The Professor, the Pool Guy, and the Paniolo

A young child with a mysterious blood disease. A widening gyre that mobilizes people from Hilo to Japan into a support team. A most unusual subplot involving the stock market and country music. Stay tuned to this true story as told in real time in these pages—because even we don’t know where it’s headed.

Orchestrated and conducted by Mark Panek. To read previous chapters, click here.

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Chapter 4 – The Pool Guy Stops Time

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Servicing pools can be a solitary affair, but it’s Wednesday, and I’m at my sixteenth and final stop, my truck’s 355-h.p. engine straining under a heavy load of chemicals and tools to climb the steep slope of the Professor’s cliff-like driveway.

I have some news to share with Mark this week, but like those of my clients who are off at work when I show up, or the ones who usually leave “the help” to do his job alone, during summer outrigger canoe paddling season Mark is hit-or-miss. So I’m happy to see his Jeep up there next to the garage, and happier still when the guy who’s most dependable of all to come out for a visit when I arrive is waiting there poolside, clutching something long and white in both hands: it’s my little buddy Kenken.

My toe, on the accelerator, feathers the truck up just shy of the garage door, and even in the side mirror I can now recognize what he’s holding, and of course: it’s a new Nerf gun.

“Hi Uncle Dave!” Before I’m halfway out of my truck, Kenken’s launched into an overly detailed description of the new weapon’s range, accuracy, rate of bullet discharge. I start unloading my hoses, vacuum, net, and now he’s explaining why this new model is better than the others in his arsenal—the ones whose specs he’s listed out for me on past visits. Then there’s a strategy discussion on how this one will give him the upper hand the next time his friends come over to battle it out.

“Watch!” He takes aim and I see the projectile explode out of the weapon toward the house. It nails the siding with a surprising thwack! It’s so loud, I’m wondering if the bullet’s even made from the same material I remember from the foam basketball I had as a kid—I could compress that thing down to the size of a golf ball, but this new stuff sounded like solid rubber.

“That looks dangerous, Kenken,” I tell him. “Do you really shoot your friends with those?”

He pulls back on the gun’s barrel with a loud click, slamming another round into position.

“Well, we try to dodge them,” he explains. “But they do hurt.”

I know he’s only ten—a couple of years older than my own two kids—but Kenken here has always seemed to push the boundaries a bit more than either my own son Noah, or his little sister Mia. Last week he was hacking away at the trunk of one of the palm trees lining the top of the driveway with—a small machete? When he started flipping the blade in the air to watch it pinwheel high above his head before sticking in the ground between his bare feet, I had no trouble stepping in for Mark and telling him to stop, which he did with a characteristically relaxed shrug, like a heavy metal blade spinning right near your head is no big thing.

Today it’s the gun, those solid bullets slamming into the siding with—at this angle I can actually hear a little echo from the thwack! sound they’re making.

“Kenken, is your Dad around?”

“He’s in Japan,” he answers, firing away.

Japan. That’s another thing Mark and I share in common: both of us managed to find wonderful wives patient and understanding enough to put up with us, and both were from Japan. The little cultural misunderstandings that come up in such a marriage made for some decent pau-hana-beer stories over the years.

“By himself?”

“He said it’s for work.” He cocks the gun again. “He’s meeting a guy there about a movie.” Another shot fired, another thwack against the house. “He’ll be home in a couple of days.”

I’m about to ask for more details when Noriko appears at the front door.

“Kenken, what are you doing? Be careful!” She says it in Japanese, which I don’t speak, but I do hear both of those expressions often enough in my own house—delivered in that same tone, too.

We exchange greetings and she’s smiling, but her smile seems unnatural. Forced. Stressed. I don’t want to pry, so I start vacuuming the pool before finally asking her how things are going.

“Not good.” Her blunt reply clashes with the smile, which now starts to fade.

“Really?” I’m surprised, wondering if she’s messing with me, or maybe about to mock-complain about work, or something her gaijin husband did to piss her off. I’m also a little surprised to see her out here at all, since she’s usually inside getting ready for her brutal ICU night shift, or catching up on sleep. As warm and welcoming as she is, only rarely over the years has Noriko joined Mark and me for drinks out on the lanai. 

“Kenken might have leukemia,” she says. “He could die.”

It stops. All of it.

Right there, it’s like time stops moving, even the sound of the bullets against the house, some combination of this incredibly shocking news, and the fact that it’s coming from Noriko, who’s delivered these very words hundreds of times over the years, but to other people, about other people’s kids.

I just stand there clutching the long handle of the pool vacuum—suddenly it hits me, like that thwack to the side of the house, that to me, Kenken isn’t “other people’s kids.”

I start to well up inside. I don’t know what to say. For an instant I close my eyes and I’m on the phone again with my mother, her pained voice trying to sound reassuring through the receiver, asking if I could come over for dinner so she can give me the details about her biopsy, her recent diagnosis, her breast cancer, and two years later, at fifty-three, she’s dead.

I picture backing up the steep driveway with no one to greet me, and the tears come, surprising me, until I start doing the math: add it all up, and over the past three years I’ve spent more time alone with Kenken than I have with any other child besides Noah or Mia. I’ve watched this kid grow in parallel to my own, in parallel to my brother Bill’s kids, who live thousands of miles away back where we grew up in New Hampshire. Little buddy? Kenken is the closest thing I have to a nephew out here.

More: Kenken is Noah. He’s Mia.

I mean, look at all Mark and Noriko have done: they’ve made all the right moves. She learned English, got her license, ICU nurse. He got his Ph.D., managed to fill one of just a handful of nation-wide Professor job openings. It’s what, three books he’s written? These books win awards.

The Paneks are good with their money. Their mortgage is paid pretty far down, I learned over a beer one afternoon when Mark was thinking about buying the lot next door. They built the rental over there—actually built it with their own hands—I even caulked nails for them myself for a couple of hours one afternoon just because I felt like supporting that DIY spirit of theirs.

Great parents.

It was all set up.

Just like Nikko and me: we built our own small business that brings in enough so she can focus full-time on Noah and Mia. Annual vacations back home to visit my brother in New Hampshire, or Nikko’s family in Saitama. A stay-cation weekend once in a while at Waikoloa. Frequent camping adventures around the island. Tennis lessons. Our own home on a nicely sculpted acre out in Hawaiian Paradise Park—Mark, in fact, who cuts his own grass, likes to joke that his Pool Guy has a Yard Guy.

It’s perfect. We’re living the dream.

Just like my mom.

And right there I make the obvious connection: as set-up as Nikko and I also think we are, it would only take one piece of news like this to wipe us out, too. None of it makes sense, none of it, nothing but the thwack! of the bullets against the house—that sound, it resumes, and now Noriko and I are both wiping our eyes.

I still don’t know what to say but my mouth starts blurting out “Are you sure?” and “Is the test accurate?” and “What are you guys going to do?”—as if you turn to the “blood disease” section of the Parenting Manual and follow the three easy steps. None of it seems real. Kenken is just as happy and mischievous as ever. He certainly doesn’t look sick.

“What can I do to help?” I ask her, and even as I hear myself it sounds ridiculous, like, let me vacuum his disease out of him, or try some of my chemical shock.

“There’s nothing anybody can do right now,” Noriko explains. “He just had a bone marrow biopsy. We’re waiting for the result. He may need radiation or chemo, or a bone marrow transplant. Mark only went to Japan because all of a sudden we need money. We want to do all we can. For Kenken.”

Money. The Paneks, of all people, need money.

Nobody ever talks about how money or how it actually works, but as it turns out, what I’ve been learning lately about money is exactly what I was looking forward to discussing with Mark today. Though it’ll have to wait until next week, now I’m that much more eager to share it with him. I still don't know much about it yet, but I start thinking that maybe I might actually be able to help after all.

To Be Continued

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Serial entrepreneur and first-time author Dave Gagne moved from Boston to Los Angeles to Paris, France before settling in Puna with his wife Niko fifteen years ago. Father of Noah and Mia, Dave owns and operates Pine Coast Pool Service, and recently founded an investment company with his brother Bill.

Raised by legendary Parker Ranch Rough Rider Gordon Kalaniopio, first-time author Shane Kalaniopio spent a decade building homes for Waimea’s Quality Builders before taking a Hawai‘i County carpentry position in closer proximity to the 80-acre Kulani ranch he and his wife Pua are building to pass family traditions down to their son Kahiau and daughter Lihau. The couple has been recognized by the Puna Soil and Water District as the Outstanding Cooperator of 2018.

Kensuke Panek is a writer living in Hilo.

Father of Kensuke, husband of Noriko, Mark Panek has been living in and writing about these islands for three decades—two of those as a professor of creative writing at the University of Hawai‘i. His writing has been recognized with awards from Bamboo Ridge and the Hawai‘i Book Publisher’s Association. A 2013 winner of the Elliot Cades Award, Panek was also honored with two titles on Honolulu Magazine’s juried list of 50 Essential Hawai‘i Books: Hawai‘i and Big Happiness: The Life and Death of a Modern Hawaiian Warrior. He’s also the author of Gaijin Yokozuna: The Life of Chad Rowan.

The Professor, The Pool Guy, and The Paniolo will feature and alternate contributions from Panek, Gagne, Kalaniopio, and possibly others. This serial real-time true-life novel was conceived by and is orchestrated and conducted by Mark Panek.

Image by Kolby Milton.