by Paul Theroux
* * *
Olive dropped him at the airport, giving him a folder with his ticket and a sheet of paper with his itinerary, his hotel, the details of Max Mulgrave’s ex-wife, her address, her phone number, and then she kissed him and patted his cheek, saying, “Gotta go.”
But inside the terminal, at the check-in counter, when the baggage handler placed his duffel on the scale, he heard the ticket agent say, “I’ll need to see your ID, Mr. Sharkey,” and the man yelped, “No way!”
“Joe Sharkey,” the baggage handler said. He was an islander, Hawaiian or Samoan, with a neck tattoo, a shaved head, a jutting jaw enlarged with bulging teeth, his big body strapped in a corsetlike brace of straps and webbing. “Da Shark!”
The ticket agent peered at Sharkey’s license and then at the baggage handler.
“Where your board at, Joe?” the man said, hooking his thumbs into the straps of his brace.
“I don’t surf anymore,” Sharkey said in a subdued voice, feeling small next to the man.
“You lost some weight, brah.”
“It’s not that.”
“He da weenah!” the man shouted at the ticket agent. “Triple Crown! Monster wave. He came top in the Eddie. Dis man da Shark!”
He reached to bump fists, but Sharkey was slow to respond, and said, “Last time I surfed I nearly drowned.”
“Not true, brah.” But the man dropped his arm and stepped back.
“I should have drowned.”
“You da Shark,” the man said in a querying and uncertain way.
“I killed a man,” Sharkey said loudly. Then in a hot whisper, “Ran into him at Waimea. He wen’ make.”
The baggage handler put his hands up and thrust with them, as though repelling a bad smell. He parted his lips and stammered, then with force said, “Shoots!”
The ticket agent said nothing, simply passed Sharkey his baggage receipt and boarding pass, but when Sharkey got to the security checkpoint he was ordered out of line—“This way, sir. Just a few questions”—and frisked and interrogated, then made to wait in a windowless cubicle while his carry-on bag was searched and whispered phone calls were made.
Finally the TSA man handed him his driver’s license and said, “You’re good to go.”
On the flight—overnight, five hours, not long enough to sleep—he sat awake in the dark as though dazzled by an afterimage.
A woman in the seat next to him said, “You got masses of attention back there.”
“Do I know you?”
“Parool Verma,” she said. “Travel writer, I’m here on assignment. You might have read my things.”
Sharkey said, “I don’t read.”
“What do you do?”
“Surf.”
She wagged her head from side to side, and though he could not see her clearly, he inhaled her, a sweetness he was unused to—perfume, a syrupy fragrance that formed a kind of aromatic shape in the semidarkness and defined her body.
She said, “I was wondering. I saw them at Waikiki. It’s mainly white guys, is it not? No people of color. I mean, minority communities.”
“Many,” Sharkey said.
“But not African American, to be sure.”
He snorted and got a powerful whiff of the perfume. He said, “You from L.A.?”
“I can say L.A. was our portal.”
“Nick Gabaldón—L.A. guy, great surfer. Black. Crashed into the pier at Santa Monica on a big day—wen’ make shooting the pier. But, hey, we don’t color-code surfing.”
“Maybe that’s the problem with the sport, not so?”
“There’s no problem. It’s not a sport.”
“What is it then, if I may be so bold?”
“I don’t know.” He was too weary to think of words. “It’s a kind of life.”
“Just that alone, selfish life.”
“Yes!” Sharkey surprised himself with the force of his reply, then fell suddenly asleep, waking just before the plane landed in daylight. The woman hurried away from him. He roused himself to collect his bag and dozed in the taxi, waking when they arrived at the hotel, and slept until noon.
The arrangement Olive had made with Libby, the ex-wife, was that Sharkey would meet her at her house for a drink. Sharkey would tell her that he had killed Max Mulgrave, he would explain that Mulgrave had been cremated, and he’d ask her to sign the release so that he could organize a proper burial. Or, if she insisted, this ex-wife might want to take care of it—maybe an interment in Floristan? The ashes would remain in the mortuary in Honolulu until a decision was made. But he needed to tell her what he had done, driving drunk, ending the man’s life.
After a shower and a sandwich, and wearing an aloha shirt, he went to the porte cochere of his hotel, where a man in a white uniform with gold braids and epaulets approached him. He looked to Sharkey like the leader of a marching band.
“Taxi, sir?”
“I’m going to this address.” Sharkey showed the man the card Olive had written in block letters.
“Alta—it’s six, seven blocks. You could walk it.”
“Taxi,” Sharkey said with such bluntness that the uniformed man grabbed his whistle and blew it hard until a taxi appeared.
In the taxi he felt fragile, afraid of what was to come, his head ringing, his skin like tissue. He wanted this to be over and then after the night at the hotel to get the early flight back to Honolulu.
The house was large, two stories, Spanish style, creamy stucco, yellow cornices, windows covered by wrought-iron grilles, a wide porch, surrounded by a deep green lawn and flowerbeds, a mainland house with thick walls and a red tile roof and a varnished door of golden timber. It advertised itself as a rich person’s house. He knocked.
A swarthy man in a dark suit opened the door.
“Joe Sharkey.”
He put out his hand, but the man, who was wearing white gloves, stepped back, saying, “Mrs. Aranda is expecting you. Right this way.”
So it was the butler, and he felt fearful again, as though tricked, out of his element—easily fooled.
She was seated in an armchair, clutching something in her lap, at the far end of the living room—flowered cushions, flowers in vases, a coffee table with a bowl of blossoms floating in it. As Sharkey approached her, a man entered the room quickly and stepped in front of him.
“Cesar Aranda,” he said. “I’m Libby’s husband.”
“Please sit down,” the woman said. “I get nervous when people are standing while I’m sitting.”
She was blond, her hair clumped and curled, a mass of it on her head and falling to her shoulders—bony shoulders and thin arms. She wore a yellowish blouse of shimmering silk, opened to reveal a chunky necklace as thick as a lei, and on her skinny wrists heavy bangles. Sharkey saw the mounded hair and jewels before he saw the woman’s face. A pinched face, a half-smile, reddened glistening lips—a brittle indoor beauty, of a glamorous sort he always thought breakable.
And what he took to be a cushion or a purse on her lap under her hands was a small dog, with white fluffy fur and wicked black eyes.
“What will you have to drink?”
“No drink,” Sharkey said. “Thanks—I’m all set.”
“I was told you came for a drink.”
“Soft drink,” Sharkey said in a choked voice.
The woman spoke to the man in the dark suit, hovering in the doorway. “You heard him, Diego. Juice.”
The woman’s husband approached her, pushed a cushion aside, and sat next to her, taking one of her hands from the dog—the dog growled—but it was less a gesture of affection than something proprietorial, a way of uniting with her against Sharkey, as they faced him from across the room. When the dog growled more loudly and swelled in the woman’s lap, Sharkey stiffened and sat back in the sofa.
“So how did you know Max?” the woman asked.
“I didn’t know him.”
With a satirical smile on her red clown mouth, she giggled and said, “What are you doing here, then?”
<
br /> “I came here to tell you I killed him.” Sharkey had rehearsed the words so many times it was as though he were hearing a hollow echo, and he was scarcely aware he had spoken them aloud.
But the woman had heard. Slowly a twitch animated her face, which had seemed small and unfriendly, and her pretty lips at first parted, seemed to prepare to speak, but said nothing and curled in a smile.
“Someone had to do it,” she finally said, and glanced at the man, tugging his hand, as the dog yapped twice and settled its head deeper in her lap.
The man in the dark suit and white gloves brought a tall glass on a tray to Sharkey and said, “Lemonade, sir.”
Sharkey took it but didn’t drink. He held it in both hands and said, “It was terrible. I was drunk. I crashed into him with my car. He was on a bike. It was a dark rainy night, the road was gnarly. He didn’t have a chance. He had no ID. They kept him in the morgue. I’ve spent the past two months trying to find out his identity and piece together his life.”
The woman wagged her head, jogging the curled clumps of her thick hair. She said, “What kind of bike?”
“What kind of bike?” Sharkey said, repeating it, because the question was unexpected. “An old bike. A junk bike.”
“The kind of bike a bum might have,” the woman said carelessly.
She’s trying to shock me, Sharkey thought, but she does not know that after what I’ve been through I am shockproof.
“That man had a Ferrari—he had millions,” she said. “And he threw it all away.”
“You pieced together his life,” the man said. His slight accent made him seem slow and skeptical. “What did you find?”
The man’s voice was self-important; the woman’s was sour. They sat side by side, giving Sharkey the sense that he was being questioned in stereo, the woofer on the left, the tweeter on the right.
Why should I tell them what they probably already know of his life? Sharkey thought. They’re testing me. But he had come for a purpose: he needed a favor from the ex-wife, so he began.
“He was, in the beginning, just a dead man lying in the road,” Sharkey said. “He was surrounded by people, the strangers who slow down when they see a car crash. Most of them knew my name, but none of them knew his name. I was stupid. I didn’t bother to find out who he was. He was a drunk homeless guy I’d crashed into. I even started to tell myself it was all his fault.” He sipped at his lemonade and continued. “But then things started to go wrong in my life—accidents, illnesses, bad-luck things.”
“Such as?” The woman seemed to be smiling again.
“My girlfriend had a miscarriage. I almost drowned.”
“You look perfectly all right to me,” the woman said. “And by the way, Max always wanted tattoos like yours.”
“Inside I was dying,” Sharkey said. “My girlfriend convinced me that it had something to do with killing that man and not admitting it. Maybe bad karma.”
“Or guilt,” the man said. He pursed his lips and added, “La culpa.”
“Yes, or that—it doesn’t matter. People say ‘I conquered the wave’ and the next time they surf they wipe out, or face-plant, or die.”
“Anyway, you did detective work,” the woman said. “Pretty easy in the age of the Internet.”
“Right, it’s not hard to find facts, but facts don’t tell you enough. We got his name from his fingerprints, and then his military record, his high school stuff, his hometown. But that’s just paperwork—I hate the word. Books, documents, photocopies. That’s not a man’s life. That just a bunch of paper.”
“It’s how the world works,” the woman said.
“That’s the trouble with the world,” Sharkey said.
“What’s the alternative?” the man said.
“I went to his hometown.”
“Jesus, you actually went to Floristan, that shithole.” The woman abruptly shifted in her seat, disturbing the dog, and as the dog squirmed and yapped she stroked him. “Go on, what’s wrong?”
“I’m glad I went,” Sharkey said, leaning back. “I met some of his friends.”
“He hated that place.”
“He built his mother a house.”
“Don’t I know it! And she was such a bitch to him.”
The man patted her hand and said, “Let him finish, darling.”
“You see where someone comes from and you understand them a lot better,” Sharkey said.
“Where do you come from?”
“I was an army brat. My father wanted me to attend West Point. Go to ’Nam, like he did. I quit school, I quit everything and surfed. Your husband, Max—”
“Ex,” the man said sharply.
“Ex-husband—enlisted. That got him out of his hometown. He was in Vietnam at the worst time. He got medals. He used his military service to go to college. Started a company, a big company.”
“That’s where I come in, darling,” the woman said to the man beside her. “We had a beautiful home in Palo Alto—I did the decorating and landscaping. Max Integer was a short drive away. We had friends, we had a fabulous life.” She sighed. “For about six years. And then Max decided that what he really wanted was to be a surfer.”
“I get that,” Sharkey said.
“I don’t,” the woman said. “He threw everything away. The business, the house, the friends—me.”
“You could have gone with him to Hawaii.”
“Really, can you see me in Wicky Wacky Woo, sitting on a beach while Max is falling off a wave? Plus do you know what the sun does to your skin?”
“I guess so.”
“Look at yourself. No offense, but you haven’t spent much money on sunblock, my friend.”
The man laughed—too hard—and patted her hand. “Be kind, darling,” he said, but his gesture roused the dog, and when it began to yap furiously Sharkey blinked and was unable to reply to the sunblock remark.
“You know all about Max’s service record and his company,” the woman said, restraining the dog. “But do you know what he had in his luggage? Probably ten million dollars.”
Sharkey said, “When you think about it, it’s really not that much in Hawaii.”
“He sold his company to his employees for twenty-five—like a fool. He could have gotten ten times that from Symantec. He gave five to his alma mater, Santa Cruz. I got the other ten, and look what I did with it. This house, a great life, a wonderful guy.”
The man lifted the flopped-over locks of hair from her forehead and they kissed as the dog twitched and fussed. When the man withdrew, touching her lips with his fingertip, Sharkey said, “I have just one favor to ask.” He slipped the document from Olive’s folder and handed it to the woman.
She lifted the paper and read, “Declaration for Deposition of Cremated Remains,” and handed it to the man, who studied it, running his finger down the page. But the woman was still facing Sharkey. “Why me?”
“Your name was listed as next of kin. If you sign it, I’ll take care of the rest. I was thinking of arranging a paddle-out, traditional kine. Flowers. A bunch of surfers. Some of his friends.”
But the woman had begun to talk over him, saying, “I know what happened in Hawaii. He turned into a bum. He bought a big expensive house on the beach, he gave money away. His friends were deadbeats and leeches, but he didn’t care. I suppose they gave him drugs. He always had a thing for uppers. Coke, when we were married, but it was mainly recreational. He probably got into speedballs and freebasing. Meth, crack—he probably tried everything. The wonder is that he got away with it.”
“Putting junk like that in your body,” the man said. “It’s just poison.”
“Listen,” Sharkey said, “I like drugs as much as the next man. Maybe more than the next man.”
“Bet you’re proud of yourself,” the woman said.
“I’m not proud of myself.” Sharkey tried to suppress his anger, but his voice was tortured. “I was zorched when I killed him.”
Unmoved, the woman said, “What do
you do besides surf? What kind of work?”
“Just surf.”
“What have you accomplished—what have you made?”
“Made moves,” Sharkey said. “On water.”
The man smiled and made a mocking noise in his throat. The woman said, “Like I said, how did he get away with it? He was famous for his speeding tickets in Palo Alto. But as far as I know he never got one in Hawaii. It would have shown up on his insurance. Never got arrested. No drug bust—they would have told me, as next of kin.”
“Mordidas,” the man said knowingly, smoothing his hair. “Must have bribed the cops.”
“The cops totally respected him,” Sharkey said, and thought, I’m not going to tell her about the prostitute’s funeral, or Wai‘anae, or the homeless camp, or his will, the trust for the schoolchildren, nothing about his lover Rhonda. She’d just mock him for it.
“Say five or ten thousand,” the man said. “I’m curious. How much cocaine does that buy?”
Sharkey cupped his hands, he shaped them, forming a small pinched pile, saying, “More or less.”
“He gave all that money away,” the woman said. “He blew it, like a fool. He was reckless when we were married. Easily bored. ‘I was a soldier,’ he used to say. ‘Burned out that self. Then I was a student. Burned out that self. Then a software geek. Burned that out.’”
Sharkey listened intently, wishing to remember the words. He said, with feeling, “I totally get that.”
“A wasted life,” the man said.
“What do you know?” Sharkey said, enraged again. “You got a job?”
“I’m a stylist,” the man said. “I have my own salon.”
“What is that?”
“Hairdresser,” the woman said.
And Sharkey lost his anger; he laughed—hooted, clapped his hands to his knees, and gagged when he tried to respond. He had not laughed for months, and it was more than laughter—he was purging himself of his sadness, expelling the misery he’d accumulated, ridding himself of gloom in a yell of pleasure. “Hairdresser!” He caused the dog to explode in a torrent of yapping.
Sharkey could not sit still in his hilarity. He got up and walked in circles, bumping the furniture, disturbing the flowers; and it was as though he were laughing on behalf of Max Mulgrave, because he was sure that Max would let out a mocking scream if he heard that the man sitting beside his ex-wife—her husband, Cesar—said he was a hairdresser. He was laughing for himself, he was laughing for Max—laughter was health and strength.
