, hip, elbow, knee, or shoulder, Aunt Elizabeth was able to relieve not only the pain, but restore litheness to their joints and allow these matriarchs to assume command of their kitchens once again for weddings and birthday feasts done in the proper old style. Such miracles did not come without reward—monetary and otherwise—and so Aunt Elizabeth was often invited to these celebrations, where she went toting her bees. She had designed a special carrying cage for her work, one that looked secure enough to calm the bus drivers yet was hinged and compartmentalized to give her quick and easy access to one bee at a time. She had given me $100 and a drawing of her design to build, but I kept the money and passed the task onto Uncle Mike, knowing that he would be grateful for any chance to serve his beloved. Master prison handicrafter that he was, Uncle Mike produced a stunning koa-wood and gold-net creation that Aunt Elizabeth filled with bees and carried off with her every night for her sessions, while Uncle Mike pined from the shed window and wished that the handle of the cage was his hand.
As much as I hated to admit it, Uncle Mike turned out to be right about Sara. After a few weeks of enduring eye jokes and crude innuendos from my peers—weeks where I studiously avoided any eye contact with Sara at all, not to lessen my pain but to keep the wolves from attacking her—things calmed down and subtle changes started taking place. At first, they just confused me: Was she really turned toward me a little more in class? Did she really just uncross and recross her legs when I happened to glance over? Were her friends really nudging each other when I passed them in the halls? But as time went on, and I got less covert and bolder in my longing, I noticed that Sara’s eyelid seemed to flutter more when she knew I was looking at her, which I interpreted as the involuntary reflex of the passions hidden in her own heart. Then one day when she ended up behind me as I finished at the water fountain, red-faced, eye atwitter like the wing of a hummingbird, a press of grinning friends behind her blocking her escape, I knew that soon, really soon, I would have my opportunity.
Unfortunately, Uncle Mike’s opportunity arrived first, and like most of his business dealings, it came in a hurry. Late one Friday night, he woke me with a rendition of “Taps” blaring from the new car horn he had installed in the hearse. Mom, Aunt Elizabeth, and practically everyone else on the lane were yelling obscenities by the time I stumbled out onto the porch in my pajamas, and all I could do was curse like the rest of them and try to hold back Uncle Mike, who had burst out of the car and bounded up the steps to wave his arms and point with his hands while he shouted in my face, none of which I heard until the horn finally completed its mournful dirge.
“…leave now!” he finished.
He stood there with an expectant look on his face, like an eager Boy Scout who had just completed a good deed and was waiting for an acknowledgment. “I can’t believe I gave you $100 to buy that stupid noisy horn,” I said.
“What?” Uncle Mike looked back briefly at the car. “If you think it’s loud out here, you should hear it inside the car.” I groaned. Uncle Mike then waved at the neighbors who appeared in various forms of undress in their doorways and windows. Most of them gave him the one-finger salute back. “Anyway, forget the horn! What do you think about the debut?”
“Debut? What debut?”
Uncle Mike shook his head. “Haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve said? For the guys!”
“The guys? You mean the Duke and the Don?”
“No, no, no,” he said. “I mean all the guys! Never mind, we just got to go. We’ll spiff them up when we get there. Let’s load up!”
He spun me around and pushed me back into the house where I dutifully started retrieving the stiffs. First my bed buddy, Duke, then the gaggle of standing admirers, followed by the denizens of the closet, all the while changing out of my pajamas between trips, a piece at a time. By the time I was fully clothed, Uncle Mike had packed the stiffs into the hearse and was only waiting for the babies that I had carried out in a grocery sack.
“I had a hard time finding the last two,” I said, as I handed him the bag. “I forgot I ran out of room in the dresser drawers and ended up putting two of them in my desk.”
“That’s okay, we only really need them for packing anyway,” he said as he took the babies out and wedged them among the feet of the stacked stiffs. “We don’t want these guys to roll around.”
After packing the stiffs as tight as the Tokyo subway, Uncle Mike threw me the keys and went around to the passenger’s side. “You drive. We have to go to Maunakea Street to pick up some red carnation leis for Duke and Don first,” he said. “Everyone will be expecting them to have one.”
I started up the hearse and was letting it rumble to life when I glanced back at the house. There was Aunt Elizabeth watching us from the window, scorn and disdain emanating from her backlit silhouette. An instinct to flee seized my foot and I gunned the accelerator, lurching us away from the curb with a loud farting backfire and sailing out of the lane as I aimed toward Chinatown.
I learned that the only people in Chinatown at that time of the night were the dead, the horny, and the people who serviced them. The hookers gave the hearse a wide berth when we pulled up to one of the 24-hour lei stands, and Uncle Mike took so long haggling with the lei seller about a pair of day-old red carnation leis that I was terrified one of the girls would come over and yell at me for ruining business or worse yet, try to interest me while I waited in the car. My previous experience with hookers had been limited to harassing them while they were arm-in-arm with an aged tourist or Japanese businessman as some friends and I cruised Waikiki from the safety of a moving car. Uncle Mike took so long that a few of the younger girls did wander over to peer in the car, but I kept my window rolled up and looked straight ahead like some kind of puritanical zealot, which sent the girls laughing back to the group. I strained to keep myself in this position until Uncle Mike returned to the car.
Having gotten the leis, Uncle Mike had me drive a little ways further, then pull onto a side street where I had to stop behind some vans that were blocking the street while they unloaded tables, chairs, and catering equipment.
“It looks like a party,” I said.
“It is,” said Uncle Mike. “The best kind of party, a Chinese funeral.” He pointed to a sign on the building in front of us: Deliveries Only — Mililani Mortuary. “I’m going in there, you start unloading the stiffs.”
“What? Here?”
“What did you think? You can’t have a party without entertainment.”
“We’re the entertainment? At a funeral?”
“True, we’re not the big show,” he admitted. And then to reassure me, he patted my arm. “We’re more like an opening act.”
I was speechless. Uncle Mike took the opportunity to remind me to clean the white shoes of the entertainers, fluff up the feather capes of the warriors and royalty, and make sure that none of the topless native maidens had bad bed hair. Then he left and disappeared inside the building, leaving me to unload the stiffs and line them up next to the car like a costumed chorus line, while deliverymen, loaders, and caterers gave me curious glances.
It was a 9 a.m. funeral for the patriarch of the Chun Hoon family, founder of one of Hawaii’s earliest and most famous supermarkets, and assured to be well attended by the island elite. We worked through the night, cleaning and adjusting the stiffs, deciding which could be used solo and which would have to be grouped, and then spent most of the early morning deciding the most crucial factor, placement. At the formal entrance to the mortuary, we secured a front-door location for Don Ho (since he was part Chinese), using him to prop open one of the doors and welcome visitors with his hit “I’ll Remember You” playing on continuous loop on a tape recorder hidden in his flaring bell bottoms. Kamehameha IV and V were placed at the end of a reception line where the family would line up to receive mourners. Kahili standard bearers and an assortment of nobles in attendance were arranged on a dais behind the open casket. With a couple of borrowed uniforms from the caterers, we shirted the topless maidens and stationed them behind the steam table for the hot foods and hoped they wouldn’t melt. We set most of the warriors on the sidewalk outside the mortuary to entice visitors off the street. By show time, we were left with only Duke Kahanamoku, which we didn’t want to return to the car like the 19th-century missionaries and the coolies which we thought about using but later rejected as possibly being misconstrued as a mocking comment on the Chun Hoon family’s humble beginnings. Duke really had no place at the funeral, but his instant recognizability would be sure to delight, and besides, we had already invested in a lei for him. We carried Duke around inside and outside the mortuary, trying to locate a good spot for him, but nothing seemed to work. Uncle Mike wanted Duke to be more than a potted plant in the background and yet did not want people to line up to see a wax curiosity, which would detract from the main event, the dead guy in the coffin. We were still running Duke around when the family and the first mourners arrived, and maybe the stress of that combined with the numerous cups of coffee I begged off the caterers all night suddenly seized my bladder, and I needed to find a bathroom. Immediately. Leaving Duke outside the restroom, I went inside and sought my relief. When I came back out, it hit me that Duke was exactly where he needed to be, so after Uncle Mike unscrewed the restrooms sign from the wall, I taped it to the blade of Duke’s paddle and twisted it in his hand so it looked as if Duke was pointing the way to the restrooms with his paddle.
The funeral was a bigger hit than we and the Chun Hoon family had anticipated. Tourists in Chinatown and locals on errands were drawn off the street by their curiosity about the stiffs and ended up giving bereavement money to the family. At the height of the funeral, based on the number of inappropriately dressed impromptu mourners, we calculated at least a 35 to 40 percent increase over the planned amount.
“That kind of traffic,” my Uncle said to me after I calculated the numbers, “is money in the bank.”
And he was right. That evening we collected our flat fee plus a percentage on the take as a bonus from the Chun Hoon family, and in no time, the word was out. From our first couple of gigs, Uncle Mike was able to get the black hearse repainted in a navy blue with the name of his business emblazoned on the sides: CELEBRITY STIFFS, ESCORTS TO THE AFTERLIFE, ROYAL — HISTORICAL — ENTERTAINMENT. After a profile in the business section of the newspaper called “Dawn of the Dead” that chronicled Uncle Mike’s shrewd entrepreneurial eye in this new market, business really exploded, and we were even busier than during Uncle Mike’s fraudulent nakahodo days. Funerals were much more lucrative because while weddings had to be scheduled on weekends due to people’s reluctance to miss work for love, the stronger emotions of guilt, fear, and regret drove people to funerals even during the weekdays.
We could accommodate almost any request. For one funeral, we converted a whaler into Tom Selleck by buying the stiff a curly wig, trimming his moustache, slapping a baseball cap upon his head, and decking him out in an aloha shirt, Bermuda shorts, and shoes (no socks) in true haole fashion. The final touch was a pair of large aviator sunglasses that hid his features. Suddenly, there he was, Magnum P.I., standing in front of us. We had kits to convert a missionary into the Pope for especially pious funerals, and we even had plans to turn our most rejected figure, Sanford B. Dole, Hawaii’s first governor by virtue of leading the rebellion that overthrew the monarchy, into a Santa Claus for the holiday funerals, thanks to Dole’s ridiculously long white beard.
Meanwhile, Aunt Elizabeth had expanded her practice from just rheumatic Chinese ladies to people of all races and ailments, offering relief for conditions as diverse as sciatica, migraine, loss of appetite, and even severe cases of acne and eczema. We were getting so many calls at all times of the day and night for “The Bee Lady of Nuuanu” that we stopped answering the phone and let Aunt Elizabeth pick up with her new greeting, “Bees!” Her big break came when she cured the bad back of a mailman who had been on disability for over ten years. After two applications and nearly a hundred bee carcasses, he returned to work to greet shocked coworkers and resume his route. Once she got plugged into the Postal Service network and their inexhaustible supply of bad backs, bum knees, turned ankles, and strained wrists, she knew she could quit her day job.
But the biggest change and the most welcome one to both Uncle Mike and myself was when Aunt Elizabeth asked me to move the hives to the front of the house ostensibly so she could take care of them herself. She needed to keep better track of her inventory, she told me, but as I told Uncle Mike, “She could have taken care of them back here, too. I think she may have other reasons.”
He just smiled and bided his time, “accidentally” showing up at the right moment to help her carry some new hive boxes, or “luckily” going in the same direction as Aunt Elizabeth’s next appointment so that she wouldn’t have to take the bus.
As for me, I was just grateful to be rid of the responsibilities for the bees, because even the little I needed to do was too much for our busy funeral schedule. When I booked funerals, I offered the families a discount if they announced in the obituaries that Celebrity Stiffs would be at the funeral. They nearly always accepted, and our performances became something like the social hits of the season. People shopped the obituaries like they shopped the movie schedules and planned their entertainment around our events. I saw many repeat funeral goers, especially kids from school, and the stature of being involved with Uncle Mike’s business, even though I was just the secretary/chauffeur/stevedore, lent me an aura of social prestige that I never could have attained otherwise. In spite of my new “cool” status, I refrained from indulging in the benefits of my new social position except once. It was nearing the end of prom ticket sales time and I had been inundated with silent beseeching looks from Sara’s friends in the hallways for weeks. Even Sara had grown suddenly demure around me, looking down whenever I looked at her so that her drooping eyelid drooped even lower, like she was indifferent to the attention she was receiving and was giving her hangnails profound concentration. I chose to trap her in the hallway after school when she was with all of her friends, so that the entire school would know. As I expected, Sara turned shyly away from me when I approached her group.
“Sara, if it’s not too late,” I said to her back while her friends shuffled behind her like an emotional backstop, “I’d like to take you to the prom.”
Sara turned in a dramatic fashion, and with only the faintest stirring of a smile nodded once. But she couldn’t control the excitement of her eyelid which was stuttering, “Yes, oh, yes.”
Pride surged in me and I told her, “Great, I’ll pick you up,” before starting to walk away. I let myself get some distance before turning back to her by swiveling my upper body in runway model fashion, and saying proudly, “Oh, by the way, we’ll be going in the hearse.”
Sara turned around to her conspiracy of friends, and they all huddled around her and giggled.
The day of the prom also happened to be a good day for funerals. We had several gigs that day, and for pre-prom entertainment, I had the choice of taking Sara to the viewing of the matriarch of a prominent Hawaiian family where the food promised to be plentiful and authentic, or the services for the colorful Waikiki entrepreneur, Dodo Sands. I decided on the Dodo Sands event, not only because the real, non-stiff Don Ho was likely to be there (having gotten his first big break from Dodo by performing in the Sandcastle Restaurant) but mainly because we were still a one-car family and Uncle Mike needed to take Aunt Elizabeth to that funeral.
She had finally relented, agreeing to attend one of Uncle Mike’s productions for the purpose, as he put it, of cross-marketing. “A chance to relieve the pain and suffering of those until they become my clients,” he told her. He finally closed the deal by telling her that at Dodo Sand’s funeral, there would be many members of the Hawaiian Musicians and Entertainers Union, where many a hula dancer’s sore feet and a musician’s stiff hands could be found.
So it was a family affair when we pulled up to Sara’s house in the hearse, Aunt Elizabeth up front with her travel case full of bees, Uncle Mike in the driver’s seat with a chauffeur’s cap he bought especially for the occasion.
“Remember,” he told me before I got out of the car, “when I’m wearing the hat, I’m no longer your Uncle Mike. I’m just some guy you hired to drive the car.”
“Yeah,” said Aunt Elizabeth, “Just another ex-con.”
Uncle Mike smiled at her. “An ex-con trying to go straight.”
“Whatevahs,” she said. “Be sure to call him ‘boy.’”
“Or brah,” he said. “Like, ‘Ey, brah, go drop us off before parking the car.’”
I just shook my head and escaped from the car with the corsage. In proper ladylike fashion, Sara made me wait in the living room with her anxious parents, who eyed me suspiciously. None of us said a word while the minutes ticked by, and the place started to feel like a meeting between historical enemies. Having no peace offering, I tried to relieve the tension by sliding the corsage across the coffee table. To my surprise, Sara’s dad grabbed it and held it up, examining it closely.
“This didn’t come from some dead lady’s funeral, did it?” he asked.
“Oh, no. No, of course not.”
His wife hit him in the shoulder. “What?” he said to her, as she took the corsage away from him and handed it back to me, “I gotta ask don’t I?”
“No, we take an oath,” I explained.
“An oath?”
“Yes, an oath to secrecy.” I thought for a moment. “To neither displace any materiel nor divulge the intimate details of the events we participate in.”
“Like a priest in confession?” Sara’s dad asked.
“Yeah, sort of like that. Although we think of it more like the privilege between an attorney and client, or doctor and patient.”
“Let’s hear the oath,” he said.
Sara’s dad was impressed, you could tell, but his wife hit him in the shoulder again, and so he shut up with kind of a disappointed look on his face. Luckily, Sara made her entrance soon after and everything was forgotten in a flurry of picture-taking of the usual sort: girl and date standing in the living room, girl and parents, girl by herself, girl being pinned with the corsage, another picture of newly corsaged girl and date; and once we got out of the house, a repeat of same except next to the car.
When we pulled away from the curb, I was about to introduce Sara to Uncle Mike and Aunt Elizabeth, but Uncle Mike said, “Shall I put up the privacy screen, sir?”
“We have a privacy screen?”
“Of course, sir, it just needed a repair.” He punched a button and a smoky glass window rose from behind the front bench seats.
“The last time I heard you speak that politely was in the courthouse,” Aunt Elizabeth said.
“Yeah, I almost said, ‘Your Honor,’” Uncle Mike said before the screen closed him off.
Suddenly, Sara and I were alone, and I struggled to think of some witty banter. But the only thing I could come up with was the pedestrian “I hear the caterers will be from the dead guy’s restaurant.”
Sara just nodded and looked around.
“The Sandcastle, I think it’s called. They’re supposed to have really good ribs…” I felt like an idiot. I looked away from Sara and through the smoked-glass screen. I could just make out the silhouettes of Uncle Mike and Aunt Elizabeth nodding their heads and laughing. I watched him try and put his arm over her shoulder and her pushing him off three times, before she allowed him to rest it on the seat back behind her.
“Yes,” Sara said and continued to look around until she spotted the long hearse bed behind her where we usually loaded the stiffs. “Is this where…”
I nodded. “I like your dress,” I said suddenly. I really did. It was a blue off-the-shoulder kind of thing that left her whole left shoulder and upper arm bare, which lent a nakedness to that side and emphasized the heavily painted eyelid and fake eyelashes of her bewitching eye.
She looked at me and smiled. It was then that she had a look on her face I had never seen before, her glittering eyelids languidly hanging about her face, beckoning me like lingerie hung from one finger before it silently slips to the floor. “Sit here,” she said as she patted the bench seat next to her.
I dutifully obeyed and whispered, “I’ve never made out in a hearse before.”
Sara just smiled and sometime in the silent happiness on the way to the mortuary, I slipped my hand into hers. 
