“Dat my other Pidgin,” Kanani said. “I spent half my childhood here on Big Island. Partly grew up on a plantation. So did Faddah—my father, I mean. Joey ‘The Pug’ Alana. Now he was a native Hawaiian. Mother and Faddah and me, we were always outsiders, a mixed-race family. The Japanese families were ashamed for Mother and the native Hawaiians thought my faddah was crazy. Then he got into trouble organizing workers, and we had to flee the plantation. For Honolulu. He worked on the docks and became a union organizer there. But then the war came. The Military Government, they detained Mother on account of her Japanese connections, not to mention those relatives back in the old country who liked to carry swords and swagger around and command those planes bombing Pearl Harbor and raise children who kamikaze American ships. So, Faddah, he saved my mother from detention camp—she could’ve been shipped off to somewhere cold on the mainland like Oregon or Idaho, penned in like so many chickens with all the kotonks thinking they better than the bulaheads.”

“Bulaheads?” Lett said.

“Japanese American from Hawaii. Kotonks, they’re the Japanese from the US. They talk like you, they look at us like you.”

“What about you? They didn’t detain you? The Military Government?”

“No.”

“Your father helped you, too?”

“Of course. He my faddah.”

“How did he do it?”

“Same as with Mother. Faddah got her released owing to his contacts—as a local labor official, he was helping to make sure the islands had enough workers despite all the martial law and security measures. Because Military Government was soon realizing that if they tried locking up all the Japanese Americans, the economy would’ve fallen apart. But, he also had to keep doing things they wanted so that Mother could stay free. Way I figure it, the Military Government really only wanted to put the screws on my faddah, to show him who was really the boss man. Faddah, see, he was becoming a big organizer by then. ILWU. On the dock, and the sugar and pineapple plantations, too. Employers, politicians, the military were always looking for bust him up. So, he cooperated. He advised certain union radical guys to stand down.” Kanani grunted at that. “But it was really for us.”

“Now here you are getting posted to The Preserve. Like I said—you must have your own angle.”

Kanani stared at Lett with one eye, like a person watching a bull that got free of a pen. “You one interrogator during the war or what?”

“Something like that. I told you what I was.”