Under the Wave at Waimea

by Paul Theroux

  “I been there,” Moe said, sounding vague. “I wen’ sell some merch there.”

  “Come with us.”

  “Okay—you got it.”

  She kissed him; he held her. He stank of dirt and sweat and seawater, and she began to cry, from the pent-up anxiety of the day—the police, the video of the funeral, the vanishing of Joe, and what she was certain was a clumsy attempt at suicide.

  Over her sobbing, Moe said, “Smoke one joint, sister. Or maybe smash and snort one of them Xanax. You feel more better.”

  “I’ll feel fine if you come with us tomorrow.”

  “This my ‘aina. This my turf. I know the way.”

  * * *

  In the morning Moe whistled from the driveway, then called out on the stairs and on the lanai flattened his face against the sliders, wearing the same T-shirt and torn shorts as in the night, his hair kinked and mud-matted, a big dark dusty angel, the oily smear of his face on the glass.

  “We go in my truck, crew cab. Your car, they think maybe you’re cops.”

  Moe drove; Olive sat in the cramped backseat with Sharkey, her feet deep in clutter, one door wired shut, the upholstery fuzzy with dirt, the engine coughing as it labored up the road amid the hum of gas fumes and burned plastic, Moe grunting each time he shifted to a new gear. The sensations of these details reminded Olive of the night before, her panicked search for Sharkey in that truck.

  Sharkey said nothing, and Olive wondered what she would do if he tried to throw himself into the road. She’d managed to restrain agitated patients, but never alone—it was usually a group on the flailing person, a nurse on each limb. But he sat next to the door that was fastened shut by thick twisted wire. He’d have to fight past her to kill himself now.

  Moe said, “How you doing, brah?”

  Olive took Sharkey’s hand, out of tender affection but also to test his mood. His dry palm, his slack fingers surprised her—his loose grip was not that of someone possessed by any urgency. It was like holding a child’s helpless mute hand.

  “How am I doing?” Sharkey said. In the same searching whisper he went on. “I feel I am someone else. I just don’t know who.”

  “You da Shark, brah.”

  Olive tugged his hand to reassure him. They were passing Waimea Bay, near the entrance to the parking lot. They did not need to mention the drama of the previous night—the groan of the waves lamented it, the rip and ruck from the shadow zone of the far-off storm was like a feverish memory of desperation.

  It seemed that Sharkey heard it that way, yet his voice was reflective, rueful, when he began to speak again, interrupting himself to start over several times, to make himself clear.

  “I did it because I felt ashamed and guilty,” he said. “And now I’m bummed and more ashamed because I did it.”

  What he’d done was understood. No one spoke, and after that pained confession, Olive thought, what could one say?

  “Thanks,” Sharkey said. “You saved me.” He was studying the ocean; they were at Chun’s Reef now. “When I was a lifeguard I never had to save the same person twice.”

  At the bypass road, Olive said, “Maybe park by the fence—near that big tulip tree.”

  But Moe had slowed and turned and nosed the truck into a half-hidden driveway that led through the tall grass, and when he came to the broad scrawled sign—KAPU—he kept going.

  “I know this place. I know these people.”

  Then they were at the edge of the clearing, a dog barking and straining on his long leash.

  “Aloha,” Moe called out, and strode to the man seated near the dog.

  In a blue haze of smoke from a smoldering fire pit, the man was sprawled on the car seat set on the ground that served as a sofa, his baseball cap resting on his frizz of hair, the same T-shirt, ALOHA FUN RUN, on his torso. He got to his feet and crouched in a threat posture, but his look of ferocity vanished when he recognized Moe. He shouted, “Mr. Kahiko, mushroom man—what you got for me?”

  “Anything you want, Jimmy.”

  The two men hugged. Still in the hug, glaring over Moe’s shoulder, the man said, “Why these fucken haoles here?”

  “My friends,” Moe said, disengaging himself and, with a little chivalrous bow, “And now your friends.”

  A movement from beyond the barking dog—two women stirred, one scuttling on all fours like a puppy from beneath the shelter of blue plastic, the other unfolding herself from the old car’s backseat. Both women looked damaged, one of them fattish, her hair twisted in gray braids, the other squinting from under slatted lids, in a ball cap and apron. The one with the ball cap went to the fire pit and kicked the smoldering wood, sending up sparks.

  “Where the kids at?”

  “They got school, yah.”

  “I know this guy,” the woman with the braids said to Sharkey. “I see you before.”

  Olive said, “We paid you a visit about six weeks ago. We were looking for someone. You told us to go away.”

  “My short-term memory is junk,” the woman in the apron said.

  The other said, “I thought you was from Child Protective Services. Come to take my kids away.”

  The big man approached Sharkey, who was scowling from the fury of the barking dogs. The man said, “Yeah—you. I remember.”

  “We brought you some malasadas,” Olive said, presenting the woman with a cardboard box, the sides of the box stained by the grease from its contents.

  “Still piping hot, the malasadas,” the woman with the braids said. She offered the box to the big man, who waved her aside, and then she took one out and began chewing.

  “I’m Olive.”

  “This Winona,” the woman with the braids said. “I’m Rhonda.”

  “Kimo,” the big man said, extending his hand to Sharkey’s and gripping it. “Normally, like I always say, we the Foreign Legion—no names. But if Moe say you friends, we got names.”

  “I’m Joe Sharkey.”

  Rhonda giggled and poked Sharkey’s arm, like a small girl’s awkward greeting.

  “The first time we were here we met a woman, Lindsey,” Olive said. “She claimed she knew the man we were asking about.”

  “Lindsey a meth head,” Winona said. “She gone.”

  “We didn’t know the man’s name then. Now we know. Max Mulgrave.”

  “Max gone too.”

  “You knew him?” Olive said, flustered by the sudden revelation.

  “He stay here for a while.”

  “I know the guy?” Moe said to Kimo.

  “Sure. The guy you call Smack.”

  “Smack,” Moe said, and turned to Sharkey. “I know Smack. Why you didn’t tell me you looking for Smack?”

  “His name is Max,” Olive said.

  “I sell him all kinds of merch. Pakalolo. Batu. You name it. That Smack is hardcore. How he get the name is he using smack, no needles—he smoke it and sniff it and sometimes eat it.”

  “We hear he pass,” Kimo said. He turned to scream at the barking dogs, and the dogs whimpered and crouched in the dirt. “Someone run into him at Waimea.”

  “That was me,” Sharkey said. “I killed him. That’s why we came here before. I didn’t know his name. I was trying to find out who he was. He wasn’t carrying an ID.”

  “You the guy wen’ kill Max?” Kimo asked, and stepped so quickly toward Sharkey that Sharkey backed away.

  Intimidated, weakened by the question, fearful of what might happen next, Sharkey said in a faltering voice, “Yes. I ran into him.”

  “You can prove it?” Kimo was leaning at him, looking eager.

  “The cops know it.”

  “I mean, you can prove he wen’ make?”

  “His body’s in the mortuary,” Olive said, to distract the man. “Ashes now. He was cremated.”

  Kimo had turned to Rhonda and was nodding vigorously. Her expression was ambiguous, at first sorrowful and slack, and then a faint smile, with something like satisfaction, flickered on her cracked and sunburned
lips, which made her reaction macabre.

  “It was all my fault,” Sharkey said, strengthened by the sight of the two people silently communicating a sense of pleasure. He’d expected to be assaulted by Max Mulgrave’s angry grieving friend, but the man had turned away from him.

  Olive took Sharkey’s hand. She said to Kimo and the women, “I don’t blame you for being upset.”

  Kimo shrugged, wiping his hands on his T-shirt. “We hear he wen’ make, but where the proof?” He gestured to Sharkey. “You did a bad thing, mister. He was a good guy—he live over there with Rhonda for, what? Year or so.”

  “More,” Rhonda said.

  “He set up her kids in school. Those kids you saw before. Smart akamai kids. He organize a trust fund for them.”

  “He had money?”

  “Not much left. He spend most of it on drugs.”

  “I never charge him much,” Moe protested. “Smack like a braddah to me. But the trouble was the batu. The cheap stuff, it can wreck you. But . . . was his money.”

  Kimo said, “He put some aside for those kids, to give them one chance in life. The bank in Hale‘iwa got all the papers. They know he wen’ make?”

  “Probably not,” Olive said.

  “You can tell them—show them the death certificate and all that.”

  “We’d be glad to do that. If it’s important to you.”

  “Important for the will,” Kimo said. “Rhonda in the will. The keikis in the will.” He went to Sharkey and held him by his shoulders. He said, “I know you upset. But was an accident. Max was high a lot of the time. He fall off his bike, sometimes he half drown. He safe now, in heaven. No more pain.”

  Hearing this, Sharkey feared he might cry, and he blinked away his tears. He could endure anger, but any expression of forgiveness made him weepy.

  Kimo faced him, and although he was ragged and smelled of the smoke and the camp, he was precise in his instructions, saying, “Go to the bank today. Take the documentation. Rhonda need that will. The kids too. After probate they have a chance. Like the lottery, brah.”

  All this time Rhonda had been smiling at Sharkey. At the mention that Max Mulgrave had been living with her—in the car or the blue plastic shelter, it was not clear—she’d assumed a sly expression. But now she raised her hand and poked his arm again, the small girl’s teasing face in her old woman’s battered features, her red eyes and gray braids fixed on their ends with tattered ribbons. She tugged his arm and then spoke softly, a braid in each hand, wagging her head like a coquette.

  “Way back, you was one lifeguard.”

  “Long ago,” Sharkey said. “I was a kid.”

  “I was one of your girls,” the old woman said in the same low voice. “You fuck me on the beach at Waimea. You call me your seal pup.”

  The other woman, Winona, had not heard. She walked over to Sharkey with the greasy box of malasadas and said, “Try one. They junk when they come cold.”

  Standing under the trees, the smoke from the fire pit blowing past them, the dog lying in the dirt biting itself, Kimo and the others took turns hugging Sharkey and Olive, who promised to meet them again and to submit the death certificate to the bank.

  “Maybe fix us up with a lawyer,” Kimo said. “And then you gotta come back and see the keikis.”

  In the truck, driving away, Moe said, “I know this guy—Max, Smack, whatever. Long time ago, he want so choke pakalolo from me I cannot receive it in my mail can, because the post office they get more suspicious. So I do a bad thing. I send it to your mail can—and, shoots, it come lost.”

  “I’ve heard that story,” Olive said, her hand flying to her face to cover her smile.

  “Yeah,” Sharkey said. “You were supplying him?”

  “Big-time—when he had bucks, and an insane spendy car,” Moe said. “Later I see him all over on his junk bike. All the time when the surf up we sit on the beach, smoking, talking story, tripping, watching you shred the monster wave. You his hero, Joe—he so stoked, seeing you surf.”

  12

  The Release

  One person remained—faceless, distant, spectral, but necessary. Maybe she was stricken with grief, or maybe not. The quest to know the dead man had turned up so many surprises. Yet when Sharkey mentally rehearsed the confrontation, his confession, the okay he required on the release form, he stalled. She was the ex-wife, in California, next of kin. She knew from a message from Stickney at the morgue that Max Mulgrave was dead, but nothing further than that. She had to be told who was responsible for his death. And Sharkey needed more than her signature; he needed to see her face. But he went on procrastinating.

  “The mainland,” he said, tasting the word, wincing at its bitterness.

  All of Hawaii’s ugliness and none of its beauty comes from the mainland, he thought—every sack of cement, every piece of paper, every plastic bag and soda can, every hard drug, every chain-link fence and pane of glass and rusted rebar, every roll of barbed wire and yellow crime-scene DO NOT CROSS tape. The cheesy Christmas ornaments, every plastic toy, all the hats and T-shirts, the high-rises at Kakaako, golf clubs, TV sets, books, Styrofoam cups, every car, every gallon of gas, every bicycle, the fiberglass and epoxy for surfboards, every single haole. Me.

  “You have to go.”

  “I feel futless there,” he said. “And everything’s wrong.”

  He meant, away from the surf—and miles of mainland surf were infected with runoff, sewage contamination, needles in the shore break, oil slick. And the traffic, the talk, the foul smell and freeways. He remembered the fleeting visit to Floristan. No wonder Max Mulgrave went to Hawaii! The mainland was bewildering and intimidating and uncomfortable; and you had to wear shoes.

  “But even after fifty years in Hawaii, I’m still a fucken haole,” he said, his head in his hands. “The only people who really belong here are Hawaiians. The rest of us are from somewhere else.”

  “What are you saying, Joe?”

  In a grieving whisper of reproach he said, “That when I killed that drunk homeless guy, I was also a drunk homeless guy.”

  * * *

  In the two weeks it took to visit the bank in Hale‘iwa and provide the death certificate and call the ex-wife to ask her to sign the form for the burial—her name was Libby Aranda, she’d remarried, she lived in Santa Monica—in those two weeks Olive was called back to the hospital; the leave of absence she’d taken to help Sharkey through the crisis was over. He’d have to go alone.

  “You’re better,” she said.

  No, he thought—it’s always pressure when people say that. Even she, who knew him so well, had no idea. And he thought, as he often had, without the words for it, If I don’t know myself, how can you possibly know me?

  “You can do this. Then it’s over.”

  Nothing was certain. Every wave had a hidden contour and something like a mystical muscle in it that could trip you; every succeeding wave had the capacity to hold you down and suffocate you to death. The world was a wave, a wave was pitiless.

  He’d counted on Olive’s affection, she’d mothered him in a way that showed him what mothering meant, encouragement and protection his own mother had never offered. But Olive’s attention, her patience, her uncomplaining support he’d taken for granted, pretending to object to it. He hadn’t realized until now that love was something practical, a tenderness in the day-to-day that made the day better.

  He’d become, through all this, since the crash—no, since killing Max Mulgrave—utterly dependent on her. Love was liberating, but love was also a mode of concern. Her love was taking his hand and steadying him, driving him when he was too distracted to hold the wheel, being his friend, waking Moe in the middle of the night and saving his life at Waimea. He would be dead without her love. So when she told him she was going back to work, he panicked. He loved her, but he was too self-conscious to repeat I’d be lost without you, as he’d told her once. But that was how he felt.

  He’d never needed anyone before, he valued
the necessity of finding his own waves; being a loner had always been his boast. He’d pitied Hunter for being helpless without an entourage of fixers. But his life had gone wrong, and becoming weak he regarded as his curse; yet Olive had stayed by his side. She was lovely, she could be passionate, but he saw that what mattered most was her compassion, her help in getting him through the day—that was love.

  She was not a saint. He knew how he exasperated her, how she turned away and murmured, “Bugger, “Crumbs,” “Knickers,” “Blast.” The times she’d said, as though in resentment, “You’re like a wet weekend.” But they were words so foreign to him it did not seem like impatience or anger but British and silly, the mantra in a weird little foreign amusement, like a chant in a children’s game.

  His first sight of Olive had been at the party long ago in the house at Rocky Point, when she’d knelt on the floor and rescued that stoner who’d overdosed, and he’d been aroused and inspired and greedy for her. So they became lovers. But their lovemaking, wild as it had been at times, mattered less than her instinct for living, her good heart and her ingenuity, her willingness to help him through this crisis. Now he could not remember when they’d last made love, and yet he knew he would drown without her. In those places, the homeless camp, the shitshow on the beach in Wai‘anae, when he was tongue-tied or freaked out by a barking dog and Olive stepped past him and asked a direct question of a stranger, he had never loved her more. She was stronger than he was, and stood by him and was patient. Only kindness mattered.

  “I’d go if I could,” she said. “I’d like to meet this ex-wife and get the drift. But I’m needed at the hospital. I’m back in surgery.”

  She hugged him and was surprised by how tightly he held her, how he hung on, the big helpless man burying his face against her neck. He seemed to be moaning, No.

  “I think it’s a good thing you’re doing this alone.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “You’ll do fine, baby.”

  He loved her for saying that.