Under the Wave at Waimea

by Paul Theroux

  His name was Ben Fujihara. He said he’d stop at the police station in Wahiawa on his way back to town to get a copy of the accident report.

  “In the meantime, here’s a list of approved body shops. You can drive it, the car?”

  “All the bodywork on the front end is busted up, and the windshield’s smashed. But it runs.” Sharkey was studying the printed form. “I could try this place in Waialua—Aloha Garage.”

  “Let me know what they say,” Fujihara said. “We’ll look at their estimate. Oh, and”—he held out a small white pad—“would you mind signing this?”

  “Is that some kind of form?”

  Fujihara said, “Your autograph. For my boy. He’ll be stoked.”

  “Does he know who I am?”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  When he had gone, Sharkey drove to Waialua, where at the body shop a man rolled from beneath a car and smiled, wiping his hands on a rag.

  “How’s it?” he said. A name patch, KEOKI, on his pocket. “Park that bad boy over there. You here for one estimate?”

  “Yeah.” He bumped the man’s grease-stained knuckles with his own, saying, “Joe Sharkey,” and waited a beat for a reaction.

  “Nice car,” the man said. “Lexus. Ninety-seven. They make da kine good that year, braddah. Sales were bad so they put everything into that year’s model—more better parts, more safety, extra padding for quiet, leather. Good product.”

  “It’s been carrying surfboards for the past sixteen years. And I had a little accident. What do you think?”

  “If fix,” he said, and with an expression of sorrow shook his head from side to side, “it look humbug.”

  “I’m here for an estimate,” Sharkey said.

  The man frowned. “She totaled.”

  “No—I just drove it here from my house. It needs bodywork on the front end and a new windshield. Pop out the dent in the door and fix some dings. It runs fine.”

  The man was smiling, as though at Sharkey’s stupidity, being patient, taking no interest in what he said, waiting for him to finish.

  “I make a report—it’s totaled,” the man said. “Then you get your money.”

  “And what happens to this one?”

  “I buy it.”

  “So it’s not totaled?”

  “You don’t get it, braddah.”

  “Yeah, I do, Keoki.” The insurance company would compensate him—and he’d buy a new car. And Keoki would get the car he admired and would fix it. “You want my car.”

  The man had not lost his smile. There was a streak of grease on his neck, his fingernails were black, his hair dusty and matted. As the two men stood face-to-face, in silence, a woman in denim overalls approached them, rolling a wheel she might have just repaired—the tire was new, with shiny black treads.

  He had first taken her to be a thin boy, but he saw that her hair was piled into her baseball cap. She was dark, thin-faced, Filipino, with large dark eyes, and seemed too small, too thin, for the fat tire on the big wheel, but she controlled its movement, balancing it on top with the flat of her hand. In contrast to Keoki, her overalls were clean. Steadying and stopping the wheel, she looked at the car as though wishing to claim it.

  “Totaled, right?”

  “So this man says.”

  She made a knowing face, widening her eyes.

  “Georgie, he wants it, eh?”

  “That was one primo year,” Keoki said.

  “You wen’ buss up someone, yah?”

  Sharkey was startled by her confident statement, having taken no more than ten seconds blinking at it to size up the car. He said, “How do you know?”

  “Koko,” she said.

  “Whaaa!” Keoki wailed. “Where you see koko?”

  And the woman approached the car and with a thin hovering hesitant finger pointed daintily to a smudge of brown like a scabbed blister on the jagged rip of the front fender.

  Sharkey said, “You mean blood?”

  “Poor buggah blood,” the woman said, and used her finger to flick a stray wisp of hair over her ear.

  “Cannot,” Keoki said, and turned away in disgust. “No can buy ’um.”

  “How much you want for dis?” the woman said.

  “I guess you’re not superstitious.”

  “This car kapu,” Keoki said. “It a bad ting. It stay wid human blood. Koko bring trouble”—and it sounded worse in his pronouncing it tchrouble.

  “How much?” the woman said.

  Sharkey said, “I don’t know. If it’s totaled, you do the math. The estimate to fix it, subtracted from the Blue Book value. I’ll sell it to you for that, or best offer. I’ll buy a new one.”

  “Suppose was da poor buggah head?” Keoki said, rocking in his greasy overalls in a clumsy anguish. “Da head is sacred kine. Full of mana. Da mana is on the car, but it a curse, yah. Why you no tell me you hit one buggah?”

  “It was a drunk homeless guy on an old bike. Maybe a tweaker.”

  “He wen’ make?”

  Sharkey sucked his teeth, tossing his head at the same time, sound and movement indicating yes.

  “Josie, you take da car. I no want ’um.” He grimaced, averting his eyes from the smudge of blood.

  “Deal.” With the heel of her hand, graceful but firm, she pushed the wheel she’d been steadying beside her, and when it was rolling trotted next to it to a car canted upon a red upraised jack.

  When Sharkey, half laughing, told Olive what had happened at the garage, she said, “Are you surprised? Hawaiians have a thing about blood and bones—any body part of a human is power. And potential trouble. That was the first lesson I learned at the hospital here.”

  “Tchrouble,” Sharkey said. “Funny. He’d really wanted the car.”

  “You reckon it strange that he had respect for the dead? Fancy that.”

  “Maybe. But the guy’s in a garage, with a wrench in his hand.”

  “For most people on earth—don’t you know this?—the dead don’t die. They’re always with us.”

  Sharkey smiled at her seriousness. “He was afraid.”

  “Fear is one way of showing respect,” she said. “But you’re Joe Sharkey. ‘No fear’ is your motto.”

  “I’m getting me a new car.”

  “You so deserve it,” Olive said, then looked away, shaking her head.

  That became his mission for a week, going from dealership to dealership, Olive joining him on the afternoons when she was free, talking to salesmen, taking test drives, and assessing the suitability of the car to take a roof rack for his board. Some of the salesmen knew his name, and Olive stood aside and watched with distaste as they smiled, glamoured by the visit of the big-wave rider. They were older men, some of them surfers themselves, eager for the boast of Joe Sharkey buying a car from them.

  Buying a car was a novelty, and a diversion. He’d believed that his old well-maintained Lexus would last another few years, or longer. He had not contemplated replacing it. But the accident had changed everything, and he found himself the object of attention, the experience he’d known in bazaars around the world, hawkers calling out, “Look, look, sir,” and appealing for him to buy. He enjoyed the attention for the power it gave him to look or to turn them down.

  He settled on a sleek, black, bullet-shaped SUV, the chrome grille set like a scowl, the rear end rounded and buttocky and businesslike, the whole vehicle hunched forward, nose down, as though for speed, with a roof rack that could accommodate two boards, a head-turner, unexpected and welcome, a gift.

  “Another toy,” Olive said when he drove it home.

  She would have said more in mockery, except that on arriving he complained of a severe headache. And then instead of driving it, cruising to Hale‘iwa, he left it parked in the garage. For two days straight she found him lying on the sofa, his hands on his face. Back spasms, he said. Insomnia.

  “I can’t believe it,” he said, talking into his hands, and explained that it was too painful for him to drive.
>
  “I was expecting something like this,” Olive said. “You keep forgetting you were in a serious accident.”

  But, his back knotted, his neck throbbing, he remembered now: the gouts of rain, the splashing windshield wipers, the bright blobby glare and in that glare the explosion of sound and light and shattered glass, the broken bike and the baglike form flung forward against the window.

  Except for the cuts on his arms he had not hurt himself. Then he had only sighed, seeing the sodden corpse of the man, and instead of a tremor of guilt or fear he had felt a towering vitality, the dizzying conceit of having survived, standing in the rain, a whole man, slightly bewildered at the sight of Olive crouching over the dead man, her fingers on his wrist, saying, “He’s gone.”

  Sharkey had not been injured; he was surprised, feeling weirdly strengthened, as though having come through a testing ordeal, proven himself, the sense of having surfed a big evil wave that had tricked and toppled him, the joy of bobbing up after a hold-down and paddling to shore.

  Driving from the dealership with the new car he’d felt the first of the back spasms, the tugs on his head, hot wires of pain wrapping his neck, seeming to yank his eyes from behind, and, fighting this, his lower back came apart.

  “I almost didn’t make it,” he told Olive—and it was true, he’d just missed hitting a cyclist on Nimitz and nearly sideswiped a car on the H-1, his hands greasy with sweat gripped the steering wheel—pain in his eyes, pain in his finger joints.

  Once, long ago, in Indonesia, surfing Mentawai Reef, he’d contracted dengue fever—a week of pain in his joints, his temperature 103 degrees, thirst, headaches, and low spirits. It was less like a sickness than a bereavement, like sorrowing, a fatal melancholy that was also physical anguish.

  That was how he felt now. “Can’t drive” was an understatement—he couldn’t sit or stand, and even lying on the sofa he was in pain, as though he’d broken his back. At night the fever headache kept him awake and, weakened by sleeplessness, he felt sharper pain in the daytime.

  The Valium Olive gave him for the back spasms depressed him and sent him to sleep, but he seemed comatose, and when he woke, unrested. A week of this, but even when he was well enough to stand, or shuffled to the car, he felt the pain again in the driver’s seat.

  “I guess I’ll do the driving now,” Olive said, knowing how he hated to be driven and thinking it might encourage him to deal with his pain and drive.

  But he accepted her offer, and though he still surfed or swam, there were days, medicated, when he was slow and sleepy and felt like an invalid, people he knew at Foodland or on the beach surveying him with surprise and saying in their gauche overfrank way, “You look terrible, man,” or “You okay, brah?”

  Yes, he said, insisting. It was a bug. It was going around. He’d be fine.

  8

  Intrusions

  To feel ill on a sunny day in the islands, to sicken under a cloudless blue sky, his eyeballs burning with fever, was a peculiar form of torture. Hawaii was not its stuffy rooms, its offices or interiors—it was its outdoors, where he lived, upright, barefoot, and all work seemed wasteful. Sharkey’s element was water, sunlight beating on the sea, its heat flashing against his face, and everything else a confinement.

  I am an animal, he often murmured to himself, I am a sea creature, a water dog, flipping from wave to wave. He seldom lingered in the house. He woke and walked outside each morning and only then did he take a deep breath to taste the day, inhaling the purring aromas of the flowers beneath the lanai, the flutelike blossoms of pak lan, the orange trumpets of pua kenikeni, the traces of jasmine, and licking all their syrupy perfumes on his lips suggested something crushed, seeping sweetness into the air, the first fingertips of day. He was vitalized by his outdoor life in this water world.

  But this particular morning, seeking a reassurance of health, he swung his stiff legs off his bed after another night of headaches and back spasms—he’d resisted the Valium, which left him dry-mouthed and zombielike—and he went outside and was so dazzled by the bright light he staggered back, the sun like a sword blade. Some deep breathing, the pranayama he had learned in yoga, helped settle his head, and by degrees he felt his strength return, a noticeable assertion of health, and he vowed to go surfing.

  Lying in bed in the daylight clouded his mind and drained his energy, desiccated and demoralized him. He needed to restore himself, to rehydrate by being in the water; he wanted to make a bold move, by surfing—to slip away from his aches and trick his illness. Simply to feel ill seemed to him a mistake, it was wrong; being decisive was the answer, action was the cure.

  He was glad that Olive was at work when he woke, because he knew she’d try to convince him to take it easy. “Relax,” she’d say, and he’d have to listen.

  Though they’d been together only six weeks, she was now part of his life; the accident had created a bond, it was something they’d struggled through, a shared experience of sudden death. Because of this he knew how she’d react. He had learned from his mother, from his solitude, that it was possible to hold long unsatisfactory conversations with people he knew well—even though they might be absent. He had one of those frustrating dialogues this morning, rebutting all the arguments he’d heard before, the times he’d been sick. He often felt that Olive became her true self when he was ill or out of sorts—“a bear with a sore head,” as she said—because it put her in charge, and in a position of strength she mothered and manipulated him in ways that made him frantic to get well.

  “I’m going surfing.”

  “That’s the last thing you should be doing.”

  “It’ll make me feel better.”

  “It’ll set you back. You need rest.”

  “I need action—the Miki Dora way.” And he nodded. “Miki once said that no problem is so big or so complicated that it can’t be run away from. Great surfer. I had one of his long boards. Da Cat.”

  “Go back to bed.”

  “You’re so bossy.”

  “Because you’re such a stubborn plonker. Look, I’m a nurse. I know what I’m talking about.”

  “And I know what’s good for me.”

  “Always the narcissist. But you look ropy, like something the dog sicked up. The dreaded lurgy.”

  “I can look after myself.”

  “You need rest, maybe medicine.”

  “I hate medicine. I avoid it. Medicine makes people sick. You’re a nurse and you don’t know that?”

  And more, sparring and nagging, and Olive wasn’t even in the room. She was six miles away at Kahuku Medical Center. Yet he was playing out the dialogue, responding to her, as he pureed a mango smoothie and changed into his board shorts and T-shirt and then threw handfuls of pellets to the geese. While they pecked and squawked he sat and drank the smoothie, still murmuring in reply to Olive’s objections.

  The glare made him unsteady. He had to put on his sunglasses and stretch again before he was able to hoist his board onto the roof rack, and even so the simple task seemed unusually laborious. But this was the cure. He needed to surf, and if this lifting of the board was harder than normal, the reason had to be the new car—the SUV was higher than his old car, the new roof rack sat on different towers and bigger clamps; it was more of an effort to hoist the board at that angle.

  “It’s just a question of getting used to it,” he said, talking in his head, as though in reply to Olive, who would have challenged him—“See, you’re having trouble lifting it”—had she been there.

  He smiled to think how we carry on conversations with people who are absent, who loom large in our lives, justifying our actions to them. He often found himself responding with force or irritation to the objections of his mother, though she’d been dead for years, opposing her through force of habit, feeling nagged.

  How the dead rule our lives from the grave, he thought, remembering Olive and The dead don’t die, and laughing out loud at this gave him a jolt of vitality.

  Pausing just before
he got into the car, he glanced at its shine, its newness, the sleek bullet shape—and his surfboard strapped on the roof rack made it sleeker. Going closer, he saw his face in the side window, someone he scarcely recognized—a much older and frailer man, and though he told himself that his aged appearance was the result of his illness, he knew that face awaited him in the future, a preview of himself as an old man. Surfers aged badly; it was the sun burning their flesh and the erosion of strong waves—pitiless nature. Surfers remained physically strong but they looked like hell, like old homeless coots, their bodies dried and hollowed like driftwood, and for the same reason, bobbing in seawater, rubbed by salt, cooked by sun.

  Behind the wheel, starting the car, moving up the driveway, he said (as though to a stranger who’d remarked on his worn and weathered face), “You know how long I’ve been doing this? Almost every day since I was a teenager at Magic Island, playing hooky from Roosevelt. Every day in the water, the sun and waves beating my face.”

  He’d seen faces like this on old half-broken men on the coasts of Africa and Asia, but he was so disturbed by his own that he tried to verify it in the rearview mirror. The mirror was crueler, clearer than the side window with its dusty soft focus. He saw a brown pinched face and anxious eyes, and while still peering he oversteered, saddened by the sight, and saw his expression change as the right side of the car caught the edge of a terracotta planter and cracked it, raking the front fender, digging a furrow into the new paintwork.

  “Shit!” He was further shamed by his eyes in the mirror, registering helplessness, as though rebuked. Then he leaned back and saw a cartouche of his foolish face.

  To blunder was one thing; to observe yourself blundering in this way was worse. And when he backed up he raked the car again and swore louder. Then he averted his eyes from the face that grew older and uglier in those seconds.