Under the Wave at Waimea

by Paul Theroux

  She said nothing—no whole words—but a gasp of impatience like an unformed word was audible to him, and when he looked again at her for meaning he saw she was moving her lips, mouthing words. Her lips were cracked, dead and peeling skin on their fullness.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

  The woman made a sudden noise, a honk of objection, the sort of sound a startled duck might utter. Hearing it, Sharkey became anxious. Then he knew, or was almost sure, she was in the grip of a drug. He knew drugs. She was toasted and mute, with the obvious slowness and density of someone under the influence, grunting and obtuse and vague, less like a drunk than like someone who’d been clubbed on the head. And she’d probably slept in those clothes.

  As he was passing the side road to town she honked again and made as though to grab the steering wheel.

  “No!” he shouted, and pushed her arm away, shoving the tennis racket. He repeated it, fiercely, but the woman hardly reacted—she hugged her bag and repositioned the racket.

  The tennis racket! It conferred respectability, suggested health and sportsmanship; and yet now he was sure she didn’t play, she was merely fumbling with it, she must have stolen it—what a fool he’d been. But he didn’t laugh, because he knew that someone drugged was someone dangerous, capable of anything, grabbing the steering wheel and sending him into a tree, howling at him, accusing him of—what?

  “Give me money,” she said—her first words.

  He said, “I’m giving you a free ride.”

  “Money,” she said, licking her cracked lips with a gray tongue.

  “No money,” he said, and became more watchful, fearing she’d use the racket on him, or yank at his shirt with her dirty hands.

  “Give five dollars.”

  He wanted her out of the car; his heart was beating fast. She seemed to swell in her seat. He prepared himself for her lunging at him, chopping at him with the racket, and he raised his right elbow to ward off any attempt she might make.

  “And now I’m going to drop you off,” he said, approaching the community center, glad that no one was in front of it to witness what might be a tantrum.

  “No,” she said, and used her tennis racket to point down the road.

  “Please get out of my car.” He took a deep breath. “I’m being righteous—pono—you get it, lady?”

  “No.”

  “Get out!”

  “Five dollars,” she said.

  “No.”

  “Give money.”

  Sharkey reached across and lifted the latch and pushed the door open, and still his elbow was raised to fend off any objection she might make.

  “Fucken howlie.”

  She batted at his arm with the tennis racket, but so feebly he snatched it from her and threw it past her into the gutter, facing her, daring her. He waited for her to use her hands on him, but she reached for her bag, tugged at one handle, and opened it—and he could that it was crammed with filthy rags and greasy scraps of paper, a tangled mimicry of possessions. She gripped the bag and hoisted it, hitching herself forward on the seat and sliding out of the car. Before Sharkey could pull the door shut she bowed as though in respect to thank him and spat at him casually, without force, leaving a gob of slime on the doorframe and a gleam of spittle on her chin.

  “Go home, bugga, back to mainland,” she muttered. “You weevil fucken howlie.”

  “You’re zorched, lady!”

  Sharkey was breathing hard as he drove away, telling himself that it could have been worse, that she could have physically attacked him while he was driving and caused an accident. And when his head cleared he laughed, thinking how before he’d seen her clearly the only feature of her that had caught his eye was her tennis racket. And he laughed at “weevil” too.

  That might have been a portent—she was witchlike enough—and was that party another, where he had met that arrogant boy? The boy who had no idea who Sharkey was, had stood up straight, the better to be seen among the surfers and hangers-on. He was so sure of himself, so confident of his ability to take any wave, the others saying, “He da weenah!” although the room was full of bowlegged and leathery old surfers who’d been riding waves long before that boy had been born.

  The boy garlanded with leis seemed to imagine that he gave off a glow—of youth, of virility, of success and sunshine—and heads were turned toward him, his mass of blond curls and blue eyes. He was as yet too young to be tattooed. But for him no one else in the room mattered. He was new to attention but already so used to it that he expected it, believing he deserved it, and would have been puzzled if anyone else in the room had been praised.

  Sharkey was fascinated. Something about that callow kid, he thought to himself—he couldn’t take his eyes off him. What was it? A tug of recognition, someone he vaguely knew, a way of standing—his posture, a resemblance to . . . who? Sharkey watched, nagged by not knowing why he was watching, but perhaps in the way a man stares at a much younger and beautiful woman who he knows is indifferent to him, who he will never see again—a glimpse of the unattainable, a black pearl the size of an acorn in a velvet box in a jeweler’s window.

  He had gone away smiling, thinking, That boy has no idea of the disappointments that lie ahead of him. He believes that he can ride any wave he wants, entice any woman with a nod, find any surf break in the world. And why, Sharkey thought, am I so rueful? He knew him. I was that boy.

  * * *

  Those two incidents a few weeks apart. And there were the dogs. Sharkey was sitting in his house drinking a cup of coffee he’d just brewed and heard a thumping, heavy paws beating on wood, two dogs loping past the window on the wood planks of the lanai, their heads lifted just above the sill as they bounded past.

  He had hurried out to chase them away but they were off the lanai by then, side by side, a pale one and a dark one, short-haired, no collars. What was stranger than their sudden appearance was that they had not barked. If they hadn’t been so heavy he would not have heard them, so there was something ghostly about their suddenness, bursting into view, then vanishing. They’d run with their mouths gaping, their thick tongues twisted out of their jaws, in pursuit of—what?

  They had bounded up the hill, out of sight, when Sharkey remembered his geese, and he ran barefoot up the grassy slope, snatching a rake he’d seen leaning against a rail. As he ran, a flock of birds came his way—the two ducks, three geese, the peacock, even some startled chickens, all apparently flushed by the dogs. But when he got to the top of the hill the dogs had gone; he could not tell whether they’d fled left or right, off his property.

  Peering at the bushes for movement, for a clue, he remembered the old gander, which had not flown downhill with the others. He called out and within seconds heard answering squawks—all the birds came to be fed except the old gander. For nine years the gander had been his companion, he’d raised him from a two-day-old gosling, and the greedy affectionate bird had never missed a feeding.

  Sharkey searched in the thickets and gullies of his property, expecting to find the torn body of white feathers or the cowering bird itself. He found nothing. No sign of the bird at all gave him hope that it was not dead, but it was a wan hope. He searched part of each day for a week, and after that week his hope was gone. Whose intrusive loping dogs? He did not know and never found out. They’d come silently, heavily, red-eyed, like dogs in a dream. Another portent.

  Around the same time, which was in the month that preceded his hitting the man on the bike at Waimea, a woman confronted him in the supermarket, Foodland, at the bottom of the hill. She was attractive—lovely eyes, a surfer’s body, her hair girlish in braids, vaguely familiar—but in the moments she began speaking to Sharkey her anger made her ugly and unknowable. She was fierce-faced, affronted, her pretty mouth twisted in threat—he could tell that as soon as she spoke she was preparing to attack him.

  “You don’t reply to my letter!” She stepped in front of him. She was loud, unembarrassed, and when bystanders p
aused to gawk at her she shouted, “You must think you’re too good for me!”

  “I didn’t get a letter,” Sharkey said, wondering if she was joking, backing away, trying to get out of the store.

  “I put it in your mail can a month ago!” Shouting, she reached for him. “I asked for a simple favor and you didn’t reply!”

  She had the animal threat face, the bared teeth, the wild hair, the recklessness of someone enraged, and he believed she was going to hit him, or scratch him—her arms were raised. Though he could block her attack, he could not easily stop her. He felt obvious, the foolish target of a woman’s anger—some bystanders began to laugh, and they hooted louder when he ran.

  Before he got away he heard the woman say, “You’ve forgotten all the people who helped you,” and the yelp, “Karma!”

  In his car, driving up the hill, he wondered if that was true—and wondered too if he would see the frantic woman again, or was she gone, like his goose and the crazy woman with the tennis racket?

  None of these incidents on their own would have alarmed him, and even taken together they were not strange enough to portend anything dark. But he reflected that all this happened before the accident that killed the drunk homeless man. Now they seemed full of meaning, with the shadow of significance. What troubled him was that he had not been able to read this meaning at the time, and even now he could not say what they were about, only that they seemed linked. Yet he was convinced they held a darkness he was too busy to discern.

  He thought, If I had put them together, might I have avoided the accident? And he answered himself: No.

  But he remembered the other incidents, trivial at the time: the old goose stepping on his foot and muddying his toes, gashing his foot on the lava rock, the centipede bite that had left one toe throbbing, stubbing that same toe, on his right foot, the one he used on the accelerator and the brake.

  All this, then the accident.

  7

  Picking Up the Pieces

  Without his own car, and with Olive needing hers—the insurance appraiser still had not examined the wreck, which had been towed to the front of the house and left there, the shattered window, the crushed and torn-open hood filling with rain and fallen leaves, a feral cat asleep on the backseat—without a car, he had begun to walk down the hill, or ride his bike, often with his surfboard under his arm, as he’d done when he’d been a teenager; and it did not dismay him. He was reminded of his youth, of skipping school, of happy days, pedaling, walking, hitching rides, being heedless, seeking waves.

  Only four days since the accident but stunned by the event, he felt his life turning around and drifting backward into the blur and simplicity of the past, when if anyone had asked him what was going to become of him, he would have said, “Who knows?” He didn’t ask. In his heart he had believed in his strength and his luck; he was convinced that he’d be all right. He kept this certainty to himself because he didn’t know anyone who felt this way, certainly none of his friends. Nor had he ever told his mother: he didn’t want his mother to say that she’d always believed in him—which was untrue—and then take credit for his success. An older Hawaiian man had guided him, the tough waterman who went by the name Uncle Sunshine. He was surprised when Uncle Sun said, “You got the juice. You got the moves”—surprised and dismayed, because now he had to live up to it, and this praise, which was also a prediction, was a burden.

  His mother had asked him what his plans were.

  “None,” he said. “But I’ll be fine.”

  “Because you have no ambition.” She had a way of snapping at him and then turning her back, and in those days of her early widowhood, with her back turned, she left the house with men. Imagine—pursed lips, a little-girl voice—I’m dating again. Her late husband, the Colonel, was screaming from his grave.

  But Sharkey did have ambition, it burned in him, because it was his secret, seeing himself in his dreams atop the boil of a massive, still-swelling wave, climbing to stand on his board and in a crouch riding through the barrel, his trailing fingers reading the wall in the pipe of rolling water, and at last twisting his board into the lip of foam, and after a swooping cutback speeding through the shallows of a breaking wave—then loud cheers, hoots, yells, and “Joe Sharkey!” shouted over the loudspeaker.

  No ambition? He was bursting with it, it trembled and enlarged him and made him incoherent. How could he tell his mother, or anyone, that in his heart he was already a hero? He had always wished for it, his small boy’s dream of bigness and power. His father’s urging him to become a soldier meant that he had to prove himself as brave, or braver, in another dangerous profession, and the risks that surfing demanded made it heroic. His ambition to ride the biggest waves, to be celebrated for it, meant he could not say those words to his mother or anyone—they’d see a skinny boy and laugh, they’d ask “How?” and they’d pity him for being deluded. Some might mock him, as they did all dreamers. Yet he lusted for glory.

  Pedaling his bike after the accident, he was returned to that dream; and he knew that he had succeeded—the years had proven it. He was now sixty-­two, a well-known big-wave surfer, a champion. He had become the person he’d always wanted to be—too superstitious to speak the word “hero,” but he knew that no one had matched him on the tour. He did not need to call attention to his surfing excellence or any of his feats—there were plenty of people to do it for him, even if not as many as before. There were the record books too; and he was a brand name—flip-flops, boards, leashes, shirts, trunks—though many of these products were no longer in the stores. Newer names, younger surfers, had taken his place. He didn’t want to think of them as the punks he saw at parties these days, it seemed envious and unworthy, but they did seem younger, flashier, more callow, without any idea of how surfing had emerged; and now and then when Sharkey said, “When I was a kid I met Duke Kahanamoku,” they merely nodded or murmured, “Sweet.”

  “He flashed a shaka at me,” he said. “One day he saw me swimming and said I was like a monk seal—water dog. It was like a blessing.”

  The paradox of surfing fame was its elusiveness, that it was local, like a tribal rite enacted in water, part of an oral tradition. Like all passed-down stories, surfing tales became distorted, exaggerated, improbable, and many were forgotten. When Sharkey had started all those years ago, surfing was seldom filmed, hardly recorded, and few pictures were made of it. It was witnessed by the guys in the lineup, or some people on the beach with binoculars, delighting some onlookers, and then gone, becoming talk, anecdote, and casual boasting. These days there were wide-angle films, scuba divers rolled with the wave and photographed surfers inside the barrel, a whole surf meet was a permanent record. But not when he’d begun.

  And so he was well known to the older surfers and a name to some others, but he was almost unknown to the grommets, the younger ones—an old guy, a presumptuous stranger at the parties, hardly noticed when he shopped at Foodland to buy groceries, just another leathery geezer in flip-flops.

  He had never ceased to surf. He had his favorite breaks and beaches, he owned twenty boards, he could still manage the biggest waves—was better surfing straight ahead on a monster wave than hotdogging and stressing his knees on a smaller one. He laughed to think that the pack of boys doing air-reverses, trying to impress the surf bunnies at Sunset, had no idea who he was. But it rankled too, because they had no memory of his achievements. He was mentioned with the handful of others as one of the first of the big-wave surfers, but the point was never made that he was still riding big waves, that he surfed nearly every day, that often after dark, after the younger guys had gone ashore to find a girl or drink beer, he was in the thick of the boil at Waimea, often alone, and no one knew, no one saw him streaking in moonlight down the face of a wave.

  He was ageless in the water, on a wave. On land it was a different story, the anonymity of old age—though sixty-two wasn’t old; Clyde Aikau and Jock Sutherland were still surfing, and they were older. His on-demand
virility in the sack had never failed him, what Olive called “your hurricane fuck.” But the sun had turned him to leather and the sun-brightened hair of his youth was now gray, and there was less of it. He was sinewy, almost gaunt in his leanness, beaky, with deeply freckled hands and a mass of ink on him, the look of a lifer in prison, or an old sailor. He resembled so many of the aging surfers, battered by waves and the hard drinking and drugging of the past, his whole life showing on his face and his body.

  The great waves he’d surfed so well had rolled toward shore and broken on the beach, and there was no memory of them now except in the talk of the other reminiscing surfers—and they had trouble with the truth. The waves kept coming, the younger surfers riding them, and now bigger money and more hype and high visibility.

  As a teenager on the Pipe, he had surfed big waves alone, unobserved, to the empty beach. That was the mystical quality of surfing—the self-possession and obscurity. For all the talk today, and all the glamour, no one rode the waves any better. He was consoled by the idea that he wasn’t alone: Hawaii was full of old surfers who were forgotten.

  So he was heartened—absurdly, he knew—when the insurance man recognized him and apologized for being a week late in looking at his car.

  “I never realize it’s Joe Sharkey’s car,” the man said, and covered his face with his hands, like a shamed boy.

  “You a surfer?”

  “Not in your league.”

  That was nice, not for his ego but because he had the man’s attention, and his respect would mean the whole messy business would be finished fast and efficiently.

  “How does this thing look?”

  “It might be fixable,” the man said. “But I’ll need to see the accident report. And we’ll have to get an estimate for the damage on the car.”

  He was a man of about forty, in a white shirt and tie, as rare on the North Shore as a woman in a dress wearing high heels. He was a claims adjuster, he said, he lived in Pearl City, he sometimes surfed at Ala Moana, his wife was in real estate, two children—and Sharkey thought, The other world.