by Paul Theroux
Joe said, “I think so,” because he was alive.
And then, “You Colonel Sharkey’s kid?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Oh, shit—I’m really sorry.”
By then other people who’d heard the commotion, women mostly, had gathered to help, dabbing at Joe’s face with hankies and saying with such nervous insistence, “You’re going to be just fine, sweetheart,” that he felt certain he would not be. They helped Joe to his feet and took him down the street to his house.
His mother shrieked and became a mother Joe had never seen before—wailing, angry, vowing to report the incident, demanding the name of the man with the dog.
“What’s his rank!” she screamed.
“Get the boy to Tripler,” a calmer voice said, and then he was in the backseat of a car, his mother still shrieking, being driven to the big pink hospital.
Under a bright light, voices above him and all around him, he lay on a table, fingers in his face, stitching him, other faces leaning over him, murmuring to him, words of kindness and concern, while his mother still chattered and sobbed. “You have a brave boy, Mrs. Sharkey.” “You’re due for a Purple Heart, son.” “The dog wasn’t on a leash.” “The boy will need shots.”
His face bandaged, and no school, the back-and-forth to Tripler, ten days of antirabies injections—he felt singled out and special, privileged, an object of interest. Everyone was kind to him, and for those ten days he felt like a soldier who’d been wounded in battle, an intimation of what it meant to be a hero.
A succession of whispers and echoes revealed the stages of the aftermath, each day something new, often in the repetition of his mother talking on the telephone. The dog had not been on a secure leash. The attack had caused physical harm and emotional distress. “Scarring.” “Compensation.” The base was liable.
Silent, still bandaged, sitting in a too-big leather chair in an attorney’s office, he listened to his mother pleading.
“You have an excellent case, Mrs. Sharkey,” the man said. “It’s up to you whether to settle or sue.”
On these car journeys to Tripler and to the attorney’s office, Joe became accustomed to soldiers spotting the insignia on the bumper and standing at attention while his mother drove past them as they saluted the car. Seeing them, he touched his face and hoped they could see his bandage.
When his father finally came home, it seemed a satisfaction to him that Joe had endured the attack. Before he hugged him, he touched Joe’s face, saying approvingly, “Battle scar.” And in the next weeks his father and mother met again with the lawyer, Joe in the leather chair listening, or watching them examine documents, the repeated words, “Settlement and release agreement.” Whatever the amount of the settlement, it was enough to allow them to move from their house at Fort Shafter to a bungalow at the edge of Manoa Valley, near Punahou School, which Joe entered that same year, as an eighth grader.
He was now in a world without uniforms, and because the wound took so long to heal and left a thick pinkish purple scar, he was conspicuous, not just a new boy but a new boy with a fresh scar on his left cheek, the stitch punctures clearly visible. The scar and his newness set him apart. He was on the fringe with the marginal boys, the sulkers and rebels, the other newcomers—the malihini, the ones who sneaked and smoked and talked about surfing.
2
Special Forces
Long before his mother told him, he knew when his father was about to arrive home from Vietnam. It was a vibration in the house that trembled in his head, like furniture being shoved in the next room, his mother clumsier, bumping through the parlor with a drink in her hand, fussing to make the house orderly, primping in the mirror as though squinting for approval, visiting the hairdresser, and talking fretfully to herself. “We’ll have to do something about that stain on the table,” or “Those faded slipcovers will have to go,” all of it a sorting-out and preparation, as though for the visit of an inspector.
And it did seem as though his father was making the visit to carry out an inspection: to be brought up to date, to make sure the house was in order, to examine Joe’s school reports. The knowledge that her husband was coming home made Sharkey’s mother nervous—“He won’t like that” she’d say, if she saw that Joe’s room was messy or that he’d broken something.
Though his schoolwork was good and the Punahou teachers were patient, he was ignored or snubbed by the other students and had yet to make a friend. But he said nothing about that to his mother, who concluded from his good marks on exams that all was well. Nor did she know that he surfed at Magic Island most afternoons, even when he claimed he was swimming at the pool or engaged in school projects. Surfing was another secret, because he loved it, and because he was still learning and did not think he was a good enough surfer to tell anyone.
Each time his father came home he was reminded of the man, how he looked, how he talked, how he’d have to get used to him again. His brutal haircuts, buzzed close to his head, showed his bumpy skull and the white slashes where his scalp had been somehow gouged. And his first words to Joe were usually “You need a haircut.”
“I told him, but he wouldn’t listen,” Joe’s mother said in a sorrowful voice.
“And let’s see those hands.”
His father snatched at his fingers, twisting each one to get a look at the fingernails, usually bitten, to his father’s rage—a grunt of disgust as he flung them down.
Joe knew when he was standing next to him that his father was average height and slim, but he carried himself with authority, his steely order-giving voice demanding attention. When he was home he seemed to fill the house, as though his aura, which was both light and shadow, enlarged him. He never laughed. He said little about Vietnam except “There’s no war,” and to the next obvious question, “It’s a pacifying operation, Joe. I’m commanding a unit of advisers,” and he paused, and ended the discussion in a tone of muffled secrecy: “Special Forces.”
The other reminder—making the man bigger—each time he came home was his father’s odor, a tangle of aromas that clung to him, this thickness of odors another enlargement. He smoked, he drank—the burned, stale smell of Lucky Strikes, the smack like a sharpness of sour sugar that was whiskey on his breath. Not a human smell at all, it made him seem oddly edible. And it produced a gagging moment of suffocation when Joe was hugged.
Of the house in Manoa, his father said, “This is how the rest of the population lives.” He cocked his head as though looking at a crowd. “Civilians.” Of Punahou, he said, “Private school. Never thought we’d be able to afford it on my salary.”
“It’s got a pool,” Joe said. “Better than Radford’s.”
“Good school. You’ll have a great shot at making the academy.”
West Point the only ambition—that had always been the measure and the goal. His father, Class of ’45, had been posted to Germany, had fought in Korea with distinction, and on the basis of his command in Korea had been selected to lead the first contingent of advisers in Vietnam.
“Maybe we could hit the beach,” Joe said that first visit after they moved.
“I’m not on furlough,” his father said. “I’m here for briefings.”
“I only hope you’re safe,” his mother said.
“No one’s safe in ’Nam. If you want to be safe, you don’t run recon patrols into the boonies.” To Joe he said, “What language are you studying?”
“French.”
“Good. They speak French over there. My men—the ones I’m training, the locals, Vietnamese—they need an interpreter. If we’re still there, you won’t need an interpreter.”
This meant that after Joe graduated from West Point and was an officer, assigned to lead a unit in Vietnam, he’d be able to give orders in French. His father was always certain of the boy’s future.
“Are your men tough?” Joe asked, wanting to hear that they were brave soldiers, because it was a way of determining his father’s safety.
“Some of my ARVN are good s
oldiers,” his father said, and smiled. “But you know what? When they want to have a whiz they squat on the ground. I say to them, ‘Get up! Piss like a man!’”
Joe did not mind that he was hard on him. The Colonel was hard on everyone.
In barking orders, seldom listening, his father took charge. But Joe saw him in his chair—mother cooking, mother cleaning, mother doing laundry—and it seemed that his father did not know how to do anything but give orders. He held himself apart from his family, and Joe guessed held himself apart from his men, the ARVN, he called them, who were not Americans.
He was always an officer at home, and sometimes a father. It seemed he did not know how to be a friend. But he said that fifteen years in the army had taught him that friendships were dangerous.
“You don’t take orders out of friendship, because you like your officer,” he said. “You take orders because you are required to obey. Your commanding officer is not your friend. It doesn’t matter whether you like him or not. He is your superior.”
Friendships are fatal to authority, he explained. People break the rules because of friendships. Discipline fails, and lives are lost when rules are broken or orders not obeyed. He said this snapping at Joe, puffing a cigarette, pausing to tap its ash into the saucer under his coffee cup.
“Your friends will let you down—they will fail you,” he said. “And they’ll expect to be forgiven, and why? Because they’re your friends.”
Joe said, “Anyway, I don’t have any friends. I’m the new boy. They hate me.”
“They don’t hate you. They don’t know you. If anything, they’re afraid of you. Don’t let them know you—keep them in the dark—and they’ll go on being afraid.” He touched Joe’s scar. “Treat them like that mad dog.”
Misled by the scar, his father had the idea that Joe, in the struggle, had fought off the dog’s attack and somehow defeated him; the man did not know, or could not understand, that Joe had hugged himself and fallen, going rigid in his terror, submitting to the dog’s jaws, overwhelmed and terrified until the owner called the dog off.
“Are your men afraid of you?”
“Yes, sir, damn right! That’s why they respect me,” he said. “And that’s why they obey. What sort of an officer would I be if I gave orders that weren’t obeyed?”
He seemed to be exhausted when he was home, sitting in the armchair in the parlor with the shades drawn. He smoked, he drank, he scratched his scalp. He always wore khakis.
Drinking calmed him and sometimes he smiled, his eyes watering, and at those moments he became affectionate, calling his wife “Swee’ Pea”—“Come over here, Swee’ Pea, and give the Colonel a kiss”—which embarrassed Joe, who would hurry to his room when his mother approached the man in the chair, patting his lap. “Sit here, Swee’ Pea.”
“I wish I spoke French,” he said in a rare instance of regret—probably drunk. “I’m glad you’re learning it.”
“J’essaye,” Joe said. “Au moins, j’essaye.”
And his father looked closely at him with wet delighted eyes.
“The French made a mess of things,” he said, confiding, because he was pleased to hear Joe speaking French. “Now it’s our problem.”
“How long will you be there?”
“Joey, don’t you see? I take orders too.” He sipped his drink—it was always bourbon. “I don’t know. But even if I did know I wouldn’t tell you.”
They were no longer on the base, so he couldn’t compare his father with other officers anymore. They lived among civilians, and the fathers on this suburban street were home every night. They drove to work each morning and returned at six. But his father’s life was the army; he did not live in the house, he visited it, dropping in on his wife and son on short notice, as though in a surprise inspection. His real home was the base in Vietnam. He was a full-time soldier who kept in touch with his family and who brought the tone and command of the army to the little bungalow in Manoa.
“Not a job,” he said. “It’s a calling. It’s a duty. Special Forces.”
Mistrustful of friendship, he did not know how to be a friend. And his idea of fatherhood was absolute authority, a giver of orders. But that suited Joe, who obeyed, and he knew that as long as his father commanded him, issuing orders, and Joe carried them out, his father would be appeased and would not ask for more. And the satisfaction for Joe was that because he was an order-taker—“Yes, sir”—his father would never know him, never know his secrets, his worries, his sadness, his weaknesses, his shortcomings; because he was obedient. And his father never asked.
No sooner had his father established a routine in Hawaii for a week or two—“Get a haircut,” regular meals, drinking and smoking in the armchair, an evening dinner at the officers’ mess at Fort DeRussy—then he was gone, always swiftly, always first thing in the morning, always unexpectedly; and another life resumed, Joe’s mother brooding.
So Joe knew that he could not depend on him, and it was just as well his father didn’t know him, because he would have been disappointed; he might have raged.
Joe’s grades faltered. He tried out for the water polo team and, though he was a good swimmer, didn’t make it, because water polo was not just about swimming: it involved thrashing for the ball, and shouting, and a rowdiness he could not muster among strangers. This failure added to his sense of being an outsider—no other boys from Fort Shafter attended Punahou. But there were boys he recognized as misfits like himself—the geeks, the jokers, the surfers.
They had one thing in common, smoking pakalolo. Being stoners was their secret and their bond, and it made them a team of outlaws. With this secret they were loyal to each other. Smoking was their shared activity, and as it was always covert, it amounted to a ritual.
The Punahou teachers were proud of the school; they spoke of it with fondness, remarking on its traditions and its heritage. They emphasized how lucky the students were to be studying there and how they had to live up to the reputation of this great institution. “Be true to the Buff ’n Blue!”
All this emotion was bewildering to Sharkey; Punahou was a name, nothing more, and the way the teachers and older students spoke of it mystified him and made them seem silly and sentimental. He was used to students hating school or satirizing it, not praising it. The boys at Radford, most of them military children, were a rough crowd who regarded the teachers as irrational and overbearing—people to avoid or subvert with pranks. But Punahou teachers were at pains to stress their friendship with the students, and any suggestion that a teacher could be friendly with a student made Sharkey suspicious.
“I tell my men I am not your friend—I am your commanding officer,” his father, the Colonel, said. This made sense to Sharkey.
A friendly teacher was a worry. What was it they wanted to know? Why were they pretending to care? Their smiles seemed false and their compliments a kind of manipulation.
Sharkey had expected bullying. He’d experienced mild bullying at Radford, name-calling, petty intimidation, occasionally a fight after school in the parking lot. He found none of this at Punahou. Yet there was something else in the air, not threat but a palpable sense of superiority; just the posture of some students, the confident way they walked, the way they spoke or gestured, oppressed him, and the only name for it was snobbery, something new to him and awful, because snobbery was not violent but instead a kind of poisonous lying. It was much worse than bullying—you couldn’t fight a snob, you couldn’t win.
The scar on Sharkey’s face made him conspicuous, a person of interest. To increase speculation and make himself mysterious, he refused to say how he’d gotten it. He did not want anyone to know him.
In his father’s stories there was always a mention of Special Forces—never names or numbers of people, or reasons for them to be special, but only a shadowy gathering of faceless men intent on a mission, recon patrols, working in darkness. Consider yourself already dead. Sharkey imagined them to be heavily armed, wearing camouflage, prepared to def
end themselves and the country, a fighting force united in their common fear of Colonel Sharkey.
The boys at Punahou, the ones who became Joe’s friends, were united too—he thought of them as Special Forces. None were outstanding students, none had any other friends, none were on school sports teams; all of them smoked pakalolo. And among the smokers and the stoners was a surfer, Harry Ho. It was Harry Ho who showed Joe his first effective moves on a surfboard, his balance, his foot placement, his stance. And Harry introduced Joe to the older surfers at Waikiki, who called themselves the Beach Boys, another group who were like Special Forces.
So the world of Hawaii seemed to be made of different contained groups, who shared interests—not Radford students or Punahou students, but smaller numbers within those larger groups, like packs of dogs, who felt safe with each other and who had secret activities all their own. In the case of Sharkey’s Punahou group it was smoking pakalolo, a ritual that was all the more attractive for being forbidden.
The headmaster, Dr. Emmett Chock, denounced it at morning assembly after prayers, saying how harmful it was—a drug, unlawful and unhealthy. And side by side, Sharkey and Harry Ho smiled, as the two most committed stoners, both of them surfers, Harry expert, Sharkey improving by the week.
And so Sharkey knew for the first time what it meant to belong to a band of brothers, the Special Forces of a small group of boys whom he could trust to be on his side, who sat together to eat, who kept to themselves during school hours, who were always on the margins, who never mocked each other, though they knew they were geeky and mockable; who seldom had long conversations and yet were in agreement on most things. Their ritual consisted of meeting after school in the far corner of the parking lot, behind the lava-rock wall next to the monkey pod tree, and passing a blunt from hand to hand until it was a small squeezed roach. It was their ritual of defiance that made them happier afterward, buzzed and always laughing.
Huddled that way they felt protected together, and when they saw each other in the playground or the pool they gathered in a cluster, ill-assorted, badly matched—Harry Ho was athletic but small, Walter Opunui wheezed with asthma and panted when he smoked, Alex Louie was skinny and sallow, Willy Miranda wore thick glasses, and Kali Fifita was overweight and slow. They jeered at the school teams; they knew they were viewed with suspicion, if not despised. But they had each other. They recognized their weaknesses, but it was secret knowledge; they did not use it to their advantage, or mention it.
