The Guns of Lānaʻi...Chapters 1 & 2

1907. Love and war in Hawai'i

Copyright ©2025 Terence Clarke. All Rights Reserved.

ISBN (digital online edition): 979-8-9857962-7-8

This book is a work of fiction. Any reference to historical events, real people, or real places is used fictionally. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Note: Chapters 1 to 4 are free for all readers. The rest of the novel is for “paid subscribers” only at $5.00 per month.

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For Beatrice Bowles

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“all the flowers are forms of water… see how they wake without a question even though the whole earth is burning'“ —W.S. Merwin

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THE STRAIT

1

Kimo pulled the Smith and Wesson 38 DA from his coat pocket, aimed at the chandelier that hung over the center of the bank lobby, and fired away. Shattered glass sprayed the customers as they dropped to the floor.

“Stay down!”

Shouting from others scattered the wail of the woman behind the counter, and rose through the falling glass. Kimo walked toward the door leading to the back office and, ultimately, the vault, and his voice cut through all the noise.

“No talk!”

He stood for a moment in the doorway. Self-note shaped his manner. He appeared even younger than his twenty-two years. But a look at his thickened hands and at various parts of his back would reveal the effects of the hard labor he had had to do in the years since he had run away from San Francisco. Still a youth, he was clearly a settled, unafraid man. He wore an old pair of blue jeans and a wrinkled black cotton shirt, the sleeves rolled up. His hat, a dark brown John B. Stetson he had bought in El Paso, on his way back a year and a half ago from Mexico, was well taken care of by him, despite the amount of sun and dust it had had to absorb. He pushed it back. He needed a shave only in patches. Unless you were standing near Kimo and looking closely at him, you may not even have noticed. His large brown eyes had a look of actual contemplativeness. The most notable thing about him in his own mind was that, despite being a thief and robber, indeed he was a thoughtful man. Just now, looking at the customers—frightened and strewn across the floor—a recollection came to him of a field strewn with dead soldiers. The image came from no actual experience. Rather it was from War and Peace, Prince Andrei and the Battle of Austerlitz. The length of the novel had intimidated Kimo when he had been fifteen and ordered by his father to read it. But he sat down at his bedroom desk and, immediately, the novel took the boy’s entire attention, especially so when Pierre is walking at night on Prechistensky Boulevard, and sees the comet of 1812 seemingly fixed among the stars…”said to portend all manner of horrors and the end of the world."

Kimo took on a rehearsed look of silent self-regard, in order to keep these people quiet. This was nowhere near the end of the world for the bank customers, but Kimo felt that he had to stand in such a way, and speak to them in such a way, so that a kind of respectful, terrified astonishment would be the result.

Lloyd Morgan waited in the center of the lobby, a rust-spotted Winchester 1887 in his hands. Kimo went behind the counter and emptied all the cash from the teller drawers into a leather bag. He tossed the bag to Lloyd, holding on to the second, empty satchel.

“Come on!” Kimo shouted. A Hawaiian in a bow tie and suit, the bank manager lay on his stomach beneath the counter at which customers normally filled out their banking slips. “Get up.” Kimo hurried a look out the front windows of the bank, worried about police.

The manager did not move, and Lloyd approached him, lowering the shotgun barrel toward him.

“No!” The manager hurried to his hands and knees. “Please.”

“Get up out of there.” Lloyd’s diction slurred his gravelly voice. Also in his twenties, he yet appeared to have no sense of the danger in what he was doing. He was calm, slightly bowed in the shoulders, and for the most part silent. Just now, though, anger at the manager flooded him. The peacoat Lloyd wore was stained with dried mud. He coughed once and swallowed, gesturing toward Kimo with the shotgun. “Do what he tells you.”

The manager stood and walked through the door past the counter.

“The vault.” Kimo took the leather bag into his left hand and pushed the manager along with the pistol. “What’s your name?”

“Arthur.”

They entered the vault.

“What about your last name?”

“Palakiko, mister.”

“You’re the manager?”

“Yes.”

Kimo surveyed Arthur’s eyeglasses. “How’d that happen?”

“I’m sorry?”

Kimo, surprised by the response, wondered how a Hawaiian was even inside this bank. “You’re a native.”

“I—“

Kimo turned away, pointing toward the vault. “Okay, put it all in here.”

Arthur took thousands of dollars from the vault shelves and stuffed them into the bag.

“I mean, how does a kânaka get named manager of a bank?”

“I… Sir, I—“

“And that?” Kimo pointed with his revolver at a small safe in the corner of the vault.

Arthur said nothing.

“Open it up.” Kimo leaned back against the counter. The Smith and Wesson pointed at the floor.

Arthur’s eyes, intent on Kimo’s, reminded him of the white plates that he and Lloyd had eaten from at the boarding house in Los Angeles, where they had first met. Two men passing through L.A. in confusion. The surfaces of the plates were cracked everywhere from much use. Arthur’s eyes had a similar perfect roundness and scruffiness.

“Yes, sir.” Arthur looked toward the safe. “I guess you want to see what’s inside?”

“That’s right, yes.”

Arthur knelt down on one knee and turned the combination lock in three different directions. He squared himself before the door and slowly opened it. Reaching inside, he took out two metal safe deposit boxes and handed them to Kimo. Kimo looked them over. Lodging the revolver beneath his left arm, he opened the boxes and poured most of their contents into one of the bags.

They were diamonds mostly, ten or so, in rings, necklaces and bracelets. Also a number of strings of pearls and a small, square brass box, with a lid, that contained a round brooch made of gold with an amber setting in the middle, a large drop of it that encased an embalmed moth. The brooch had been nestled within a purple velvet pouch, for protection.

Kimo held it up. “You ought to take this for your wife, Arthur.” He replaced it in the brass box and put it carefully into the bag.

Arthur turned from the safe and fired at Kimo with a pistol left inside for just such an occurrence. Kimo took hold of the cold metal doorjamb. His blood slipped against it like fine oil on glass. He fell to his knees. His right arm hung down from the shoulder motionless, a cylinder made of carnal meat. He dropped the satchel and, as though thrust from the vault into a gutted, brown-riddled dream, he took up his bloodied right hand with his left, to make it move, to bring it back to life. His sight darkened. Arthur stepped past him. Kimo sat down, turned and leaned his head back against the doorjamb.

As Arthur grabbed the satchel from the floor, a bullet scoured his left temple and he too went down. The satchel fell on its side, and coins and jewels scattered from it onto the wooden floor. They were golden disks and flecks of light, soaked in both men’s blood. Arthur shivered. He appeared to die. Kimo could not get his own knees to bend. He could not stand. The vault door creaked.

“Come on, Kimo.”

Spattered with grey mud, one of Lloyd’s boots was cracked across the instep. He carried the satchel filled with cash, and knelt down next to Kimo.

“Can’t see, Lloyd. Don’t leave me.”

Lloyd leaned over and scooped the coins and jewels back into the second satchel. He took the satchel up and secured its strap. “Come on, man.” He pulled Kimo to his feet, placing a free arm around his waist. The two men stumbled from the vault. Lloyd’s Winchester supported Kimo’s back, the barrel pointed to the floor. He held both satchels in his free hand and stumbled as one of them slipped away from him. The two men picked their way through the people on the floor. Lloyd pushed the satchel along with his boot.

When they arrived at the front of the bank, Kimo sagged against the open door. “I can’t.”

“You have to.” Lloyd dropped the second bag and took Kimo by the armpits. “Come on, buddy, stay up.” To Kimo, Lloyd’s voice sounded condemning. It was a coercive judgment that added to his pain. “You’re comin’ with me.”

But Kimo sunk to the floor, and propped himself up in the bank doorway. He turned toward the street. Lloyd stood and left him. “I’ll get the horses.” A few blocks away, three Royal Hawaiian police approached on foot, one of them with a shotgun in his hands, the others pulling their revolvers.

Floating through the black, fleshed haze of his pain, Kimo looked for Lloyd. “Don’t leave me.”

Lloyd, in the saddle, pulled the second horse behind him by the reins. Kimo passed into a faint. Coming out of it, he saw Lloyd’s horse approaching him. The animal was terrified. Gunfire came from up the street. Lloyd had let the second horse go.

“Jesus, Lloyd.” Kimo fell against him as Lloyd knelt down. “I thought you were going.”

“Yeah, I. . .” Lloyd reached across Kimo’s chest and grabbed the second satchel. “See you, buddy.”

He ran the few steps to his horse and mounted it. He did not look back. Coins dropped from one of the satchels into the muddy street, bits of light that electrified Kimo’s failing vision.

2

El Pituco, an Argentine from Entre Rios province, had arrived at the prison in Honolulu just after the new century had begun. To him, the twentieth looked a lot like the nineteenth, some of his years in the 1880s having been spent in a prison in Argentina. In the Oahu prison, he had shared a cell with Kimo Severance for seven years.

On this particular day, their last as convicts, El Pituco took up a long piece of dark blue cotton cloth, used in the jail to mend old pants and shirts. He had sewn seams into its edges so that it would not shred, and now held opposite corners of it. Spinning the cloth halfway into a long kerchief, he placed it around his neck, and cinched it at the rear. It was, Kimo knew, a celebration of his release.

“I had one of these when they brought me in here,” El Pituco told him. “They took it away. But an aldeano like me….” , which Kimo had learned from El Pituco was the Spanish for something like “a country boy.”

“You come from the pampas, you need one of these.” El Pituco was packing his suitcase…less a suitcase, rather a kind of cardboard box with a leather handle, colored gray. “Lot of dust out there.” He had an extra pair of drawers and a second-hand suit plus a pair of Levis. He held a blue denim prison shirt in one hand. The cowboy boots they had given him were badly worn down at the heels. He walked bowlegged.

El Pituco appeared made of mottled leather. With his years in prison, his face had taken on a stained coloration, dark brown in his cheeks and neck. The travail of incarceration had also brought to him a look of disgruntled worry. He did not deserve what had happened to him, it seemed, and his eyes showed clearly the anger that that offense caused in his heart. His unhappiness was demonstrated by the resolute care with which he moved.

Defeat. Rage.

The day he had first entered Kimo’s cell, he had had little English. Having signed on to an Argentine whaler, he had jumped ship in Honolulu and run from its Chilean first mate, who had been struggling from the deck to his feet and shouting at El Pituco that he was a maldito hijo de puta. Cucho Menendez, the first mate, was white, a pure Spaniard chileno. The two men never got along, Cucho having decided that an errant gauchito like this El Pituco gauchito would never understand the whale and never learn how to kill one, principally because he was an Indian and, even worse, an Argentine Indian.

El Pituco had attacked Cucho with a club. When he had entered Kimo’s prison cell a few months later, he knew only that this other guy, sitting on his cot, was also a gringo. Convicted of stealing a horse, El Pituco paused for a moment, a single folded blanket in his hands, as Kimo surveyed him.

“Who are you?”

El Pituco felt little compunction to answer, so that the sound of Kimo’s question remained alone between them, little affected by the guard’s closing and locking the barred cell door. El Pituco knew the phrase, one of the few English ones that he had. But he wouldn’t answer the question because he didn’t know who this gringuito was either. Silence embodied El Pituco’s anger, and his having to share a cell with a man like this meant only that they breathed the same air, nothing more.

El Pituco stored his few other personal things under his cot, and sat down on it, his back to the wall.

“¿Mexicano?” Kimo had moved to a small wooden stool next to his own cot. He glowered, his eyes cast downward.

“Argentino.”

“Eh….” Kimo nodded. “No conozco ese país.”

Surprised by Kimo’s heavily accented Spanish, El Pituco began a short description of where he was from. He described the cattle herds on the pampas south of La Paz, the little town on the Paraná River near which he had grown up. His description was piece-meal, phrases and half-phrases. He had figured this fellow understood what he was saying, and so now Pituco resented Kimo’s wordlessness.

“Speak English?” Kimo still did not look up.

El Pituco paused a moment, trying to find in the man’s evasive posture the true intention of the question.

Finally, Kimo pointed to his own chest. “Me llaman Kimo.” Beyond that, that first day, there was little of anything between them.

Now, seven years later, El Pituco did speak English, a language he had learned largely from Kimo Severance. Kimo sat across from him on the same stool, his own suitcase packed but not yet strapped shut. He too wore Levis. Kimo’s white shirt was badly wrinkled, although it had come from the prison laundry without a blemish of any kind. He put on the suit coat they had given him, and picked at it, pulling away pieces of thread and lint. The wound in his right arm had long ago healed, but badly, leaving the arm with dull internal pain, as though a shattered piece of wood remained stuck inside. He passed a hand down the long trenched scar that ran its length.

El Pituco closed the suitcase. “Argentina got to live alone for a few more years, Kimo.” He surveyed the case with a smile. “I won’t get far with these tesoritos.”

Little treasures. Kimo could not imagine what was coming. Outside. Prison had taken the fired anger that had driven him as a boy and slowly, inexorably dampened it, so that now, like El Pituco, he hoped he could simply set up somewhere. The guns, the intrepid madness, and the wish to get even…none of that interested him any more. He wanted only to find a place to work on one of the islands. Run some cattle, maybe. Work in a store in one of the villages on Maui. Go fishing.

But he well remembered the anger. Although it had led him to the severe injury to his body, Kimo’s heart suffered even more. He knew that what had driven him to forsake his family in San Francisco and to end up in Hawaii, to steal horses and cattle, to hold up ship chandlers, apothecaries, and that bank, was that he had been born with his suffering, an infant driven into resentment.

His father Samuel Ezzard Severance was a banker whose very clothing made him resemble a civic statue. He had a grand, cold face with a heavy moustache that added to the air of unquestioning personal importance that pervaded every conversation Kimo ever had with him. Samuel Ezzard’s English Catholicism had made a kind of leather out of his feelings, and his rearing of his son Joaquim had had a similar chemical abrasiveness and tanning. The father felt that, although his wife gave birth to the boy, she had little other responsibility than to milk him until he could be weaned. Such a boy should understand the very nooks, small streams, and pebbles of God’s dangerous garden, so that he could safely negotiate in close detail its most stony menaces, especially if he were to go to Harvard and then run the family businesses in San Francisco, as Samuel Ezzard’s plan was on the day Joaquim was born. Joaquim was bullied into acquiescent silence for the entirety of his childhood, in which humiliation was the core of his education.

The odd thing was that, although forced to read the books on which his father insisted, he actually grew to love many of them. There were books of geology and mining, the soporific histories of English kings—this Henry, that Richard—one after another, the engineering that, when he was twelve, was chosen for him as a field of study by his father, the right kind of training for a banker whose goal would be to fund the ascendancy of California as a great state. Books on American history and even, to Kimo’s eventual surprise, on Renaissance European art. Some interesting. Many slavishly boring.

But it was the novels that Kimo grew to thirst for, the great English novels of Austen, Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy. “So you’ll know where you came from,” his father said. “The history of your people.” The history itself interested Kimo well enough. But it was the complicated, promethean emotions of these novels that thrilled him, and led him to believe that you had to be English and white—American and white was good enough , too—to be civilized. He learned that from his father, almost the only thing on which the two could agree.

All this ended in 1890, when Joaquim was eighteen and attacked his father in the kitchen of their Nob Hill mansion. Luckily Samuel Ezzard was able to get the knife out of Joaquim’s hand and to call for help from their butler Johnson, a humorous, upsetting black man whose insistence on making comic light of everything did little to hide his own contempt for Samuel Ezzard. Joaquim did not like Johnson, thinking him a phony with all his light-heartedness. Only when he was in prison some years later did Kimo come to realize that there was no other possible way for Johnson to act, since Samuel Ezzard Severance believed of Negroes that the things they were qualified for were dancing and muddying racial purity. That was the reason for Samuel Ezzard’s further opinion that they should be shipped back to Africa where such frivolities were tolerated, if not downright valued. Kimo once himself also assumed such things about Johnson, especially that he was subservient simply as a result of being black. That’s how black people were. But in prison, Kimo perceived in his memories of the butler’s self-deprecating comedy a distinct and self-effacing hurt. Watching Pituco and the Blacks, Hawaiians, Filipinos and so many others being herded around by the white guards, Kimo realized that whatever better treatment he himself got from the guards in Honolulu came to him simply because he too was white.

—

Johnson had stopped the fight, and, one week later, Kimo left. Fuck his father. Fuck Harvard. This was the end of San Francisco for Kimo, the end of California, the end of the United States.

He went to Mexico, to a town called Topolobampo on the Sinaloa coast, where he found work with a fisherman named Adolfo Santander, a forceful, ugly man as little like Samuel Ezzard as one could imagine. Dressed every day in soiled Mexican cotton pants and shirt, Adolfo went out onto the small bay of Topolobampo in a skiff with a sail, also scum-soiled, and dropped nets for shrimp. Kimo, his hands so delicate that he could not at first handle the nets, took to the work with a kind of relieved intensity. This he could do. Adolfo had worked for a time on a sardine boat in Monterey, California, and spoke quite simple English. He taught Kimo enough Spanish for him to befriend some of the fishermen.

Kimo won Adolfo’s real praise when a surprise squall came across the bay late one afternoon, a gray, slovenly animal of cloud and wind, blustering with rain. Adolfo was at home at the time, on the small farm he owned outside the village. Kimo, realizing the danger to the skiff, went with the other fishermen and, like them with theirs, unmoored Adolfo’s boat from its shabby wooden dock and sailed it into the storm. The storm itself was risky, but to leave the skiff moored would surely have destroyed it.

The squall passed in half an hour. By the time Kimo returned to the mooring, Adolfo was waiting. His face was covered with a week’s beard. He reminded Kimo of the sea lions he had watched at Land’s End in San Francisco. They were grave, important-looking creatures whose humorous language sounded a great deal like the portentous whining of his father’s business friends: complaints against the government, the Chinese, Benjamin Harrison, Mexicans, the Negro, the Irish…

“Gracias, Kimo.” Adolfo was unable to pronounce Joaquim’s real name, and had shortened it. “You saved me.”

The other fishermen lauded Kimo’s quickness when the storm had come, and especially the way he just watched the others and so handily followed their example of sailing directly into the squall.

“Valiente ¿no?” A fisherman named Rigoberto, whose every surface was granulated dark with exposure to the sun, clapped Kimo on the shoulder. “Un perro cimarrón. No experience and all. A gringo, too. But brave, hombre. A wild dog.”

Adolfo and the others agreed. This was the first instance in Kimo’s life that authoritative men congratulated him for anything. Adolfo was gathering the sail together and, sitting on the skiff, asked Kimo to help.

“You know about sails, no, Kimo?”

“Just what you’ve told me.”

“Bueno, I’ll show you more, yes?”

“Show me?”

Adolfo shrugged, his teeth gapped and rugged with crannies, brown-yellow. “To fold them, chico. You need to know about that, if you’re going to fish, no? To fold them so that, when they open…” He pointed into the blue luminescent sky. “They fly.”

—

“There’s not much, is there?” Kimo said to El Pituco now as he strapped shut his own suitcase.

El Pituco put on his shirt. “A gaucho don’t wear things like this.” He had explained to Kimo the origin of his nickname, that a pituco in the Entre Rios pampa was a man who dressed well, a kind of gaucho dandy. Cocky, too. “That’s why it’s important, how you pronounce it,” he told Kimo. “Pee-tú-co. Somebody get’s it wrong, he’s makin’ fun of you, ‘cause everybody in Entre Rios knows what a pituco is.” El Pituco told him that, when you went into La Paz, the town on the great Paraná River to which he and his father brought steers to market, “you have to dress good, and act like you know what you’re doin’, or the girls don’t like you.” He nodded, and took on a look of mock self-importance. “Un gaucho peregrino, ¿eh? we say.” El Pituco ran his hands across the front of his shirt, which did nothing to reduce its wrinkles. “Somebody’ll make a song out of that some day,” he muttered.

Kimo laughed now. “And that shirt is all you’ve got?”

“Not for long, chico. You’ll see the kinds of clothes I can make.”

“I forgot. You know how to sew.”

“Yes, my father taught me.” El Pituco’s father had died in prison. “He was a good thief.” He buttoned the shirt. “And a superb tailor.”

The iron door behind them opened. One of the guards, Bob French, entered the room. Bob was a man of somewhat courageous kindness to the prisoners, very unlike the other guards, especially the other white guards. Of course, in the Oahu prison all the guards were white. Kimo did not care for any of them himself, except for Bob.

“All right, Kimo. Pituco. I got your five dollars here.”

He handed each man a single bill. Bob’s thin face, like that of a starved serpent, hid his real regard for prisoners that showed any talent for communication. So few had that talent that those who did were victimized by the others. That briefly had been the case with Kimo, although he sustained himself with such fearlessness his first year in prison that the others grew to worry about him, about how he would react if they were to try anything threatening with him.

When, some years later, the new prisoner El Pituco was assigned to the same cell, Kimo worried for several days that the Argentine was too dangerously quick-fused a man, and that his quiet demeanor was a ruse. Kimo held himself at a remove despite their living so closely in so small a space. They were like two quarrelsome mutes, he mused.

Two weeks after El Pituco’s arrival, a guard entered the cell, to search the prisoners’ possessions. A monthly event, this invasion always unnerved Kimo, especially recently, when this particular guard, named Alton Cable and new to the prison, was assigned to do the searching. Kimo had no possessions, but Alton was devoted to punishment of the prisoners, which qualifed him for particular approval from the warden and other prison officials. He quickly became the guard most feared by the prisoners, a large, dirty man known for his direct cruelty. Alton moved through the cells with impunity, and made each offender a specific recipient of certain kinds of mistreatment, depending on Alton’s understanding of that man’s particular weakness or fear.

Kimo’s weakness was his skin. “These others…these Hawaiians and other darkies…What are you doin’ here?” Alton kept up a continuing ribald needling of Kimo whenever he saw him, always on the subject of how a white man worth anything wouldn’t be caught being imprisoned with a bunch of savages. “You had to be born stupid to get caught and tossed into this place, Kimo. What’s wrong with you?”

When Alton came into the cell this time, he took apart Pituco’s cot, and right away found the needles and thread that the Argentine had hidden in one corner of the mattress. “What’s this?”

El Pituco, not understanding the guard, stood to the side. Another guard, Bob French, stood outside the cell door.

“Some kind of seamstress?” Smiling, Alton pulled the two wooden spools from the mattress, each stuck with a needle. The threads were white and black. “Making yourself a dress here, Pituco?”

El Pituco spoke, but only Kimo understood what he was saying. It was a plea to be left alone, an explanation that the needle and thread were the only things he had that he cared about, and that there was no need to take them. When Alton, ignoring Kimo’s translation, stuffed the spools into his pants pocket, Kimo gestured to Pituco with both hands, a suggestion that he keep calm.

“Stay out of this.” Alton took a step toward Kimo, who had been standing just inside the cell door.

“Don’t worry, Alton, I’m just—“

“And keep quiet.”

“That thread’s not doing you any harm.”

Alton pushed Kimo against the cell bars, took him by the shirt and banged him once more into the bars. He and Kimo both knew that, were Kimo to resist, he would be placed immediately in solitary. A felon, in for first degree robbery, Kimo was to keep quiet and speak only when asked a question. So he allowed himself now to be attacked by Alton Cable.

El Pituco grabbed Alton from behind, twirling him about and jamming him against the bars. Kimo fell to the side, and Bob French stepped into the cell, stumbling over Kimo’s legs and pulling at the Argentine’s shoulders. “Come on, Pituco. Let him be.”

El Pituco’s glazed eyes widened with anguish, his struggle clearly electrified with rage at Alton. Kimo too attempted pulling the Argentine away, knowing that any such attack by a prisoner would get him into deep trouble. Released, Alton turned and immediately attacked Pituco, the club he wielded opening two large cuts on the Argentine’s right temple. He shouted at Pituco, although there were no words, rather enraged cries.

“Alton!” Bob attempted interfering. “Let him be.”

Alton paid no attention and, under a continuous beating, El Pituco fell to the floor.

Finally, Bob was able to pull Alton away. “That’s enough.” He hurried the guard from the cell, leaving Kimo to minister to the wounded Argentine. Blood flowed to the cement floor. El Pituco struggled against Kimo, but could barely speak.

A few more guards arrived at the cell door and, pulling El Pituco into the passageway by his shirt, they picked him up and carried him away. The assault continued at the end of the passageway. Alton’s profanities directed the others.

Bob was the one guard still in the cell. Kimo knew that he was to keep silent. Seated on the floor, he waited. Bob stood in the cell doorway, listening to the noise at the end of the cell block. The Argentine’s shouting, although in Spanish, clearly conveyed his fear and the results of the pain that the men were inflicting on him.

El Pituco was put in solitary confinement for three months. When he returned finally to Kimo’s cell, two scars showed on the side of his head. His nose had been broken, and had healed poorly. When he sat down on his own cot, the handcuffs now removed, he waited as Bob and the one other guard with him retreated up the passageway. Bob had spoken quietly several times to Kimo, about Pituco’s welfare in solitary.

“Gracias, Kimo, por lo que hiciste.” El Pituco lowered his head. “En ayudarme, amigo.” He remained silent for a moment, as did Kimo. “Gracias.”

—

“You may think five dollars goes pretty far.” Bob gestured toward the bill in Kimo’s hand. “But you fellows been in here for. . . how long, Kimo?”

“Me? Fifteen years.”

Bob scratched the back of his neck, removing the billed cap from his head. “Lucky that bank manager didn’t die.” He replaced the cap and shrugged. “You’d ‘a been in here forever otherwise.”

“Just about.”

“So that money—”

“Until they hanged me.”

“That five isn’t worth what you think it is. Don’t spend it all. . . don’t spend it—

“All in one place.” Kimo shrugged as well. “You sound like my father.” He folded the bill and put it in a pants pocket.

“Probably. I sound like my own father.” Bob went to the door and re-opened it. “Good luck to you boys.”

Kimo took up his suitcase and moved toward the doorway. He extended a hand to the guard. “Thanks, Bob. You’ve been kind to us.”

“Kimo, a fellow educated like you, you shouldn’t be here.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“So don’t come back.”

Bob stood aside as Kimo passed, and then took Pituco’s hand as well.

“Take care of him, Argentina.”

The two men preceded Bob down a cement hallway to an iron door. Bob took out a key ring.

Outside, a mud alleyway was bordered by a brick wall. The bricks themselves were scabbed with rain mold, stained red-brown and gray-white. Kimo shielded his eyes. He hadn’t actually seen such light in a very long time. To Kimo, the sound of the door opening wide was that of a volcanic crack splitting open. A purple bougainvillea ran the length of the wall, so that Kimo’s first impression of his new liberty was one of fluorescent dark brightened by its own shadow, like tumbling, falling wine.

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