by Paul Theroux
I’m sick, he told himself. I’m going surfing. I’ll feel better in the water, I’ll get well.
The surf at Waimea was head-high and clean, but even so he decided on the simpler predictable break at Pua‘ena Point in Hale‘iwa. He felt better driving down Kam Highway and promised himself a good day. When he parked he vowed not to look at the scrape on the fender, but a man on an old bike near the wall at the parking lot called out to him.
“Nice ride. Too bad it mess up. You hit one tchree?”
Sharkey shrugged, unstrapping his board, telling himself he didn’t care; but his annoyance was like heat suffusing his body and pressing against his eyes. The man had one leg slung over the bike, and the very sight of the rusted bike, the man clinging to junk, made Sharkey furious.
But he said, “I like it the way it is.”
“Da fender kapakahi. It look humbug.”
Tucking the board under his arm, making for the beach, Sharkey heard the man call out behind him.
“I know one guy do body work. He stay mauka side of ‘Ehukai, near Ted’s Bakery. Can fix, brah.”
The man was still muttering as Sharkey knelt to fasten the leash to his ankle, and then he dropped onto his board and paddled out. So as not to betray his weakness to the man he had marched to the shore and now paddled, asserting himself. But he had not gone far when the effort of it slowed him. The water was chilly, like cold metal against his skin, and the twist in the small of his back that Olive called a spasm kept him thrusting hard with his arms.
Easing up, he lost his momentum and was pushed sideways and slowed by the slap of a low blunt wave like a speed bump. He tried to right himself, lost his grip, and the board crushed with a chewing sound against a coral head. He felt through his fingers on the board the scrape of his fins and hoped they hadn’t snapped. Another set of waves lifted him and helped him straighten, but the force of it took all his attention, so that he couldn’t tell whether the fins were damaged.
He headed for the empty wave of the break, glad that he had it all to himself, because he knew he would be struggling. The sets kept coming, and he rode them, straddling his board, waiting for a likely one, misjudging several before he caught the crest of a good one and was swept up, paddling, and then canted on the face of it, and he stood to surf it. But just as he mounted the board, positioning his feet to angle it, the thing slipped from beneath him, and he could tell as he toppled that two fins were gone and the third broken.
He thrashed to regain his board and hugged it and paddled to shore in dark water as the sun was blurred by rags of drifting cloud. He was cold again, and cursing his board and the sharp coral head he’d hit, and the wave that had swung him sideways.
His board seemed heavier for being damaged and useless, he had to stop twice on the beach to kneel for rest, and the second time he saw a man on a bike pedaling away—the man who’d spoken to him near the wall.
It seemed odd for anyone on such an old bike to be pedaling so fast, and he smiled at the urgency of the man, because he himself was feeling so winded and slow.
But then, nearer the car, he knew why. His side window had been smashed, his expensive sunglasses stolen—that was all—and the thief was gone.
After he’d strapped his broken board to the roof rack and started out of the parking lot he looked for the man on the bike—he was certain he was the thief. He saw no sign of him, only the obvious fact that it was easy for anyone on a bike to vanish down a narrow dirt track that led through the mass of ironwood and kiawe trees banked by guinea grass on the far side of the road.
Still, Sharkey gunned the engine, hoping to catch a glimpse of the thief, and as he imagined sideswiping him and knocking him sideways off his bike, the effort of pressing his foot on the accelerator caused a stabbing pain in his big toe. He could only relieve it by easing up on the pedal. And it was then—his foot throbbing, the car slowing—that he saw the last of the thief, his dirty shirt, his rear tire, disappearing through the bank of guinea grass at the roadside and enfolded and hidden by the dense trees.
Sharkey’s foot was so sore that even if he’d been able to park near that pathway, he knew he would not have been able to chase the man. He howled in frustration and drove home slowly, infuriated by the broken glass at his feet. In his garage he swung his legs out and saw that his toe was swollen, probably aggravated by the seawater and his awkward stance on the board. And the reddened bulge still bore two marks like eye slits, the piercings of the centipede’s jaws. So the bite of the centipede had become infected, enlarged, mottled pink, pale yellow, and purple, like a poisonous creature inhabiting his toe, making him clumsy, causing him to limp and stumble.
“It’s like a carbuncle,” Olive said later. “I’ll have to lance it and drain it. You’d better stay out of the water.”
Sharkey did not mind the pain of the narrow blade slicing his flesh; the cut was like a flame, cauterizing the wound, a ritual of punishment and forgiveness. He’d always regarded incisions and tattoo needles, blood-drawing and stabs, as small deflowerings, always with a blossom smear of crimson. He liked Olive’s medical term, “bloodwork.”
But he was still angry. “He broke my window for a pair of sunglasses. I could have killed that guy.”
Olive lifted her face and looked at him with wonderment that became a disbelieving smile.
“He excites my contempt, as my dear mother used to say.”
“My mother never said that.”
He limped more thumpingly now, his bandaged toe chafing in the thong of his flip-flop. He took such care that his overcautious gait dragging and hesitating to protect the toe caused him to stumble, and in one of those stumbles he fell.
He’d been shutting the henhouse door with one hand, latching it, and holding a bowl of eggs with the other. He missed hooking the nose of the latch to the fitting’s eye, and leaning away and attempting it again, he snagged his sore toe on the overhang of the brick step. It was as though his foot had caught fire. He raised it and lost his balance and toppled forward, the bowl breaking on the bricks, the eggs smashing in a mass of yellow mingled snotlike yolk and goo and fragments of shell.
He cursed again, louder than ever, and heard his helpless howl echo in the gully below. The chickens squawked back at him and he heard their racket as blaming.
His days were fraught with accidents, many of them minor, like dropping the bowl of eggs—but such clumsiness made him feel old and futile. Some were more serious—he left a burner on the stove alight and scorched a pot (Olive: “That’s a sure sign of senility”—she was joking but he was stung). More serious still, he very nearly hit another cyclist, swerving as he reached for his cell phone, horrified that he had come so close that the man called out and pedaled after him, catching him at a red light and thumping the car roof, screaming, “Howlie!”
So after all these years that was what it had come to. Over fifty years in the islands, years of big-wave surfing, of beer-drinking on the beach, and handing out free weed, and party-going. He wasn’t Joe Sharkey of Waimea fame, or the Shark, or Braddah Joe, or Joe-Boy or Uncle Joe. He was a haole, another white guy in a new car, an unwelcome alien.
And because he was injured and couldn’t get into the water, and his new car was unreliable—possibly a lemon—he did not go far. He rolled down the hill to Three Tables and sat in a beach chair with binoculars, looking for the blowhole vapor of a whale offshore.
While he was sitting there one day, a man approached him, a fat man carrying fins and a face mask.
“Saw three whitetips,” the man said. “Under that ledge.”
“Really.”
“You got three types of sharks here in Hawaii—your tiger shark, your great white, and your whitetip. But your whitetip is mellow. They just stared at me, like ‘Who’s this guy?’ and I swam right past them.”
The man was pale and flabby, with rented fins and a mask, and he stood beside Sharkey, his feet planted in the sand, still talking about his encounter with the sharks. He was earnest in a salesman’s way
, selling his information, and now he was talking about the configuration of the clouds in the distance.
Sharkey stared with defiance. He thinks I’m a tourist.With his bandaged foot and his binoculars he might have looked the part, but how did that square with all his tattoos? He became indignant, insulted to be unrecognized and, worse, having to listen to this ignorant man lecture him, telling him what he knew.
“Why are you giving me a fucking weather report?” Sharkey said. “I’ve lived here my whole life.”
“Take it easy.” The man was rattled by Sharkey’s sudden outburst. “All I said was I saw some sharks.”
“I’ve seen a million sharks! I’m a shark!”
Backing away, the man said, “Know what, pal? You got a problem. You need help.” And walking off, attempting to be brisk, he sank and stumbled in the sand, a clumsiness that—Sharkey saw—spoiled the effect of his scolding.
The next day a young man with a camera approached him. Sharkey believed he had recognized him and was going to take his picture. He was not sure whether he should cooperate or snub him. But the man said, “Mind taking my picture?” and handed him his camera. Sharkey obliged; the man lingered, standing too close.
“This sand is so coarse. It’s not like this in Louisiana, where I come from. We got a more powdery kind of sand—real soft. But this stuff is amazing, the way it feels on your feet, gritty-like. I guess it’s a different kind of sand altogether. I thought there was only one type of sand. But there’s more. The way I see it . . .”
I have traveled the world, treading the sand of a thousand beaches, Sharkey thought, and this man is lecturing me, like that other man with the sharks, not listening, no questions, just assuming that I am, like him, another tourist from the mainland, an old retiree on an island vacation.
He laughed at the thought, throwing his head back, but in an obscure way he was hurt—as he had been with the stumbles and the broken eggs and the theft and the misunderstandings—and that gave his laugh an edge of bitterness. These intrusions upon the serenity of his life amounted to assaults; made him overcautious, even a bit timid, and here he was in his beach chair on the sand, his sore toe upraised, and the young man still drawling.
Ludicrous. But there was an element of the ridiculous in the bewilderment of sadness. What were these intrusions telling him?
“You think that’s funny?” The man beside him was fierce, blinking, his jaw chewing his anger.
And Sharkey realized how he had been laughing.
“No, I don’t,” he said, sounding suddenly fearful. “Not at all.”
9
Repetitions
Hunter Thompson used to repeat himself.”
“Queen Anne’s dead,” Olive said.
“What?”
“An expression,” Olive said. “You’ve told me that before.”
“And what he said was often about me.”
“So you’ve said. You’re a mesmerizing raconteur.”
“Always stayed in a luxury suite, either in Waikiki or at the Kahala, half-eaten meals all over the place, bottles of brandy and his stashes of weed nearby. Coke in his shirt pocket, usually the same plaid shirt.”
Olive stared at him. He wasn’t fazed. She said, “And he always checked in under the pseudonym Mr. Joe.”
“I think you know why.”
Squinting at him as though he’d just teased her, but with a half-smile of forgiveness illuminating her face, Olive began to speak in a hot whisper of impatience. “Look—”
Sharkey cut her off, saying, “But Hunter was a fan and a recreational socialite. He didn’t know squat about surfing, but he was reckless and had an instinct for risk—for the drama of sport, for physical effort.”
“Right,” Olive said. “He looked you up.”
“He looked me up.” Sharkey was staring into the shadows at the corner of the room, as though by speaking earnestly he might bring the man to life and see him emerge from that darkness. “He’d been given my name by a big-wave rider.”
“So you told me.” Olive wondered where this was going—the urgency, the story she’d heard before. She said, “Absolutely spellbinding.”
She had a wary guarded look, watching him through heavy lids, the look she might have had for one of her patients who’d come to the emergency room with slashes on his arm and a story about how he’d fallen down—fallen down? Or the man with deep scratches on his face, in handcuffs, charged with shooting his wife, saying, “I was cleaning my gun.” But she listened rather than contradicted what was obviously a story, watching without seeming to doubt or mock, because there was no telling what the injured person might do.
“Hunter used to tell me that he envied me. His pseudonym was a kind of compliment.” Sharkey smiled in the direction of the shadow, as though meeting a ghostly gaze. “Mr. Joe.”
Listening, Olive thought, At what point will he realize that he is rabbiting on in a blatant parody, almost as though he’s testing me to challenge him? In speaking of the past, describing his surfing exploits, he had told such extraordinary stories that even the blandest retellings sounded like boasts. Yet the offense of boasters was not the oversized, obnoxious stories but that they were bores, because boasters repeated themselves and couldn’t keep their stories straight, being essentially untruthful in their exaggeration. And they never listened.
What she longed to do these days of his talking was to face him and say, “For the love of God, park it!”
But Olive was too watchful, too cautious, to make an objection to Sharkey, because that was the other trait of boasters—their insecurity, their thin skin. Yet Sharkey had seemed to her to have a healthy ego, and she wondered at this monologue about Hunter Thompson that she had heard before.
“‘Writers are surfers,’ he said. He was a great guy, a kind of tragic figure really, who liked being around stronger men—outlaws, pirates . . .”
“Bikers,” Olive said. “Gun nuts.”
“You got it,” Sharkey said, and seemed to relax, though he did not look at her, was still peering across the room.
What was going on? Didn’t he remember?
That was all he said that evening. But it was enough—too much.
Out of the blue another day he began to talk as though someone had flicked a switch. They were at the table, using chopsticks to eat the bowls of ahi poke and rice that Olive had brought from Foodland on her way home from work. Sharkey put his chopsticks down and sat forward and stared past her.
“I was at this surf meet at Mavericks,” he said. “When it was over—I came second, a money prize—I drove up the coast and had an urge to look up an old girlfriend. Not just an old girlfriend but a great passion, the kind that makes you wild and irrational. I’d been divorced for about a year—my wife never watched me surf.” He made a resentful face, pushing out his lips. “‘People don’t care about me. I’m nobody to them. All they want is to get close to you.’”
Olive said, “San Francisco.”
He nodded. “Mission District. You’re going to think she was some airhead surf bunny I’d known years before that I’d nailed in the back of my van.”
“I don’t think that.”
“She was a college professor I’d met in a coffee shop in Santa Cruz. She was small and kind of sallow, with one of those drowsy, hungry faces, pretty in a girlish way but not unusual, with greeny-gray eyes, the sleepy kind. She looked like a grim little monkey and she was combing her hair at the table when I saw her.”
“Without a mirror.”
“I mean, what woman combs her hair without looking in a mirror?” Sharkey said. “I sat at the next table, and there was something”—he sniffed, twitching his nose—“in the air. She seemed to give off a warm damp odor of sexuality. Maybe a pheromone, but it smelled to me like bark mulch, something of the earth, something swampy. She seemed to be freaked by my leaning into her space and she went to a table outside. I followed her and pestered her—teased her, that was always my method.”
“Whe
n boys tease you it’s usually because they’re attracted to you.”
“Someone told me that once.”
“I know.”
“It worked. It wasn’t love, it was desire, an animal urge to possess her. I hung around, I told her I was single, I talked about places in the world I’d been surfing—Cornwall in England got her attention, South Africa too. We had sex that night and the next morning. That great swampy smell got stronger. I wanted to eat her, I felt like a cannibal. We left bite marks on each other. I was half mad. I couldn’t leave her. I almost cried when I had to fly back to Hawaii, and I’d wake up at night and smile, thinking of her. I went back two weeks later. By then we’d talked a little on the phone, but I hated the phone. When we were together she said that she’d found out who I was, that I was married, that she was angry. I told her I was divorced. But she was demented too, the same desire. We had this full-on physical thing, fastened to each other, thrashing, insane. Later she called me, she cried, she wanted me, she threatened to kill herself, she raged at me. I needed to surf, yet I was still obsessed with her. I began to understand what addiction is like, how meaningless it is when people say, ‘It’s bad for you. It’ll kill you. You’ll have to give it up.’ No—I wanted to devour this woman. Crazy, I remember the obsession more than I remember the woman.”
“Then it ended.”
“In the worst way,” Sharkey said. “And a long time afterward I saw her in San Francisco. We had lunch. She was pinched and disappointed, a little old woman with white hair. I barely made it through the meal. I thought—”
“No magic.”
Now Sharkey raised his eyes to her. “You’ve had that experience?”
“You’ve told me that story before.”
“When?” He looked bewildered, as though she’d tricked him into talking.
“The thrill is gone. No magic.”
“So you know?”
“You left out the part where she was going to drown herself in your swimming pool.”
“Motel swimming pool. I told you that?”
