My ears were still ringing and I was pretty sure that I smelled like twenty different kinds of cigarette smoke brands and one kind of Tennessee whiskey after spending a few hours in that dive off of Fort street mall.
It was a long walk back to my car or at least it seemed like it, Dwight and Kyle bitched the whole way about not being able to hook up with any potential go home dates. Dwight and Kyle were brothers who mainly cried about not being able to find a girlfriend but once they did, they fell off the map and no one would see them until their girlfriends dumped them. That in itself was a seven-month pattern, you would have thought they’d learned their lesson but stupid has no desire of ever being smarter and neither did Dwight and Kyle. However, our friend Renee inherited a military Asian guy who was in port for the weekend. His ship was docked out at Pearl Harbor and he was one of the lucky few who earned a weekend furlough. That meant he needed a ride back to base, no problem. Dwight sat shotgun while Renee sat between Kyle and her date.
“What’s your name brother?” I asked while eyeing him in the mirror at the same time.
“Kevin,” he extended his hand over my right shoulder from the back seat and I gave it a firm shake.
“I’m Shaun,” I replied while pointing around the car at the same time. “That’s Dwight, his brother Kyle and of course you already know Renee.”
“Hi, I’m Renee,” she giggled like a little girl as she playfully shook his hand.
“Where you from Kev?” I wanted to make sure that the guy didn’t feel uncomfortable and of course, I didn’t want to make Renee feel like we were the overprotective pretend big brothers.
“I’m actually from here,” he piped up. “Takeuchi is my last name, I graduated from Aiea.”
The name sounded very familiar but how many Kevin Takeuchi’s are there in Hawaii? He was a clean-cut well-mannered guy with a natural smile so I wasn’t worried. Even if it never turned out to be anything, at least Renee hooked herself up with a decent person for the time being.
“So, how are we getting you on base? The Makalapa gate side or the Ford island route?” Looking at him in the mirror I could see that he was running it through his head. “Makalapa is good, just tell the guards you’re dropping me off and they’ll let you turn around and head back out.” I could hear Renee ask him if he wanted to key in her number on his phone but he quietly told her that he didn’t have one, there wasn’t much of a point to it. She removed a receipt from her bag and began to scribble it down for him. “Just tell it to me, I’ll remember it.” He told her.
“Trying to get rid of me already?” Renee gave him a suspicious look but with a slight smile. She’d been through this one more times than she cared to remember.
“I’m a signalman on my ship, it’s my paying job to remember. Tell it to me, I’ll remember, I promise,” he assured her.
She leaned over and whispered it in his ear and looked at him after, “you got it?”
“Yes, I got it.” He laughed.
“No laugh, if you don’t call me at one in the afternoon tomorrow I’m coming back here and I’m waiting in front of your ship until you come off,” she growled her threat more than she spoke it. Yeah, Renee had a habit of diving into the deep end of the pond without really knowing how to swim.
“Psycho,” Dwight muttered as he shook his head.
“Shut up Whitey,” Renee threw the balled up piece of paper at Dwight’s head for emphasis. He ignored her and opened his phone to his archery app.
“I’ll take a serial killer at this point,” Kyle said to himself.
“You should be on my ship then,” Kevin began. “Most of the female officers are psychos, especially the shore patrol.”
“Where do I sign up?” Kyle looked at Kevin with abject desperation.
“Mom is never going to let you sign up for anything that takes you away from her so just forget it,” Dwight droned.
“Now there’s a psycho,” I nodded. Dwight agreed but Kyle lost his cookies as usual.
“Brah, I told you never call my mom a psycho you fucking bitch!” He screamed.
“There’s only one bitch in this car and it’s not Renee!” With my right hand, I reached back and shoved my middle finger as close as I could into his face. “Kyle, Kyle, quarter mile kiss your mother’s ass and make her smile!”
Before complete mayhem erupted in my car, Renee slapped my head from the back seat and screamed, “Look! We’re at Makalapa gate already!”
We all collected ourselves and calmed down as we rolled up to the guard at the gate, he leaned out of his shack and put his left hand out. I rolled my window down and gave him the best non-threatening face that I could come up with, hopefully, it didn’t look like I had to take a shit.
“Good evening sir,” he was a stern but courteous young Marine.
“We’re just dropping someone off,” motioning to the back seat. I rolled the back window down so the marine could get a look at Kevin. He was right back at my window with his face right up to mine, “Is it one of those three? Are they military dependents or something?”
I was confused for a second which made me look in the back seat where I saw Renee pressed up against Kyle so hard that he couldn’t move. Her head was buried in his shoulders and from what I could see from Kyle’s face, he wasn’t mad at me anymore, he was pale with wide-eyed fear. Dwight was still trying to make sense of something but I couldn’t tell. I looked in the rear view mirror and that’s when I saw it or didn’t see it. I had to turn around to get a good look; it was empty. The seat where Kevin Takeuchi was just nuzzling up to Renee and making sweet baby talk was devoid of his presence.
Shit.
Rightly so, the young marine was upset and he was not having any of our bullshit. We were cleared out of my car and given a full inspection of our persons short of a cavity search. Then we had to wait while my car was taken apart, I didn’t bother to try and explain that a flesh and blood person that Renee met at a club who told us that his ship was in port, vanished in the back seat of my car while Kyle and I were trying to kill each other. We were made to wait another hour before they searched us again, after all that time the young marine finally asked me the name of the person we’d all met earlier that evening. Then he asked me the name of his ship, which I won’t give here for security purposes. Another hour passed before the marine returned and he when he did, he gave me some interesting information before he told us to skate our asses outta there and to never come back.
“Sir, the name of the ship you gave us that you say your friend is on, in which he claimed is in port on this base, is in fact right now as we speak in the Kingdom of Bahrain, off of Saudi Arabia.” That’s really the last thing he said before he let us drive off into the sunrise. So the question remains, who is Kevin Takeuchi? No idea, there’s no information on him on any census records, no picture of him in any Aiea high school yearbook. I’m pretty sure I’ll get the same results if I look for his birth certificate. I’ll tell you one thing, I remember in high school that there was something on the news about a local kid who was in the service that got stabbed outside a club near fort street mall. This had to be at least ten or twelve years ago, he was home for the weekend because his ship pulled in at Pearl Harbor. Instead of going to a hospital emergency room, he flagged down a cab and had it drive him back to base. He bled to death on the way there and died before the cab reached the gate at Makalapa. Could the Kevin Takeuchi we met have been the same guy?
Good question.
.............
THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON
Renee lived the life of a female bachelor, work all day, party all night, rinse and repeat. The aftertaste of Patron and green olives still lingered in the back of her mouth and she could feel a piece of the pimento between her teeth. She tried to ignore it and go back to sleep but it was just too annoying. Sitting up in bed she gazed over at Kyle laying there covered with half her sheets and blanket. Making her way to the bathroom she brushed her teeth and took a shower that vacillated between hot and cold. She didn't dry herself off completely and was still a bit wet when she sat back on her bed. Looking over at Kyle, the thought crossed her mind to fuck him first and then tell him that what happened last night wasn't going to be anything after he walked out her door. Her phone rang just then, she happened to look at the Hello Kitty clock on the wall and noted that it read 1 pm. There was no caller ID but as she answered it, the voice on the other side said, "Hey, it's Kevin! I told you I'd memorize your number!"
Kyle's dreams of his new found love with Renee was shattered when he was suddenly jolted awake by her high shrill screams. "Fuck," he said to himself, "I knew it, she is psycho."
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