Under the Wave at Waimea

by Paul Theroux

  He could not imagine a future without her. “I’m done dogging chicks,” he told himself. He married her in a ceremony on the beach, both of them draped with leis, flower crowns on their heads, all their friends attending—his were surfers in T-shirts and shorts, hers were from town, men in jackets, women in dresses. Their friends stood apart, and he could see at the reception afterward at the hotel in Turtle Bay that his friends, awkward in the formal gathering, kept together, got drunk, and left early.

  A week later Sharkey called his mother from the pay phone at Foodland and told her his news. She said, “Oh, God,” and sobbed, and he knew it had been the right decision not to invite her to the wedding.

  Sugar wanted a baby. She said so, soon after they were married, indicating that there was plenty of room in the beachfront house at Jocko’s.

  “If we have a baby, we won’t be able to travel,” Sharkey said—he intended that summer to go to South Africa for the waves at Jeffreys Bay, their winter swell.

  Sugar said, “I don’t want to go.”

  “To South Africa?”

  “To leave Hawaii.”

  She had been once to the mainland, to Las Vegas, and hated it. Las Vegas was the world. Hawaii had everything—why go anywhere?

  Sugar and her friends and family distrusted the weather elsewhere, were comforted by their own food, reassured by the trade winds, and did not believe their sunshine could be duplicated anywhere else on earth. “Lucky we live Hawaii.” Her family lived in Wahiawa; her father had once picked pineapples at Helemano and was now a civilian employee at the officers’ mess at Schofield Barracks, her mother a cashier at the city tax office near the Wahiawa Police Station. They were proud of their haole son-in-law. They wanted a baby too, their first grandchild. No one had mentioned any of this beforehand: so much was revealed now.

  Having grown up in a town in the middle of the island, Sugar was ill at ease living on the beach. The sound of surf kept her awake, and she told Sharkey about her fears of being flooded and drowned, imagining a wave rising up and breaking over the house. She was a poor swimmer, she never sat in the sun, she said surf meets were too long, she didn’t drink or smoke. She yearned for a child.

  An island girl, a simple girl, he’d thought; then he knew—no one is simple. Had she been a surfer, they might have spent their days together. Now even their nights were fractured by arguments, by silences, to the sound of the waves on the rocks in front of their house. In her sadness, and sometimes grief, it was as though a baby had been stolen from her, a phantom child she longed to possess.

  Sugar’s disappointment at their divorce was mixed with relief. He was not the sunny guy with money that she’d married but a selfish haole who cared only about surfing with his friends, nothing else. Her parents were angry: he’d let them down, he’d misled their daughter, and the divorce was a humiliation for them.

  “And now all the paperwork,” Sugar’s father said.

  But Sharkey hired a lawyer and gave them the amount of money they asked for, and his car, the furniture from C. S. Wo, and the cat. He kept his house at Jocko’s, emptier now.

  * * *

  Sharkey’s mother seemed grimly satisfied—perhaps she’d hoped he’d fail. The divorce was proof that she could not be replaced. And when he began avoiding his mother, in what seemed a self-destructive act of revenge—but it could have been a result of her drinking—she broke her hip, became housebound, insisted on a wheelchair until her hip healed, drank more, and demanded that he leave her alone.

  “Go ahead, do what you want. I have Milly.”

  Milly was a middle-aged Filipina in green scrubs, who declared at the outset, “I am a licensed caregiver.” She was gracious, attentive to the point of being a fussing hoverer, and she assured Sharkey that she would look after his mother as though she were her own mother. She moved in, slept in Sharkey’s old bedroom, took charge, cooked, and cleaned, dragging a mop from room to room over the hardwood floors. Her cousin Orlando—Sharkey suspected him of being her lover—became a live-in handyman, bunking in the shed behind the garage.

  Sharkey had seen enough of such arrangements to understand the ominous implications. Courts in the islands heard the cases all the time: the caregiver moves in, bonds with, and then dominates the employer, gets written into a new will, displacing the family. And the thwarted, disinherited family members litigate for what they believe is rightfully theirs, but in vain. The intrusive, usurping caregiver inheriting the house and the fortune of the employer was a common story in Hawaii; most moneyed families had a version of it—grotesque, melodramatic, farcical, or violent, depending on how much money was involved, but always with the same result, the servants ending up with everything. People who had much less, hearing these stories, clucked in sympathy but believed that there was justice in it.

  His mother knew that, and the more she said, “Milly’s a treasure, Ollie can fix anything,” the more resigned he was to finding a renter for the house at Jocko’s and moving back, enduring his mother’s final years, simply to protect her.

  Turned out of the house, Milly bared her teeth at him and hissed like a snake, certain proof that she was as greedy as he suspected. But she had beautiful teeth. She stole some of his mother’s jewelry just before she left. Orlando growled and made vague threats, saying, “I’m not leaving this island,” and made off with some tools from the garage.

  “This is as it should be,” his mother said. “Just the two of us.”

  Surfing calmed him, he competed more, and with his winning, his mother insisted on going with him to the North Shore, though she dozed in the car for most of the way, waking to the sound of the surf when he rolled down the windows at Waimea.

  Sharkey was having his picture taken one day at Ali‘i Beach and heard a familiar fluttery voice: “I’m his mother.” She ran to his side and posed with him, girlish, waving to the camera.

  She had been too young to be a widow, and she was now too young to be an invalid. She complained of obscure aches, and Sharkey hated her for what he took to be her dishonest complaints, for his captivity, having to spend every night under her roof. It was as though he were sitting on a swell, waiting for a wave to take him away, but there was nothing to ride.

  He wished her dead, and one night she complained of chest pains. “And my arm!” Sharkey took her to Queen’s Hospital in spite of his skepticism—she said she was in agony; he believed she was drunk again. She was admitted and wheeled away. At dawn the next day a nurse (he guessed) called him at home to say, “I’m sorry to tell you your mother has passed. We tried our best. It was her heart—congestive heart failure.”

  He was musing on the bland word “passed.” She was hardly sixty. He had disliked her and doubted her, yet she had been telling the truth.

  “Excuse me—did you hear?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you like to view the body?”

  What was the point? And he feared the feelings the sight of his mother might provoke.

  “No,” he said, and asked for the body to be sent to Borthwick Mortuary.

  In an unexpected turn, Milly and Orlando showed up at the cremation, loudly grieving, and later filed a suit challenging the will, which Sharkey fought off.

  When people asked, Sharkey said, “It’s tough—if you’ve been through a divorce and then your mother dies, you know what I mean.”

  Yet he was relieved; he’d ridden this wave to the shore, as he had with Sugar. He was unburdened, free to do what he wished. He tried to remember what it was that had impelled him to marry. But he knew the alluring woman he had proposed marriage to did not in the least resemble the unreasonable woman who became his wife—nor could he recall much about the allure. He gave thanks for his freedom, and five months later, just before he went to South Africa, he saw Sugar at the tax office visiting her mother; he was at the Registry of Motor Vehicles across the hall, renewing his driver’s license. He was delighted to see that she was as pretty as ever, forgiving, dressed in a loose blouse. Be
aming beautifully, she said, “Hapai”—pregnant. Not married, she said, but was planning to; her fiancé was a policeman—“Dispatch,” she said—in the same building.

  “He knows you,” Sugar said. “Your career.”

  “Why are you smiling?”

  “It’s incredulous.”

  * * *

  South Africa, cold in July, was strange and bleak. The long flight to Jo’burg, the connecting flight to Cape Town, and, as always, he looked for surf when the plane banked toward the city, flying parallel to the coastline and the great granite flat-topped mountain. He’d come alone—none of his friends could afford the trip, though all of them had heard of the waves at Jeffreys Bay.

  The taxi driver who took him to his hotel said, “American?” and then, “You’ve got problems with your Blacks too.”

  “I live in Hawaii,” Sharkey said.

  “I saw that movie,” and then, “Hula-hula.”

  “What problems?”

  “Not with the Blacks as such,” the man said, “but these whites who want to start trouble. Blacks aren’t the problem. The whites who stir things up are the problem. All Blacks want is a push-bike and a little rondavel to raise their kids. What do they know about voting? They never had a vote. They obey the chief.” Then he stopped at a red light and looked around. “And by the way, you want to stay out of this area—it’s all Blacks and coloreds mixed in.”

  “What is this area?”

  “District Six.”

  Sharkey then counted the streets from there to the hotel, and after he checked in, needing to walk, he went back to the area the driver had warned him about, District Six. It was a chilly evening, dark, with a damp wind from the harbor. Down a side street he heard loud music from a building and entered—a club that was filled with people dancing to a band. The men were dressed in suits and ties, and some women in bright dresses lingered at the bar, smiling at Sharkey in his sweatshirt as he passed them.

  “Where do you come from?” a woman asked. She was tall, with a shaved head, in a long loose gown. Purple lipstick suited her blackness and shimmered in the light of the glitter ball.

  “America.”

  “I want to see a real cowboy,” she said, laughing.

  “I’m a real cowboy,” he said, and the woman laughed harder. “Have a beer.”

  At once the woman ceased laughing and raised her hand, gesturing as she spoke, in a marveling voice. “I was born in this city. I have lived here my whole life. I tell you no white man has ever bought me a bottle of beer.” She ordered it in her own language, shouting at the barman and seeming to announce it to the women near her, and pushed a stool toward Sharkey.

  They drank together in silence for a while, the woman smiling, then she said, “What are you doing here, man?”

  “Looking for waves.”

  “None in this place!” Her laugh was full-throated, attracting attention, but the women who heard her laughed too, as though inspired.

  “Jeffreys Bay.”

  “That is too far away. Eastern Cape. You will need a car.”

  “I’ll get a car.”

  He needed to repeat it. The music was so loud they had difficulty hearing each other, so they listened to the music instead. The crush of people, many of them staring at Sharkey, pushed them closer to each other. Sharkey marveled at the fact that he had been in the city such a short time—an hour or so—and he was among lively people, getting drunk, drenched in sweat, smothered by loud music—happy, feeling he’d found out how to belong.

  When he caught the woman’s eye he lowered his head and said in her ear, “What’s your name?”

  “Thandi.”

  “Come with me to my hotel, Thandi.”

  “I will be arrested,” she said, and grasped his arm. “Follow me.”

  She led him through the crowd at the bar and out a side door to an alley and, taking his hand, hurried him to the end of it, where in the semidarkness Sharkey saw a picket fence, higher than his head. Leaning against the fence, the woman lifted her long gown with one hand and drew Sharkey nearer to her with her other hand, tugging on his sleeve.

  “What?”

  “Jig-jig,” she said.

  Instinctively Sharkey looked around. A light burned over a doorway in the building they’d just left, but it was too distant and feeble to illuminate them. The alley was clammy-cold, the fence smelling of urine.

  They were alone, he saw, but he was anxious, suddenly in this dark stinking place, and he began stalling, saying he was tired, he’d been on a long flight, and he was still talking as the woman groaned.

  “Ach, we could have been finished by now.”

  * * *

  The rental—a pickup truck the agent called a bakkie—came with warnings, some of them printed (Do not leave valuables in the boot) and some verbal. “No hitchhikers,” the agent said. “And I’d advise you to hire a driver—you’ll get there quicker. You’ll have more time for surfing. Safer as well.”

  So Sharkey agreed and was introduced to Murad, a stocky man of about thirty, who volunteered that he was not Black. He was colored, he said—Malay and India, “and maybe a native, way back.” He had gray eyes and his skin was sallow. He wore a thick sweater and a skullcap.

  “They say the wave is a great right. The surf there.”

  “I know nothing about that,” Murad said.

  He was mostly silent after that, concentrating on the road, which was empty and straight in a landscape of low hills and thick bush, no villages, few houses, but here and there a glimpse of movement.

  “What is that bird?”

  “We call it a volstruis,” Murad said. “You call it an ostrich.”

  Around noon, at a crossroads near a beach, stopping for gas—Murad muttering to the pump attendant—Sharkey suggested eating at the small restaurant across the road. Murad sighed and looked displeased.

  “I’m hungry,” Sharkey said.

  “I will wait.”

  “Why not join me?”

  “Do you know where you are?” Murad said.

  Sharkey saw a sign at the crossroads: MOSSEL BAY—2 KM. He said, “Mossel Bay.”

  “South Africa,” Murad said through clamped teeth. “I am not allowed to eat in that restaurant. But go—ach, take your time, man.”

  Sharkey ate alone—fish and chips, in a booth, in the almost empty restaurant. He bought a sandwich for Murad, but lifting the top slice of bread, Murad sighed and said with distaste, “I don’t take varkvleis—this meat.”

  Sharkey slept off his jet lag the rest of the way, and when they arrived felt fresh enough to surf—or at least to test the water, to paddle out to the break. He directed Murad to a parking lot facing the beach, where head-high waves were beating against the sand—smaller waves than he’d been expecting, but good enough to relax him and cleanse him of the sweat of travel. His wetsuit was in his duffel bag, his surfboard in its sleeve in the back of the pickup.

  “Give me a hand, okay?”

  Murad folded his arms and said, “I don’t carry.”

  At the hotel Sharkey said, “Is there a bus back to Cape Town?”

  “The night bus. It is slow. They will charge you extra for your board. You will not like it.”

  “I’m not taking it,” Sharkey said. “You are,” and put out his hand. But when Murad went to shake it, Sharkey said, “Keys.”

  * * *

  A full week on the wave that was later called Boneyards: Africans gathered at the far end of the beach to watch him, but no other surfers showed up. “They’ll come in the holidays,” the owner of the hotel assured him—a man who also said, “You’re putting on quite a show for the kaffirs.”

  “I guess that’s a good thing,” Sharkey said with a smile.

  He took some pictures of the break, but without a telephoto lens it was impossible to do justice to the size of the waves, which had risen to twenty feet by the end of the week. From the beach they were like Sunset on a good day; on the break itself it was a huge and fickle wave, and
his news was that it broke left and right.

  What he remembered were the red roads and the cliffs, the syrupy gum-tree smell of woodsmoke from the cooking fires in the ramshackle village of round huts and their circular roofs at the back of the town, cigarettes sold in cans, the aroma of grilled fish, the dense flocks of shorebirds, the wide sky and the sunsets. He got cautious looks from Africans, their odd salutes and sidelong glances, their acknowledging grunts as he passed, and their rags—sensational rags, wool hats, torn trousers, and the malnourished faces of the children running on the stony paths on bare feet.

  * * *

  Travel in Africa made him feel small, it shook him, the rattle in his head affecting his balance; he longed to be home. After that journey he was glad to be back in Hawaii, and happiest on the North Shore, enclosed by the arms of the great bay. Everywhere else, even in Honolulu, the unpredictable happened, not necessarily bad but sometimes impossible to understand, because away from Waimea, he was among strangers.

  An odd episode occurred the evening he visited a surfer friend, Trey, who’d begun to work in town at the Hotel Honolulu, at the seedy street-hooker edge of Waikiki. Trey supplied Sharkey with bags of Big Island pakalolo he called “killer buds,” usually meeting him in Hale‘iwa. But one day he said he needed to meet Sharkey at the hotel bar, Paradise Lost, at a specific time. Sharkey laughed at Trey’s absurd insistence on being punctual, the stoner actually using that word. But he wanted the pakalolo, so he was on time.

  “Meet Eddie Alfanta,” Trey said when Sharkey arrived. “He’s my Big Island guy.”

  Eddie was a dark squat man in sunglasses, with thick slicked-back hair, a heavy gold watch, a neck tattoo, and a gold tooth showing in his lopsided smile. His T-shirt said, WET WILLIES—TUMON, GUAM. He reached to fist-bump Sharkey’s knuckles.

  “No waves there,” Sharkey said, pointing to the T-shirt.

  “Fact,” Eddie said. “Trey said you been around,” and seeing that Trey had slipped away and was now behind the bar, he added, “Trey not so much travel. Hey, take a load off.”