Under the Wave at Waimea

by Paul Theroux

  Olive slid past the waitress as she was bringing the glass, saying, “Here you are,” and claimed him by kissing him hard, saying to the waitress, “White wine.”

  “And one more of these,” he said, pouring the last of the bottle and handing it back to her.

  “They told me you were out here,” Olive said.

  “They’re so young,” he said, seeing the waitress now head inside to the bar for the wine. “Here’s a story. A reasonably attractive young woman is sort of lost. She’s a surfer, better than average but not a headliner. She gets dumped by her boyfriend. Bummer. And then instead of a new Brazilian bathing suit she buys herself a thirty-dollar pair of frilly knickers and puts them on her smiling ass, and men clamor to talk to her. She meets an older man, with money. Just this change of clothes, this one thing, and her whole life is transformed.”

  “In England it wouldn’t happen that way. Some posh bloke might be tempted, but as soon as she opened her mouth she’d be slagged off as an oik.”

  “An oik,” he said.

  “A scrubber.”

  He faintly understood. He said, “An American would pounce.”

  “Because Yanks are randy little monkeys,” Olive said. “Most men are.”

  “But you like me—and we’re so different.”

  “Yes. Utterly.” She leaned at him; she said, “I like friction.”

  “That’s the good news,” he said. He pushed at the half-rolled blind of split bamboo. “They call these chicks in Singapore—these shades.”

  “I forget you’ve been everywhere.”

  “I had to, or I would never have found this place. And now that I’m cured of travel, I don’t want to go anywhere.”

  “What about the surf in Indonesia? In South Africa? The eighty-foot waves in Portugal? What about Jimmy’s, the break on Christmas Island? That you named after Captain Cook.”

  They were new enough to each other that she deferred, and listened, and asked for more.

  He sipped his beer. He said, “There’s enough here, all the surf I need or want.”

  “There’s Joe’s.”

  Joe’s, the left-breaking wave at Sunset, named by others for him. The waitress returned with Olive’s glass of wine and another beer for Sharkey. He said, “And there’s Joe’s.”

  Surfing had turned him into a traveler; he had taken his board around the world, to the places Olive had named, and to Brazil and Tahiti and Cornwall too; to the break just beyond Hue on the midcoast of Vietnam, to San Sebastián, and to the harbor at Hanga Roa in Rapa Nui. He knew the world by its surf breaks, by its bands of surfers, a compulsive and secretive and single-minded tribe of barefoot, big-shouldered gypsies.

  “Cheers,” she said. But he was frowning. “What’s wrong?”

  “I was looking at that junk on the shore. There’s junk at Joe’s. There’s junk everywhere.”

  “It’s so gross.”

  “There’s a whole mess of it in the mid-Pacific, an evil wheeling tangle of marine debris—rope, plastic, chemical sludge, a floating junk pile, getting bigger. Some of it gets loose and floats here.” He pointed to a fragment of plastic bobbing in the water. “We’re part of it. The great Pacific garbage patch.”

  He finished his beer and ordered another and became sullen, pouring this third beer, telling her how every crisis on earth, from pollution to overpopulation to poverty and ill health, could be ascribed to humans. He sipped and said, “We’re the problem.”

  “Something cheery, please,” Olive said. “I’ve had a long day in triage.” Seeing the waitress, she called out, “Please bring me a beer.” Then she said, “One cheeky bastard in the ward decided to flash his old job at me.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Laughed,” she said. “It would have been against hospital protocol to kick him in the goolies.”

  “No!” Sharkey said. “Disturbing!”

  Just then the waitress handed Olive a bottle of beer and walked away laughing at Sharkey’s horrified reaction.

  Olive said, “Sometimes the sight of people laughing alarms me.”

  “Ever notice, rich people don’t laugh a lot—it gives too much away,” Sharkey said. “And it’s sinister when they do. You know it’s a form of boasting.”

  “The poor actually cackle and hoot. They have nothing to lose,” Olive said. “You want to laugh with them.”

  “The word ‘juices.’” Sharkey had finished his third beer and was signaling for another. “Juices can seem dreadful.”

  “Bodily fluids,” Olive said.

  “‘Fluids’ is worse,” Sharkey said. He watched the waitress pour a bottle of beer into his glass and drank a third of it, staring at Olive, nodding as he swallowed.

  “Are you saying you hate those words because deep down you’re aroused by them?”

  “Deep down they disgust me,” he said with such sudden force that Olive drew back. “Litter. Graffiti. Stretch limos. Garbage in the ocean. Sewage spills.” He put his glass down. “I think of them and I can’t swallow.”

  “Steady on, Joe.”

  But he was gesturing and insistent, with a drunk’s deafness. “Surfing in the Philippines that season I got horribly sick, I couldn’t understand it. The waves were awesome. Heavy evil barrels, all ours,” he said. “I was stoked, yet I got sicker.”

  “Right,” she said, and looked closer. He never opened a book, but he always had a story that got her attention. He wooed her with his stories, like a traveler returned from a long journey, wishing to be a hero, seeking a listener.

  He swallowed the last of his beer and took a glass pipe from his shirt pocket, mashed a pinch of weed into the bowl with his thumb. As he squirted a flame from his lighter he took a deep hit, throwing his head back and gulping.

  “Then a local guy told me why no one else was there. We were surfing on an outflow from a sewage culvert!”

  “There goes my appetite.”

  “I surfed Midway,” he said. “It’s just up there, end of the chain—three hours away. The waves aren’t great, but it’s amazing for bird life. Everywhere you look there’s albatrosses nesting on the ground, thousands of them. And dead chicks. The mother albatross flies five hundred miles to scoop up a colorful scrap of plastic floating on the ocean. She flies back and jams it into the chick’s throat.”

  “Crikey,” Olive said softly, but Sharkey was still talking.

  “All the problems on earth, the ones that threaten our existence, are caused by humans,” he said, palming the pipe; and she was reminded of how a few drinks, or a hit, made him pompous.

  “If they threaten our existence, then isn’t that a good thing? Our extinction will solve the whole business.”

  “Not fast enough,” he said, slurring his words. “Instead of eliminating litter and nuclear waste and dirty air and traffic, and all the rest . . .”

  “Eliminate people.”

  “You got it,” he said, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Lose them. Not a few. All.”

  “I must be in the wrong profession,” Olive said. “Grafting away in a hospital. Making people healthy.”

  “You’re easing their pain. That’s noble. I’m thinking of something else.”

  “Zero growth.”

  “That’s a start,” he said. “Negative growth. Progressive depopulation.”

  “No one’s having babies in Germany or Italy, or Russia, or Japan,” she said.

  “India’s overflowing with them,” he said, and still talking disgustedly he raised his empty glass, signaling to the waitress. “So’s China, so’s Africa. It has to stop. I like the idea of shrinking cities, cratered towns, empty villages—huge areas of hollowed-out houses and collapsed communities—thanks”—the waitress was filling his glass again—“grass growing where there were once streets, wolves roaming in the old broken neighborhoods,” and he smiled and giggled a little as the waitress hurried away. “Frilly knickers.”

  “You’re drunk.” He was toasted, he was deaf and doll-like, sure
of everything, precise in his movements, meaninglessly cautious.

  Instead of replying, Sharkey sat back and stared at the ocean. The surface had gone black but it was dimly visible and rutted; the southerly breeze created low furrows that caught the edge of moonlight, the flop of the shore break, the distant sea like wrinkled tinfoil, all of it distressed.

  “My father was in ’Nam,” he said. “He’s in a chopper, heading to Khe Sanh, his first week in the war. A young soldier is strapped next to him, and he sees he’s scared, and my father says, ‘I’m going to give you some advice, kid.’” Sharkey paused and Olive became attentive. “‘When you get to the firebase, consider yourself already dead. With that in mind, you’ll be fine.’” Sharkey filled his pipe again and spurted a flame into it.

  Olive closed her eyes and intoned, “Consider yourself already dead, and you’ll be fine.”

  “Hunter Thompson loved that.”

  “You knew him?” Olive said eagerly.

  Sharkey jerked his thumb as a yes and said, “He was such a drunk, such a stoner. Always stayed in a luxury suite, either in Waikiki or at the Kahala, half-eaten meals all over the place, bottles of brandy and his stash of pakalolo nearby. Coke in his shirt pocket in a twist of paper, usually the same shirt. He didn’t know squat about surfing, yet he had an instinct for risk. He loved seeing big strong men compete, especially in sunshine—marathoners, football players, surfers. And he was dazzled by the availability of drugs here, though he misunderstood the culture. He made it into mumbo-jumbo and cannibalism. Hawaiians battling each other and cursing. His idea of sport.”

  The trill of tickled strings of a ukulele drifted past them from inside the bar, and in the nearer distance the wavelets shimmied in the pale moonlight, mimicking its rhythm, or so it seemed to Sharkey, his heavy head saturated with smoke.

  Olive said, “The Lono book.”

  “Hunter used to tell me that he envied me,” he said. “His alias was a kind of compliment. Whenever he checked into a hotel, no matter where in the world, he gave his name as Mr. Joe. He made a point of telling me that. He was a great guy, a kind of tragic figure—timid, for all his partying. He liked hanging out with me. Imagine—and he wrote about ten books. I ­haven’t even read five books. He told me once, ‘Surfing a big wave is like writing a book and just as intellectually demanding. Joe, I’m a surfer!’ I didn’t know whether to agree or not. But I did say to him, ‘It’s all in the head.’ He shot himself because he thought he was falling apart physically. Because the world had gone rotten.”

  He was nodding again, remembering, and he had kicked off his sandal and begun to massage his foot. “Wrecking the planet. The things I’ve seen. Damming rivers. Dynamiting fish. Oil spills. How much do you really care?”

  “When I’m at the beach,” Olive said, “and I see a plastic bag or some bits and bobs of rubbish, I always pick them up. The small things we do can save us.”

  “Have another drink.”

  “That’s my limit. That’s your limit.” She wagged her finger. “Brain damage.”

  “I’m not drunk,” he said, clutching his foot.

  Seeing he was agitated, she took his hand and said, “You’re the luckiest man in the world. You’ve been everywhere. You’ve made money doing what you love. You still get a shit-ton of wonga from residuals on endorsements. You have your mother’s trust fund and a massive house. And you have me. Why on earth are you rabbiting on about death and destruction?”

  “Too many people,” he said. “People are the problem.”

  “What’s wrong with your foot?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You keep rubbing it.”

  “That bite,” he said. “It’s itchy, like an old beesting.” He scratched it again. “Actually sort of pleasant to dig at it,” and he kicked off his sandal and raised his foot. “And that other thing—the cut.”

  Holding his foot firmly, she used her thumbs to examine his big toe. His foot was long and brown, his twisted toes curled like a flipper.

  “Two claws—or fangs—that’s a centipede signature,” Olive said, and chafed one thumb against the reddened bumps. “Papular urticaria—these are the papules. An allergic reaction to the bite.”

  “Thanks, doc. It feels better already.”

  Olive was peering closely. “Envenomation. I’ll clean it again when we get home. This could ulcerate or go septic. You need to put something on it. Your poor foot!”

  He toed his flip-flop and slipped his foot in. “There were no centipedes here until humans came. No pigs, no goats, no mongooses, no mosquitoes, no feral cats, no dogs. Humans are the problem. Humans are an infection on the earth.”

  In his pitch of indignation he sniffed and wrinkled his nose, then drank again, and he used his knuckles to clear spittle from his lips. He became self-conscious as he did so, turning aside to see whether anyone had noticed him.

  As he turned, a big brown fat-faced man grunted at him, and Sharkey, startled, jerked his head away as though he’d been slapped.

  But the man laughed and said, “How’s it, brah?”

  Tattoos on his neck, a cluster of scars raked beside one eye, a low rattling laugh—Moe Kahiko. His hand seeking a fist bump, was so tattooed it looked like a blue glove. The man had come from behind him and was now crouched beside him like a snorting wordless animal hoping to be petted.

  Bumping the tattooed fist with his own, Sharkey recovered from the surprise and said, “I’m good, brah.”

  “You scared him,” Olive said.

  “Nothing scares this braddah,” Moe said. “They tell me you stay out here on the lanai with the wahine.” Moe smiled, showing his discolored and broken teeth. “I try say aloha to my braddah.”

  “You catching any waves?”

  “A few. Da kine. Too much da wind.”

  “I was out at Rubber Duckies yesterday.”

  “Was insane,” Moe said.

  “A malihini did a face-plant on the rocks. Cracked his leg. Olive fixed him at the hospital.”

  “Today was big but more worse da wind.”

  “Moe, this is my wahine, Olive.”

  “Nice to meet you,” the man said, and clutched at Olive’s hand, enclosing it with his two thick tattooed ones as though trapping a small bird.

  “Besides being a great surfer, Moe is a wall-builder. He did the walls at my house with his team of Tongans.”

  “No walls nowadays.” Moe shook his head, saying, “Business is junk all over the island.”

  “What about the North Shore?”

  “Here is more worse. It the junkest.”

  Sharkey had the ocean on his gleaming face, blue eyes and fine lines from the years of sun flashing on the water, a bony mask, the leathery skin shrunk to its contours. And the other man, stocky, with a fleshy face, like a feature of the earth, big dirty feet and blackened fingernails and tattooed fingers, his knuckles bruised from handling the lava rocks he fitted onto the walls he made.

  Sharkey said, “Moe, you should advertise.”

  The man sniffed and considered it and dismissed it with a grunt.

  “If I did that, people around here wouldn’t like me more than they already don’t.”

  Laughing at each unexpected word, Sharkey said, “I’ll remember that. Want a drink?”

  “Gotta go, brah.” He rummaged in the pocket of his shorts and brought out a bulging plastic bag. “Dis for you. I smoked one pig—take it. Is da kine.”

  He hugged Sharkey and when he turned to go bumped a chair, stumbled a little, and walked off, lightly cursing.

  “See?” Olive said. “Some people aren’t so bad.”

  Sharkey sat back and stared at the ocean again. The surface had gone black but it was dimly visible and rutted; the onshore breeze swept low furrows, their edges moonlit, the nearer water gulping and dark, the water in the distance at the horizon like ripped cloth, all of it distressed and dreamlike.

  “I used to buy pakalolo from him,” he said. “Then I went elsewhere.”
/>   The pretty waitress appeared again, holding menus under her arm.

  “Can I get you guys something to eat?”

  Drawing a deep delaying breath of equivocation, as though just coming awake and reminded of where he was, Sharkey looked to Olive for an answer.

  “I’m not hungry,” she said.

  “Yeah, I’m good.”

  The waitress slid the check next to his drink, saying, “No hurry. I’ll just leave this with you. Mahalo.”

  When the waitress had gone, slipping among the cluster of tables, twitching through the hanging strands of beaded curtains in the doorway, her ponytail dancing, Olive said, “You’re not as gloomy as you sound.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I see you staring at the waitress’s glutes. Isn’t that a sign of hope and belief?”

  “A mere glance at the wonder of nature and Hawaiian nutrition. God made those curves too.”

  “She’s all tits and teeth. And you’re drunk, mate.”

  “Just a little.”

  “Instead of pigging it here, let’s have a drink at home,” Olive said, and seeing that Sharkey had become subdued, she hugged him. He held on, he kissed her. She said, “I don’t trust anyone until I see them drunk. I didn’t trust you. And then I saw you plastered. You were nicer, just a little giggly. And I realized I was safe. Hey, let’s go.”

  4

  Drunk on the Road

  The night-blooming jasmine, a leggy hedge of it next to the parking lot, filled the air with a flare of sweetness that matched the moonglow on the distant headland, Kaena Point, giving it the look of an outstretched paw in the sea, the shadowy mountain and ridge behind it like a recumbent lion.

  Sharkey murmured these images in sentence fragments and pointed at each—the jasmine hedge, the headland, the mountain, the moonlight on the water, now eclipsed by a swelling cloud—and then he bent over to scratch his buzzing toe.

  “My foot is killing me.”

  Olive had turned her back to the sea and the mountain ridge and the cloud. She said, “How did Moe cure you of buying his weed?”