by Paul Theroux
In the window seat beside him, Olive said, “This is the right thing to do.” She took a folder labeled FLORISTAN from her bag and began to flick through the papers inside: travel brochures, hotel and rental car confirmations, lists of offices and locations. On top, in a separate stack, the papers that Stickney had copied for them, the details of the dead man’s history. “You might think it’s melodramatic for me to say this, but your life depends on it. That’s how I feel.”
Sharkey grasped the folder and opened it on his lap. He looked at the top sheet of paper, running his eyes over it but not reading it, merely allowing himself to be impressed by the close print and the detail. It was as though he were not looking at words at all but rather at a thickened mass of complex equations that amounted to a kind of formal magic for those with the time and patience to separate the lines and translate it. But the idea of doing that himself—reading it—fatigued him.
“We’ll make a schedule from this.”
“Shed-jewell,” he said, mocking her.
“Plonker,” she said.
But he was comforted by the fact that Olive understood the challenge—the quest—and was taking charge. He placed his hand on that top sheet as though drawing warmth from it.
“I’ve mentioned Hunter Thompson,” he said.
“Many times.”
“I really related to him.”
“You told me you never read his books.”
“Right,” Sharkey said. “But it’s not about reading his books. It’s that he wrote them. Lots, I think. He did journalism. Writing—that’s all he really did. The drugs, the women, the crazy—yes. But the writing was all he really cared about. That one thing.”
He was nodding, jogged by the movement of the plane, which had begun to speed down the runway, and suddenly lifted. Then they were in the air, tilted over Waikiki, in the distance the vast hollow battlements of Diamond Head, which when they passed it seemed like a gigantic barnacle. Sharkey was murmuring, his hand still pressing the papers, as though rehearsing what he would say next.
Olive leaned nearer to him. “Where are you going with this?”
Sharkey did not look at her. He seemed more earnest facing forward, squinting in the roar of the plane. When he spoke it was with a voice of certainty, raised to be heard above the noise of the engines.
“My one thing,” he said, “the only thing I ever did, was surf. That was my life, all I cared about. That’s all I did. Monster waves.”
He smacked the folder and pressed again, and in its thickness it seemed to pulse with life, to hold more warmth than when in his hand.
“Unlike him,” he said.
“He’s got a name, Joe.”
Sharkey lifted his hand and lowered his head to the label at the top of that stack of papers. “Max Mulgrave.”
“The man you killed.”
Sharkey bent his head, inclining it closer to the name, his eyes squeezed shut, his lips twisted in confusion.
“We’ll find him.”
In a pained whisper of self-reproach, Sharkey said, “He did so much in his life.”
Olive stroked his cheek but, daunted by the howl of the air rushing against the plane, could not think of anything more to say.
“All I did was surf.”
Then he slept, and they flew into darkness, waking hours later with a sudden bump of turbulence and the pinpricks of lights below them, meaning they’d crossed into California, and he dozed again. Dawn over the desert woke him. A wheelchair was waiting for him in Dallas, and the next flight, to Little Rock, was short. They were soon in a rental car, Olive at the wheel, in the paler light and bushier trees of the mainland, flatter hills, a chill in the air, October in the Ozarks.
* * *
Always, away from Hawaii, the world looked older and darker, in muted light under a lower sky, the landscape lumpier, and fenced, much of it gouged by plows. But the trees were taller, the houses bigger and more solid and severe than any in Hawaii. The road through the flat-topped hills was lined by blackish woods, and in some hollows they saw a white-painted house and what looked like a farm, planted fields or a tethered horse, a dog rushing to the perimeter fence when they slowed the car.
“Parts of the West Country look like this,” Olive said. “Devon. Dorset.”
Meadows, rivulets running through them, browsing cows. The woods were leafier and softer, the trees agitated by the breeze, and where the land was low-lying it was muddy. Yet it didn’t have a visible edge, as Hawaii did—you weren’t confined, you could keep driving.
“I’d die in a place with no water.”
“Voilà, there’s some water.” In the depth of a valley the shining folds and corrugations of a shallow river tumbling over water-smoothed boulders.
“How much farther?” Sharkey asked, then sagged and slept.
It was early evening when they reached Floristan, Sharkey coughing himself awake as the car stopped. They found the motel Olive had booked, and, too tired to eat, heavy with jet lag, they slept, waking before dawn, lying in each other’s arms.
Sharkey said, “What would I do without you?” in a whisper. “I’d be lost without you.”
She had no reply to this. She was too moved to speak, grateful for his acknowledgment.
“I’ve never said that to anyone.” He breathed it into her ear. “I’ve never felt it.”
“Lovey,” she said.
“My father used to tell his men, ‘Consider yourself already dead, and you’ll be fine.’”
He’d told her that before, numerous times, fixed in the trauma of his repeating-himself phase. She did not remind him. She kissed him; she said, “Buck up, mate, we’ll muddle through this.”
But over breakfast at a diner next door to the motel—“A real breakfast,” Olive said—he sat, looking futile once more. Olive took a sheet of paper from her folder and pushed it across the table to Sharkey, who was licking pancake syrup from his fingers.
“Read it to me,” he said.
She didn’t need to consult it, she knew what was written on it. She said, “We’re going to his school, to the town hall, to the registrar of deeds, to the police station—all the places that might have a record of him or his family.”
“We could have found records online, like that moke Stickney did.”
“Just bumf.”
“Bumf?”
“Bum fodder. Paperwork. You say you hate it and you’re probably right. We have to talk to people who might have known him—family, friends, anyone. We need to find out who he was.”
“Where do we go first?”
“Swings and roundabouts,” she said, with a shrug. “Cop shop, I reckon.”
Sharkey felt small and ineffectual in her presence, admiring yet intimidated by her conviction. She was brisk and downright, in the English way—“Buck up, mate” was her mantra, and, now and then, “Pull your finger out.” No wonder she was such a capable nurse: she was decisive, dealing with injured and suffering people, always conscious of time passing, motivated by a sense of urgency, her whole being possessed by the necessity to save a life—to rescue; and now she was rescuing him.
But though he was grateful, and murmured his thanks, he was helpless, as when, under the wave at Waimea the last time he’d risked surfing, he’d been trapped in the water, aware both of drowning and of being surrounded by swimmers, unable to help himself. And that helplessness had terrified him, because he’d thought I’m drowning and yet could not move, as in a dream, paralyzed by sleep, and surrendering to the heaviness of the water, rolled in the coffin of the wave and, looking up, was taunted by the dim daylight far above, on the surface.
Seeing him brooding, Olive asked the waitress for directions to the school, the town hall, the police station. Removing a pencil from her bun of hair, the waitress circled them on the map Olive had printed from the Internet. After that—the waitress saying, “Y’all come back, hear?”—they headed down the main street, Sharkey tagging along behind Olive. Passing a whitewashed house with gr
een shutters and an old wheelbarrow serving as a planter, geraniums spilling from its tray, and on its own island in the center of town, surrounded by flowerbeds, the granite statue of a Civil War soldier clutching his musket, Olive said, “Pure Americana.”
“Mulgrave—sounds familiar,” the desk sergeant said at the police station. “I think there was a kid at our school with that name.”
But when Olive spelled it, the policeman said, “That’s not it. It’s your Yankee accent, ma’am.”
“Hear that, Joe? My posh Yankee accent.”
The sergeant agreed to tap the name into his computer, but found no matches.
“Anything before the early nineties, it won’t be in our database. We didn’t get computers hereabouts till then. You could check at the town hall—right across Main Street.”
The lawn fronting the Floristan Town Hall was planted with apple trees, some of them still hung with fruit, and the façade of the building was shaded by a high-roofed porch lined with white columns. Inside, the lobby was cool, a fluff of dust on the varnished floorboards. Seeing TOWN CLERK lettered in gold on a door, Olive entered and greeted an elderly man in a swivel chair, reading a newspaper at a desk.
“Nice trees out front.”
“Floristan’s famous for its flowering shrubs. You have to come in springtime.”
Olive asked see the voting rolls. The man selected a ring binder from a shelf, saying, “This is up to date,” but the name Mulgrave did not appear in any of its pages.
Olive said, “The family definitely lived in Floristan.”
“They own property?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“Registrar of deeds—down the hall, just past the drinking fountain. They might have something for y’all.”
Olive rapped on the counter and a powdered white-faced woman appeared, her cheeks crimped like piecrust when she smiled at them. She was kindly beneath her makeup. She wore a yellow silken dress, a floppy bow at her collar, a blue flower pinned just beneath her billowy shoulder. She said she didn’t hear too good—“Hearing-impaired,” she clarified. When Olive wrote the name Max Mulgrave on an office While You Were Out pad, the woman said, “Give me some time-frame idea of the date you think he lived here, please.”
“Could have been fifty years ago.”
“That’s a help,” the woman said. She was perhaps sixty—old enough to be a contemporary of Max Mulgrave’s. But when they asked, she said, “I’m from Fayetteville. I married a Floristan boy.” In a softer voice, “He passed.”
She went to a cabinet and pulled out a drawer. Using the fingertips of both hands, she flicked through the cards, searching for the name.
“Little bitty old cards,” she tut-tutted.
The process took so long that Olive and Sharkey sat down in chairs by the wall.
“Y’all check the voter rolls?” the woman called out, still looking down at the cards.
“Yes. They sent us here.”
“No one by that name presently owns a residence in Floristan district.” The woman shoved the drawer back into the cabinet.
“But thirty or forty years ago, or more?”
“If they did, the records would be in the annex, where we keep the old files. I can look. I’ll let you know if I find anything. I’m fixin’ to do that after lunch. I’m Rose.”
“Thank you, Rose.”
“I love your accent, miss.”
“I love yours,” Olive said.
“But yours is like the movies.”
They traded phone numbers and set off for Floristan High School. Brick, squarish, as stately as the town hall, it was two blocks down Main Street. They walked, Olive wondering whether she should simply stop when she saw anyone of sixty or so and ask whether he or she knew the name Max Mulgrave.
“All this way from Hawaii,” Sharkey said, wondering at the town, shaking his head.
The receptionist at the high school took them to the office of the deputy principal, who was Black—a tall man in a dark suit and floral tie who introduced himself as Dr. Johnson.
“Those records would be in storage,” he said when Olive told him the graduation date. “You need to go online.”
Sharkey lifted his hands to his face and groaned into his fingers, turning away.
“Is he all right?” Dr. Johnson looked sour in his sudden confusion.
“We’ve come rather a long distance.”
“This is the new high school.” Dr. Johnson had turned away from Sharkey. “Your friend might have attended the old high school.”
“Where’s that, Doctor?”
“On Cherry Street. It’s a museum now.”
“How old are you, Doctor?”
“Forty-seven—and by the way, please call me Purnell.”
“Purnell, did you know a family named Mulgrave when you were a teenager?”
“I take it they were white folks?”
“Yes, sir,” Olive said, and heard Sharkey mutter “Haoles” through his teeth.
“I didn’t know any white folks at all when I was a youngster. I lived out at Yellville—but not in Yellville proper. Countryside. First white person I ever got to know was at college. I was around twenty then.”
“What about the yearbooks? He might be in one of them.”
“Maybe have a look at the school library. What did you say was the year this gentleman graduated?”
“’Sixty-nine.”
“Ancient history,” Dr. Williams said in a pained voice, tightening his face. “Library’s the big room on the second floor. Miss Ruffin will be glad to help you.”
Miss Ruffin, a soft-faced woman, chalky with makeup, was seated at a computer; her welcoming voice said, “Come right on in.” She tapped the keyboard with a gesture of finality, stabbing at it, then turned to face them and listen to Olive’s question.
“Excuse my apron,” she said. It was starched and white, with yellow flowers embroidered on the bib, and made her look like an elderly child.
Olive wrote Max Mulgrave’s name and his graduation year on a slip of paper and handed it to Miss Ruffin.
“Tell you one thing for certain,” Miss Ruffin said. “You won’t find anything of that kind on this here computer. All the yearbooks is over on those shelves. Ain’t got but one file copy on hand, and none of those early years been digitized.”
“So we came to the right place,” Olive said.
“Yearbook-speaking,” Miss Ruffin said, “you’re at ground zero.”
“That’s a lovely apron.”
“It’s to keep the dust off. Books are just a caution for dust.”
“Apron? Dust?” Sharkey said. “What is all this talk? What are we doing here?”
Hugging him, to comfort him, to restrain him, Olive felt the tension in his body, his hard arms tensed as though about to lash out. Soothing him, she heard Miss Ruffin speaking.
“The Apple Blossom, 1969,” the woman was saying in a new tone—brisk, efficient—selecting a blue volume from the far end of the shelf. “You can use it on the table yonder. Just return it to me when you’re done.”
Sharkey’s outburst had spooked her, stung her, made her wary, and impelled Olive to hold on to him until she felt him relax, a softening of his posture. She led him to the table, where they sat side by side, Sharkey with his head in his hands as Olive leafed through the yearbook. She turned first to the section headed SENIORS, the graduating class, and there he was, blond, thin-faced, solemn, in a white short-sleeved shirt with an oversized collar, a stain on the pocket. The other boys on the same page wore jackets and ties, and most were plump and smiling. He looked forlorn.
The caption under his photograph read: Max Mulgrave . . . “Buzz cut”. . . Good with numbers . . . Slide Rule Club . . . “I’m real busy” . . . “Hey Joe” . . . Future astronaut.
Olive read it to Sharkey in a low voice, but he remained holding his head and did not react. The entry was much shorter and less detailed than any of the others, and unlike them there was no listing of his pa
rticipation in sports or student politics or the prom. Others mentioned football, baseball, Apple Blossom Achievement, Future Farmers of America, cheerleader, cadet.
But two items stood out: “Hey Joe” and the Slide Rule Club.
“It’s a song,” Sharkey said.
“Fancy that, Joe,” Olive said. “Not in my repertoire.”
“Loved that song,” Sharkey said. “Kind of an anthem for me. ‘Hey Joe, where you gonna run to now?’”
Olive had found the page headed SLIDE RULE CLUB and the group photo, eight students, four girls seated on chairs, knees together, their hands on their laps, fingers laced together, and standing behind them, four boys, Max Mulgrave on one side, pale, haunted-looking, a face of apprehension, the same short-sleeved white shirt with the big collar, the same stain.
“Some of these kids might still be alive,” Olive said, writing their names in her notebook.
When she was done—there were no more mentions of Max Mulgrave in the yearbook—she handed the volume back to Miss Ruffin, open to the Slide Rule Club page, and thanked her, saying, “Do you know any of these people? They’d all be late fifties, early sixties now.”
Adjusting her apron, Miss Ruffin settled the book on the counter and studied the page, touching each name with a pale finger, murmuring to herself.
“Those girls is most likely married,” she said. “Probably grannies by now. But this Terry Baggett, he’s in town—Baggett Insurance. And this fellow Ray Siggins, you’ll find him somewhere. It’s a good family, lots of Sigginses hereabouts. Curtis Rickards—lots of Rickards too. Could be one of the Rickards at the dairy, or the filling station.”
Baggett Insurance was nearest, on Main Street, beyond the Civil War memorial, but Terry Baggett was not there, the secretary said. Olive said it was urgent. The secretary offered to call him, saying, “This about a policy?”
“In a way,” Olive said.
The woman hesitated, and then Olive saw that she had been eating a sandwich, which she still held in her right hand, half concealing it below the level of her desk. A bit breathless in her confusion, she said, “Missed my breakfast,” then placed the unfinished sandwich on her blotter and dialed the number. She handed the ringing receiver to Olive.
