by Paul Theroux
Still working on his toe, feeling the burr of his fingernail on it, Sharkey said, “It was crazy.” Then he stood and stamped the dust of the parking lot, flexing his toes. “I was in Half Moon Bay, surfing Mavericks. I’d been away for weeks—hot romance and big waves. One night I get a message to call Moe. I’m thinking, What? He never called me on the mainland before.”
As he opened the car door and slid behind the wheel, Olive said, “I think I should drive.” As she spoke, rain began to fall, plops and whispers on the nearby leaves.
“I’m fine. It’s just—” He lifted his right foot and wagged it.
“Your poor toe.”
“And a goose stamped on my foot. What was that word, ‘venomed’?”
“Envenomation.”
He repeated the word in her English accent and then, “I love it. Now look.” Sliding behind the wheel, splaying his fingers, Sharkey showed her his car key, and with precision, inclining his head, he fitted it to the slot and started the engine. “We’re good,” he said, and switched on the headlights. “Leave your car here. We’ll pick it up tomorrow.”
Pearl-like raindrops began to scatter across the windshield as though flung by an unseen hand. He tapped the wiper lever and started the blades. The patter was like the tut-tut of a warning, because a moment later the windshield was awash, water streaming across the wiper blades as they slapped back and forth, two gleaming fan shapes on the window.
“Where did this dirty weather come from?”
“Wind’s from the south,” he said. He eased the car out of the parking lot into the road, moving slowly, angling his head to see through the flicking wipers. “Kona weather.”
“Moe,” she said, to prompt him. “The phone.”
“Yeah. Moe. He says to me, ‘I done a bad ting.’”
“Pig English,” she said.
“Pidgin.”
And she knew from his pauses and his drawl that he was telling the story his own way, slowed by beer. Drinking made him solitary and slow and deaf, the combination of beer and weed simplifying him. He became ponderous, punctuating his speech with pauses. He narrated in one-sentence paragraphs, each one like an announcement, ploddingly—“with care,” someone might say, but Olive knew he was drunk. Though she felt safe with him when he was drunk, his drunkenness turning him into someone milder; he became a person she did not know well. An inner self was released with alcohol, as though he needed to be pickled to come to life. And drinking, far from impairing him, increased his concentration and made him more deliberate.
“I done a bad ting.”
Repeating himself was another feature of his drunkenness—and most people’s—but she could see he was distracted, negotiating the narrow bridge out of Hale‘iwa, squinting at the lights of an oncoming car, past the wipers smashing at the rain. But once he was beyond the beach park and moving faster on the straight road, he resumed.
“I says, ‘What is it?’
“He says, ‘I don’t want to tell you.’”
Olive laughed at his mimicry of the forlorn voice on the phone.
“He says, ‘I was getting some deliveries from the Big Island. Two, tree packages a week. Da kine, all taped up, all plastic inside, no can smell ’um.’
“I’m thinking ‘packages from the Big Island’ means pakalolo. But of course who am I to raise an objection? He knows I’m one of the more serious stoners on the North Shore.”
“Which is why I’m wondering what made you give up buying from him.”
“I’m coming to that.”
He was leaning forward to see, the strain of peering through the splash and beat of the wipers giving him a false smile.
“Take your time,” Olive said.
“‘Two, tree packages a week for one haole guy. Maybe it more better if I not send ’um one week to my mail can.’ I can’t see much through this rain,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the drumming on the car roof. “‘Maybe more better if I send two, tree to you.’”
“Your mail can?”
“My mail can.”
“But you’re in California.”
“That’s the whole point. Moe comes up with the brilliant scheme of diverting his packages of pakalolo to me.”
“Addressed to who?”
“To me, from his grower.”
“Is that legal?”
“I said—” Growling at the rain, Sharkey then sighed. “That glare is driving me nuts.” He winced again. “I said, ‘Did you send them?’
“‘One, I send. Da kine.’ I’m in Santa Cruz at a pay phone, putting coins into the slot, holding an old-fashioned black receiver, and I can’t believe what I’m hearing. A package of pakalolo sent to me through the U.S. Postal Service.
“‘You sent a pound of weed to me?’ He says, ‘No. Small, the box.’ I said, ‘If I’m busted I’ll lose my house. I’ll have to do time for that amount. They’ll kick me off the tour.’ He says, ‘I know I done a bad thing. I neva inten’ fo’ do it. But I wen’ wrapped it okay. Cannot smell.’
“I says to him, ‘Moe, for God’s sake, don’t do it again.’ And then he starts to make a whinnying noise and I think, What? He now sounds like a small boy with a big problem.
“I go, ‘What is it?’
“‘It nevah come! Maybe too small, the mail can.’”
“Careful,” Olive said, seeing that a car ahead had pulled over but not completely. It was tipped against a storm drain, part of it still angled into the road.
Sharkey tugged at the steering wheel, squinted ahead, cursed so softly it could have been a prayer, and swung his car around the protruding vehicle. She was reassured by his efficiency.
“The package of pakalolo he’s sent me hasn’t arrived. His plan was to intercept it and keep sending the weed to me—because after all I’m not home. But on the day of delivery there is no box of weed in my mail can, as planned by the genius.
“I says, ‘Are you sure it was sent?’
“‘Guarantee. My braddah have the receipt.’
“‘So where’s the pakalolo?’
“‘I dunno.’ And he made that whinnying noise again. ‘I know I done a bad ting.’”
“That’s mental,” Olive said.
“I assumed it had been seized. They have sniffer dogs. A big wrapped box from the Big Island can only be weed. A dog smells the box and they pass it to the feds. Dealing weed in that amount through the U.S. mail is a federal offense. I guessed it was a pound, maybe more. I could be facing serious jail time.”
“God, what did you do?”
“I cannot see a thing,” Sharkey said, flicking his high beams onto the rain-swept road. “I didn’t want to cut my trip short—the surf was huge—so I kept calling home. Moe’s always mournful. The package is nowhere to be seen, two weeks after it was sent priority mail from a neighbor island.”
“Weren’t you worried?”
“Petrified. I could not believe anyone would do anything that stupid.” He slapped the steering wheel. “Jail! Big fine! Seizure of assets!”
“So what happened?”
“I can’t see through this rain,” Sharkey said, beginning to shout—and his shout matched the force of the rain, which was a harsh sound. The rain was an odor too—of earth and roots—and with the window cracked open for air the dampness inside the car drenched them.
“The package of weed,” Olive said, to prod him.
“I was in suspense for a month.” Sharkey leaned closer to the windshield. “Moe thinks it’s been picked up by the feds. What I didn’t tell him was that I’ve been having my mail forwarded to the mainland, to the post office in Santa Cruz. And I’m pretty sure they know something about well-wrapped packages like that.” He leaned again. “I cannot see a damned thing.”
His talk, his story, nagged at her, when all she wanted was for him to sit in silence so that she could use the drama of the weather to claim his attention, like music swelling behind a spoken epiphany. She felt that his inattention, his halting way of telling the story, had left them e
xposed to the fury of the storm. She had needed to fortify herself to endure it, but, distracted by him, she was startled by the way the car was thumped by potholes. Every phase of the rainstorm was a surprise and—it was true—all she could see in front of them was the rain-splashed windshield. It was as if they were in a cage and saw nothing beyond the bars.
In the headlights of some oncoming cars, the wet road was briefly visible again. Passing the surf break they knew as Chun’s Reef, Sharkey saw the waves rising and dumping at the edge of the road, the froth pooling in the shallow broken pavement.
“Surf’s up,” Olive said, because he was stalled in his story.
“Junk waves,” Sharkey said, lowering his head toward the steering wheel to see the road better. “My foot is really killing me.”
In the dense and dirty nighttime rain, oncoming cars were licks and blobs of light stroked by the twitch of the wiper blades. Then he was driving blind again and could not see past his hood ornament. The drop of his wheels into the road ruts jarred his teeth; more cars, more headlights. He drove into the light as helplessly as into darkness.
“No sign of the package of pakalolo,” he said, gripping the wheel, fighting the potholes. “All this time I’m waiting for a visit from the feds. Then one day I go to the Santa Cruz post office and there it is, a small, well-wrapped box, innocent-looking, about the size of an old video cassette. Maybe a pound of weed, compressed in a brick.”
“Contraband,” Olive said, and averted her eyes from the glare of the oncoming cars rounding the curve at Waimea.
“Yeah. I was so spooked I destroyed it—burned it and buried the ashes. And I left Moe in the dark. He could have ruined me.”
“You didn’t tell him?”
“He doesn’t deserve to know. He’s a useless shit, like everyone else. Oh God—”
Sharkey was still talking when there came a sudden shattering crash that was both a succession of loud bangs and an urgent thump on the chassis. The rapid three-part noise was like a tree branch collapsing onto the car, so explosive that Sharkey’s chest smacked the steering wheel. He lost his grip, he foundered. At once a low portion of the windshield splintered into his lap, pricking his arms with shards. Olive squawked in fright, her hands flying to her face.
Stamping on the brake and swerving onto the roadside, Sharkey came to rest and clutched his face, babbling in confusion, and then Olive saw a twisted bike and a motionless man who’d hugged himself into a bundle.
“Jesus,” she said as she shoved her door open. She crouched over the man, seizing his wrist for a pulse. The rain flattened her hair, plastering it against her face. Her shoulders were skinny in her soaked clothes. Even in the rain the smell of alcohol coming off the man was strong. In the light from Sharkey’s car, Olive could see a gaunt face drained of blood yet serene and unmarked, as if made of wax. Except for the eyes—wide open and dull and disappointed—it was a martyr’s death mask of surrender.
“He’s gone,” she said in a small voice. Sharkey was staggering from the car, groaning with effort. “The man’s dead,” and she raised her anguished face to Sharkey, who knelt next to her, frowning.
Cars slowed down, the drivers gaping. A policeman stepped out of a blaze of blue lights, raking the scene with a flashlight.
“That your car?”
Sharkey said, “It was an accident.”
“He must have been riding toward us,” Olive said. “I just checked him. No discernible pulse. I think he’d been drinking.”
“He was on our side of the road,” Sharkey said.
“Don’t move him.” The policeman began talking into his phone. “DeSouza. Code One—serious. I’m going to need an ambulance at Waimea. We’ve got a collision. One man down.” When he clicked the phone off, he said to Sharkey, “You okay?”
“I’m good.”
“Let’s see your license and registration.” Working his flashlight over him. “Was you buckled up?”
“Sure,” Sharkey said, and Olive looked away.
“You’re Joe Sharkey,” the policeman said, moving his flashlight from the license to Sharkey’s pale face and bleeding arms.
“That’s me.”
“I seen you here at Waimea, way back, on a big wave. My old man surfed Waimea. Ray DeSouza.”
“‘Ray-Ban,’ we called him.”
Her voice cracking with anger, Olive said, “What about this poor man?”
“You knew him?” The policeman turned away from Olive to concentrate on Sharkey, who lowered his arms and stood in the rain, nodding. “Was one great guy. Wish he was here. He pass.”
“Bummer.”
“For the love of god,” Olive muttered, peering down the road as though for relief.
Now the siren of a distant ambulance overwhelmed the chugging of the waves.
“Let’s get out of this rain,” the policeman said. “Sit in my car. We’ll go to the station for a statement as soon as they take this guy away. I got to empty his pockets, check for an ID. You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re limping.”
“Banged my foot in the accident.”
Onlookers had gathered, a small crowd, all dressed alike, in T-shirts and shorts, barefoot. The dead man was dressed that way too, but his clothes were muddied—whether from the crash or before, it was impossible to tell. Olive knelt and took the man’s pulse again, and slipped her hand into his and held it, pressing it softly, wishing for a miracle.
“Wipeout,” someone said in a low voice.
Another muttered, “He wen’ make.”
Then they sat, side by side, Sharkey and Olive, behind the divider grate of the squad car, and were soon taken away, up the long hill to Wahiawa.
“What are you going to do about that man?” Olive said.
“Sister, we seen that buggah before,” the policeman said.
At the station the policeman went to the counter. “Joe Sharkey,” he announced to another man in uniform behind the desk. The man rose to shake Sharkey’s hand. “I heard we got us a Code One. Officer DeSouza was first responder, so he’ll take your statement.”
Sharkey gave his statement—the rain, the darkness, the potholes—and as he spoke, pausing, offering more, he recreated the circumstances of the accident, and the seconds of impact became episodic, a whole halting narrative. “I saw him at the last minute,” Sharkey said. “I tried to swerve but he came straight at me.” Olive frowned. “He was cycling down the wrong side of the road.” Olive sighed, turning away. Detail upon detail, the story fattened and became fiction.
“Probably drunk—he stank real bad,” the policeman said. “We seen him a coupla times near that squatter camp on the bypass road.” He smiled at Sharkey. “Was you on the Pipe today? Was epic.”
“So who is he?” Olive asked.
“We don’t know. He was carrying a fake ID. I just ran a check on it. No hits.”
“I was out,” Sharkey said. “Got some good rides on triple overhead bombs.”
“Sweet.”
Sharkey stood abruptly and went outside. On the veranda of the police station, he stared into the rain, which was still pelting past the streetlamps, glittering in gold drops as it fell. Olive walked over to him, facing the downpour. She lifted his arm and draped it on her shoulder.
Sharkey said in the night, “I ran into a drunk homeless guy,” and Olive began to cry.
“Give you a lift,” the policeman said, and opened the rear door of his cruiser. On the way back to Hale‘iwa, he monitored his crackling radio, and only spoke once on the way: “Gonna be epic tomorrow too.” He dropped them at Olive’s car, saying, “I’m Ronny DeSouza—you ever need anything, get in touch,” and bumping fists with Sharkey said, “The Shark!”
Olive took the wheel and drove to the house. She watched Sharkey cross the lanai to the wicker sofa, where he sat, his hands on his knees, palms facing up, as if in a yoga pose.
“I ran into a drunk homeless guy.”
“You said that already. Yo
u pranged that poor bloke on his push-bike.”
It was not his repeating the statement that bothered Olive. It was the sentence itself, and his tone—relief tinged with resentment—when what she expected him to say was “I killed a man.”
She approached him, not so much to console him as to console herself. He stared into the night. He looked supremely relaxed, in a posture of reflection—he might have been composing a poem in his head, she thought. She went closer and saw that his body seemed uninhabited.
5
The Search for the Hundred-Foot Wave
You’re so happy,” a journalist had said to him once, a woman from a surfing magazine, wearing a T-shirt with his face on it and lettered DA SHARK! She meant, You’re impossible—and she seemed to be complaining, because she wanted a different story. “And you’re younger than I thought.”
“Days you spend on the water are not deducted from your life,” he said, and laughed. “Surfing keeps you from growing old.”
A life of happiness was too easily summed up, and who cared? In books, in gossip on the tour, in life generally, a happy man was a rarity—usually someone minor, one-dimensional, shallow, careless, often a fool. And with surfing’s emphasis on struggle and risk, they were dopers, they were stoners, they were beer drunks, but they were happy when the surf was up. He did not contradict the interviewer. He smiled and snapped his fingers as he did in idle moments, mouthing a song.
Bum
Bum
Bum
Biddly-bum . . .
Yet for a long time—years perhaps—a shadow had been creeping across his life. This advancing darkness had been preceded by ominous mutters, and a sticky damp as of stinking fingerpads, the prickle of hairy hands, a rising odor—an animal smell, or that of a desperate tramp—overripe, like decay. It was the sense that a creature had been stalking him, and he took this shadow to be a premonition—of what, he could not say.
Engrossed in surfing, the pure frolic on water, he hadn’t paid much attention, and when he mentioned it to Olive soon after he met her, she had not taken any interest. You couldn’t scare a nurse, nor impress a nurse with a horror story or a mention of a bad smell: their working lives dripped with blood and wounds and puke. One of the traits he loved in Olive was that she could cap any gruesome tale with one much more macabre. She’d seen people in every form of distress, humans trapped and suffering—the ailing, the maimed, the dying; drowning victims, battered wives, dope-sick tweakers.
