by Paul Theroux
They brought something—pills, meth, batu, crack, speed, pakalolo. Kids! And she would have obliged. Two at one time was something new, but I wasn’t really surprised.
What surprised me at first was that he didn’t blow them all away. Then I thought, He’s law-abiding—what he did was by the book. You don’t shoot unarmed suspects in the back on this island.
Only the gun not going off was also kind of appropriate for Erskine, like a symbol. He was on the plane too fast for me to tell him I’d take care of the kid.
3. Verna: A Lesson in “Just a Skosh”
Never mind Erskine called me “shelter dog” and kept his big plastic gun by the bedside. He bailed me out of that awful trailer up at the landfill, and I didn’t even tell him that for a while up in Lihue we lived in a container in the industrial area near Nawiliwili Harbor.
My stepmother, Jen, grew up speaking Hawaiian on Niihau, called herself a functioning alcoholic, and was afraid of mirrors. “We never have one meer anyhow.” I gave her one from the thrift shop and she screamed like it was a trick. “It’s a present!” I screamed back. “Take it down!” And why? “Because there’s probably some babooze behind it?” She had the idea that all mirrors were two-way: you were being spied on by a freak on the other side.
“That’s not funny. You call that funny? It a meer!”
She made me afraid of mirrors, which annoyed Erskine. When he looked at me it was that face he made when he was checking his cell phone, noting the number, the “Howzit?” look. Then he’d always turn away with that shouldery big-dog walk, Officer Serious.
Everyone thought they knew about my father, that he was good at everything, saved scrap, had all the answers. “I cockroach that fuel pump from an old Honda.” Several things they didn’t know. That he was afraid of flying and had not visited a neighbor island since the passenger barges stopped in 1972. So my one wish was to take flying lessons, to see my father’s face when I got in the cockpit and took off down the runway—maybe say, “Want to hop in?” beforehand. They thought he was a bully because he spanked me. But he liked to spank me—or anyone, and maybe I deserved it for being wild and quitting school.
“You panty,” I would say, to pretend I wasn’t afraid.
Or he told me I was adopted and that he’d give me back to the orphanage if I didn’t behave. I believed him.
The container we lived in for a while had no windows and was like an oven in the summer when the trade winds dropped.
I smoked cigarettes. Jen said smoking is a filthy habit and to give it up. No smoking or drinking on Niihau. But smoking relaxes you, and anyone who doesn’t know that has never smoked. I needed to be relaxed. I smoked pakalolo. It was easy to get; everyone grew it, and that too was relaxing. “Don’t knock it,” I’d said to Jen, who would have been mellower with Dad if she used just a skosh of weed, and I told her so.
“Just a skosh,” she said, wily old auntie, and, “Here, why you no help me bake some cookies?”
She had me sift the flour and mix in the sugar and shortening and butter, and when it was smooth, the cup of chocolate chips. She could tell that I was enjoying the mixing.
“Your ma wen never show you how for make cookies?” she asked, pretending to be amazed.
Which was cruel, because my real mother was dead from riding in the back of a pickup truck that was rear-ended on Kokee Road.
“Not yet,” Jen said, snatching the spoon I was going to lick.
And then she took me out to the yard and got a stick and poked it into a twist of dog doo, and back in the kitchen she dipped the stick into the golden cookie dough and stirred it.
“Now taste um.”
She knew what I’d say, so I didn’t say it.
“Just a skosh!” she screamed. “Same wid djrugs!”
But when he brought home the key of coke from that Moniz cousin my life was changed, and I don’t care what anyone says: it is the greatest feeling in the world, and not addictive like meth if you’re smart, no more than candy, in fact just like candy. I wanted to be a functioning coke sniffer.
“It’s spendy,” the chief used to say. But he found some more, maybe the same key, and he made me pay for it in my own way.
He couldn’t blame me for wanting more. Junior got some in Maui from his surfing buddy Ledward, and said, “Now what are you going to do for me?”
Erskine was always working, at the station or on calls. What was I supposed to do—and his boss the chief always hanging around?
“What you good at?” the chief asked.
“Nothing. I so junk.”
That made him laugh.
“The junkest.”
Having Kanoa didn’t make him happy either. The chief held him more than Erskine did at the baby luau.
Junior was always around on the day Erskine was in Hanalei. When he said, “I want to try something insane,” I knew I’d have to say yes, and met Ledward.
I knew Erskine wouldn’t shoot.
4. Noelani: Nothing but Stink-Eye
When we met on the Big Island, all Erskine talked about was how unreasonable his ex was—demanding, petty, immature—and I was totally on his side. He did not miss his little boy Kanoa at first, but after we were settled and he moved from highway patrol to a desk job in Hilo, he said he wanted to get custody, that his ex was a bad influence.
Around that time I was thinking: Cop, killjoy, straight arrow, spanker, scold—what kind of kid would want to be in the same house with him?
I could just about stand him. He was a righteous bully, never wrong, knew all the answers, knew the law (“that’s a Class-A felony”). I felt sorry for what he’d been through, but I didn’t want to go through it myself. He was making plans to fly over to Kauai to visit the kid.
I called Verna. I said, “You don’t know me.”
“Who’s this?” she asked.
“Noelani. But listen up. I just want you to know that Skinny is coming over to talk to you about joint custody.”
“That’s all I need.”
And I heard a man in the background squawking and thought, Another one.
After that, Erskine said, “Every time I go over there she’s not at home, the kid’s not there, and no one knows where they went.”
“Maybe at her parents’ place.”
Erskine said, “She doesn’t have anyone in the world except me,” and went silent.
That was more and more the case with me. My friends didn’t like Erskine for his strictness. They enjoyed a little smoke now and then, they watched football, they drank beer at the beach. And Erskine frowned at them the whole time.
“Dis guy nothing but stink-eye.”
He had no doubts. He was the law, and even on a neighbor island where things weren’t so strict he enforced the pettiest law: no dogs on the beach, no ball games, no open containers of alcohol—even confiscated pakalolo and brought it home and maybe was testing me because he made a big show of locking it in a desk drawer.
In the pictures he showed me, his kid looked so different and so poi-dog I wanted to say, “You sure he stay yours?”
Not only the kid’s different features but the kid’s smile—Erskine never smiled. Plus the fact that after the first few times, Erskine seemed to lose interest in me. I was a lot older than Verna—closer to Erskine’s age—but even so, I seemed to have more in common with her, this ex-wife, than the man himself.
And she began confiding in me, saying how she’d let him down.
“Don’t beat yourself up,” I said.
Though I rarely went to a neighbor island, I went over there to see what she was really like. She was young enough to be my daughter, and that’s how I felt toward her. She gave me a big hug, and we had coffee.
“Ma, I want do shee-shee!”
The kid Kanoa was just awful and looked local. But he was very well dressed, new shirt and slippers and surfer shorts. I felt sorry for Verna, but I didn’t want him. So I kept tipping her off whenever Erskine was on his way over. I thought I was doing
everyone a favor.
On that one and only visit I met her new guy, Junior, and recognized him from what Erskine had told me: hapa-haole, tribal tattoos, Raiders hat on backward, a big laid-back moke who worked an excavator. But I could also see the attraction. He was like, “Whatever,” and that was not Erskine’s way.
What ended it was this visit. I began to think: She’s been through a lot, made a few bad choices and lost her looks living with this blalah, and was making the best of it. But time passed, and I lived with Erskine and got to know him better and became like her. He made me that way, and I knew exactly why she two-timed him.
If I stayed with Erskine that’s how I’d end up, as a stoner and probably cheating on him and getting blamed, and so I fired him and went back to my own island, Lanai, and stayed in touch with Verna.
The last thing Erskine said to me was “I’ll probably stay single. I’ll be okay. I can’t handle hooking up with a new wahine, telling her all my stories, listening to all her stories, and then there’s dealing with her stuffs. I’m married to my job.”
5. Junior: Dog Luck
I put it down to Erskine was a haole from the mainland, raised by his mother, and didn’t always understand what he was looking at. Like the tourists who sit on the beach and don’t see those upside-down bowls in the shore-break are turtles feeding on the rocks and far out the puff of mist is a whale blowing, and when the tourists turn their backs the turtles stick their heads up and the whale breaches, slapping itself down sideways. Or they see monster surf and say, “Hey, cool.”
Such a know-it-all giving out speeding tickets is one thing. But when he busted me for possession, and I was still a kid: I couldn’t work for the state or join the army or get back to Maui. So I negotiated a key of coke from some dealers in Oahu, but it ended up in the harbor. Barry Moniz knew, and told his uncle, the chief, and that was the end of my hopes.
When he came home early that night and caught us naked, all in the bed, the overhead light on, his gun pointed at us, I went dead all over, first chicken-skin, then just numb. And afterward I didn’t believe he’d really gone. I thought he was waiting for us to come outside so he could ambush us.
“Buggah wen go or what?” Ledward asked in a whisper.
We sneaked out by the back door.
“Junior. I tink we makeh-die-dead,” he said in the pickup.
I heard that Erskine was transferred to Hilo, and with him on a neighbor island, things quieted down. It was Chief Moniz who told me. He made a few visits to Verna, gave her some money, like he felt sorry for her.
“She no can get food stamp,” he said to me. “Wass the happs?”
The happs was I never smoked another joint from that day and I got a job digging, working an excavator, but because of my police record, not at the landfill, a state job, where I could have made more money. Ledward said she could have gotten us killed, but I said, “It was our own fault. We were the ones that set her up.”
“Because she wen ask for da kine chrabol.”
I was annoyed that he was blaming her. I saw things I’d never seen before, that Verna was in a bind, and after a while I married her on the beach at Hanalei, her kid Kanoa there in a little aloha shirt, a luau, the sunset, a green flash. I never saw Ledward again, because he went to Molokai.
And Verna would get a call from time to time, I guessed from Erskine, she didn’t say, and we’d go stay with my cousin in Kapaa until Erskine gave up and went back to the Big Island. He wanted custody. But I would have said, “Tough. You left her. I married her. This is my hanai kid now.”
Ledward used to say, “Yes, I want to catch waves in a foreign country, maybe Brazil, if I can snort coke there and have sex on the beach.”
He is in Kaunakakai, maybe shaping boards, maybe hanging out. And Verna talks about taking flying lessons, which will never happen. Kanoa is on Oahu, where Chief Moniz retired, and got him apprenticing as a roofer. Kanoa still doesn’t see much of his father, and never knew how his mother almost got shot one night. Erskine’s ex, Noelani, sends Christmas cards and sometimes a pineapple.
I’m glad Erskine just walked away. He did the right thing by not shooting us. Yet he wasn’t innocent. I’d never be able to convince him, but he was responsible. Instead of revenge I ended up with Verna. She makes pickled mango, one of those older women on a back road, selling it in jars, and you’d never guess from her smile the things that have happened to her.
But what was it after all? It was island style, a period of drugs and freaky sex and getting out of hand that all people go through before they settle down, especially on the neighbor islands. Then it passes. But it was all dog luck, because I would have shot me.
The Traveler’s Wife
IN THE CAR on the way home from the Willevers’, Bree said, “It’s funny—” and Harry Dick knew she was about to object to something. She became chatty and opinionated at the wheel, and he was sorry he’d had three drinks because he hated being a passenger, especially her passenger. And what was that odd smell in the back seat?
Harry Dick Furlong, the travel writer, dedicated his books to his wife, Bree; he praised her for her patience in awaiting his return, and the way she ran the house, and coped with the demands of his office when he was on one of his trips—and tonight, as always, at the Willevers’ she had listened to his stories as though hearing them for the first time. He liked to say their marriage was a partnership that worked.
The evening had gone well. The Willevers were good hosts, and grateful to Furlong for agreeing to the dinner so soon after arriving back from his last long trip. In addition to being a reader and a friend, Ed Willever was the Furlongs’ attorney. He was also a tease, and it was a mark of his trust in their friendship that he dared to tease Furlong.
At the meal, Furlong had done most of the talking. He was full of new stories, and though most of them were boasts they sounded authentic. “You couldn’t make this stuff up!” About being starved, stranded, threatened by some rowdy boys, propositioned by a drunken woman at a bar. One about a snake, another about a scorpion. “As a traveler I often feel like a castaway.” At times it seemed it was not Harry Dick at all, but a fictional wanderer named Furlong whom he was recalling with amazement and admiration.
His trips had given him an aura of wizardry, as sudden vanishings and reappearances often do, travel in his way like an accumulation of magic, overcoming dangers as he plunged deeper into the murky world. His books were reports on the extraordinary, news from distant places. His criticism of most travel books was “You could see that sort of thing without ever leaving home.”
He immediately thought “It’s funny—” meant Bree doubted one of the stories he’d told at the Willevers’.
“You don’t believe I had a scorpion in my shoe?” It had leaped out, he’d said, just before he slipped the shoe on.
“Not that,” Bree said. “It was when you talked about not wanting to be known.”
Furlong refused all interviews; he never appeared on television; he avoided book tours—no autographs, never elaborated on his trips, did not answer questions. “It’s all in the book.”
Exasperated, he said, “Haven’t we been through that?”
“But when Ed said, ‘It’s kind of a cheat, isn’t it?’” Bree was driving efficiently, glancing in her rearview mirror, tapping her turn signal. “And then, ‘Being well known for your desire to be unknown.’”
“He was trying to be funny.”
“It got me thinking.”
She had never doubted him before. Never questioned him. And it cut him, because her point—Ed’s teasing remark—was too logical to refute. Was she doubting him now?
He said, “I like my privacy.”
“And everyone knows it. And they talk about you because of it. Like Ed said, ‘The well-known recluse.’”
“You’re taking him seriously.”
Ed had also said something about having it both ways, but she did not remind him. They were in the driveway now, yet Bree remained
in the driver’s seat, holding the wheel as though gripping it gave her authority.
“I’m just asking.”
“I got stuck in that village. I told you. I wanted to come home sooner.”
Still she hung on to the steering wheel. “And when Ed said that going on a trip was maybe not leaving at all but making yourself more conspicuous?”
“He was drunk,” Furlong said, sounding drunk himself.
“Making a big deal about hiding from the limelight was a way of attracting the limelight.”
“Please.” The word meant everything, but especially it meant, “This conversation is at an end.”
Bree said lightly, “I don’t know.”
But before he got out of the car, Furlong sniffed and said, “Do you smell something?” He made the clownish face of someone interrogating a smell. He said, “Cigarette.”
“I had a smoke,” Bree said.
“You—what?”
It was the explosive tone he would have used if she had said, I have a lover. He was shocked, almost disbelieving, but the odor lingered as proof, and I had a smoke sounded worse than I had a cigarette—more knowing.
“At Ed and Joan’s, while you were talking. I went outside. Probably my coat still smells. It’s on the back seat.”
“I cannot believe this. No one smokes anymore.”
“I took it up.” She spoke promptly, as if she’d rehearsed the reply.
“I stopped twenty years ago.”
“I had never tried it.”
“It’s dangerous.”
“So is your travel.”
“And it stinks.”
“You won’t smell it. You’ll be away.”
He was so shocked by her casual I took it up, he was too embarrassed to tell anyone. He felt he had to hide her smoking from people they knew, and Bree objected to that. Smoking relaxed her, she said. It aided her digestion. It passed the time. Your own smoke smelled different from other people’s smoke. “Who knew?”
