THE BUTTER KNIFE

Honolulu 1985
It was impossible and it happened within seconds.
There must have been at least one hundred people waiting in line for food; the line stretched through the soup kitchen, and spilled to the sidewalk outside. My friend and I were closer to the back of the long building, so we knew we had a long wait in front of us, but it was worth the trouble for the plate of food we would eventually receive from this place, the only soup kitchen in Honolulu at the time, and more than likely our only meal of the day.
Everyone has waited in lines and the experience is pretty much the same all over, shuffling about, low talking, people moving to and fro with their food. So it was not noticeable when a local man came up to the line, right about to the middle, to speak with another local man who was waiting. But then the newly arrived man cut. He stepped right in front of his friend, and then turned around and grinned, daring anyone to defy him. He was a big man, known for drug abuse and violence, and no one had any intention of defying him. Until someone did.
It was so fast, yet, if I had painting skills I could paint every molecule of this instant as it came into being. A young white man, thin and dirty, and as quick as a lightning bolt, jumped out of the line and pulled a butter knife from his pants pocket. For a brief moment he held it at eye-level…any of us who happened to be looking in that direction, as I was, could easily see that it was a butter knife. Smooth and brightly reflecting the light, we could tell that there weren’t even any serrations on the blade. I know that many of us who saw this had just enough time to think how futile such a dull knife would be against this local Hawaiian man, twice the size of this skinny attacker, before the white man lunged forward. The simple utensil disappeared into the man’s chest, handle and all and the amount of dark red blood that suddenly exploded from the wounded man immediately told us that his heart had been hit. The red stream was so forceful as it covered the attacker and many nearby, that it seemed to be spent by the time the victim hit the hard floor. Many closer to the scene mentioned later how disturbed they were by the fact that the victim had not had time to close his eyes before he died.
I wish I could say that this was the most startling thing that had ever happened to me, and that I was frozen in place with shock, but I knew better. I knew that there was nothing I could do. I also knew that if I stayed I would be forced to go to the police department for questioning with a hundred other people, and that all the white people would be held even longer, for longer questioning, to make sure we didn’t know the murderer. So, like dozens of others, I ran. We ran in all directions, some screaming, all of us crying.
No one knew the young man – he had only just arrived from the Mainland. We never saw him again either, though the effects of his  insane actions were far-reaching. Because the killer was a Haole, a white person, and he had killed a local, there was a time of retribution, when homeless white people became especially unpopular. Locals, homeless and otherwise, would bully us, and worse. The police know about this sort of backlash, and we (white homeless people) were advised not to be seen at the soup kitchen for a while. Instead, we were fed from a van under a bridge on the outskirts of town, for about two months, a policeman always standing nearby for our protection from angry locals.
The van would come every day at 5 pm, and we were grateful, even if we did have to walk a few more miles to get it. And when we did meet under that bridge we would always talk about that day, that terrible moment. We all agreed, every single one of us, when memories of that horrible incident came into our mind we wouldn’t see the killer, or the victim, or even that insane amount of blood…we all saw that damn, impossible butter knife.