My Kind of Town
>> Queen's Medical Center Words of the day
The beauty of Pidgin English, as Andy Bumatai once pointed out, is its combination of brevity and colorful description. A non-Pidgin speaker, for instance, might say, "I'm sorry, could you repeat that, please? I couldn't hear what you said because of the jackhammer in the foyer." A Pidgin speaker would say "Eh?" and leave it at that.
"Make die dead," was one of Pidgin's few emphatic redundancies. And Quinn Ah Sun knew he was in trouble when Detective Lopaka LaCroix from Internal Affairs used it to describe the guy Quinn had shot.
"Heart attack," Lt. Dennis Nakasone added. "Partly it was the loss of blood from being shot, partly it was the crystal meth in his blood, partly it was the beating you gave him."
"Beating? I never touched the mutt!"
"Somebody did," LaCroix said. "Smashed the guy's nose flat, broke ribs on both sides, stomped on his privates."
Quinn held up the back of his hands for them to see -- no cuts, no bruises. "Besides, I've got witnesses."
"So we hear," LaCroix said.
"We got the report," Nakasone said. "We want to hear your side."
>> Portlock
"Burning bridges." Lily Ah Sun didn't know where the term came from, but it was so graphic. It was also a philosophy in which she believed. Not the involuntary kind, where stupid or insensitive behavior ends relationships. No, Lily believed in burning bridges constructively. If you never want to pass this way again, burn every bridge that leads here.
Lily learned the tactic back at UH, when she caught her boyfriend Steven and her good friend Allie doing it in his van in the parking structure. Lily burned both of those bridges. Same thing when she hired her friend Candace to be her secretary and found out Candace's smoke breaks meant smoking pakalolo.
And she'd just done it again with her cousin Quinn.
"I think he heard you, Mum," her maid Rosalita said as she hung up the phone. It was the right thing to do after catching Quinn in his bed at Queen's kissing and being fondled by that slut Gwen Roselovich.
When Rosalita answered the phone, held it out to Lily and said "It's your cousin Quinn," Lily hissed, "Tell him he can go straight to hell!"
Lily wanted Quinn to hear it. She wanted to burn that bridge and never go back. The cousins had gone 21 years without speaking and it would be fine if they went another 21 with nothing passing between them but silence. But if Lily did the right thing, why was she crying? This was the first time smoke from a burning bridge got in her eyes.
Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek.
His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin
with weekly summaries on Sunday.
He can be emailed at dchapman@midweek.com