Delicious Read online

  Praise for Delicious:

  “At once sexy and repulsive, the novel manages to plant sharp moral and cultural barbs in its gorge-fest of a plot.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Rated NC-17 for intermittent comic violence, good-natured swearing, cannibalism, humorous amorality, and some truly perverse sex.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Hits exactly the right spot. . . Haskell Smith smartly keeps the action lively by cutting back and forth between viewpoints while tossing off hilarious one-liners and situations that would be over-the-top if they weren’t so hilarious. But what really makes this novel work is its deft touch with serious themes of displacement and relationship changes. Delicious is not for those with weak stomachs, prudish minds or delicate ears, but that leaves the rest of us to savor the novel’s many twisted charms.”

  —Sarah Weinman, The Baltimore Sun

  “Smith is a funny guy—see his earlier work, Moist—and this ribald account of a food-catering war in Hawaii is—like wine-drizzled opakapaka and hungry sex—difficult to put down.

  —Honolulu Star-Bulletin

  “In this darkly comic tale of contract killers, strip-club patrons, libidinous gay producers, and entrepreneurial island chefs, Smith deftly manipulates his characters toward an inevitable and gruesome conclusion.”

  —Tom Dolby, Out

  “Sex is certainly the throbbing heart of this exuberantly perverse, engagingly comic new novel. . . . It’s all neatly twisted together, viewed with a sweetly jaundiced eye and discussed in fleet, pungent prose. . . . Smith’s characters are mostly likeable, the less estimable more so—all drawn in broad, deft strokes. . . . A sprightly light read. Grade: B+”

  —Cincinnati CityBeat

  “This is an absolute gem of a novel—an addictive and engaging page-turner that is both hilarious and unexpectedly touching. Mark Haskell Smith is a genius at humanizing the absurd, prettying up the grotesque and altering the reader’s expectations in all kinds of wonderful ways. Delicious is a joy to read and the most aptly named novel in recent decades.”

  —David Liss, author of

  A Spectacle of Corruption and The Coffee Trader

  “I haven’t laughed so hard or often at a crime novel in years. Delicious is a wonderfully perverse book and I recommend it in the highest possible terms, with this caveat: Don’t read it right before dinner.”—Scott Phillips, author of

  The Ice Harvest, The Walkway, and Cottonwood

  “Smith uses a light brush with which to paint a heavy picture—the rape of Hawaiian culture by the do-gooders who came over from the mainland to save them and destroyed them. Smith does a nice job of interspersing the language and the customs without confusing the reader. . . . You’ll be treated to a group of people who at times almost defy the laws of gravity or something. They are funny, weird, serious, off the wall, you name it. . . . Each [character] is a jewel.”

  —Manya Nogg, I Love a Mystery

  DELICIOUS

  DELICIOUS

  Mark Haskell Smith

  Copyright © 2005 by Mark Haskell Smith

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Smith, Mark Haskell.

  Delicious / Mark Haskell Smith.

  p. cm.

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4739-5

  1. Family-owned business enterprises—Fiction. 2. Caterers and

  catering—Fiction. 3. Honolulu (Hawaii)—Fiction. 4. Murder for

  hire—Fiction. 5. Cookery—Fiction. 6. Cooks—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3619.M592D45 2005

  813′.6—dc22 2004062312

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  For Diana, my designated driver

  DELICIOUS

  The End of the Story

  One

  “I’m gonna dig an imu.”

  He couldn’t think of any other way. So the night before, Joseph went out and gathered as many large rocks and hunks of lava as he thought he’d need. He’d spent the morning collecting banana stalks and chunks of koa wood from a farm near Waiahole, filling the bed of his pickup truck with as much of the stuff as he could, all the while telling the farmer that, yes, he was making kalua pig but, no, he wasn’t having a luau. It wasn’t a party for family and friends. It was a business thing.

  He drove the long way around, past Kahuku and Waialee, past Sunset Beach, and the Banzai Pipeline with its horde of roughly glamorous surfers, their bodies bronzed and articulated like Roman statues, their long hair curling from hours of salt and sun, attended by young girls with tight bodies in tighter bikinis.

  Joseph had often wondered what it was like to ride the big waves on the North Shore. To feel the ocean swell and build underneath you until it rose up, three stories high, rumbling and pushing with a primeval force, beginning to reach out over you, cutting off the sun and sky, wrapping around you in a seething roil of heavy foam. Joseph had seen it, all that pressure building inside a tunnel of water until it suddenly collapsed, like a building falling down, the air pressure exploding like a cannon, shooting a surfer out of the tube in a blast of salt spray at fifty miles an hour. He had heard it was an unbelievable rush. Better than sex, better than any drug. But he couldn’t do it. Leave it to the crazies from Brazil or the rad Cali dudes to risk getting shredded on the coral just beneath the waves.

  Joseph didn’t like to go out into the water. He didn’t surf in it. He didn’t swim in it. He didn’t even like to ride in a boat. Whenever he was in the water the hair on the back of his neck would stand up. The fear of joining the food chain. A distinctly sharky vibe.

  He liked the beach. Liked to kick back, drink a beer, watch the girls, feel his skin go from brown to really brown. As long as he didn’t have to enter the water, the beach was fine.

  Joseph stopped for gas and an energy bar in Haleiwa before turning inland, driving past the sagging homes and rotting little farmhouses that dotted a desolate countryside filled with scrub grass and clumps of wild sugarcane.

  Most of the land was owned by Dole or some other agribiz that zealously guarded its pineapple fields, putting up gates and patrolling the rutted roads in pickup trucks. But that didn’t bother Joseph. He knew where to go.

  He turned off the pavement and onto a dirt road, the red soil rising up in a cloud behind his truck like a brush fire. He jounced down the road for a few miles, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, and then stopped, the truck disappearing for a moment in a thick swirling cloud of dirt.

  Joseph let the dust settle and then backed the pickup down a deeply rutted and pockmarked trail through a dense thicket of sugarcane near an abandoned sugar mill. He drove slowly, careful not to bottom out the springs on his truck, the rocks and firewood clunking and lurching in the back.

  The main house and crushing mills stood faded and falling apart, ruins from another time, left over from the days of C & H, Claus Sprekels, and the sugar boom, when hundreds of Japanese and Filipinos, wearing heavy clot
hes to keep from getting lacerated, had hacked down cane in the fields to sweeten cakes, cookies, and coffee on the mainland. It had been a big business on the island until the company found a cheaper place to grow and harvest sugar. Now it was a wasteland, the sharp canes growing wild, like a forest of green razors, waving in the breeze.

  Joseph rolled his window up; he didn’t want to get cut.

  He reached the edge of the thicket, a small clearing by a decaying outbuilding, and pulled to a stop. He climbed out and looked around. He could turn his head in any direction, and all he could see was tall green sugarcane bobbing in the breeze.

  It was hot, so Joseph took off his T-shirt, revealing a lean body with taut muscles and light brown skin. He looked Hawaiian but, like most people on the island, his lineage was a mixed bag. His father was half Samoan, half Hawaiian, his mother a slender blend of Thai and Danish. He looked like everyone else in Honolulu, brown skin, Asiatic eyes, and dark hair, but with a kind of beautiful mash of a face, his Thai and Northern European DNA fighting it out on a handsome Hawaiian canvas.

  He had a Samoan last name, Tanumafili, but he was never mistaken for a Samoan. When asked what race he was, he always referred to himself as chop suey: a crazy mix of leftovers jumbled up and thrown together. Chop suey. Fill that in on the census form.

  Joseph dropped the gate on the truck and began chucking hunks of wood into a pile. Bright red dust, looking like something from Mars, rose up in little blooms with each thud and thunk as he emptied the truck bed.

  He fished a bag of newspaper and some small sticks out of the cab of the truck—stopping to take a long drink of cold water from the battered Igloo cooler in the front seat—dragged the bag over to a clear spot, squatted, and began to form the material into something combustible.

  Sweat, dripping from his forehead, put out the first match. The second one reached the crumpled newspaper without incident. Joseph watched as the paper caught fire, sending tentative licks of flame up into the twigs. He picked up a couple of large hunks of koa and, using an ax, split them and threw them on the fire.

  Now came the hard part.

  Using a stick he marked out a large rectangle on the ground, about six feet by four, bigger than your average imu. Joseph spit into his palms, plucked a shovel out of the truck, and drove it into the ground along the line he’d made. The blade bit into the soil with a crunch, and he heaved the loose red dirt, pocked with dark pebbles of volcanic rock, off to the side.

  As he dug, Joseph thought about what his uncle had told him. They were being invaded. They had to do whatever they could to protect themselves, their island, and their way of life. It reminded him of all the old stories, the folktales of brave warriors, island kings, and angry volcano gods. But Joseph didn’t need the old stories, the tribal warfare, the myth of Pele, or the arrival of Captain Cook to convince him that his uncle was right. He had seen the consequences of invasion with his own eyes. Rich Caucasians from the mainland were buying up property on the cheap, displacing local families, and then turning around and selling to even richer Japanese. Companies were building factories, employing hundreds of locals, and then shifting the business farther west to Asia, where cheap labor flourished, leaving the islanders unemployed, living with debts they could never repay.

  Life was hard enough. The cost of living in Honolulu was far higher than what the average person could afford, and most of Joseph’s friends had to work two, sometimes three jobs just to make ends meet. Those without steady employment often found themselves fishing for dinner. An empty net and their children went hungry, while overstuffed pinkskinned tourists ordered room service and drank mai tais on the beach.

  The mainlanders, the haoles, had come and taken what they wanted. They had abused the islands and the people who call them home, perverting the spirit of aloha and turning it into a marketing catchphrase for bare-breasted hula girls and rum drinks in tiki mugs. They didn’t give a rat’s ass about the local traditions, the culture, or the Hawaiian people. All they wanted was money. Profit at the expense of the natives.

  Joseph had seen it happen before, but it was always to someone else. Now it was happening to him and his family, his ohana. So he was digging an imu. He couldn’t think of any other way.

  ...

  Joseph stopped digging. He stood up in the hole, now almost four feet deep, and cocked his ear. He heard the whine of an engine reversing down the dirt road, the crunch of tires, the soft putter of exhaust. He climbed out of the hole just as the rear of a plain white van appeared in the clearing. Joseph had to shout to keep the driver from backing into the fire. The van skidded to a stop and then lurched forward in quick little hops, as if stung by a bee.

  Joseph directed the van next to his truck and watched as the dust settled and his cousin Wilson climbed out of the driver’s seat. Wilson stood and stretched, blinking in the sunlight. He was a lot bigger than Joseph: strong, with a large barrel chest and huge bulging biceps ringed with tribal tattoos. Wilson’s shaved head looked like it was planted on his shoulders, his neck disappearing in a mass of thick muscles bulging out at extreme angles like flying buttresses. He wore shorts and flip-flops, revealing legs that looked like smooth tree trunks, knotted with thick blue veins.

  Wilson had turned down a chance to play defensive end for the University of Washington Huskies, preferring to go right into the police academy. But police work was tedious and he never made it onto the force, dropping out of the academy and settling into a life working for his father’s company. Occasionally, Wilson would take a job as a bouncer at a local disco. He liked that job, enjoying the music, the girls, the free crank. He held the record for tourist tossing, having once flung a rowdy Japanese man over a parked car and into the middle of Kalakaua Avenue. He came back the next day and measured the distance from the disco’s door to the bloodstain still on the street. Twenty-four feet seven inches. Untouchable.

  Joseph, his body slick with sweat, stepped forward and embraced his cousin.

  “Cousin.”

  “How’s it?”

  “Getting close.”

  Wilson broke from the embrace and looked at the hole.

  “Wow, brah. You almost done.”

  “We might need some more rocks.”

  Wilson checked the pile. “Looks like enough.”

  “Did you bring any food? I’m starving.”

  Wilson nodded. “No worries. Nana cooked us fried fish and rice.”

  Joseph looked at the fire. “Let’s put the rocks in and eat.”

  ...

  As the rocks began to heat and smoke in the fire, Joseph and Wilson sat in the shade of a large banyan tree, eating from Tupperware containers of fried fish and rice.

  Wilson spoke with his mouth full. “How long you think this gonna take?”

  “All night.”

  Wilson didn’t like the sound of that. “All night?”

  “Better to be on the safe side, don’t you think?”

  “Seems long.”

  Joseph snapped at his cousin. “I don’t want to be going back and starting over because we didn’t give them the extra time, man. I don’t like this as it is.”

  Wilson shrugged. He generally let Joseph take the lead. Joseph was the smart one in the family, the ambitious one, the one who went to college. Unless it was one of Wilson’s areas of expertise—football, primarily—he deferred to his cousin.

  “You da boss.”

  Joseph stuffed a chopstick load of food in his mouth and exhaled. “Sorry. I’m just tired.”

  “No worries. You da best cook in da family.”

  Joseph looked over at the van parked next to his pickup at the edge of the thicket. “They in there?”

  Wilson nodded. “Dey not goin’ nowhere.”

  Joseph nodded thoughtfully. For some reason, he looked up at the sky. He saw blue. Nothing else, not a cloud, not a bird, just a wash of vibrant color. He didn’t know what he expected to see: God looking down on them? Not that he, or anyone in his family, was particular
ly religious. Occasionally his grandmother would make a kakuai, an offering to the gods. But that was usually associated with someone’s marriage or the birth of a new great-grandchild. She never made a big deal out of it, once pitching an overripe banana out the kitchen window and saying it was a kakuai because they needed rain. No one else in the family even bothered to do that. Who has time for old myths and stories when you’ve got to go to work? But Joseph couldn’t be persuaded to disregard the local beliefs. Why should he? As far as he knew, the world was full of akuas. Maybe there really was a volcano goddess, shark god, waterfall god. We got loads of gods and goddesses around here. It was the Christian God who was always causing all the problems, with his absolute decrees of good and evil, right and wrong. The Christian God just didn’t understand that sometimes—well, circumstances arise where good and evil become relative terms. The local gods understood what Joseph and Wilson had to do. They approved. For some reason the Christian God always sided with the mainlanders: the haoles and butter-stinkers.

  Wilson finished his food and let out a belch. “Da rocks look ready.”

  ...

  They laid down a good four-inch layer of beach sand in the bottom of the hole. This helped insulate the ground and kept the heat from dispersing too quickly. Joseph chopped the banana stalks in half, soaked them briefly in water from a well near the abandoned outbuilding, and put a layer over the sand while Wilson pushed the white-hot rocks out of the fire toward the hole. Together they shoved them onto the banana stalks, steam bursting from the stalks the moment the hot rocks hit them, and then tossed another layer of wet banana stalks on top of them.

  Now came the meat.

  Joseph followed Wilson over to the van. Wilson opened the doors to reveal two large, naked, and very dead Caucasian men slumped in the back. There were nasty-looking wounds on their chests, the skin blackened and burned around the puckering bullet holes.