by Paul Theroux
“The bitter melon,” Winnie said. “So ono. I eat it fast before they beep me!” She spooned some into Sharkey’s bowl.
“Eh, stop it, kids,” Wallis said to the two who were still filling water glasses with handfuls of rice.
“I can discipline my own keiki,” Winnie said, and pushed the glasses to the center of the table. She scowled at the children. “Don’t waste food.”
“They so kolohe!” May called out. “Oh, da pretty.”
At that, the children darted under the table—Sharkey felt them bumping his feet. He looked to May for relief, but she was hugging her father, nuzzling his neck.
Wallis said, “Wendy was a late baby. Kind of a caboose. My mother hapai when she was late-forty-something. Eh, Ma?”
Hearing her name, the old woman looked up and seemed to see Sharkey for the first time. “You from mainland?”
“I came here when I was little. My dad was military.”
The word seemed to cast a blight upon the table, killing conversation, and no one had a response.
“He died,” Sharkey said.
And that was worse, a darkening that was palpable. May’s mother frowned, Wallis grasped her hair and gagged a little, Winnie looked for refuge in her pager, studying its green light. But it was not a silence, only a pause that was filled by the howl and racket of the restaurant. They looked at the television sets, where a dark figure speeding down a ski jump took flight.
Winston solemnly unfastened the flap of his briefcase and brought out large squares of red paper stamped with gold Chinese characters. He handed one to the old man and said, “Long life, Pop.”
May’s father plucked a chewed chicken foot out of his mouth. He said, “No. It say, ‘Good Fortune.’”
“Same thing to me,” Winston said.
“Chinese Man of the Year,” May said, and Sharkey could not tell whether she was mocking her brother or praising him. But he didn’t respond, he was still handing his father lengths of gold-printed red paper.
“This one is ‘Fa’—Make money,” he said. “This one ‘Double Happiness.’”
One of May’s arms was around her father, the other around her brother’s shoulder. “This my double happiness,” she said. “My ohana.”
“He no like bitter melon,” May’s mother said.
Sharkey looked at his bowl, green blobs afloat in their own viscous juice, where Winnie had dropped them.
“These fun noodles,” the mother said. And tapping the rim of dishes at the center of the table, she said, “Teriyaki chicken. Lomi salmon. That macaroni. Potstickers. Plenty poi. No more chicken feet left!”
“I’m good with this,” Sharkey said, and prodded the goop in his bowl.
May said, “Joe was a lifeguard at Ali‘i—Waimea too. Monster waves there keep him busy.”
“What kine money they make?” Winnie asked, still staring at her beeper.
Winston sniffed and said, “That fricken haole guy was so bummed out when I told him we don’t need him, or his wahine. He so ignorant of the culture rules. Take your money somewhere else, I said.”
Wallis said, “Eh. You could be one yakuza gangsta man with all them tattoos.”
“You have any children?” Sharkey replied, folding his arms, trying to minimize his visible ink.
“Got a poi dog. Real ugly mutt,” Wallis said. “That’s my baby.” Then she poked Sharkey’s arm and said, “Eh, you a good conversationalist.”
Sharkey could not think of a reply. He saw that May had found a baby and was holding it, making noises at it. Embracing her father, hugging Winston, bouncing the baby on her lap, she was in her element. “Brandon!” she cried to the baby’s face. “You have one luau next month! Say aloha to Uncle Joe!” She was more content than he’d seen her—happier than when she’d surfed a big wave. She was not a surf bunny; she was the obedient daughter of a stern unsmiling man, a member of a family, a tight fit in an ohana.
“Get one keiki for yourself!” Wallis said to May, pinching the baby’s cheek—too hard; the baby began to bawl.
The family: how Hawaiian they were, Sharkey thought—more Hawaiian than they perhaps knew, and they might have objected if he’d mentioned it, since they presented themselves as having so much Chinese pride.
“Be right back,” he said, to get away from the crying baby, and stumbled through the packed restaurant to go to the lanai to smoke a joint. Other men were there, smoking cigarettes.
One of the men said through his teeth, “Gong hei fat choy.”
“Far out, man,” Sharkey said, swallowing smoke, squinting in the glare of the afternoon sun. He turned and put his forehead against the glass of the restaurant window and, searching the room, at last found the Wong table.
At Roosevelt he had been the bullied haole, yet he’d had a vague sense of attachment, doing battle and sometimes winning. But at this meal, with this family, in this restaurant of Chinese families yelling and eating, he had never felt so alien. The mention of surfing evoked nothing but murmurs of disapproval. May seemed unable to defend Sharkey to her family, but worse, Sharkey was incapable of defending himself.
A family somehow fitted together, unlike the Colonel and his mother and him, not a family but strange pairings for him, first with his father, then with his mother, all of them discontented, a bad fit. The Wongs were exuberant, and May was one of them, with a role as respectful daughter, adoring her father, humoring her mother, admiring her brother and sisters. She fooled with the children, whom Sharkey saw as annoying. But he was an outsider, he was not entitled to an opinion, and anyway even the pesky children belonged to the family. These brats had membership. He smiled, remembering how he’d seen May as a sister, and hoped he might be brotherly until she allowed him more access. He’d liked their abstinence, no hugs, once or twice a chaste kiss on her cool lips. He was glad it had gone no further: her keeping him away had freed him. There was nothing to explain, nothing to apologize for. He was a stranger.
Buzzed from the pakalolo, he peered at May’s father and imagined saying to him, “You have nothing to fear from me. I want nothing from you. I am May’s friend, that’s all—and hardly a friend. Just a haole who surfs with her.”
When he returned to the table, the old man was holding a red restaurant menu and peering through wire-rimmed glasses. “It say here the rat is akamai. Very clever. Save things—save money, and maybe a little cheap with money too. Have lots of children.”
“Iole we call rats when I live on Big Island—some iole nui come so big,” Mrs. Wong said. “Trouble with rats is too many keiki.”
Then Wallis turned from the snow scene on the television screen, hitched herself in her chair. “Lai see!” she said, and the children shrieked.
“Money,” May said.
The old man was shuffling a thickness of red envelopes. He tapped them on the table to straighten them and worked them with his thumbs.
“There goes my pager,” Winnie said. She stood up, brushed crumbs from her scrubs, and said, “Mummy’s got to go to work.” And to the solemn man, “Kenny, get them in line.”
Kenton pushed the children toward to the old man, the children falling silent, a faint expression of hunger on their faces, which were smeared with food. One by one they crept near the old man, who handed each one a red envelope. Clasping the envelopes in sticky fingers, rewarded, they dropped to the floor and fought for space between the chairs while the others resumed eating.
“When you was born?” Mr. Wong suddenly asked Sharkey.
“Forty-eight,” Sharkey said.
The old man picked up the menu again and ran his finger down the back of it and exclaimed, whipping off his glasses. “Was a rat year too!”
“I born fifty-one,” May said. “Rabbit year.”
“You’re a bunny,” Sharkey said. “I knew that.”
“Let’s see,” the old man said, tapping a yellow fingernail on the menu. Then he grunted. “It say here that rabbit and rat not compatible.”
“Yo, heinous!”
Sharkey said, and laughed, and wondered if anyone would notice he was stoned. “What a shame.”
Winston said, “Maybe a blessing.”
Slightly dazed from smoking the joint, Sharkey remembered a fragment of what he had planned to say to the old man. He turned to Winston and spread his arms for drama and said, “You have nothing to fear from me, man.”
The pakalolo had deafened him, and he could not tell whether Winston, or anyone, had heard. No one reacted, though he’d meant it as a thunderous statement.
May was seated next to her brother, and Sharkey saw that they were holding hands.
“Or you, Bunny,” Sharkey said, and felt the need for more smoke. “I’m going outside. Don’t wait for me.”
13
Naming a Wave
A notion that made Sharkey laugh was to name a place, any place on earth—Paraguay, Albania, Baluchistan—and the Hawaiian surfer, innocent on his tiny islands far from the world, looked hopeful and asked, “Got waves there?” But Sharkey could be innocent too, and that was how he heard there was a wave at Christmas Island. He was certain that it hadn’t been ridden, at least not by anyone on the tour, because the wave had no name.
The mention had been casual, not the explosive blurt of a surfer with news of a big swell but offhand, from a fisherman he met, who’d flown down from Honolulu, the only route to Christmas Island, seeking bonefish in the flats of the lagoon.
“At the harbor mouth of the atoll, pretty awesome—rocked my boat.”
“So you could surf it into the lagoon?”
“I guess.”
Sharkey was reassured by this vagueness: a surfer would have known for sure. Sharkey wanted to know. The island now seemed virginal for its unnamed wave, a blue plow blade sliding in from the sea.
It was the spring of his biggest achievement so far, as the youngest winner of the Pipeline Masters. He used his prize money to buy a ticket. He zipped his board into its padded bag, triumphant in his second trip away from Hawaii, to surf the wave and maybe to name it. And at the end of the three-hour flight he pressed his face to the window as the plane banked for its descent. The island was shaped like a bulky magnifying glass, with a thick crusted coral handle, the lagoon serving as the lens, glacial milky blue, a smooth vitreous pool of magic in contrast to the dark ocean around it, frothy and windblown. In the distance, at the break in the reef, a rolling wave lifted, white-maned, and—he was still squinting—no one on it.
As for the rest, the island was narrow beaches and coconut palms, some smudges of villages, a perimeter road without vehicles, no large buildings, a place outside time but with a landing strip much wider and longer than he’d expected.
Off the plane, onto the glare of the tarmac, the passengers awaited their luggage—mostly older men, some of them islanders in white shirts and long pants, and a contingent of fishermen in khaki shorts traveling together. The luggage yanked from the plane was piled in the sunshine to be claimed. A woman standing apart, a brown Madonna in a billowy green long-sleeved dress that reached to her ankles, holding a baby, was trying to get the attention of one of the porters, who was intent on retrieving a duffel bag for a fisherman.
Sharkey caught her eye. But a man in an aloha shirt stepped between them. “Can I help you?”
“That box”—she gestured with the baby—“it mine.”
Sharkey watched as the man seized the heavily taped cardboard box.
“It my toaster.”
“And there’s your bread,” the man said with a grim smile—a large carton labeled as forty loaves of white bread from a Honolulu bakery. Fresh-Baked, Home-Sliced. The Taste of the Isles.
Then the man turned to Sharkey and said, “Congratulations.”
Sharkey smiled to cover his confusion.
“I saw you at the Pipe,” the man said. “You killed it. Gerry didn’t do too bad either.”
“Thanks.”
“You guys have youth on your side.”
Saying that, the man sounded rueful. He wore flip-flops, board shorts, his feet dirty, his nose burned, but he had the broad shoulders and slim sinewy legs of a surfer, and though his hair was wild it was thick and sun-scorched, and when he extended his hard-knuckled fingers—showing a pale, peeling, almost amphibious paw—Sharkey knew he was a waterman.
He shook hands, the complex Masonic grip of North Shore surfers, but resented being compared with Gerry Lopez, whom he felt he’d outscored on the day.
“Doc Bowers,” the man said.
“I know why you’re here,” Sharkey said.
The doubting way the man cocked his head and smiled reminded Sharkey of how the older surfers had always regarded him until he’d proved himself at the Pipeline. The old have a special smile they use on the young, and it is the more pitying and patronizing when nothing more is said.
So Sharkey said, “This your first time here?”
“They only started regular flights here a year ago,” the man said, and when Sharkey didn’t ask why, he added, “I’ve been looking at the weather. When there’s a big southerly swell, like now, that wave’s insane.”
He hated hearing the man’s enthusiasm and seeing his gusto in the tightening gulp of his throat, because it was how he too felt, and any discovery shared was a discovery diminished. He thought of himself as a loner, and he felt mocked and subverted, as when he believed he had an original thought or impulse and he came across someone else who had the same one.
Wanting always to be first, he felt undermined by everything the man was telling him, especially “Maybe we could ride it together.”
That the man had not given the break a name gave Sharkey hope.
“First I need to find a place to stay,” he said.
“I know some people.”
Sharkey resented that too. The man was way ahead of him; Sharkey had no names.
“Please identify your bags,” a man in a gray uniform said to them.
They indicated their boards in the big padded sleeves, and their duffels—Sharkey noticed that the man had brought some boxes of food, but did not remark on it, or anything more; he felt already the man knew too much.
“I guess we’re the only two freaks here,” Doc said.
Outside the small airport building, which was no more than a shed, onlookers stood behind a fence, their fingers hooked on the mesh. One ragged islander in a misshapen bush hat held a square of cardboard, crudely printed BOWERS.
“That’s my man,” Doc said, and waved.
The man touched his hat, greeting Doc, then introduced him to an older man in a white gown next to him. “This is our fadda priest”—Doc shook the man’s hand—“and this our dive master Tofinga”—another handshake—“and my friend Tawita.”
Excluded from the familiarity and friendliness, Sharkey said, “There’s a hotel here, right?”
“Captain Cook,” the priest said.
“Also known as Main Camp,” Doc said. “Or you can join me in the village.”
“I’m okay,” Sharkey said. He hoisted his board bag and jammed it under his arm, and when one of the islanders, stepping forward, said, “Taxi?” Sharkey handed him his duffel and tried to push past the waiting men.
“If I can help,” the priest said, reaching and touching his arm.
“I’ll be fine,” Sharkey said. Again he resented being crowded and imposed upon, when all he wanted was to ride the wave alone. He wished to separate himself from these people, to be away and on his own.
He found the hotel, and a room smelling of its painted cinder blocks; he rented a pickup truck, and he set off the next morning to drive to the far corner of the island, to find his own way of getting to the wave.
There was only one road, dead flat, paved for a few miles, then rutted coral and loose stones and packed sand, and after twenty minutes he slowed to a halt and got out to determine what progress he’d made by taking a look at the lagoon. He walked in the direction of the water through the head-high saltbush scrub, big-winged birds flying up from where his elb
ows bumped the branches, and he smelled the sour sun-dried seaweed and the sting of salt before he stepped onto crystalline boulders of coral and beheld the great gleaming lagoon. More beaky birds took flight at his appearance on the stony shore. He saw that he was less than halfway to the far side of the lagoon.
Turning his back to the lagoon, he hurried to his pickup truck and in his hurry became lost in the hot air and speckled shadow trapped beneath the low canopy of thorny bush and twisted scrub that stank of marine decay, dead fish and dried barnacles. The broken coral at his feet looked like bleached and shattered bones. What had seemed like the path he’d taken was a rut of packed-down coral dust like a game trail. He saw movement ahead—the fidget of a feral cat, another panicked bird, and the sunlight burning through the meager dusty leaves.
He could not climb the spindly stalks to see where he was; the thorns tore at his arms and he was mocked again—a hundred feet into this vegetation and, ducking and thrashing, he saw no way out, no access to the road and his truck. He ran and stumbled, then sat and, short of breath, wondered whether he was impatient or afraid. Perspiration smeared the blood on his arms. He heard a squawk and called out, as though in reply; but it was a bird.
And then at the height of his panic, flushing another bird—roosting frigate bird—and scarcely able to breathe, he saw the red of his truck through the bush and credited that ’iwa bird with saving him, the bird an omen, directing him. He sat in the truck, simply breathing, hot with anxiety, glad to be alone with his shame at having become so easily lost.
Back on the road, he resolved to stay with his truck and followed the road for several miles, until he came to a grove of coconut palms. The rows and ranks of palms reassured him with their symmetry and their abandonment—they had been set there by a human hand, but it seemed the humans had fled, leaving the place to him.
There were no people anywhere here; the road was overgrown with weeds, and the only vehicle he saw was a wreck, resting on its axles, its front end sunk in sand. Farther on he found a deserted village—empty roofless huts of what had been a coconut plantation—and a barrier of mangroves, their exposed roots opening onto a view of the lagoon. He considered looking for the wave, but seeing that the sun was setting, he feared becoming lost again. He pitched his tent, and in the gathering dusk the mosquitoes and blowflies began to bite. He lit his camp stove, boiled some water for noodles, then crawled into his tent and zipped it against the insects and lay listening to the chatter and whine of night creatures and tried to sleep, insisting to himself that the day had not been a failure.
