Under the Wave at Waimea

by Paul Theroux

  “All those stitches. I mean, I work in a hospital, but that much suturing is pretty rare for us.”

  “Remove front of rib cage, expose trachea and lungs and remove. Then abdominal. Liver, kidneys, intestines, what-not. Inspect da kine, send everything to lab.” He nodded, widening his eyes. “We more thorough. Reason you never see in your hospital. Autopsy is a big money loser.”

  “I’ve seen enough,” Sharkey said, and crept to the door, retching.

  “We put everything back. Then we sew up.”

  “What did you find here?”

  “Says here no alcohol. Not much food. Traces of drugs—suspected meth. Complete toxicology report no come through yet. But homeless.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I can always tell by da kine dirt.”

  “Just that?”

  “Skinny guy, needs shave, condition of hands and feets. Signs of negleck. Poor people, you can always know. Plus, no one claim him up to this point in time.”

  “What about personal effects?”

  “Nothing that we found. Nothing in pockets.”

  “So what happens now?”

  “Wait and see. I thought maybe the reason you come here with this consent authorization letter was to give us some help. Maybe you know him. Maybe you saw him.”

  “We don’t know him,” Sharkey said in a choked voice, leaning against the far wall.

  “What we’re maybe going to do is get the sketch artist from HPD to come over and do a picture. Like how he looked when he was alive. We’ll put the sketch in the Advertiser or MidWeek and see if anyone get memory jogged.” He turned to Sharkey. “What kine board you got? Wencil gonna ask me.”

  Olive said, “Didn’t the fingerprints help?”

  “Like I said, we run them on the database. No hits yet. You know, sometimes we never find out. Couple of guys last year, no hits at all. Still unidentified.”

  “Where are they?”

  “At the mortuary. Over at Affordable Caskets off the freeway, Moanalua. Got cremated. Ashes in a box. But we kept some DNA in a file, just in case.”

  “He has a sweet face,” Olive said.

  “Haole guy,” Stickney said, and with pride he added, “We autopsy more akamai, so no disfigurement.”

  “Looks like wax,” Sharkey said.

  “Because more worse exsanguination,” Stickney said, proudly licking the word on his lips. “Bleed out when we work on him.”

  All this time the dead man had lain as gray as dead meat, his withered arms to his sides, the fourth person at the conference, a silent, futile presence around whom all the talk had circulated. By degrees, as though daring himself, Sharkey had inched nearer, blinking at it, until the body became less fearsome, its color less shocking, and at last familiar, but tragically so, contorted like a martyr’s.

  The man looked drowned, though it took an effort of Sharkey’s dulled imagination to see him as a whole man. He was a fragment, not only in the sense that he’d been cut apart and sawn open and stitched back together, but a fragment as an aura of emptiness, this body as a shell, no more than a carcass—a sad wrapper of dead and folded flesh, its tubes and pipes and organs hauled out and poked over and shoved back in. Its essence was gone. Its essence was life. Its blood had been drained away. It was a spiritless bag of skin and bones, and the skin itself, bluish yellow in places, its limbs ashen, its hands—Sharkey was nearer them now—enclosed in small paper sacks, fastened at the wrist with pale tape.

  A surfer held down under a succession of monster waves, pawing not at water but at a smothering boil, ended up this way, suffocated and finally pushed to the beach—pale skin, corpse meat, staring eyes, soupy seawater spilling from his gaping lips. Sharkey had seen them in the sand at the shore break, at least ten drowning victims in his life, young men vital in every way, powerfully built and yet defeated, stiffened by the rigor mortis that seemed to come so quickly. His gaze was always drawn to the hands and feet, perfectly formed and useless, the sad still fingers and toes. But those poor dead men—and one small pale Japanese woman with a fixed face of terror, her mouth rigid, gaping in a silenced howl—they had been whole, newly dead.

  Yet this nameless man, UNIDENTIFIED MALE printed with an inked number on his toe tag, was mangled, incomplete, grotesque, like a botched crucifixion, a mass of cuts and crude sutures so widely spaced they were like the stitches on a rag doll, the swollen edges of skin and flesh a child’s learning-how-to-sew project, a blob of laced-up guts.

  Only the man’s face was whole, and though it had bristly unshaven cheeks, the blue lips slightly parted showed excellent teeth, even and of an unlikely whiteness, the face itself unmarked—thin, slight, indignant creases around the eyes, an expression of affront, of being wronged—the suddenness, the unfairness of death. The man was not old or ugly, as Sharkey had expected. He was perhaps in his early sixties, and there was a suggestion of athleticism in his sinewy legs, gone gray now but retaining their shape. His hair was long but neatly arranged—Stickney’s doing; he looked tidy and compact, taking up a narrow length of space on the shelf of the morgue drawer.

  The face was mutely accusatory, and Sharkey saw I am here because of you in its eyes and its crumpled form: I belong to you. I am your responsibility. It is your duty to lug me into the light. And so Sharkey felt burdened and afraid and helpless, and he sorrowed for the man and for himself, encumbered by having to drag this dead nameless corpse along wherever he went from now on.

  He saw himself lying there—he’d come near enough to death so many times it was easy for him to project his own body into the drawer. But what shocked him was that the man looked so small and lonely, naked and discolored and bloodless, unrecognized, friendless, the best of him—the miracle of life—gone. Not obscurely leaked away but taken from him, his life knocked out of him. And he looked unloved.

  But turning away from the corpse, Sharkey felt an uprush of energy, joy bordering on rapture, a feeling of miraculous survival, and needed to calm himself from his exaltation. But I’m alive!

  “I’m going to take some pictures,” Olive said, raising her phone.

  “Can take. But cannot publish without family permission,” Stickney said.

  “Which family?”

  Stickney reacted, jumping a little as though teased. “Good question, sister!”

  Stickney went on talking to Olive, skidding his thick fingertips on the papers on his clipboard, his jowly face full of life—his presence made it for Sharkey a study in contrast, the dead man looking deader, more futile, like a scabby log tossed by a wave to the beach among the broken shells and splintered driftwood and webs of dried sea froth, the corpse twisted into that same mass of sea-washed flotsam in a tangle at the tidemark.

  “So you can’t tell us anything about him?” Olive was saying.

  “I can tell you everything,” Stickney said, wagging his finger at the body with each assertion. “What he ate. What he drank. If he smoked. If he done drugs. That he was probably homeless. How did he die. Plenny more.” Then he smiled, but grimly. “Only one thing. No name, as yet.”

  “How did he die?”

  “Not from the drugs, but he had drugs in his system. Cause of death was blunt-force trauma to the cervical and spine. Skull fracture. Internal bleeding. Say hemorrhage here on the report.”

  “From the accident,” Olive said, and took Sharkey’s hand and held it, clutching his cold fingers.

  “Hit by car,” Stickney said. He grinned at Sharkey. “Wait till I tell Wencil I seen you. Insane, brah. He gonna freak out.”

  3

  Kapu

  In the distance a glowing canopy of high leafy boughs in a grove of brittle albizia trees, rising rags of oily smoke, the flare of a campfire, light without much illumination, the whole of it hidden by tall scrub and guinea grass, enclosed by evening shadows. At the edge of the road next to the guardrail a supermarket shopping cart lay on its side, with a rusted broken baby carriage, the limbless torso of a child’s plastic doll, a b
urst-open plastic bag of trash, its contents strewn and picked over, probably by feral cats or wild pigs. And painted on a board in the goop of what looked like peeling nail polish, the word KAPU.

  “We should have come here sooner,” Olive said, but disgustedly turning aside. The junk pile had an aura of hostility and violence, and the sign meant go away.

  “Probably weeks ago,” Sharkey said.

  But they knew, standing there at the head of the path, why they hadn’t. The place looked forbidden, if not haunted. There was no road. The path was narrow and seemed to lead into the pinched darkness of an ambush.

  It was almost six o’clock, an hour from sundown, the day after their visit to the medical examiner’s office. On the way home, passing this spot, Olive had said, “Homeless camp.”

  “What do you think?” she said now, lingering at the roadside—the bypass road, cars flashing past. She kicked at the shadowy overgrown footpath, near a tulip tree in flower, its fallen blossoms littering the ground like red rags.

  “It’s getting dark,” Sharkey said, in the insincere, too-emphatic tone of an excuse.

  “Maybe come back,” Olive said, fumbling for a reason not to enter the path and stepping away. “Maybe earlier next time.”

  They got into their car and went home, into the dying light, not saying what was on their minds, the thought they shared, that a place so near and so familiar, just a few miles from their house, close to Hale‘iwa and the main road, not far from the beach, some of it visible—the woodsmoke, some patches of plastic tarp and laundry on some of the branches of the bigger trees—here was a place that was unknown and maybe dangerous, like a jungle village in Indo, away from the beach.

  But these people were poor, they were homeless and unemployed and ragged; they were the filthy bearded men and gaunt women that drivers saw crossing the bypass road at that point, hurrying on dirty feet, slipping into the muddy rut of a path, elusive and seemingly desperate, clinging to the edges of the town, crouched in the tall grass. They washed, if they washed at all, in the sinks in the changing rooms at the beach park and scared the tourists. They didn’t panhandle, they didn’t beg, they were reputed to be thieves yet were seldom caught in the act. Their overwhelming intention, it seemed, was to remain hidden, anonymous, out of reach, and in the uniformity of their raggedness they preserved a kind of anonymity—no one could name them, they looked alike in their poverty, they were a constant presence. Yet they were unknown.

  And that was odd in a beach community where everyone had a name, or at least a nickname.

  On the night of the accident the policeman had said, “We seen him near the homeless camp on the bypass road.” Stickney too had said, “Homeless. I can always tell by da kine dirt.”

  Without saying so, both Sharkey and Olive had avoided going to the place, but they knew—once they had stopped on the road and studied it—that they were committed to paying a visit. Stickney had said he’d found no personal possessions other than the man’s rags, the policeman had found no ID. But there was more to know, more to uncover, which might lead to their learning the man’s name.

  So after that first tentative assessment of the place—their glimpse of the smoke, the path, the junk pile—they went again, heartened by a sunny morning and fewer cars on the road. The passing traffic the previous time had made them conspicuous and self-conscious, standing by the guardrail. They were embarrassed to be seen there by passersby, raising suspicions, and they felt awkward too, being in a place where they didn’t belong and—since kapu meant forbidden—were not welcome.

  More rejection. Sharkey felt the awkwardness more than Olive. He’d once been welcome everywhere, living his surfing life as the Shark. He was accustomed to being recognized and greeted, as the policeman, as Stickney had done; and it surprised him—bewildered him—when someone asked him his name and didn’t say, “The surfer,” as soon as Sharkey spoke it. He’d taken it for granted that he would get a smile or a hug. But this had been so frequent in the past few years that he now saw it as indifference, confirming his sense that no one knew him anymore, or if they did know his name, they didn’t care—dismissed the risks he’d taken, the prizes he’d won, the monster waves he’d survived.

  The thought of trespass was unformed in his head, just a pulse of hesitation, but it became clearer when, starting down the path, his bare legs cut by the sharp edges of the tall grass, brushing it aside, walking ahead of Olive, he saw the bobbing head of a man approaching—bearded, with matted greasy hair, sunburned in blotches, pushing a rusty bike.

  “Hi—how’s it?” the man mumbled through cracked lips without a smile. He prodded with his bike, shoving the handlebars before him, nudging Sharkey and Olive. Then they were beside him, close enough to smell the man, his dirt-sweat, his damp hair, the stink of his rags. A decaying haole, blocking the path.

  Sharkey reached for the man’s hand and shook it and gripped the hard dusty fingers and said, “Joe Sharkey.”

  The man squinted at him, sizing him up, then frowned, looking toasted or tipsy—vague, anyway, in the bright sunshine. Breathless, unsmiling, he opened his mouth, then closed it, swallowing his name as neatly as a cane toad snaring an insect.

  “We’re visiting,” Olive said.

  “Looking for someone,” Sharkey said, his right hand humming with the man’s dirt.

  The man leaned back and scratched his neck. The tattoo on his neck was large but unreadable. He spoke to Sharkey. “You a cop?”

  With a surprised giggle of incredulity, Sharkey said, “No, man, we’re just cruising.”

  Extending his hand, his yellow fingernails upright, making a cup of his palm, the man said, “Give me something.”

  Olive had been preparing for this, clutching a dollar. She handed it to him.

  “Come on!” the man said sourly, pinching the dollar bill and gesturing, as though handing it back. “Give me five.”

  The man was thin, and smaller than Sharkey, yet there was about him an air of menace—his teeth, his dirty, demanding fingers—and a twitch of the unpredictable. Sharkey knew he could shoulder him aside, push him off the path, but the man would howl and push back, scratch like a cat, maybe bite, and what was the point of fighting him?

  Handing him another dollar, Sharkey said, “It’s cool—we’ll just slide by,” and slipped behind him.

  “You ain’t going to find anything,” the man said. “You on the wrong road, buddy.”

  “Where’s the right one?”

  “The one that leads somewhere,” the man said, and jammed his handlebars against the overhanging grass and pushed into it, calling out behind him, “This one don’t lead nowhere.”

  When he was gone, Olive said, “I don’t like this.”

  “Might as well check it out,” Sharkey said, without conviction. He was glum from the encounter but walked on, shoving at the grass, taking the lead.

  The air was hot and windless on the path, enclosed by the tall grass, but further on—only minutes, slapping at the insects whirling in the stillness—they were at the edge of a clearing and saw the tents, the blue tarps stretched on poles and slumped like heavy awnings. Two cars were parked on flat tires under the big tree, one car with a whole wheel missing from its back axle, and it was obvious from the cardboard taped on the windows that they served as shelters. Tipped-over cereal boxes littered the top of a wooden picnic table; a cat was asleep on a tin tray.

  A woman in a baseball cap poked at a pot propped on boulders, the pot and the boulders blackened by the fire.

  “Yaw,” she called out, and opening her mouth in objection showed her blackened teeth. A man who had been sitting camouflaged by the leafy shadow on a sofa stood up and became visible—not a sofa, Sharkey saw, but a whole car seat askew on the stony ground. The man was fat and fierce-faced, his head enlarged by a frizz of hair in which tiny white scraps of lint were entangled.

  Two small children stirred inside one of the cars, and a woman in a beach chair waved her arms and shouted, “You no see t
he sign?”

  “What sign?” Olive said.

  “Da kapu sign.”

  “We never see it, sister,” Sharkey said.

  “I telling you,” the woman said. “Dis all kapu here.”

  This woman was younger than the others, with thin hard-muscled legs, wearing a man’s shirt and old faded surf shorts, and yet for all the tears and stains in her clothes and her dirty feet, she had lovely eyes—greeny-blue—and an appealing manner, coarse and up-front, that suggested the willing surf bunny she might have been thirty years earlier.

  Now the man said loudly, “You haoles gotta go.”

  The children roused inside one of the cars began to laugh, jostling each other, perhaps playing a game, and then flinging toys through the car’s open door—broken toys, fragments of plastic.

  The fat man took a few steps forward. His dirty T-shirt was lettered ALOHA FUN RUN. He opened his mouth, worked his big jaw in reflection, then said, “What you want?”

  “We’re looking for someone who maybe used to live here,” Olive said in a reasonable voice.

  “He got a name?”

  “We don’t know—we’re not sure.”

  “You don’t know who you looking for? Is insane,” the woman in the ball cap said from her creaking chair. She shrieked at the children, yelling for them to be quiet, and the children sank into the darkness of the car’s interior.

  In that moment of distraction, Sharkey looked around and saw the fat man leaning against a tree, his arms folded on his potbelly.

  “The man died,” Olive said. “We think he was staying here at the time.”

  “Ask ’em what they got for us,” the fat man called out.

  The woman in the baseball cap stepped forward. “You hear him. What you got for us?”

  “If you have any information, we’ll help you,” Olive said. “The man was riding a bike and got hit by a car just over a month ago on Kam Highway at Waimea.”