Chapter 52

We decided on Hawaii for a honeymoon; I’ve always wanted to go but never have been there, and of course neither has Hugo.

It was going to be Hugo’s first time flying, and I went to some trouble to prepare him for it. But he’s seen plenty of airplanes in the air, and he went on-line to look up how they work—he’s got reasonably adroit at using the computer and surfing the Internet—and he seemed pretty comfortable with the idea when the time came.

Airport security annoyed him a little, especially when it got around to taking off his shoes and walking across the dirty floor in his socks—can’t they at least keep it mopped?—but he just soldiered on the way he always does and off we went.

It was about like it had been so long ago with the car; he loved it. I’d made sure he got the window seat, and he was fascinated looking out at the dwindling landscape below.

Until we got into the cloud layer and above, anyhow. That made him a little nervous. Not that he said so, but at that juncture he suddenly decided to start telling me all about how airplanes stay up and I kind of got the feeling it was more to reassure himself than inform me.

“Wings are shaped to push more air below them than above when airplane moves,” he said. “Air below pushes up, and less air above does not resist, and so the plane may fly so long as it goes forward to continue pushing the air.”

I nodded to show lots of interest, and he went on for a while but gradually seemed to settle down. It’s nine or ten hours to Hawaii, he even slept a little in the middle of the flight. I nodded off, too; weddings are wonderful, but they’ll wear you down.

We both found Hawaii fascinating. I’d set it up for some island-hopping, I wanted to see it all—Oahu, where we landed, with Diamond Head and the North Shore; Maui with the tropical forests and mountains; the Big Island with the volcanoes and black sand beaches; Kaua’i with the only navigable river in Hawaii and Waimea Canyon (“the Grand Canyon of the Pacific” and one of the driest places on Earth) and Mount Waialeale (only about ten or twenty miles away but the wettest place, 400-plus inches of rain a year); all of it.

And we did see it all, but Irving, damn him, cut us a couple of days short. At the last fucking minute he decided he needed Hugo to sit in on a preliminary hearing in a case I’d figured was pretty cut and dried but which Irving said he now thought might be a little “hinky.”

It was a bar fight, plain and simple. Guy No. 1, the victim, had a rep as a nasty drunk. He picked a fight with guy No. 2, our client, and it wound up out in the street. By all accounts our client had the vic flat on his back on the pavement purely beating the living shit out of him until one of the wits—great big guy—literally pulled him off and threw him back against a wall. Our client banged his head against said wall and slid down to the ground, out cold.