by Paul Theroux
“When did it happen?” she asked.
He bobbed his head as though marking time. He said, “I honestly don’t know.”
“Think,” she insisted.
She could hear a slow growl of frustration. Sharkey didn’t speak, only made an audible gripe, but it was a grunt of futility, not as distinct as a word.
“Over a month,” she said. “It’ll be five weeks on Thursday.”
“That long?” he said in a whittled tone of loss, his voice trailing off.
“And in that time nothing good has happened. You’ve gotten repetitive. Incoherent sometimes. I lost the baby—your baby. You almost drowned.”
He was slumped, holding his hands to his eyes. She wanted to say more but was overcome by pity, the big tattooed man with muscular shoulders sitting hunched over in silence, his posture that of a child sorrowing for a wrong he’d done.
He was fragile, he was broken, she had to be careful, and she drove as steadily as she could, so as not to jar him with sudden acceleration or braking. She lulled him with the monotony of the straight road and, on the outskirts of Wahiawa, just before the bridge at Lake Wilson, she slowed the car.
Sharkey still slumped, Olive looked over and saw scattered rags at the base of the embankment, a tipped-over supermarket shopping cart, a baby carriage, and she knew that this was not junk or discarded but the elements of primitive domesticity, the camp at the top of a steep path where, beneath the eucalyptus trees and the Norfolk pines, there were people in dirty tents or under tarps, a cluster of homeless people, cooking over wood fires, muttering in the dampness, and children too, living like jungle folk, hidden by bushes—the Hawaii she hadn’t expected, of bad days. The woodsmoke and tang of burned meat from those huddled poor gave off the misleading odor of a picnic.
After the bridge, another light and the low town, she turned left and at the top of the hill another left, Sharkey groaning with each turn.
“Oh God.”
“We have to do this.”
The police station was a one-story, flat-topped building at the street’s dead end, behind a well-lighted parking lot.
“I don’t want to go in.”
“Just try to remember what happened, and we might not have to.”
She parked the car and led Sharkey to the open terrace where, on the night of the accident, she’d approached him, the rain falling hard, and he’d said, “I ran into a drunk homeless guy.”
That is wrong, she’d thought, but she hadn’t acted, hadn’t corrected him. And afterward his life stalled, went sideways, seemed to drag to a halt, and he’d become hopeless.
I have to revisit that scene, she’d thought, his dishonest statement.
They climbed the stairs to the terrace where the police station sat like a fortified building atop a swale of sloping grass, a lava-rock wall at its perimeter. Seeing her pass him on the stairs, Sharkey paused, but she gestured for him to follow, insisting with her beckoning hand.
Sharkey obeyed, digging his toes ahead of him—the reluctant child again—and when he drew near her he whispered, “I’m not going in there. You can’t make me.”
She turned to him, took him by his two hands to calm him, brought him closer, and as he bowed toward her she touched her forehead to his and said softly, “All you need to do is tell me what you said in the accident report.”
“You mean what happened that night?”
“What you claimed happened that night,” Olive said. “The lies, the half-truths, everything that got you off the hook.”
He hesitated, then said in a small shallow voice, “I explained the accident.”
“Was it the truth?”
“It was what I remembered.”
Olive said, “Joe, listen. If you don’t tell me the whole truth, I’m going inside. I’ll get a copy of the report and I’ll show you that it’s full of lies.”
He stood flat-footed and solemn on the terrace, glancing at the station entrance, then turning to look outward, beyond the rock wall, to the parking lot—the lights in a nimbus of drizzle, the wet street, the night glow over Wahiawa, the air muddy and chilly, a twinkle of red lights and the stutter of a rotor, a helicopter bumping low in the sky in the distance, going lower to land at Schofield Barracks. Sharkey pretended to be interested, he fidgeted, rubbed his arms in the chill, sniffed a little, blinked and breathed hard, unsure of what to say.
Olive said, “You told them you hadn’t been drinking. Was that true?”
“No. I’ve already said that.”
“But you dictated it to the cop who was writing it down in the accident report. You saw him writing it.”
“Okay, I’d had a few drinks.”
“Three drinks. Over the limit. And the pakalolo.”
Still watching the starless and indifferent sky, Sharkey nodded.
“You were in a good mood—talking—but you were toasted.”
“Yeah.”
“Seat belt?”
Sharkey jerked his head, an unwilling negative.
“So the cop wrote another lie on the report.”
“Guess so.”
“Did you see the man on the bike?”
In a thin breathy voice Sharkey said, “I guess.”
“Former lifeguard, trained in first aid. Did you administer help to the victim?”
“Kind of,” Sharkey said, beginning to object. “Okay, you got out of the car and checked on him.”
“What did you do, Joe?”
He took a deep breath and with an effort of will that was audible said, “Nothing.”
“But in the report it says that you hurried to his side and checked his vital signs.”
“I meant that you did.”
“All those lies,” Olive said.
“The cop never asked the right questions,” Sharkey said. “He saw who I was, he mentioned his old man—I knew the guy. And here at the station the same deal. ‘You’re Joe Sharkey.’ It’s happened lots of times before—you’ve seen it. Locals respect a waterman. They know the risks I’ve taken.” He muttered a little, then said, “My rides.”
“They gave you a pass. They were dazzled. You could have set them straight.” Olive stepped away from him. “The worst of this isn’t that you lied to them, or concocted a false accident report. The kicker is that you lied to yourself.” Her voice frail and tearful, she said, “I loved you—and you lied to me.”
He walked away from her, into the half-shadow at the corner of the station. She watched him for a while and, standing there, she saw a squad car pull in. After a slamming of car doors, a policeman marched a barefoot, handcuffed man up the stairs to the terrace. The man’s long hair was flopped over his face, his shirt torn. Another policeman met them at the station entrance with a flashlight, which he shone on the face of the handcuffed man, who averted his gaze.
“This the ten-sixteen?”
“Yah. Lemi Street. Domestic.”
Seeing Olive, the cop with the flashlight turned it on her and called out, “Can I help you?”
“I’m fine, but can I ask you question?”
“Make it quick—we gotta book this guy.”
“When you get a fatality—accident or homicide—you send the body to the medical examiner, am I right?”
“Yeah. In town—Iwelei.”
“How long do they hold the body?”
“Till they ID it, so they can issue the death certificate,” he said, standing against the door, propping it open for the other policeman to lead the handcuffed man into the lobby of the station. “That all you need to know?”
“Thanks. That’s it.”
When they had gone inside, Olive walked over to Sharkey, who was still half in shadow, his upcast face peering into the darkness.
“That night,” Olive said, “you were standing right there on the terrace. Do you remember what you said?”
Sharkey began to speak, then sighed, an irritable fumbling to make a reply, thought better of it, and finally lowered his head.
Using
his careless voice, Olive said, “I ran into a drunk homeless guy.”
Sharkey nodded, rubbing his face with the back of his hand, chafing his mouth with his knuckles.
“Tell me what you did.”
“Killed him,” he said. “I killed a guy.”
“Who was he?”
Sharkey’s hands went to his face as though to mask it.
2
“Unidentified Male”
His frailty was one thing—as a nurse, she understood that, he’d experienced some sort of psychic trauma; but he was infantile too in a way that baffled and provoked her. He had been like a child at the scene of the accident at Waimea, yawning anxiously, looking away, shuffling his feet. And he was childlike too at the police station, hesitant to speak, tongue-tied and touching his face; he had squirmed in the car like a brat, and back home had curled up, hugging himself, buried in pillows. Olive struggled to be patient. The stark truth that he had no one else—that his behavior would have antagonized most people—brought out a maternal side in her, the one that had softly throbbed in her body when in a pool of blood she’d miscarried in the surf. And so she reclaimed the child in Sharkey.
They were back in the car the next day, heading into town on the freeway, Sharkey bent forward as though he’d been scolded, and she could hear his long slow breaths, like sighs of woe, as he made himself small in the passenger seat, spitefully compact, holding his head in a lamenting posture.
In the heat and glare of Honolulu, on the dusty concrete of the back streets of Iwilei, he seemed smaller still and looked stricken, among the industrial buildings tagged with graffiti, the lowered shutters, and the corrugated iron warehouses behind padlocked fences. He was no longer the bold waterman who rode the big waves. She wondered if his childishness was a reversion, his way of sorrowing. It was not his physical size she was assessing but the diminished aura of strength, his way of standing, one shoulder lower than the other, that made him oblique. He was now like a man seen in profile, turning aside, shy and unthreatening. Because of that impression, she—who was delicate and so much smaller—loomed larger as a force, giving directions, vibrant with nervous energy, taking command but maintaining a mode of motherly protection.
Sharkey lingered behind her—“I’m with her,” he said to the receptionist, who singled him out because he was a man—while at the counter Olive unfolded the paper with her hospital’s letterhead.
“I’ve got this for the medical examiner,” she said.
“Stickney not here at the moment. He wen’ stay in conference.”
The clerk fingered the paper. She was a fish-faced woman, her black hair drawn back so tight the contour of her skull was evident under it. Her fingernails were long and glossy green, and one nail tapped a line on the paper.
“Who Olive Randall is?”
“That would be me.”
“I’m need for see you photo ID.”
Olive handed over her driver’s license and at the same time signaled for Sharkey to show his.
“This is my partner—he’s mentioned in the authorization. We’re here to get an update on one of your pending cases, a body that was brought in.”
“I’m reading all that here,” the clerk said peevishly, prodding the paper, head down. “Take a seat.”
“The medical examiner,” Olive said. “We need to see him.”
“Chief medical examiner,” the clerk said, still pondering the paper, and without looking up added, “We real backed up today. If this letter approved I check if anyone free to assist you in your requess. You need see Stickney.” Only then did she raise her eyes. “Sit, please.”
Sharkey had already found a chair and was staring vacantly at the floor. Olive drew up a stool next to him. A framed announcement on the wall was headed FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS (FAQS) ABOUT AUTOPSIES, the first question being, Where is our loved one being taken? Olive looked away.
“It’s going to be all right,” she said in a voice so raw it was like a surrendering statement of utter hopelessness.
She raised her hand to touch his cheek, and he reacted as though he were about to be slapped and, wincing, looked pained. That made her all the more tender toward him. Her instinct was to hold him, caress his head and whisper reassurance. When he bowed as though in despair, clutching his hands, his tattoos looked frivolous and mocking, like graffiti.
So they sat, side by side, slightly apart, small mother, big boy, twitching at times, saying nothing, as though grieving, while people came and went, murmuring at the counter, taking no notice of them, rattling papers, and it seemed they were perhaps in mourning too.
Olive glanced up. Can we come and see him/her? was the second question in the framed announcement.
After twenty minutes or more—Olive couldn’t tell; she had begun to meditate, relishing the silence of the wait—the door to the inner office was thrust open by a man who held it ajar with one hand, a clipboard in his other hand.
“Joe Sharkey,” he said with a summoning shout.
“And I’m Olive.”
“You Braddah Joe?” the man said, a smile forming on his lips. “How’s it? I’m Stickney.”
“Are you the chief medical examiner?” Olive asked.
But the man—potbellied, in green scrubs—was awkwardly hugging Sharkey while still clutching the clipboard.
“Hi, Stickney. Aloha.”
“I think maybe you know my cousin Wencil Makani. Big surfer. He seen you on the Pipe so many fricken times. He say was awesome—he so stoked.”
As the man backed away to behold Sharkey, Olive reached and flicked the clipboard, saying, “We’re here to see the death certificate of this person.”
“You make us proud, brah,” Stickney said, jerking the clipboard Olive had touched and holding it against his loose shirt. “At your age, still riding monsters.”
“Riding monsters,” Sharkey said in a small ironic voice.
“Dis way, guys.” Gesturing with his clipboard, Stickney indicated that they should follow him through the door. He led them along a corridor, past offices to a stairwell leading to the basement, talking the whole time. “No death certificate for this case as such. Before we issue official-kine death certificate we need one ID, and so far cannot—got no hits so far on the ID.”
“What have you got?” Olive asked.
“Got autopsy report.”
“Can we see the remains?”
“That’s where we going, sister. Like I was telling you. To da kine—morgue.” And to Sharkey: “Surf up today morning?”
“Head-high.”
“Is that the coroner’s report?” Olive asked, because Stickney, wagging his arms in the stairwell, was rattling the pages.
“Pathologiss,” he said.
“What do you do?”
“Medical examiner. I do some assisting. Like, I helped with this case.”
“The accident victim?”
“The assumption is accident, but who knows the real true reason for decease. Look like he got smoosh pretty bad by one car. But, hey, what led up to it is the question.”
Sharkey looked away, his hands flying to his face.
Olive asked, “What’s the answer?”
“Autopsy,” Stickney said, chewing the word. “Or you can say necropsy.”
They had come to the bottom of the stairway, where a windowless corridor led to a heavy door. Stickney poked some numbers onto a keypad on the wall, then pushed open the door.
The smell of disinfectant was strong—stronger than anything Olive knew at the hospital, stinging her eyes. When Stickney flicked on the inside lights, she saw what might have been a bank of filing cabinets, a gray wall of handles and labels. Stickney tapped the paper on his clipboard, all the while glancing at the labels. Then he bent over, and in one graceful motion, saying “One-two-tree,” caught hold of a handle and pulled at it, sliding out a long platform on chuckling rollers, a shroudlike cloth on it, lumpy from the body beneath it.
“Here one decease,” Stickney said,
and swept away the cloth, bunching it and tucking it under the gray bony feet, a plastic band around one ankle and on the other foot a toe tagged and scribbled with a number and a date.
The rest of the body was as gray as the feet, but in places with the dull yellowish pallor of old rubber. It was damaged in places, deeply scored—slashed and stitched, like a big mended monster doll, part of the skull broken open, a piece of the cranium missing, a Y-shaped scar running from the shoulders down the chest, the stem of the Y ending at the lower belly.
Sharkey had turned away and was staring wildly at the floor.
“We’re wondering who he is,” Olive said.
“The one thing I cannot tell you,” Stickney said. “Because we never find out.”
“Did you take fingerprints?”
“Always we take—if got fingers, the body.”
“Sometimes no fingers?”
“Or more worse, sometimes hands no got. Sometimes feets no got.”
“In that case, dental records?”
“If got teeth. Buggah came here last week, no hands, no teeth. What can we do?”
“Crime victim?”
“Coulda been, was decompose, one month, maybe more, in Ke‘ehi Lagoon, was dredge up by one fisherman.”
“If you can’t ID a body, what do you do?”
“Keep ’em here in the locker. Wait for ohana. Maybe they mention a tattoo or a mark or scar.” Stickney consulted his papers. “Just one small tattoo on this body, like a name.”
“Show us, please.”
“Left arm—forearm.”
Stickney used his ballpoint to indicate the inch-square mottled patch, bluish on the shriveled skin.
“Looks like a Chinese character,” Olive said, and photographed it with her phone.
“I never think of that,” Stickney said. “In the file, the tattoo.”
“What happened to the head?” Olive asked, and heard Sharkey softly groan.
“Was autopsied. I open it myself. Vibrator saw. Brain was took out for lab work.”
“Did they find anything?”
“They look for abnormality. Tumor. Toxic substances, all that. Same with chest cavity. The guy got hit by one car, but why? Maybe he drunk? Maybe drugged out? We start with external metrics—weight, length, identifying marks.” He chopped with his clipboard. “Then we cut.”
