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“A full complement. We're going to put a lot of your men to work on this one.”

Joe and Ed were instantly suspicious. “Yeah?”

Francis nodded and sipped his coffee. Joe and Ed sipped their coffee. Yuki took out a notepad and a mechanical pencil.

Joe shot her a look. “What's that for?”

“I thought I might need to take notes.”

Joe turned to Francis. “We're not making any concessions.”

Francis smiled. He'd been waiting for this. “I'm not asking for any deals.”

“You're paying full freight.” It was not a question.

“Absolutely.”

Francis thought he saw Ed's shoulders relax.

“The last time your studio was here they killed us with concessions.”

“That was last time.”

Joe continued to eye him suspiciously. Francis sipped his coffee.

“Look. I'll level with you guys. This is a short job, an easy job, and the studio decided they didn't want any headaches. This thing goes to series and we're here on a permanent basis—well, then I'd imagine someone from business affairs would come and renegotiate.”

Joe and Ed nodded conspiratorially, as if they'd just been let in on some valuable corporate secret.

“What about overtime?”

“Overtime, golden time. We go over, you get paid.”

“Meal penalties?”

“If we owe you a meal, you'll get a meal. We're bringing in a catering company, one of the best. Your guys are gonna eat prime rib until their arteries explode.”

Joe and Ed exchanged puzzled looks. “You're not using Sid?”

Francis looked at them. “Who's Sid?”

“Everybody uses Sid. There's only one caterer on the island.”

Francis adjusted his sunglasses. “Well, now there's two.”

Joe and Ed frowned. “Our guys like to eat local.”

“Local? What do you mean?”

“Spam an' eggs,
loco moco,
poi. You know? Local.”

Francis shrugged. “He'll cook whatever you want.”

Yuki looked at the men. “Excuse me for interrupting, but wouldn't it be better if your men ate a healthier diet? I mean, really, who knows what's in Spam?”

Ed looked at her. “Belly buttons and assholes.”

Yuki made a face and went back to minding her own business.

Joe turned to Francis. “What's the name of this outfit?”

“It's Jack Lucey out of Las Vegas.”

Joe nodded soberly. “I've heard of him.”

The half papaya arrived. Francis squirted some lime juice on it, careful to shoot a little of it in Joe and Ed's direction. He scooped up a spoonful.

“I've worked with him before. He's quite a character.”

Hannah sat in Joseph's kitchen and drank a cup of coffee. She was on her lunch break and still had time before she had to go back to work, so she relaxed, enjoying herself. She sat back and put her feet up on the table. Even though she was dressed in her schoolteacher outfit, a pair of navy slacks and a buttoned pink and white striped blouse, she slouched in the chair, letting wrinkles grow like weeds on her freshly pressed clothes.

She was Hawaiian, with black hair and beautiful brown skin, her black eyes twinkling out of a delicate moon-shaped face. Her body was thin—her mother thought this to be evidence of some Japanese ancestry—and she had small, beautifully rounded breasts like the Tahitian women in paintings by Gauguin. Stuffed into professional clothes, she felt like a fraud, not like a native Hawaiian but like any Asian salary woman working for a big corporation in Tokyo or Singapore.

Hannah had always chafed under the school's dress code. This was supposed to be laid-back Hawaii, the Aloha State, where even the governor wore sandals and an aloha shirt to work. But the school administration wanted the faculty to
appear crisp and professional. Perhaps there was some logic to it. If the teachers stood around chatting in Hawaiian dressed like hippies and surfers, it might give the wrong impression. They were under enough pressure as it was.

The No Child Left Behind law demanded English proficiency as a sign of a good school—as if speaking a native language somehow meant you weren't as smart as kids in Connecticut. It was a big bunch of mainland bullshit. But it meant they were constantly forced to test their kids, allow auditors to come and watch the classes, and put up with all kinds of bureaucratic indignities.

Hannah sipped her coffee and looked around the kitchen. She liked it when she stayed over at Joseph's house. It was immaculate, almost compulsively clean, compared to her house; there were no mounds of dirty laundry dotting the landscape like those termite hills in West Africa, no stacks of magazines, books, and newspapers covering every available inch of counter space. Joseph's house was antiseptically spotless, as if he expected the health department to arrive any minute for a surprise inspection.

Joseph would pick up after her. Put her laundry in the hamper, recycle the newspapers, and clean the dirty dishes that she stacked in the sink. He used to joke, as he put her sweatpants in the wash, that it was nice to have a woman's touch around the place. Hannah liked him to pick up after her. It showed he cared. He spoiled her that way.

Hannah's black eyes twinkled as she heard Joseph come into the house. “You want some coffee?”

Joseph shook his head and bent down to give her a kiss. “Sid just called. He's flipping out about something.”

“Call me later.”

Joseph looked at her, slouching in the chair with her feet up. “You're gonna wrinkle your clothes, sitting like that.”

Hannah smiled. “I know.”

...

Jack couldn't believe it. Didn't any white people live here? What was wrong with this place? Isn't this supposed to be America? Everywhere he looked there were Chinese-looking island people going about their business. Even some of the signs were in Chinese or Japanese or something. They might as well be in Hong Kong.

The white people, people like Jack, stuck out like the sunburned Hawaiian-shirt-wearing bumpkins they were. They weren't from around here. They were from Michigan and North Carolina, Kansas and Oregon, Ohio and Minnesota. They'd come all this way, to the middle of nowhere—the single most isolated group of islands in the massive Pacific Ocean—for some sun. They looked like they'd got it, too. Skin peeling off their noses, their foreheads and necks the color of boiled lobsters, Day-Glo gaudy shirts draped over beef-fed guts, and stick legs as white as a picket fence back home.

“We need to get some sunscreen.”

“I got some. SPF thirty.”

“Is that good?”

“Yeah. I think it is.”

“I don't wanna look like these French-fried motherfuckers.”

“Wear a hat.”

“Drive, will ya? I'm roasting in here.”

Stanley cranked up the AC. “Better?”

“Just hurry up.”

Stanley was driving. This meant they crawled along as slowly as possible; stopping for every little thing they could stop for. Jack wondered if Stanley had ever run a yellow light in his life. The car lurched to a stop the nanosecond the light turned yellow. Nope. But then Stanley had never had an accident, either.

The constant stopping and painstakingly glacial maneuvering was tedious; in fact, it bugged the shit out of Jack. If he'd watched
Oprah
or had any kind of psychological training, he would've recognized that Stanley's driving was passive-aggressive behavior designed to make him crazy. And it did; it drove him nuts.

“Drive. Please.”

“Look at the traffic.”

“I can see it. It's all going past us.”

“You want to drive?”

That was a rhetorical question. In Las Vegas, Jack drove. He didn't even like to have Stanley ride in the same car. But the car rental agency wouldn't let Jack drive in Honolulu. Stroke survivors weren't allowed on the insurance plan. This was news to Jack, and it really pissed him off. The clerk—she looked Chinese but her name tag said
GAYLE-ANNE
—had stood there, not a drop of aloha in her manner, not even pretending to be friendly, and told them that only Stanley could drive. She said the word
liability
over and over again. Loud and slow. Like Jack was a retard. As if
he
was the liability.

Jack made sure to bang his walker against the side of the Lincoln a few times just to show them what kind of liability a cripple could be.

So Stanley was at the wheel, the demonically sluggish pace giving Jack plenty of time to check out the city.

Jack saw a sign that read:
LA FEMME NU.
It had all the graphic nuance of strip club signage. But what language was that? Maybe the
D
and
E
were burned out. Jack smiled to himself. Maybe this town will be all right after all. A strip club. Wonder what those Chinese chicks look like bangin' their pussies against a pole?

He'd come back later, after he'd dumped Stanley at the hotel, and find out. But first they had work to do.

...

Francis needed to lie down. He desperately needed an hour of sleep and perhaps a hit of Xanax just to take the edge off. His body shook and quivered; he looked and felt like a palsy-riddled octogenarian as he made his way down the corridor toward his room.

The stress of keeping it together while dealing with the Teamsters, coupled with the reek coming off the Asian girl, had been too much. He'd thought that having a good hearty breakfast might turn the tide against the relentless pounding of his hangover, but all he'd really accomplished was to give himself a barbaric case of indigestion and greasy pork-product burps. There was actually one point where he thought he might lose it and launch a Technicolor yawn all over the table. But he was a grown-up. He maintained.

He carefully opened the door to his room and crept in. He was hoping the lifeguard was still there; instead, it looked like a grenade had gone off. Not only was there broken glass, apparently a bottle of Barbancourt rum, and splinters from
the smashed ukulele, but all the dresser drawers had been pulled out and overturned and their contents strewn around in a frenzy of looting. Francis saw that his suitcase had been upended on the bed and then tossed out onto the balcony.

He walked into the bathroom and noticed that his prescriptions of Xanax and Valium were missing, as well as some extremely expensive vitamins Chad had given him. The vitamins had been custom-mixed by his nutritionist to help him cope with the stress of his job. Had Chad fucked the nutritionist, too?

Francis saw his carry-on bag sitting in the bathtub, its guts dumped out and rifled through. His digital camera was gone, as well as his cell phone and Palm Pilot. For the first time it occurred to Francis that perhaps the young man was not an actual lifeguard. Good thing he'd stuffed his laptop, a wad of per diem, and a few hits of really good E in the little safe tucked in the closet. At least it wasn't a total loss.

Francis was suddenly desperate for a cocktail, so he opened the minibar—miraculously untouched—and searched for some vodka and orange juice. He found something called
POG
that looked like orange juice, and after reading the ingredients, learned that it contained some orange juice among the papaya and guava, and mixed it with a little bottle of Absolut.

It tasted pretty good, actually. He washed four Advils down with it, draining it completely, before slumping backward onto the semidemolished bed and cracking his head on the coconut-shell bra that had been hiding in the mess.

He felt a lump growing on the back of his head. He knew he should put some ice on it but couldn't find the energy to move. Instead, he felt a certain jolt of satisfaction fill him. Here he was, wasted and fucked, ripped off and robbed, feeling
like death warmed over. It hurt. But he was partying. Getting down and dirty and having fun. All the things Chad said he couldn't do. That was always the reason Chad gave for his infidelities. Francis was just an old stick-in-the-mud. He didn't know how to have a good time.

Francis was determined to prove him wrong. Here he was in Honolulu giving as good as he got. And he was just getting started.

...

Joseph arrived at the office, an immaculately clean yet ramshackle kind of warehouse filled with stacks of equipment, much of it nonfunctional and piling up in the far corners. There was an industrial kitchen with boxes of canned goods stacked on huge tables, all arranged around a massive stove salvaged from the old Canlis restaurant in Waikiki. Joseph found the Teamsters, Joe and Ed, standing around the coffeepot with his uncle. The Teamsters nodded sympathetically while Sid fumed.

“Fuckin' haole motherfucker.”

Joe picked at his Styrofoam coffee cup while Ed looked at his feet and shrugged. “He's paying full freight.”

Sid shot Joe a murderous look. “All de times I fix you pineapple fried rice —”

“What the fuck you want me to do, tell the membership they can't take the job?”

“Yes.”

Ed cleared his throat and tried to reason with Sid.

“Our people are starvin'. They're livin' on food stamps, for chrissakes. What do you think they're gonna say if they
find out we turned down a fat job like this? You gotta be reasonable, Sid.”

Sid didn't feel like being reasonable. “Dey're gonna eat haole food. Mainland food. It's gonna kill 'em. Why fo' you wanna poison everybody?”

Ed and Joe shrugged. “You're the best. We know that. That's not the issue.”

“Wot's the issue den?”

“We signed the contract.”

Sid glared at them. “I never work a nonunion show. Never. You know dat.”

Joe and Ed didn't have much to say to that. It was true that Sid never worked nonunion shows. It had been that way for years. If a nonunion show came to Oahu, they'd soon find that there was no way to feed their crews except making take-out runs from some nearby
okazu
or mom-and-pop puka. It was expensive, and not every crew member wanted a lunch of
musubi,
squid
laulau,
barbecue meat stick, or fried butterfish collars with rice.