by Paul Theroux
“Bring your kit. I think we have a situation.”
A woman in a pink patterned pareu parted the flowering hedge, a black valise under her arm. She brushed past Sharkey and he got a whiff of her, not perfume but a soapy aroma of damp hair and glowing skin and a tangle of sweetness, maybe from the crushed petals on the hedge.
“In here,” Franco said.
“Call 911,” the woman said, entering the house.
Sharkey in his semidaze drifted to the window and looked inside, relieved that it was open, no glass now to reflect his face. A boy lay doubled up on the floor and the woman knelt beside him and began talking to him, urging him to wake, taking his pulse, putting her ear to his chest and mouth. The boy was eerily bluish, his shirt unbuttoned, his toes feebly twitching.
“I just found him here like this,” a girl crouching nearby said.
“Did you see him take anything?”
“He does a bunch of stuff. China Girl. Tango. Batu. I don’t know. Is he going to be okay? Hey, what’s that?”
“Narcan,” the woman said, adjusting her pareu as she waved away the fretting girl. “Move, please.”
“They’re coming,” Franco said.
And Sharkey watched, breathing slowly, as the woman in the pareu bent over the boy, her face against the boy’s, her mouth locked on his in what seemed sudden passion, heaving her breath into him, pressing on his bare chest. The kiss of life. Then she sat up and frowned, her hands snatching at her bag, unwrapping a syringe, biting the tip off, holding it to the light, the window where Sharkey stared, drunk with fascination, a humming in his head, half smiling.
Half smiling—because of the kiss and the craziness. At the other side of the house loud music had started, with shouts and laughter; and here in this shadowy room, the little crowd of silent anxious faces, the boy on the floor, his chalk-white face and blue lips, the woman hovering and inserting the syringe into his right nostril, depressing the plunger, the boy’s head moving as though in protest, and then the left nostril, penetrating a bubble of snot and shooting the Narcan up his nose.
The music was still thumping the walls and the floor as the boy opened his mouth. No sound came out, his mouth was simply gaping, but he wagged his head in a sort of sluggish resistance and he gasped, choked a little, and, attempting to raise his head, he drooled on his chin.
“He’s moving,” Franco said, a flutter of panicky relief in his voice. “Is he all right?”
“No—this is going to take a while.” The woman was peering with a small flashlight into the boy's eyes, then wiping his chin, brushing his hair out of his eyes, tidying his shirt. “And if he’s been on fentanyl he’s going into withdrawal.”
Just then, over the sound of the music and her voice, and the shouts from the other room, and the laughter, the wail of a siren, growing louder, nearer.
“Tell them to take him to Kahuku. I’ll go with him. He needs to detox.”
Still slack-jawed and doglike in his stupor, Sharkey now filled the window, watching the frantic figures, admiring the efficiency of the small woman in the flimsy pareu—pretty wahine, he was thinking—and she seemed the only person in the house with a working brain, someone with a gift, in the sudden visitation from next door, a ministering angel taking charge.
What he first noticed from her physique was that she was not a surfer, and that confounded him, because this slight, small-boned woman had obvious power. She had flown into the room and hovered over the boy in his distress—muscular, blue-lipped, frozen in a convulsion, pale twitching toes—and she had kissed him with force, as insistent as a lover, pressing her mouth against his, and breathed life into him. Lifting her face from his, she had worked magic on his nose with a syringe while caressing him, all this time Sharkey gaping at the window. Even in his half-buzzed state, dead-eyed, his mouth open, his flesh like clay, Sharkey was aroused, as though a voyeur at a scene of unembarrassed passion.
“You’re blocking the light,” the woman called out to Sharkey.
“Sorry,” he said, and heard his voice as goofy.
But the woman had gotten to her feet and was shaping her hands in the air as though trying to grasp something.
“What’s all this fuss about?”
She meant the music, the shouts, the laughter from the other room.
Franco said, “Planning a paddle-out. You’re welcome to come along, Olive.”
“Anyone I know?”
Hunter, Sharkey said in his mind, and at the same time Franco said, “Hunter Thompson. It’s taken six years to arrange this.”
“My hero,” the woman said, putting the last of the vials and the syringe back into the small box and slipping the box into her bag, deft with her beautiful fingers. “I always fancied him.”
She looked around the room, at the tall tattooed girl crying in relief, another girl wearing a dog collar, the giggling surfer boys, the solemn face of Franco clutching his cell phone, the spilled food and vomit, the clutter of beer cans, the racket in the next room, brutal music and cackling laughter. All this with the slowing siren of the ambulance outside the bungalow, the gagging boy on the floor, and the sizzle of breaking waves just beyond the hedge at Rocky Point.
Then, staring disapprovingly at Sharkey, she tossed her head and said, “Hunter Thompson. How staggeringly appropriate.”
* * *
Silent, heads bowed, in the muted light of early morning, the young surfers gathered on the beach at Waimea, holding their boards under their arms, as Franco—old, limping, white-haired man—distributed the leis. Dawn was a milky gleam in the ragged clouds above Waimea Valley—no sunlight yet—and a pinkish vapor lifted and lightened at the horizon to the west, where the wide ocean looked flattened by the sky.
“Nice to see you, Shark,” Franco said, handing Sharkey a coil of soft yellow blossoms.
“Wouldn’t have missed it for anything. Too bad we couldn’t have done it sooner.”
But Franco had moved on, still distributing flowers. The surfer next to Sharkey spun his lei on his wrist and turned to Sharkey looking baffled—freckled, pinched face, flexing his toes in the sand. He said, “This guy—what’s his name?”
“Hunter.”
“From the mainland?”
“From all over.”
“Where did he surf?”
“Everywhere.”
“Gnarly?”
“You bet.”
“Sweet.” And the boy twirled his lei over his head, adjusted his board, and started down the beach, kicking the damp sand.
He had no idea. None of them did. And he would have been disillusioned if he’d met the man, especially in his last years, the frenzied, injured, addicted Hunter, who could barely walk. And the woman, Olive, who had said, “My hero,” looking up from the boy whose life she’d just saved—she too would have been bewildered by the wreck of a man whose books she obviously admired, whom she’d never met. He was a man who had never surfed and ended up baffled by the sea—crippled by pain, buzzed on drugs, stalled in his writing, hating his body—who’d blown his brains out. But he was a hero.
So that’s how it worked, Sharkey reflected as he flattened himself on his board and paddled toward the middle of the bay. Hunter’s physical self didn’t matter. His books stood for him—that madman genius, people called him, his furious voice of defiance—the man in the books was the one people loved and talked about; the man himself had vanished into his myth now.
None of these paddlers knew him, the nurse—Olive—at the bungalow, the spectators here on the beach—none of them could have had any idea of Hunter’s timidity, his vulnerability, his whispers, his frailty, his clinging to life, and with a gunshot his letting go, dropping himself over the falls for an eternal hold-down.
But though no one in the paddle-out knew him, they would remember him, as a spirit, at the dawn of this lovely day, in the imagery of floating flowers, the surfers ranged in a great circle on the bay while the long-haired Hawaiian priest, seated on his board—a blossom behind one ea
r, a crown of flowers on his head, a haku lei of pikake—chanted prayers in full-throated Hawaiian. All the surfers slapped the water, pounding the sea with open hands, and cheered. Then it was over, a formal effort ended, the ritual creating someone to remember, a bit more of the myth.
Sharkey turned as soon as the slapping stopped and the water was stilled. Paddling to shore, he saw her waiting on the beach, a small figure in green hospital scrubs, holding a lei, looking helpless, but smiling when she saw him slipping off his board and approaching her.
“I was at work, in surgery—they wouldn’t let me off. I’m sorry I missed it. A paddle-out is so awesome. I cry sometimes.”
“It’s all pau,” Sharkey said. “It was beautiful—a good turnout. He’s been honored. A good memory.”
“What to do with this?” she said, lifting her arm on which the lei hung. Then she smiled and lifted the lei and, standing on tiptoe, looped it over Sharkey’s head.
“You’re supposed to get a kiss with a lei.”
“I know that,” she said, and kissed him, warming his lips with hers on the cool morning.
“Don’t go,” he said, seeing her turn away.
She faced him then, squinting, dipping her head, an exaggerated What now? smile.
The panic Sharkey felt just then was the urgent need he experienced when he wanted a drug or a drink, a thirst he felt convulsing his whole body. It was not lust, it was a need much deeper, a desperate sense that he was being abandoned, that at last he’d found someone who could save him.
“Don’t leave me,” he said.
She took it to be a joke and smiled again.
“Please,” he said, and with that word Olive lost her smile and took a step closer to him.
Part III
The Paddle-Out
1
Lies
She’d hoped for dirty rain and just a scrub of moonglow, but the visibility was poor enough to suit her, the car’s headlights diffused by misshapen ghosts of drifting sea mist, one of them twisting like a wraith in the road. Beside her, Sharkey sighed and squirmed like a small boy in a big chair, kicking to get comfortable, wishing to be elsewhere. Two weeks after his wipeout he was still too rattled to get behind the wheel. Struggling to break free of the hold-down, snatching at his leash, he’d somehow whipped his hand and sprained his wrist. He was gripping the wrist now, cuffing it with his good hand as he fidgeted, discontent obvious in his cramped unwilling posture.
“This sucks.”
But Olive did not reply. She drove downhill to the shore in silence, then along the narrow road next to the slosh of the sea.
At last she said, “Bloody right. That’s why we’re here.”
Near Waimea a pothole the size and shape of a manhole opening shone in the lights of an oncoming car, water from the morning’s rain shimmering silver in the hole.
“I hate being here.”
“Ask yourself why.” When he didn’t answer she went on. “And yet you pass this spot practically every day on your way to town or surfing.”
“I don’t stop.”
“That’s why we’re stopping.”
“I don’t even look.”
“You have to—now.”
He struggled in the seat. “I don’t want to do this.”
“Pull your finger out, mate!” she said, and gasped in frustration.
That got his attention. When he sensed the car slowing down he covered his face, but clumsily, favoring his injured wrist.
“It was right here,” she said, “on a night a little like this.”
She rolled onto the shoulder of the road, a narrow strip of sand, broken coral, and stones grinding beneath the tires. Her yank on the handbrake had a force with the sound of a demand in it, in the ratcheting a jerk-squeak of finality.
Sharkey sat in silence. After a deep breath that he expelled as a sigh he said, “I didn’t see him.”
“That was your first lie. You did see him—you said, ‘Oh God’—and then you hit him.”
Olive unclicked her safety belt and got out of the car, Sharkey following her, slowly, in reluctance. Now Olive was kneeling in the dark, the sound of waves breaking in Waimea Bay, sea-slop draining from the deep fissures in the lava rocks on the low cliffs.
“He was lying here,” she said. “I could see his neck was broken. Head trauma. He had no pulse.”
“He was drunk.”
“You were drunk,” she said, standing up to face him.
“I was buzzed.”
“Buzzed is drunk.”
“He was riding down the wrong side of the road.”
“You’re blaming him. A lot of bike riders ride that way.”
“I didn’t mean it,” Sharkey said softly.
“I know it was an accident. But it might have been avoidable if you’d been sober. Remember, I wanted to drive.”
“Why didn’t you say so?”
She stared at him, a passing car lighting her face, her expression of defiance.
“Don’t tell me you don’t remember—please, not another lie,” she said. “The cop came and asked for details.”
“I knew his father. Ray-Ban. Goofy-foot.”
“You didn’t tell him you’d been drinking. He asked you if you’d been buckled up. You lied about that. He asked you how fast you’d been going. Another lie. How many lies so far?”
“People say those things all the time.”
“Yes. But a man died,” Olive said. “You killed him. And there’s some sinister shadow over you—over us. And you think it doesn’t matter? You don’t eat, you can’t sleep, you hardly surf these days.” She paused and took his hand. “Your life has somehow gone into reverse.” She tugged his hand for emphasis. “We have to make it right.”
He turned away from her and clutched his face again. “I said I was sorry,” he whispered into his hand.
“A lie. You never said that.”
“I want to go home,” Sharkey said. “My wrist hurts. I feel terrible. I’m tired.”
They stood in darkness, hearing the sea, the low breaking waves at Waimea, seconds apart, like a vast tureen of thick soup somewhere beyond the palm trees, the plopping sound of it being slowly emptied. And when a car approached and the road was lit, they saw the ugly broken pavement and the loose stones, the litter of soda cans and plastic bags snagged on low bushes, and their own car, parked at an angle on the sand, tilted on the shoulder, the pothole like a brimming sewer, the nearby tree trunks slashed with initials.
“It was right there,” Olive said. “That hole filled with rainwater. I hadn’t realized how deep it was.”
Sharkey squinted past the palms to the bay, scowling at the dribble of moonlight on the blobs of froth. No wind, only the slop and plop of the soupy sea on sand and rocks.
“Kneel down with me,” Olive said.
“All the drama,” Sharkey said, and made a sibilant scoffing, seeming to spit.
“A man died here,” Olive said. “On this spot.”
Sharkey glanced to the left and right, and seeing no cars, he walked near the pothole, kicking his flip-flops. Then he lifted his swollen wrist with his good hand to favor it and knelt next to Olive.
Bowing her head, Olive said, “Three beers at the bar and a hit of pakalolo. ‘We’ll get your car tomorrow,’ you said. No seat belt. Driving in the rain, you began that long story about Moe Kahiko. Then ‘Oh God.’ You hit the man and kept sitting. You didn’t get out of the car. I did, and saw that he was dead.”
“I checked him out,” Sharkey said in a tone of protest.
“Wait. The cop comes,” Olive said, still narrating the order of events. “You tell him that you weren’t drinking. That you were buckled up. That you didn’t see the man on the bike.”
In the distance beyond the curve of the bay a car’s headlights lifted from the surface of the road, making a tunnel of the trees. Sharkey rolled back to a squat and began to get to his feet.
“Stay where you are,” Olive said. “Is that what happened?”
“Something like that.”
“Is that a yes?”
Sharkey sighed—the small boy’s sigh, a whimper with a yes fluttering through it.
The oncoming vehicle slowed down—an old pickup truck, a surfboard slung in the back—and when it rolled to a stop the driver cranked down the window.
“You guys all right?”
“We’re fine,” Olive said.
But the man was watching Sharkey, who had dropped to his knees again.
“Sure you don’t need any help?”
Olive said, “We lost something.”
“Eh,” the driver grunted, with confidence. “Joe Sharkey—how’s it?”
Sharkey lifted his hand slowly, a tentative salute. “Like the wahine say, we wen’ lost something.”
“Some bugga cockaroach you stuffs?”
“Nah.” Sharkey touched his face, keeping his hand against it as though he didn’t want to be scrutinized. “Was maybe my fault.”
When the man had driven off and they were in darkness again, Olive said, “How many lies is that?”
“I don’t know. Couple, three.”
“Seven,” she said. “But there were more.”
Back in the car, she pulled onto the road and drove toward Hale‘iwa, then onto the bypass. The tension of visiting the scene of the accident, her intense concentration, her anxiety—all the emotion—nerved her to be efficient rather than uncertain. And Sharkey’s halfheartedness stiffened her resolve. It was like being in Emergency, hyperalert at midnight, receiving a casualty on a gurney, controlling the moment, in triage.
“Where are we going?”
Home was in the opposite direction. Olive had taken the way through the cane fields and was ascending to Helemano on the steep country road, no streetlamps, little traffic, twelve miles of darkness.
“Wahiawa,” she said. “The cop shop.”
Sharkey nodded; he seemed to accept the logic of retracing their steps, reconstructing the timeline of the accident. But he didn’t speak; he lapsed into the dullness Olive had come to see as his usual mood since killing the man, not unwilling but bleak and detached and luckless.
