Under the Wave at Waimea

by Paul Theroux

  “He wen’ make?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know dis buggah.”

  “What’s his name?”

  The woman smiled. She put her hand out and twitched her fingers. Olive folded a dollar into the woman’s hand and she made a fist, enclosing it.

  “That Jeff. Haole guy.”

  The children in the car began to scream in the backseat, kicking the seat back, one beating the other and pulling his hair.

  The other woman spoke up, not whole words but denying noises, a kind of whinnying, as she sidled close to Olive. “He not Jeff. I know the guy wen’ make.”

  Olive held out a dollar. The woman took it and held it to her face in two hands, examining it. “He name Oncle Mack.”

  “Did he have a bike?” Olive asked.

  Watching Olive closely, the woman said, “He have one bike. He ride dis bike.”

  “This Uncle Mack,” Olive said, “was he a haole?”

  “Jeff da haole,” the first woman said. “She a bull liar.”

  “Oncle Mack, he a fucken haole too.”

  “Dis all kapu!” the fat man shouted from beneath the tree, and gestured, spreading his arms. “Time to go.” He pointed to the path. “Show’s over.”

  Before Sharkey could react there was a commotion in the dense grass and four children emerged, walking into the clearing, a girl and three boys, all of them neatly dressed, wearing small backpacks. Seeing them, Olive smiled, feeling somehow reassured by their solemnity and neatness, the way they nodded at the strangers as though showing respect. Just as quickly the children became shy, averting their eyes, awkward in the disorder of the camp.

  “We not homeless,” the fat man called out, protesting. “We houseless. Big difference.”

  “Who is this Uncle Mack?” Olive asked the woman who was fluttering her dollar bill.

  “This our home. They try to kick us the hell out. How you can kick people off their own ‘aina?”

  “Uncle Mack not the man. Jeff the man,” the woman in the baseball hat said.

  “All kapu!” the fat man shouted, waving his arms, his gesture taking in the whole camp.

  “We’re going,” Sharkey said as the man started to walk toward him and the woman in the baseball hat pressed against him. He said, “Joe Sharkey.” He said it distinctly, as though uttering a formula for protection, but it had no effect.

  “Give me something,” the woman said.

  At the picnic table the four children had slipped off their backpacks. They seated themselves, two on each side, and were sorting books and papers as though preparing to do homework. It was hard for Olive to tell through their dirt and their gaunt faces if the adults were haole, but these children being young, in clean T-shirts and shorts, were certainly haole, and the tallest of them, a boy with a splash of ink on his arm, had a thatch of light hair, streaked blond by the sun.

  “They go to school?” Olive asked.

  “Yah. Elementary—by the old cane fields, pass Ali‘i Beach,” the fat man said. “Give me some money—buy books, buy stuffs for them.”

  And now Olive considered the schoolchildren seated and scribbling, and the two small children in the car playing again, reciting in singsong voices, and the first woman back stirring the blackened pot, raising her ladle, lifting white bones and black meat and slimy greens.

  “Is that soup?” Olive asked.

  “Is not,” the woman said in an indignant tone, chucking her chin upward in a gesture of superiority and twisting her lips. “Is adobo.”

  In that moment, with that word, Olive saw it anew, as a whole coherent settlement. The place had come into focus. What had seemed random, makeshift, a thrown-together huddle of shelters and junk, cast-off people and their broken things, now seemed unified, something fixed and whole. It had a purpose, and a sense of permanence. Was it the neatly dressed children that completed it? Tarp shelters side by side, beach chairs, the car-seat sofa, the inhabited cars, the cooking fire and the pot of adobo, especially that—a meal with a name.

  It was primitive but it served them, and in the trailing smoke and the trampled earth, the bypass road out of sight, the camp existed in a parallel world, a dirty improvised version of the other one, self-sufficient. And the trash pile—old bottles and plastic bags—like an anchor, in the shape of a great scab of indestructible squalor.

  Frightful, Olive was thinking, impossible to clean up, and also, We don’t belong here.

  Glancing back, she saw the fat man leaning against the big tree, cradling something in his arms, a creature that came awake and raised its head: a small dog, but with the pinched face and the flaring ears of a bat.

  Sharkey seemed to be loitering, looking around, as though at any moment he would be recognized and admired. He then passed a barrel and looked in, seeing empty bottles and cans. Someone had collected them to redeem at the supermarket.

  “This is all money here,” he said, praising them.

  But, hearing him, the man holding the small dog made a pushing gesture that was unmistakably “Go away.”

  The completeness of the camp disturbed Olive—being purposeful, it seemed more of a threat, more tenacious and potentially hostile. She signaled to Sharkey, and he followed her to the path, making a shaka sign to the people, but it was not returned. Then, a few steps into the path, they looked back and saw high grass and nothing of the camp.

  In the sudden heat of the narrow path, its humid confinement, the bunched upright grass blocking the breeze, the whole passage a stifling tunnel of razor-edged grass blades and thornbushes, Sharkey tripped on a low post, regained his balance, then kicked it in fury.

  It was another signpost, another splintered board daubed KAPU.

  “We should have obeyed it,” Olive said.

  Sharkey sniffed. He said, “Did you see those kids doing their homework? They go to school! School costs money—where do they get it? I wanted to give them something. That boy, the older one with the hurt eyes—I saw myself in him.”

  “What do you mean?” She was ahead of him, calling over her shoulder.

  “Haole kid. He has a tough time at school. He has to stick up for himself. Fight for everything he has.”

  And Olive remembered the children, the big boy with the solemn face, the tense way he sat, like a boy on a bike, a little apart from the others, his sun-scorched hair, his delicate hands, and that was not ink on his pale arm—her memory came into focus—but a blue bruise.

  “Joe Sharkey got bullied at school?”

  “Every fricken day.”

  “Must have been horrible.”

  “Made me want to win,” he said. “They were local punks. All I cared about was surfing. I’d never be able to fight them—too many of them. But there were the waves. They took me away. You could be a very tough guy and wipe out on a wave. I learned to ride monsters. It was my way of escaping from them.”

  But Olive had hardly heard that, or rather, she’d heard that boast so many times she was deaf to it. She was thinking of the bruised boy with the conspicuous blond hair and the wounded eyes and I saw myself in him. And a surge of love and sorrow for Sharkey that she’d never felt before made her throat ache, a constriction that kept her from being able to say she loved him. So instead she paused on the path and rested her head against his chest briefly, chafed it with her cheek, the clumsy touch of mute animal tenderness.

  At the end of the path, just ahead, where it gave onto the bypass road and their parked car, they saw a woman from the camp—the younger sinewy one, with the wild hair and the man’s shirt and dirty surf shorts. A bath, a comb, and clean clothes might have made her desirable—she wasn’t old, late thirties maybe, and though she had the leathery look of the others, and their watchfulness, she had health, a sturdy posture, and an air of defiant confidence.

  She called out “Hey!”

  “How did you get here so fast?” Olive asked.

  “I take the other way. We got a quick way out in case the cops come and we gotta make a quick escape
.”

  But they walked past her.

  “I can help you. I know the guy.”

  Olive turned to face her.

  “Give me some money and I can find his stuffs.”

  Olive said, “You know the guy that was killed?”

  The woman squinted, pursed her lips, looking grave, and nodded slowly. “Was a great guy. Haole guy. Was a shame he pass.”

  “The other woman back there said his name was Jeff.”

  “Rhonda stupid. She don’t know nothing.”

  “What was his name?”

  “They don’t have names here, just nicknames.”

  “What was his nickname?”

  “I forget—my memory junk. Being as it’s my medication.”

  “You have his things?”

  “Most of them. I was afraid the other ones might cockaroach his stuffs, so I hide them. Even the cops, I didn’t show them.”

  A smiled floated at the woman’s lips and trembled there, and when she winked at Sharkey, she seemed younger, flirtatious, a look of canny calculation altering the light in her complexion. Then she turned to Olive, fixing her eyes on her—sisterly, conspiratorial, seeking an answering smile. The woman was about Olive’s height but bony, legs apart, her dirty feet in frayed flip-flops, her posture insistent. She put one hand out, level with her waist. The dirt was dark in the ingrained lines of her palm, her fingernails black—a skinny hand asking to be filled.

  “What’s your name?”

  The woman pressed her lips together, hesitating. Then ungummed them and said, “Lindsey.”

  Olive put a twenty-dollar bill into her hand and the fingers trapped it and closed over it.

  “When?”

  “Give me a few days. And another twenty.”

  “We’ll be back Thursday. To the camp,” Olive said. “You’ll get the other twenty then.”

  “Thursday’s good,” the woman said, and she jammed the money into the pocket of her shorts.

  In the car Sharkey said, “The cops could have done that. Why didn’t they?”

  “Because the man didn’t matter,” Olive said. “Don’t you see? Homeless, poor, living under a tree. Why should they care?”

  “But you heard the woman. They went there looking for personal effects.”

  “She probably figured they were worth something to her.”

  “She guessed right. I promised her forty bucks. I’m sure she’ll hold out for more.”

  The two days they spent waiting to return to the homeless camp they speculated on what the woman might bring them—clothes, papers, books; not valuables, but items they could use to identify the man she had called Mack.

  Having emboldened themselves—Sharkey smoking a joint—they went back, choosing midafternoon, a time when they imagined the children would be home from school, counting on their presence to bring an air of calm to the place that was menacing in its clutter and stink.

  And the children were there, as they’d hoped, seated at the picnic table over their papers and schoolbooks, doing homework, looking diligent, though they’d slipped off their flip-flops and kicked the dirt beneath them as they worked. The way they sat, with their backs turned to the world, seemed their way of shutting out the sight of the disorder. Nor did they glance up when Olive and Sharkey entered the clearing, not even when the small dog with the batlike ears and the pinched snout began to yap, shaking its head.

  “Ola,” the fat man said, and scooped up the dog, smiling at the tense expression on Sharkey’s face. He said, “You got big maka‘u. Is the dog or me?” and showed his teeth.

  “I’m not afraid,” Sharkey said, but he stepped away.

  “Ola wen’ smell you fear.” He snorted, affecting superiority. “You panty.”

  One of the children gasped, then looked away.

  “We’re looking for Lindsey,” Olive said.

  “No names here. We like the Foreign Legion.”

  “Lindsey had a name.”

  “She split. Not in the legion anymore.”

  “We were supposed to meet her.”

  “You got appointment, yah?” The man mocked them with his body, dropping the dog and crossing his arms while the dog darted at them, yapping.

  Olive said, “Do you know where she is?”

  “She high somewhere,” the man said—he hadn’t stopped smiling in his grim way, though it wasn’t really a smile, it was a scowl of defiance. “I think maybe someone give her some money. Wonder who?”

  “She junk.” The words were distinct and near, but whose?

  It was the other woman. Now they saw her, so still on the torn car seat under the tree that, camouflaged by her rags, she seemed like a lumpy part of it, or a heap of rotting cloth. The children at the table crouched with lowered heads, averted eyes, scratching at open notebooks, ignoring the strangers, the dog yapping and slavering.

  Olive saw again that the disorder of the camp was fixed and featureless, and so it was not a camp at all but a settlement, like the ruin of a scattered household. The burst cushion was left where it had been, those empty cans had not been picked up or kicked aside, the beach chair, the chewed boogie board, the mildewed mattress, the shredded plastic bags—all of it remained as they had seen it before, nothing moved or cleared, giving the squalor the look of solidity. The same piercing smell too, as before, woodsmoke and damp rags and decaying food. Olive was struck—not that it was ugly but that it seemed indestructible and everlasting.

  The fat man had not moved, though at some point he must have unfolded his arms, because he was pointing at the path and mouthing the word kapu.

  4

  Pau

  They drove home and told themselves they weren’t shocked—that it was a dead end, they’d been misled, they’d allowed themselves to be persuaded by the woman Lindsey because they were so intent on finding the identity of the man who died. They’d keep looking, they said; they wouldn’t let this stop them. They were devastated, yet they wouldn’t admit it, and the failure ate at them.

  For a week or more of shapeless days they hardly left the house. They said there were chores to catch up on, repairs to be made, animals to be fed—the geese, the chickens—all the maintenance that living in the country required, vines to trim, windows to be washed, rats to be trapped.

  “So much to do,” Sharkey said.

  “We’ll deal with it.”

  What was unspoken between them was the bleak experience of the homeless camp. They’d been shocked, more than they could express in words. The sight was not just dreary, it was unexpected; it was appalling, like looking into a pit of poverty and hostility and being hated for it. Sharkey, who prided himself on being fearless on a monster wave; Olive, who dealt with blood and death and who believed herself unshockable—they were frightened and intimidated by the homeless camp, by the sight of junk and improvisation, by the physical threat of the fat man and his yappy dog, and they felt helpless and bereft in the presence of the earnest schoolchildren.

  It could have been a jungle clearing in a poor country—it was no better. Given its proximity to the well-traveled road, to the world of money and tourists and restaurants, it seemed worse than something they might have found thousands of miles away. Sharkey had seen such slums on his surfing trips, in Africa and South America. but none of them had depressed him like this. And yet it was a fifteen-minute drive from their house—easily walkable, a hike down the highway, then the path through the tall grass and there it was: desolation.

  So easy to get to, so miserable; and the logical next thought: how simple for those desperate people to climb out of their stinking encampment, carrying a slasher, and find their way to houses up the hill or along the beach—to the lovely pole-house that Sharkey and Olive shared—and take revenge for being so poor. The experience of the homeless camp made them keenly aware that they had so much that these people wanted, running water and shelter and good food, what seemed like luxury.

  How was it that on this lovely island such a blighted place could exist?
And they knew that there had to be many such places. The homeless who camped on the beach or pitched tents on the side streets of Honolulu came and went, usually moved along by the police; but this camp in the clearing under trees, with the dog and the children and plants growing in pots and junked cars serving as shelters—this camp was immovable.

  Olive envied Sharkey for his faulty memory—his response was a general feeling of woe, the detail fading. All she saw was detail, the ugliness of it, the resentment on the people’s faces, the village of dirty feet, just down the road.

  They weren’t imagining that the dead man might have lived there. They had the policeman’s word for it—DeSouza, whose father had surfed with Sharkey, had said that he’d seen him “near the homeless camp on the bypass road” and added that he knew him by sight. And those people—the fat man, Lindsey, the woman she had called Rhonda—they had known something of the man, but they’d been suspicious and they’d calculated that any information they had was worth something. It was easy to understand their reaction—unhelpful, aggressive, mocking, threatening. They lived in an insecure world of leaky tarps and old cars and junk piles, of struggling to get by, always in a survival mode, scavenging or thieving.

  The thought that the dead man could have lived there gave Olive a little glimpse into his life. Sharkey shrugged when she mentioned it, saying that the man was probably headed there when Sharkey had killed him. And now it was as though he’d never existed.

  * * *

  Sharkey and Olive stayed home, and in the ponderous way he went about his chores now Sharkey avoided discussing his reasons for abandoning the search for the dead man’s identity. Olive, who remained his motivator, kept to herself, stunned by the sight of the filthy homeless camp so near to where they lived in comfort.

  They were afraid, not so much that they would be tempted back as that the people there, seeking them, conning them with “We got news . . . we know the guy,” would find out where they lived and rob them.

  And there was always the chance that the dead man had a relative—a lover, a wife, a child—at that homeless camp or another, someone who would find out why Sharkey and Olive were asking about the dead man and would stalk them and take revenge. So they were afraid, cowed by what they had seen, and kept to themselves. Olive had taken a short leave of absence from the hospital but she worked a few days, filling in for someone who was sick. It was a relief for her to be back in the hospital, dealing with trauma and fractures and wounds and seizures, rather than at home with Sharkey, who had become more withdrawn, or on futile searches for the identity of the man he had killed, the corpse with the tag on his toe—a number, no name.