Under the Wave at Waimea

by Paul Theroux

  Having turned into a side street, Kaulawaha Road, Olive slowed the car in front of a chain-link perimeter fence, a black dog head-butting it and making it rattle. The dog yelped and slavered, speaking to Sharkey in accusatory barks.

  Industrial fencing and a guard dog, but the house was lovely, two stories faced in redwood, in contrast to the bungalows, small behind their faded paint, that lined the street near it, the big house like a symbol of a powerful man towering over the poor.

  The fence was recent—shiny, out of character in the funky unfenced neighborhood. A covered lanai on the second floor faced the sea, allowing a view of the town, the ocean—sunsets, waves, the green flash.

  “He lived here in the 1980s,” Olive said. “When he bought that house for his mum.” She slipped out of the car and, sensitive to Sharkey’s hesitation—the barking dog, his fatigue and anxiety—said, “Come on, mate. I need you.”

  Just as they got to the edge of the fence, they saw a man striding from the house in the direction of the barking dog. He did nothing to calm the dog, allowing it to leap at the fence, making the chain links clang against the steel posts.

  “You want something?”

  He was dark, local, Hawaiian or Tongan, with black slicked-back hair and a wet jowly face, in a sweatshirt with cut-off sleeves that showed his beefy arms. He carried a thick wooden club in one hand. He wore shorts that came below his knees and flattened flip-flops on his tortured-looking feet. The dog gnawed at the club, coating it with slobber.

  “Nice house,” Olive said.

  But this pleasantry seemed to anger the man, and his anger was highlighted by the perspiration on his face. Still holding the club, he lifted the front of his sweatshirt with his free hand and mopped it, showing his belly, a four-inch appendix scar upraised like a purple welt.

  “Nevvamine.” He flexed his big jaw; he had dog teeth and a scummy tongue. “You selling stuffs? Something like that?”

  “We just have a few questions.”

  “What department you from?” The man put his head against the fence, facing Olive.

  “Take it easy,” Sharkey said.

  “Eh!” The man’s grunt rumbled from his belly. “Bodda you?”

  Olive said, “We were wondering about a previous occupant of this house, that’s all. Someone we’re researching.”

  “I stay here ten-plus years!”

  “What’s your name?” Sharkey said.

  “Who wants to know?”

  “Me—I’m Joe Sharkey.”

  The man shrugged, and went on poking at the dog, goading it to growl and nip at the wooden club. “You don’t need to know any names, okay, haole?”

  Sharkey stepped back, not because of the man’s rude reply but because the dog had tired of gnawing the club and had leaped, thumping the fence with his front paws and opening his mouth wide to bark.

  “This house was once owned by a man named Max Mulgrave,” Olive said.

  The man frowned. He turned away and walked a few steps, then he paused and called over his shoulder, “Time to go—I mean, for you.”

  “Dead end, dead end, dead end,” Sharkey chanted as they walked back to the car.

  Olive said, “No—another revelation. Look at this lovely house. He lived here. He looked out of those windows. He stood on that lanai and watched the sunset and the waves. Maybe he was a surfer. Why else would he come here?”

  Sharkey could not match the dead broken man to a surfboard—he barely imagined him upright. But he was rattled by the visit for another reason. He took a deep breath, then said, “That dog freaked me out.” He was relieved to see that the dog had followed the man into the house.

  “This is the address that was on the payment form—the one he signed,” Olive said. “This has got to have been his house.”

  Kicking at the weeds by the roadside, Sharkey said, “I hate unfinished business. We don’t know anything.”

  “We know masses,” Olive said. “We found his hometown. His photograph. His friends. We know where he came from—that’s crucial.”

  “We don’t know enough,” Sharkey said, and gasped, feeling helpless and lightheaded and lost. “It’s making me worse, the not knowing.”

  Drowning out his moan there came two blasts of a siren’s bloated buzz, a police cruiser heading toward them, stopping directly behind Olive’s car, blue lights flashing, its buzz dying. A burly policeman in a tight shirt got out and stood facing them, his thumbs hooked onto his belt—the belt weighted with gadgets, phone, Taser, cuffs, mace, and a thick black pistol.

  “This is private property, folks. We’ve had a complaint.”

  “We were just leaving,” Olive said.

  “That’s good, because I don’t want to get involved in any paperwork.”

  He didn’t blink. He kept his mouth open, teeth showing, as though to warn them.

  “Paperwork,” Sharkey said, spitting the word.

  Hoping to lighten the mood, Olive said, “We’re day-trippers from the North Shore, making an inquiry. We think a man named Max Mulgrave used to live here.”

  The policeman brightened; he let go of his belt and stepped closer, smiling. “You know Max?”

  “In a way,” Olive said. “Do you?”

  “Everybody in Wai‘anae knows Max,” the policeman said—impressed, eager to oblige. “Rich haole. Good guy. Haven’t heard anything about him for quite a while. I know he took some hits.”

  A crackling sound in Sharkey’s head kept him from speaking.

  “So this was really his house?” Olive said.

  “One of them. The first one, best one. The others were more worse. One was junk. But Max—he stay humble.”

  “The man who lives in this house now doesn’t know him.”

  “He from Maui—got money, got some food trucks. He know Maui things. He don’t know the Leeward Side. He buy this from another guy. He so lucky to have Max house.”

  “What can you tell us about Max?”

  “I can tell you he was bulletproof. I can show you his friend—he knows everything. They were buddies. But, hey, you gotta move your vehicle.”

  “Where is this guy?”

  “Follow me.”

  In the car, following the cruiser, Olive said, “He doesn’t know. He thinks Max Mulgrave is alive.”

  Sharkey sighed, as he often did hearing the man’s name, the name like an accusation; and he knew that saying he was dead would mean his having to admit he’d killed him. He resisted saying anything; his guilt burdened and weakened him.

  “This policeman is taking an extraordinary route.”

  The cruiser had moved through a neighborhood of small bungalows, along back streets of junked cars, to the highway, but instead of reentering the residential area the policeman headed to the beach on a service road patched with softened tar that ran parallel to the main road, past overflowing trash barrels and piles of litter—blue plastic, discarded tires, rusted bicycles, and shattered toys. They came to what looked from a distance like a campsite, a huddle of tents atop a steep sand dune, surrounded by windbreaks of canvas, and twiggy lean-tos wrapped with tarpaulins, the twigs protruding like bleached bones. A small Hawaiian flag flapped upside-down on a stick secured to one of the tent poles.

  That was the foreground of improvisation and disorder; in great contrast the background was a forested ridge, the old twisted lava flow showing in its folded slopes, the green dignity of a Hawaiian mountainside, its sweet aromatic woods.

  The policeman waved them forward, and when they drew beside his cruiser, he called out, “Ask for Frawley DeFreeze. Is his friend. He mention Max to me other day.”

  Olive parked, and they walked up the ramp of sand and tussocky turf into the littered area of the tents, where three men were seated in beach chairs, facing the sea, the small waves flopping against the shore, rolls of scummy foam draining into the sand, some shrieking children kicking at it.

  “Aloha,” Olive said.

  The men leaned back, scowling, their chairs strain
ing under their weight. Two were very fat, bulked against the frayed webbing of the chairs; the third was gaunt, holding a small flattish can under his chin. They wore dirty T-shirts and torn shorts and baseball caps. Now Olive could see that the gaunt one was eating, flicking food from the can to his mouth with chopsticks. At first glance they were like a trio of ragged clowns, harlequins in patches who at any moment might get up and dance and distract her with their foolery, but she saw they were inert and stubborn and colorless in their squalor.

  “This whole area private property,” the fattest man said, gesturing with his cigarette. His face looked roasted by the sun, blackened and peeling in places, his lips cracked, but he wore a good pair of aviator sunglasses, which obscured his eyes. As though for emphasis, he canted sideways and spat into the sand. His hat was lettered LOCAL MOTION.

  Sharkey said, “You guys surfers?”

  “We look like surfers to you, haole?” The man plumped his belly with his hands, and the others laughed.

  “Reason I ask is I’m a surfer.” He put out his hand. The others did not move to shake it. He said, “Joe Sharkey.”

  “Here’s a stick,” Local Motion said. A bruised and chipped surfboard was jammed in the sand beside one of the tents. “Give me twenty bucks for rent. Go surf.”

  Sharkey hesitated, digging his toe in the sand, hating the man for his hostility. “Not today.”

  “Haole say he one surfer dude. Now he say he no want for try surf.” He nudged the man next to him, who obliged, expelling cigarette smoke with his laugh. The gaunt man went on eating, now making scouring motions inside the can with his chopsticks. The yellow label on the can said WAHOO. He stared at Sharkey, then opened his mouth wide to clamp it on the chopsticks. He sucked the fish fragments from them, then tossed the can aside.

  “Frawley,” Olive said. “We’re looking for him.”

  “He at the food pantry,” Local Motion said.

  The gaunt man, dabbing at his lips, looked closer at Sharkey. He squinted and said, “Sharkey,” and chewed the word with his lips, because he had no teeth. “Sharkey,” he said again. “You was at Roosevelt. You was a Rough Rider.”

  “Yeah. Long ago.”

  “Old days,” the man said. He jabbed his thumb at his sunken chest, snagging it on a rip in his T-shirt. “Fonoti. I stay Roosevelt.”

  Sharkey knew the name as one of his antagonists but could not discern the muscular wild-haired boy in this skinny toothless balding man squeezing his chopsticks with bony fingers and staring out of deep-set eyes with his mad monkey face.

  “I was in da hui,” he said. “Wilfred Kalama and Bradda Jay and them.”

  “Wilfred—what happened to him?” Sharkey said, remembering his tormentor.

  “He wen’ make. Too much of drugs. Ice, he smoking.”

  “Batu,” Local Motion said, as though clarifying.

  “Vai and Nalani, they got grandkids. Nalani stay in Vegas.”

  “You know this fucken haole?” Local Motion said.

  “We was at Roosevelt,” Fonoti said. “Hey, good old Rough Rider days, brah.” He saw a fleck on one of the chopsticks and lapped at it. “So where you stay—what kine job?”

  “Like I said, surfing.”

  “Except,” Local Motion said, gesturing with a fat finger, “I offer him one stick and he back off like a panty.”

  “He’s tired,” Olive said, provoked by the man’s mockery. She had kept a little behind Sharkey, listening to them, surprised by the sudden names and the reminiscence of school in the squalor of the camp, the flapping tents, the litter, the tossed-aside Wahoo can sunk in the sand.

  Not tired but anxious, needing relief. The names had fluttered through Sharkey’s memory as distant and dark. He was looking at the sea, gazing beyond the men and the scattered camp and twists of paper and broken plastic as of shattered toys, easing his mind with the afternoon light on the water, the far-off waves, silvery corrugations at this distance. The sun was so low a fishing boat crossed in front of it and blocked it, winked it away for seconds. The incoming swell was a consolation, the ocean seeking him. He had known struggles in the water, but in the end the sea had always befriended him.

  Clearing his throat, Fonoti struggled to his feet, staggering a little, then kicked past the two other men and approached Sharkey and straightened. In a strangely formal ritual, he opened his arms and hugged him, jarring Sharkey hard with the itch of his sweat-stink. He released him and beheld him, his dark eyes deep in their sockets.

  Local Motion clapped his hands to his knees, a decisive gesture. “Me—I’m Frawley. What you want to know?”

  He folded his thick arms across his shirt and turned his sunglasses on Olive, and she saw on his roasted face the pitted scars from chicken pox or acne.

  “Max Mulgrave,” Olive said. “What can you tell us about him?”

  “Max!” the man said. “Bradda Max,” and reached to bump fists with Olive. “He down on his luck now, but he one great guy.”

  “When did you first meet him?”

  “Early days—eighties—when he came here after the big buyout deal with his company.”

  “That he sold?”

  “Not to Symantec, though they made a big offer. He sell it to his employees,” Frawley said. And now, losing his aggression, he lost the lilt of pidgin and the gabble of synthetic English, becoming more grammatical as he gained in pride. “He did the right thing for his workers.”

  “I take it his company made software,” Olive said.

  “You don’t know?” The man laughed in a surprised, superior way, blowing out his cheeks. “Max came up with one of the first and best software programs for finding glitches in operating systems. Debugging was his thing. Bug fixes. Software patches.” He reached to scratch his blunted and damaged-­looking big toe, then heaved himself back in his chair and went on. “He devised the Max Patch—you don’t know that, and he famous for it. Max had the formula. But he wasn’t satisfied, so he made the smart move. He sold everything and came to Hawaii.”

  “For any specific purpose?”

  “For the specific purpose every haole comes to Hawaii—to chill, to smoke pakalolo, to catch waves.”

  The word “waves” woke Sharkey. “He was a surfer?”

  “Maybe better than you,” Frawley said. “You know the Big Board Classic—Buffalo Keaulana’s competition? Max competed two, tree times.”

  “So did I,” Sharkey said.

  Lighting a cigarette, Frawley eyed Sharkey sideways, blowing smoke, the smoke swelling, seeming to represent the widening cloud of his doubt. “Max got major points.”

  “I got points,” Sharkey said. “Did he win?”

  “Didn’t have to win. Surfing for him was all the time fun. He was pono.”

  Olive said, “How do you know so much about his business?”

  The man next to Frawley, who had not spoken, poked him and laughed, and Frawley said, “I see what you’re thinking. Big fat babooze, living on the beach, dirty clothes, dog life.” He wagged his finger at her like a wiper blade and said, “I was senior accountant with the biggest firm in Honolulu, office on Bishop Street. I serviced clients from all over, high-end clients—Max was one. I had a nice house like Max, nice car, wife and kids. I was kicking ass. I’m not the buggah you see. Hey, I was Frawley DeFreeze, CPA. I had a life.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Internal audit. Forensic audit. Big shibai. Some downtime in O Triple C. Insolvency.”

  Olive said, “Cooked the books?”

  Scowling, Frawley pinched the dirty bill of his cap with one hand and lifted it. He scratched the scurf on his bald patch with his other hand, grubbing his scalp with his bitten nails, grunting, as though audibly reflecting. Then he smacked his lips.

  He said, “Defalcation.”

  “I’m not sure what that means.”

  He settled his cap again. “Made some bad choices.”

  “What about Max?”

  “Made some more worse choices—went al
l hamajang with no receivables and no liquidity,” Frawley said. “But before that he did some great things—righteous things. Touched people’s lives. Ask anyone.”

  “Tell me about his company, this amazing invention of his,” Olive said.

  “You’re interested in his company that he sold”—Frawley puffed his cigarette in defiance—“and you don’t care nothing about the people he helped?”

  “I’m just curious about where all the money came from,” Olive said in a subdued voice, to calm the man.

  “Guess you’re not computer savvy—the whole fricken world knows about Max Integer. Kids at the high school here use the Max Patch—updated one. You got a computer, brah?”

  Sharkey said, “Yeah. I don’t use it much. Just for Surfline or Windguru, to get swells and wave heights.”

  “There’s books about his debugging. Real hybolic stuff. You read books?”

  This challenge from a fat man wearing a LOCAL MOTION cap and a chewed shirt, sitting over his swollen belly in a twisted and slumping beach chair next to a stained and torn tent on a littered dune in Wai‘anae.

  “Books,” Sharkey said. “Not much.”

  “Go online,” Frawley said. “Big surfer, try surf the ’Net.”

  “And we’ll find out about Max Mulgrave?”

  “Not the Hawaii stuff—he was low-profile here. But you’ll find out what he created, the company he sold.” The man concentrated on his cigarette, puffing it, tapping ash. “But listen up. If you want to know what he did here you won’t find it on Google. You have to ask people in Wai‘anae.” He turned aside. “Fonoti—true or not true?”

  “True, brah.”

  “What about his wife?” Olive said.