by Paul Theroux
“This is Terry,” came the voice.
Sharkey had been staring out the window at the planter on the sill, the browned late-season blossoms. But as though to turn his back on Olive, he crept to an aquarium bubbling on a shelf, the yellow and blue fish flashing at his approach.
“You don’t know me,” Olive said into the phone. “I’m at your office, inquiring about a man named Max Mulgrave.”
In the long silence that followed, Olive wondered whether she’d been cut off.
“Hello?”
“I’m thinking,” the man said. “I haven’t heard that name for years. You kind of blindsided me with it.”
“You were in high school with him.”
“Coon’s age ago.”
“Were you friends?”
“What’s this concerning, miss?”
“My name is Olive Randall. I’m trying to trace old friends and acquaintances of Max Mulgrave’s.”
“I don’t reckon you’ll find any.”
“Why would that be?”
“He didn’t have but two or three to begin with. And when he left town he never come back. Or maybe once, but not more than that.”
“So he did come back?”
“That was the talk. It would have been years ago. Maybe it was to see his mother.”
“Is she still in town?”
“She passed.” The man sighed, a scraping sound in the phone. “I’m sorry, miss. I don’t have time for this.”
“Can I run a couple of names past you?”
“Do it real quick.”
Olive read from her notebook, “Curtis Rickards. Ray Siggins. Mary Lou Gordon.”
Interrupting her, the man said, “Mary Lou’s married. Moved long ago. Ray’s still in town, but he’s busted up about his wife’s passing. Curtis, you might find him at his garage. Gotta go. Bah now.”
The phone went dead. Olive handed the receiver back to the secretary, who said, “Mr. Baggett’s real busy.”
“Curtis Rickards,” Olive said. “Could you direct me to his garage?”
But the secretary was looking fretfully at Sharkey, who was twirling his finger in the bubbling aquarium, poking at the darting fish, his tongue clamped in his teeth in concentration.
“Sir, y’all mind leaving them fish be?”
Sharkey, still with his finger in the water, said sharply, “Do I tell you what to do?”
“Joe!” Olive said in sudden fury, and Sharkey shrank like a scolded child and sidled away from the aquarium.
“Rickards’ Garage,” the secretary said. “It’s set back a piece, behind the Piggly Wiggly, big ole Texaco Star up top. But he don’t pump gas no more,” and seeing Sharkey creeping back toward the aquarium, said, “Sir!”
Olive led him outside, but before she could warn him to behave he said, “Something about this place. You get the feeling that half of it is buried.” He meant the state, what he had seen of it, the sense he’d had on the drive from Little Rock. The life of the land was hidden under the hills and hollows and the trees thrashed by the wind, in the muddy creeks, an inner darkness of ghosts and corpses and bones, the dirty water and stagnation in the roadside ditches, the faded shirts and ragged underwear hung out to dry on the laundry lines of the poor farmhouses, a haunted landscape of secrets and resentments. He did not have the words to explain this vision to Olive. He said, “I found that fishbowl a relief.”
Farther up the street, passing Belle’s Diner, she saw the Piggly Wiggly store and smiled at the name—“Extraordinary,” she said—and behind it the Texaco sign the secretary had mentioned.
“I’m hungry,” Sharkey said, pointing at Belle’s Diner.
“Let’s see this guy first.”
Inside the open-fronted garage a man in blue overalls was tinkering with a car upraised on a block lift.
“Looking for Mr. Curtis Rickards,” Olive said.
“In the office,” the man said, and seeing Sharkey behind her, added, “You got some serious tats, bro.”
“You too,” Sharkey said.
In the manner of someone surrendering, the man lifted his arms, showing his forearms, in one of his greasy hands a socket wrench that he held like a weapon.
“Four years in Cummins Unit,” he said. “That’s where I learned to do this,” and wagged the wrench. “What’s your excuse?”
“Surfer tribal,” Sharkey said, but Olive was at the office door, calling to him, and when he joined her inside, she said, “This is Mr. Rickards. He’s going to tell us about Max Mulgrave.”
“Call me Curtis—pleased to meet you,” the man said, reaching for Sharkey’s hand. He wore a battered baseball cap and a T-shirt with red lettering, GO HOGS. The man spoke slowly, with a lazy mouth, his lips so loose and awry Olive couldn’t lip-read his words. “So you know Max?”
Olive said, “In point of fact, we don’t know him at all. We’re doing a bit of research on his background.”
“Something happen to him?”
“He passed away.”
“Sorry to hear it,” Rickards said, and adjusted his ball cap in a formal reflex of grief.
“Mr. Baggett told us where we could find you. We understand you were in high school with him. The Slide Rule Club.”
“Oh boy, that takes me back.” He sniffed in reflection, then seemed to remember something. “Please have a seat. Can I offer you folks a soda?”
“No thanks,” Olive said, sitting, Sharkey pulling another chair next to her. “And we don’t want to waste your time.”
“This is Floristan,” Rickards said. “All we got is time.”
“Max Mulgrave,” Olive said, prompting him.
“Very smart—supersmart. Very quiet, grew up real poor. Clothes all tore up. Got teased at school.”
“For being poor?”
“For being smart,” Rickards said. “Got whupped by his pa.” He tugged at his ball cap again, leveling his visor, the visor stained from his tuggings. “One thing I recall is he was restless—set on leaving Floristan. And he did. Joined the army out of high school. I believe he served in ’Nam, like some others in our class. Never came back.”
“We heard from Mr. Baggett that he might have returned to see his mother.”
“That could be so. But old Widder Mulgrave, she’s long gone.”
“Where did she live?”
“Off Seven South. One of them roads that crosses the creek. That’d be Indian Creek. I don’t get over there unless I have to tow someone or light up a battery.”
“Do you remember anything else about Max Mulgrave?”
“Math whiz. A brain—imagine that, a brain in Floristan. Real quiet type. Could have gone to Fayetteville, but he didn’t have the money. And look at me. I had the money, but I took over my daddy’s business instead.”
Sharkey cleared his throat to get Rickards’s attention. He had been staring at the man’s head as though trying to locate a thought inside it. He said, “He was teased at school?”
“You know how kids are,” Rickards said.
“I sure do,” Sharkey said.
“Had to fight his battles.”
“I know all about that.”
“What about other friends like you?” Olive asked. “Are there any of them in town?”
Rickards’s half-smile drooped on his loose lips, rueful in reflection. He said, “I can’t rightly recall if he had a girlfriend. Smoked a lot of weed after school, but that was no big deal. All of us was stoners then.” He tapped the ragged blotter on his steel desk as though indicating that he was struggling to think hard. “It was so long ago. I wish I could tell you more, but darned if I can remember.” Then he glanced up but looked severe, narrowing his eyes. “One interesting thing. I went over to his house once. It was to bring him a book—it was a little old book of logarithm tables, like we used before computers. Max was sick in bed, and we had a test coming up. This was his old house, shotgun shack, not the one his mother moved into later.”
“You took him a book,” Olive said. �
�What was interesting?”
“Interesting in a sorry way,” Rickards said. “The house was all cattywampus. Max was ashamed. He hadn’t expected me. He didn’t like me seeing it—the house cattywampus, and his life no better. His ma smoking on the front stairs. Off to the side a beat-up Eleanor.”
“Eleanor?”
“Outhouse—privy. Particular kind. They didn’t have no plumbing, the Mulgraves,” Rickards said. “By then his daddy had run off. And after that visit he avoided me, like I’d seen things he didn’t want me to see. Out of shame, I guess. He stayed away from me. I wasn’t too surprised when he joined the army. Folks from Floristan, that’s one way to move up—the service. I imagine he was a lot better off wherever he went.”
“After the army he went to college in California,” Olive said. “Started a successful business. Then sold it. Relocated to Hawaii.”
“I’m so fetched to hear that,” Rickards said, and choked a little and fussed with his cap, then pressed his fingers to his eyes.
Olive saw that the man was weeping, using his fingers to stop his tears, murmuring but not able to speak clearly, his effort showing in his crumpled shoulders.
“I’m sorry to upset you.”
“No, I’m happy,” Rickards said, but in a suffering voice. “It’s just remembering his poor old shack, and Max sick in bed, and how ashamed he was. I’m glad for the happy ending.”
“Thanks for your help,” Olive said, rising from her chair and moving to the office door.
Just as they were leaving, Sharkey turned to face Rickards, his mouth opening wide, his neck reddened under his tattoos.
“I killed him,” he said, keeping his mouth open, panting furiously. “I killed Max Mulgrave.”
Rickards huffed and seemed to swell, and stood up at his desk, kicking his chair back. He snatched at his hat, and out of his pain-filled face, his bulging eyes glazed with tears, came a strangled helpless honk that might have been an anguished word.
Too tired to look further, they went back to the motel, telling themselves they needed a nap, but they slept on, waking in the dark, bewildered by the strangeness, the stale breath of the air conditioner, the smell of the decaying carpet. They lay in silence, open-eyed, until the stained ceiling became visible in the next morning’s daylight.
At breakfast Sharkey was silent. Olive said, “I know what you’re thinking. Waste of time. Wild goose chase. But this is where he came from. This town made him. These people, these streets, that man. We know him better. This was his world.”
Her cell phone sounded, its ring and vibration causing it to fidget on the table.
“Is that Miss Olive? This is Rose, from Deeds. How you folks doing? I just found something.”
* * *
The woman was where they’d left her, in the small office, a folder on the desk before her. She plucked it open with satisfaction.
“This is the title deed we found in the annex. For a house in the name of Ebba Mulgrave, Indian Creek Trail, right here in Floristan. And this here, another document certifying payment in full, some serious money, with the notarized signature of the gentleman you inquired about, Mr. Max Mulgrave. And his address.”
Olive examined the names, mother and son, impressed by the flourish of the son’s signature, in great contrast to the mother’s irregular scrawl, less a written name than something pictorial, a doodle in blue ink.
“Funny old address,” Rose said.
“Kaulawaha Road,” Sharkey said.
“You know how to say it. What kind of word is that?”
“Hawaiian.”
“That zip code,” Olive said. “It’s in a place called Wai‘anae.”
Rose clapped her hands and said, “Looks like you found what you was looking for.”
8
The Leeward Side
You look happy,” Olive said. “I can tell you’re much better.”
Crap. Sharkey, blank-faced, too tired from the return flight to speak, thought people said those empty words to sell their hopeful delusions and to be blameless.
He was not happier, he was not better, getting back to Hawaii on the long flight from anywhere was like a hangover, he still felt weak and alienated, like someone fighting the grip of turbulent water. The memory kept repeating. He’d been drowning in the outflung arms of Waimea Bay when they found him and hauled him to shore. But the fright had not abated, and now he knew that in such close calls, something much worse than he’d experienced before, the fear did not leave him, even in the clods of red dirt in Floristan: he went on drowning.
“Glad to be back here anyway,” was all he said after Olive prodded him.
He could not tell her why, though he knew. He never had the words for the images in his head and didn’t want to sound stupid trying to describe what he saw, the stifling sense of confinement he felt on the mainland, the chill on the sunniest days, how he craved the freedom he felt in Hawaii, the beauty of the light skimming on the ocean, the empty space most of all.
Everyone stupidly believed it to be the other way around—“the mainland’s huge, man”—the cities and long roads and distant hills in places like Nevada and Utah, or where they’d just been, in the bushy woods and low hills of Arkansas. Those places pressed on his head and imprisoned him with bad smells, the air thick with sour vegetation and decay, with diesel fumes that reeked of poison, the cities stinking with too many people. He had hated the dark woods on the drive to Floristan, the disorder by the roadside, the junked cars rusting in tall grass. In every crowded town he’d imagined witchlike faces staring from the windows of houses. The mainland was a place of muffled voices and intimidating buildings and overdressed strangers, all those baggy clothes and big shoes—you never saw flesh, never bare feet.
He could not rid his mind of the sense of failure he felt, trapped in mainland narrowness, suffering an obscure thirst, the dust like a disease. The mainland was a place of threat, of danger, of whispers—yes, the roads were long, but they were all dead ends, the mainland was an underworld of shadows and strangers.
Hawaii was huge and sunlit and sweet. It was not just the mountains and the cliffs and the green vertical pali, rising like organ pipes, under the sky-high arches of enormous rainbows—it was the water. The sea was also Hawaii, the sea was its world. The islands did not end at the shore. They were part of the luminous ocean, and the ocean was endless and life-giving and, just offshore, empty of people. No one on the mainland knew that. “Cali’s got waves,” they said, but the rest of California was jammed against all those other states, of wreckage and desert. Hawaii was a gorgeous green woman reclining on her side, sensual, sloping, allowing you to rest against her softness.
* * *
So he was where he wanted to be. Yet he knew he was fractured and feeble, stumbling at times like an old man who could not swim to save his life. And he was exhausted too—all that way to a dot on the mainland map, only to discover that the plot led to Wai‘anae.
Guessing at his frustration, Olive said, “We needed to go. We know him better now, because of that trip. We have something to go on.”
They were in Olive’s car, passing Chun’s Reef, barefoot grommets crossing the road, their boards slung under their arms.
Sharkey said, “What do we know.” It was not a question, it was an exasperated remark.
“That he was poor, and restless—you saw his sad face in the yearbook. That he wanted something better. That he was determined to leave. That he’s not the corpse in the mortuary now—he’s a man in motion.”
“That he got teased at school,” Sharkey said with feeling.
“You saw that he bought a big expensive house for his mum. He ended up with money.”
“He didn’t end up with money. He ended up drunk, on an old bike, in the rain at Waimea. He ended up dead.”
They had passed Weed Circle and the narrow track to Snake Road, which Olive took to avoid the traffic at Helemano. She cut through Schofield to Kunia Road, a ribbon of pavement across the lower slope
s of the hills and the mountain, the old volcano, deeply scored, its tubes of lava cold and densely forested. Concentrating on the narrow road and avoiding potholes, Olive had not answered, so they were passing the plowed fields at the Ewa end when Sharkey spoke again, as though finishing his thought.
“And I’m dying too.”
“We’ll find him,” Olive said, in her hearty bucking-him-up tone.
“I used to drive this way to go to Wai‘anae and Nānākuli to surf,” Sharkey said. “I was strong. I knew I’d get hassled by mokes in the lineup, but I’d think, ‘Bring it on, brah.’ I earned respect.”
“I wish I’d known you then.”
“Good thing you didn’t.” He seemed cheered by the memory. “I was a dog.”
“Lucky me,” Olive said. But she thought how she hated the way men boasted of their stupid maleness, the way they thought that women were impressed by the boasts. But only other men cared, or laughed, while women concluded, Another reason not to trust you.
He was not a man, he’d become a child again, and she felt sorry for him, especially at those times, more frequent now, when he admitted he was afraid.
“It was all different when I came this way before,” he said. “Because I was different.”
“We’ll go straight to his house,” Olive said, to change the subject, because she knew that he’d talk about how everything was different, and that would lead to him talking about being old, then he’d talk about dying, and she hated that. She wanted him to understand that they were still on a quest and that a new life for him might be possible at the end of it.
* * *
“I’m staying in the car,” Sharkey said, suddenly deadened—the fear was physical. They had passed through Wai‘anae on the highway, the shops on the right—yellow walls, scrawled signs—the sea shimmering on the left, the waves like enemies, the thresh of water scooping at tree roots, toppling palms—they lay across the beach—and cracking cement revetments, tossing gouts of sand on the highway. The glare of sunlight exposed the squalor of Wai‘anae and made it sinister, the graffiti more hostile for being so visible, the detritus—driftwood, household garbage—like mayhem. The gray coconuts piled in the high-tide trash on the grassy dunes looked to him like severed heads.
