by Paul Theroux
This neck of the atoll, which had once been wild and then planted with palms, was wild once more. The night air was like black silk, the crescent moon was bleached and pitted and coralline too, and at last he forgave himself and gave thanks for the darkness, the muffled bird squawks, the distant lap of waves against the mangrove knees. The earthen odor, of decaying palm fronds and blackening coconuts and the tang of dead fish—all this, hidden in the thickness of brush and scrub, caused him to rejoice in being alone on this empty spit of coral.
In the morning, hot at seven, under a cloudless sky, he fired up his stove again and made tea, ate one of the energy bars he’d brought from Hawaii, and, leaving his board and his truck, set out to find the wave. This time he noted carefully the way to the edge of the lagoon. He walked slowly, memorizing the path, and when he came to the pocket beach in the slot between the mangroves he saw the low promontory that was one pincer tip of the atoll—a density of palms on tumbled coral—and the white lip in the water that was probably the wave. It was so distant he could not determine its height, though its face was good-sized, and in the glassy conditions it slid from the sea between the pincers of coral that formed the mouth of the atoll before breaking where the water was smooth, another one lifting behind it, and more, a set of six. He saw himself crouched on the leading wave, jamming his board into the blue tube, making a dramatic entrance, riding into the lagoon.
Beyond the sliding wave and the pale blue water, on the far shore, was a small scattered village, low buildings of rough boards, fronds stacked on the roof, looking plunked down and ugly among the graceful palms, and farther on, taller than the palms, the square spire of a church.
It was too far to paddle to the wave, so, looking for access, Sharkey walked along the irregular edge of the lagoon, slapping at branches and stumbling on the rubble of broken coral. But even an hour of walking brought him no closer, and his walking convinced him that the wave was inaccessible from this side of the atoll. He knew the deception of sea distances, and even if he reached the promontory ahead, it was a mile or more paddle to the wave—too far. And so he picked some passionfruit from stringy vines that were twined on the spindly saltbush branches, and that was his lunch. He dozed for a while but was woken by flies on his face, and then—taking care—made his way back to the pocket beach and the beaten trail and his little camp.
Telling himself it was wrong to hurry, he decided to spend another night, and again he gloried in the wildness of the place, the scrape of the palm fronds, the nameless birds that squawked in the night, the slosh that carried from the lagoon’s edge, and he congratulated himself: surfing was not only the search for a great wave or a shore break; it was in its essence the discovery of a place like this.
After his early start the following morning he saw, with surprise and pleasure, something he had missed before—a profusion of rusted machinery, old tractors and dump trucks and bulldozers, their paint peeled off, falling to pieces in the jungle beside the road, disintegrating into heaps of reddish flakes, becoming part of the planet again.
But he could see they had been serious machines, perhaps the equipment of the coconut plantation, used for clearing and plowing the land. Some had metal tanklike treads rather than rubber tires. And as though defying their decay, the palms were heavy with clusters of unpicked nuts, and the fallen ones darkened the floor of the groves, some of them newly sprouted.
He drove on, satisfied that he had seen the wave and identified it as rideable. It was too hard to access from the inner shore beyond the camp he’d made, but it seemed approachable from the village on the far side of the harbor mouth. With this in mind he drove for another hour, past the airport and the hotel and some roadside settlements that might have been villages, and saw that he had rounded the atoll. This side was inhabited, with flimsy huts and fences, a few scrawny dogs sleeping in the road, chickens pecking under the palms, and children playing.
He was disappointed by the sight of the huts and the litter: it was not possible to be alone here, and he realized with his first glimpse of the children in the road and the men squatting among the trees, motionless, like vegetation themselves, that he had been buoyed at his camp in the palm grove because it was uninhabited. But idyllic was an unattainable state, even on this small atoll, and he told himself that it was the squalor and the idleness here and the skinny kids and the lame dogs that made it real.
Just ahead he saw the church he’d spotted from across the lagoon, and what had seemed like solid granite from a distance was gray-painted wood, simple clumsy carpentry on a large scale, the blunt and splintery steeple, the great flat front of the church mimicking a cathedral, and above the double doors a circular window painted green and yellow to resemble stained glass.
The priest he’d seen at the airport was standing with some children, peaceful in conversation, his hand on the shoulder of one of them.
Sharkey thought, as he had at his camp, what did it matter if there was surf or not? The rumor of a wave had enticed him, but what mattered was that he had found this peaceful island.
He greeted the priest and said, “I saw you at the airport a few days ago.”
“Yes, I remember.”
But Sharkey had been brisk with him, and he hoped the priest had not remembered his rudeness in wishing to get away.
“I was on the other side of the island,” Sharkey said. “No people.”
“Because of the bombs,” the priest said.
“Right,” Sharkey said. “I’m trying to find the best way to the wave.”
The priest nodded, saying, “Your friend was saying the same thing.”
Sharkey tried to hide his annoyance. Affecting to be casual, he said, “He’s probably ridden it by now.”
The priest’s face gave nothing away. He said. “You can ask him. I saw him going into town this morning.”
“There’s a town here?”
“We call it a town,” the priest said softly. “It’s just over there”—and he pointed to where the road curved into more palm groves. “The bar and the dive shop and the boatyard where they do some repairs. Your friend won’t be hard to find, though he seemed to be in a hurry.”
Sharkey leaned toward the priest with a question in his eyes.
“People move slowly here,” the priest explained, having read Sharkey’s expression. “Your friend was walking fast.”
Sharkey said, “Have you ever seen anyone ride that wave?”
The priest shook his head. “We have some divers and fishermen, all of them i-matang—outsiders. The people here seldom swim.”
“What do they do?”
“They do what people do on small islands. They fish in the lagoon. They gather coconuts. They play. They quarrel.”
* * *
The town was as the priest had said—one street, a few shops, a pier, a bar with a veranda that overlooked the harbor, some beached and broken boats, a low-tide odor of decayed fish and slime drying from green to black. Sharkey parked his pickup truck, and as soon as he got out and slammed the door he heard, “Joe Sharkey.”
The man who called himself Doc had darted from the bar—and Sharkey was gratified to see that he was unchanged, wild hair and trampled flip-flops and the same aloha shirt but unbuttoned. Yet even under the rags he had the physique of a surfer—the shoulders, the legs, the burned hair, the hands pink and boiled-looking from soakings in seawater.
The man said, “Doc,” as though to reassure him.
“How’s it?”
“Insane, man,” Doc said, but in a soft wondering way, and he went on, speaking in a disbelieving tone that was the more alarming for being a near-whisper. “The place where I was staying? It’s just a hut in the palms. But the first night I’m there I hear these noises, someone getting hosed, that rocking sound and those unmistakable sighs. I think, ‘Beautiful.’ But at breakfast I’m talking to the guy—that one you saw, with the hat—and we’re being served by this young teenaged girl—eggs, tea, papaya.”
The man sto
pped and shook his head.
Sharkey said, “I’m listening.”
“I said, ‘Your wife’s young.’ He looks at me. ‘My daughter. My wife’s off-island.’ I was thinking how I once had a daughter that age. So I left. I found a room here in town behind the bar. It’s nothing, but the vibe is better.”
Doc looked hard at Sharkey, sadness in his eyes, helplessness in his posture, his arms to his sides, flexing his empty hands.
Sharkey said, “You been on the wave?”
The man didn’t speak, he was thinking of something else, but Sharkey was elated when with just the slightest toss of his head the man said, “Nah.” Then he straightened and added, “I’ve been watching it. Grinds out some steep barrels.”
“You stoked?” Sharkey asked.
But Doc just smiled that older man’s smile.
Sharkey said, “I’ve been on the other side of the island. No one there.”
“Because of the bombs.”
It was what the priest had said. Sharkey said, “Was this place in the war?”
“I’m having a beer,” Doc said, turning away and walking to the bar.
And that was another thing that older people did—didn’t answer a question, said something else entirely, as though you hadn’t spoken, to make you small.
“Soft drink for me,” Sharkey said on the veranda of the bar, and when Doc ordered a beer, Sharkey had the urge to see the man drunk. He wanted to see him incapable of riding the wave today, too drunk to stand, hungover tomorrow.
“Big bombs,” Doc said. He kicked off his flip-flops and rested his feet on the veranda rail. Now Sharkey saw a bandage on Doc’s foot, but it was so dirty he had not noticed it until the foot was raised.
“How big?”
“The first tests were three-megaton H-bombs, but the yield-to-weight ratio made them more destructive—measured in terajoules, they were bigger by far than the one we dropped on Hiroshima. First the Brits in the fifties. Then us. In the sixties we set off twenty-four shots.”
“I didn’t see any craters.”
“Atmospheric tests,” he said, pointing upward with his bottle of beer. “Some from planes at eighteen thousand feet, some suspended from tethered balloons. No craters, unless you count genetic damage, genomic instability in DNA, birth defects, high levels of ionizing radiation, and radioactive contamination.” He swigged his beer. “Cancer.”
“There were people here on the island?”
Bearded, sweating, he went on drinking, but he was unexpectedly full of information. “Not many, a few hundred. They were instructed to put blankets over their heads so they wouldn’t see the flash. No one told the birds. All the birds were blinded.”
“And you know this how?”
“I’m a physicist, man. Cal Tech. I went to Hawaii to surf fifteen years ago and never looked back.” He drank again but held the beer in his mouth for a moment as though in reflection. Finally he swallowed and asked, “This bombing is news to you?”
“I heard something. I thought it was Bikini where the tests were.”
The man didn’t answer at once, though when he did, he spoke casually, dismissively, disgustedly. “Way west of here, in the Marshalls. Another nuclear disaster.”
“I saw a lot of heavy equipment on the other side of the island.”
“Abandoned by the military. They dug huge holes and buried a lot of it, the rest they left to rot—too expensive to take it away.” Now Doc smiled, a drunken smile. “It’s a hole.”
“What happened to your foot?”
“Gashed it on the beach yesterday when I was scoping out the wave.”
“Coral’s sharp.”
“Broken bottle. There’s glass everywhere. Rusty cans. Plastic.”
“So,” Sharkey said, and paused and nodded, “you make it to the wave?”
“Didn’t want to risk it with this foot. The priest bandaged it—the clinic was closed.” He smiled again. “This island is freaking me out,” and what he said was the more disturbing for being whispered.
Sharkey said, “I was beginning to enjoy it. Now I’m not so sure.” He leaned toward Doc and said in a low voice, “I got lost in the bushes by the lagoon.”
Doc laughed loudly. “That’s funny. When Captain Cook came here, some of his men went ashore. They immediately got lost—for a couple of days! It’s the freaky vegetation. The island was uninhabited. It was perfect. But Jimmy Cook named it and put it on the map. Other ships visited. It became a coconut plantation. Then a bomb site and a junkyard. Now it’s what you see—a dump.”
Sharkey looked around and sniffed. “What’s that smell?”
“Oil spill on the slipway—someone must have dropped a barrel.” He finished his beer, then said, “Do me a favor? Help me move my board? It’s still at that guy’s hut.”
“Are you going to surf with that foot?”
“Maybe not. But I don’t want to leave my board with that criminal. His own daughter, man!”
So Sharkey drove Doc down the road past the church and into the palm grove on a rutted track to the hut, which was a tin-roofed plywood box, painted green, sitting on cinder blocks. A man sat on the front steps, smoking a cigarette.
“That’s Dad,” Doc said under his breath.
He was a dark frowning man in a torn T-shirt and shorts, his elbows resting on his knees, the cigarette in one hand, an open can of sardines in the other, and what Sharkey noticed was the size of his hands, the thick fingers, the way they dripped with oil.
“I’m here for my board.”
The man hesitated, moved his mouth as though to speak, then went on chewing.
In its padded sleeve bag it leaned against the hut, but the bottom edge of the bag was torn, the stuffing pulled out.
“Who messed with my board?”
The man chewed, then, twirling one finger into the can of sardines, he said, “Was a rat,” and went on chewing.
Nothing more was said. Doc lifted his board into the bed of the pickup, and as they drove away from the palm grove and were nearer the road, Doc said, “There she is.”
A young girl in a school uniform, white blouse, blue skirt, was walking toward them. Sharkey slowed and stopped. Doc leaned out of the window.
“Remember me?”
“Yah.”
The girl’s thin face was set in a resentful, almost sulky expression, her underlip protruding. But perhaps she was shy, guarded, averse to questions.
“How’s school?”
The girl made a face, not at the question but at the man who asked it, and said nothing.
“Everything all right?”
Now she did seem resentful, and she nodded, then turned and walked up the path where the man, her father, was waiting.
Doc sighed, and as he did Sharkey saw the island anew, as if for the first time. He had been thinking only of the wave and the best way to approach it. Nothing else had mattered to him. But now he was seeing the island with Doc’s eyes, another place entirely, and he wished he had not known.
He had always surfed alone. History and customs and holidays didn’t interest him, except when they impeded his surfing. He was proud of surfing every Christmas Day—the surf was always up in December. “Surf is my religion.”
He did not want to know what Doc knew. He told himself that Doc was trying to impress him. Doc was a dropout, and like most dropouts he retained his old instincts and habits. He was not a competitive single-minded surfer. Doc’s problem was that he knew too much.
But the next day, Doc with a newly bandaged foot helped him carry his board down the slipway, and he watched like a proud parent as Sharkey paddled out to the wave and sat rocking on the back of the swell, now and then riding it, exploding through the barrel.
And for Sharkey the wave was pure and ageless and eternal; no matter how badly the island had been abused, the wave remained the same, unspoiled, the same shape it had been centuries before, when it had rocked the sailing ship of Captain James Cook. Sharkey surfed for the remainder of h
is week on Christmas Island, claiming the wave as his own, rejoicing in it. Now and then he saw Doc onshore, a tiny figure in an aloha shirt sitting on the pier.
He saw that he’d been wrong—wrong about Doc. Wrong about the island, wrong in his judgments and his sarcasm, wrong about himself. But in this small, flat, crusted, and contaminated atoll, humming with flies, the itch of dog fur rising from its rotting coconuts, its littered beaches and reeking villages—the glowering man with the big oily fingers—in all this the wave was a muscle of water that lifted him and carried him forward, a thing deserving of a name. The wave at least was pure. He hadn’t been wrong about that.
One of those nights, stinking of diesel and chattering with the racket of the bar’s generator, under the glare of fluorescent tubes, Sharkey fist-bumped Doc and said, “Call it Jimmy’s.”
14
A House at Jocko’s
Saving his money—the prizes, the endorsements, the annuity from his father’s life insurance—he was able to buy a house by the sea on Pohakuloa Road, and saw Jock Sutherland’s first ride on the break that he bestowed his name upon. With a house, his girlfriends stayed longer, weeks at a time. He grew fond of one, who called herself Sugar, because her Hawaiian name, Kaleoikaikaokalani—the Mighty Voice of Heaven—he found unpronounceable. Hawaiian-Chinese-Filipino, she was a beauty. He met her at a club in town.
“Not a surfer,” he told his friends, “but she has other talents.”
“All the wahine got those,” was the usual response.
“Not like Sugar.”
