Under the Wave at Waimea

by Paul Theroux

  “How’s it?” Wilfred asked the next day.

  Sharkey said, “It was good stuff. Like medicine.”

  “Geev ’um,” Wilfred said to Fonoti, and another firm, fat, well-wrapped joint was handed over, palmed to Sharkey.

  “Anything for you, brah.”

  Wilfred and the others seemed relieved that they were able to help Sharkey—more than relieved, they took pleasure in supplying him with pakalolo. And the boys who’d made his life at school miserable now seemed like rescuers. So, he reasoned, maybe they were maddened by strangeness and wealth and the sight of happiness, but they understood misery and loss and death, and now Sharkey was one of them, in pain.

  He sucked in the smoke, shut down his breathing, and held it in his lungs, where it glittered in his blood, bubbled to his head, to his muscles, and he was uplifted and calmed—as though he’d just heard something unusual, to make him laugh and ease his mind, news he’d just forgotten, but good news that tickled him. And the odor too was a tang he came to savor, like the fragrance of green grass smoldering in a great thatched heap, slowly cooking, never bursting into flames, the smoke he could taste, smoke he could swallow, smoke he could eat, that filled his body with a burr of warm light, glowing in his eyes, taking the pain away and somehow inflating him, summoning the image of his father and inspiring forgiveness.

  The joints that Wilfred gave him were thick enough that he could smoke half after school and prepare himself for consoling his mother, and in the morning, before school, he smoked the other half, improving his mood so that he could face the other boys, and in this frame of mind he was confident enough to ask Wilfred for another joint. Wilfred always shook his hand—that complex local handshake, hooking thumbs—and directed someone in his little gang, the kanaka ohana, to comply.

  The pakalolo was welcome. It gave Sharkey the sort of lift he needed, for the kindness of the boys made him conspicuous, and their attention oppressed him in ways he hadn’t expected. Their forced good humor directed at him demanded a response. For “How’s it?” or “How you doin’, brah?” he had to say he was doing well, getting over it, though in his silent and sober moments he knew he would never get over his father’s death, and even in those times when it briefly left his mind his mother might be near him, tearful, to remind him. Nothing and no one could fill the empty space where his father had been.

  He had known what it was like to be bullied—the continual skirmishing, the need to look over his shoulder, the unexpected elbow or insult. What he was unprepared for was the weight of scrutiny in other people’s pity, their need to be reassured, as though they were the ones suffering and had to be bucked up. It took energy to endure being pitied, he had to be alert, and prompt, like someone who’s expected to offer elaborate thanks for a gift and might be in danger of offending the giver, to the point where such attention could seem like more than a burden, the gift an expression of hostility.

  The boys were simple; they needed their kindness to be noticed, their generosity to be acknowledged, because Sharkey had been their victim and now, led by Wilfred, they were making him their friend in a sequence of encumbering gestures.

  One hot afternoon after school Wilfred said, “Come,” and Sharkey followed him down the hill and through Papakolea, a street of bungalows, and through side streets lined by shacks. When he hesitated and looked behind him he saw Vai from school with one of her friends, a smaller girl he recognized from the class.

  Vai pushed the girl toward Sharkey. “Dis Nalani.”

  The girl smiled and fought off Vai’s hand.

  Ahead of them, Wilfred had paused near a white van parked at a slant just off the road. “Get in, brah,” Wilfred said to Sharkey, yanking a side door and handing Sharkey the joint he’d been smoking. “You need dis.”

  Sharkey climbed in, but before Wilfred shut the door, the girl Nalani shouldered past him, and then they were sitting on a torn mattress in the stink and heat of the van, the only light the glare from the sun burning from the pinholes of rust on the sides and the roof.

  In a shy croaky voice Nalani said, “You want to play with me?”

  Sharkey puffed and held the smoke in his throat for as long as he could while considering what to say, but the girl was touching him, seeming to know just what to do, as though she’d been with him before, and when his body had a reply, she laughed a little, a giggle of satisfaction that was muffled when she tugged down his shorts and gripped him with her hard hand, and then in the semidarkness, the heat of her mouth on him, the pressure of her lips, and the tickle of her encircling tongue, as he lay back dazed until, gulping, she was done.

  That too was an embrace, an act of compassion, another gift, his first, and it became something he wanted, though he needed to smoke pakalolo to get himself through it. He sometimes wondered whether he would have been better off alone—no sympathy, no pity, and away from the agony of his mother. He kept a joint handy and burned it whenever the pain returned, because the sadness he felt was physical—an ache where he imagined his soul to be, at the core of his being.

  And the remedy that surfing had always been—the relief of being on the water, tumbled by a great purifying wave—the remedy of surf was replaced by smoke. He felt a sense of panic, of the sort you might experience by losing your wallet or keys, when he patted his pocket and realized he had no more pakalolo, and was alarmed to ponder how he’d manage to get through the rest of the day.

  This need became clear in this anxious period of crisis—he understood his father’s chain smoking and whiskey breath, his mother’s drinking—she did not disguise it, she kept saying, “I need a drink,” she no longer hid her bottle among the sofa cushions; and he understood Wilfred and the others—they were worried and weak, they made no pretense with him of being tough, they had nothing to fear from him, nor he from them. Blaine, the pale boy who’d betrayed him, kept his distance—he lingered, dull and uncomprehending, but Sharkey understood him now too: he was someone who was happier and less complicated than he’d guessed, and Blaine profited from Wilfred’s new mellow mood, his easing up on everyone in general. And Wilfred seemed content in the knowledge that he had the power to ease Sharkey’s pain, giving him pakalolo packed in matchboxes or sealed in plastic bags or rolled in joints, blunts as fat as a finger.

  The sharp aroma and smoke-smell of weed Sharkey now associated with optimism and gratitude, a deep gulp of it the prelude to laughter and forgetfulness. It took away his appetite, it gave him time to think, and his thoughts were always incoherently pleasant. If any shadow loomed, if that pain stabbed his soul, he lit up again, and the pain was gone, the world was bearable, his mother was not a bore, and even school made sense: you went there to meet your friends, you picked up weed and smoked it afterward, and then the day was gone, up in smoke.

  He was so dreamy when he was buzzed that his mother did not question his mood; whiskey made her abrupt and irrational, but if he was patient, he tolerated her, saying nothing, and kept her company, she merely sat and sipped and smacked her lips, and was soon asleep in her chair, her head twisted sideways on one shoulder. Then he’d help her to bed, and she was usually still asleep when he set out for school, ducking behind a hedge on the way to smoke the remainder of his joint.

  Not surfing, not even swimming, he saw how close he’d come to resembling the other boys. After school the only urgency was to get high—no sports, nothing but idle talk under the trees, and then they went back to their houses, or the backseats of the junked cars, and he walked home and sat in the hot shadow of the parlor, waiting with his mother for the day to end. And before bed and in the morning he saw a new face in the mirror.

  How much time had passed since his father died he could not say, but he could estimate it by examining his face, how pale it was from being out of the sun, the sunken eyes and hollow cheeks, his lank shoulder-length hair that had lost the sunburned highlights, the purple teeth marks on his neck—Nalani’s love bite. They still met in the van in Papakolea, she still said, “You wan
t to play with me?” He was a pale skinny stoner like the others except that they were dark. He was as dirty as they were now; his mother had stopped doing the laundry, she rarely cooked, she was usually too drunk to notice what he’d become, and most days he got takeout at Zippy’s.

  He mocked himself for looking like the boys at school, but he did not feel so bad when he saw that his mother too was rumpled and neglected and either drunk or else pickled and sleepy. Drinking made her cranky, and when she fell—stumbled because she was drunk—and injured her hip, only more drinking eased her pain. She sat in a wheelchair instead of the armchair and waited for Sharkey to push her from room to room. The doctors found nothing more serious than a bruise on her hip, but she claimed they were mistaken.

  “I have internal injuries, like Dad,” she said when she was drinking, and using the Colonel as an example, she threatened to die.

  She never guzzled whiskey. She drank half a cupful first thing in the morning—seeming to assuage herself by using her old coffee cup, as though drinking whiskey from a coffee cup represented virtue. Then to maintain the buzz she sipped through the day, tipping the bottle into her cup with exaggerated care. Drink made her ponderous and cautious, as if in her deliberate gestures she wished to prove that she was unaffected, as judicious as ever. But her slow hands and her halting head shakes proved she was drunk—saturated, deaf, unable to stand up, irrational when she was challenged by the simplest question.

  In that state she had no idea that Sharkey was high, though now and then when he smoked, finishing a roach, she made a face. “What’s that smell?”

  Mother and son, each slumped in a chair in the hot shadows of a Honolulu bungalow on a late afternoon, the blinds half drawn, the sun slanting into the valley and burning on the back wall. Sharkey was soothed by the flutter of his mother’s light snores. She might wake up and say, “Tell me something,” or “When’s Dad coming home?” or “Where have you been?” and fall back to sleep.

  It was only the drunks on the street who fell down and swore and flailed their arms; his mother was a genteel indoor drunk, sleepy when she was not drinking. Perhaps the whole reason for her drinking, for anyone’s drinking, was to sink their worries and be stupefied enough to sleep.

  Sharkey did not smoke pakalolo to sleep; he smoked to be bright, to take away the dull ache of his anxiety, and to pass the time; he smoked to be a friend, he smoked to be himself—he did not like the person he was when he didn’t smoke. And always when he smoked it was as though he was in the water, buoyant but adrift.

  Smoking cost money, and pakalolo was itself a form of currency that he used to lure Nalani to his house, sneaking her past his dozing mother to his room, where they sat cross-legged on his bed, passing a joint back and forth until, laughing softly, they kissed, and then he held her head, his hands against her ears, and lowered it into his lap, saying, “Don’t stop, don’t stop.”

  He handed over fives and tens to Wilfred now, money that he twitched from his mother’s purse. But one day there was none in the purse, and his mother was too sleepy to give him any, so he had to say to Wilfred, “I’m tapped out, brah.”

  “I gotta pay my guy.”

  “Got no money, brah.”

  Wilfred thought a moment, in reflection probing his nostril with his finger, then said, “You got one board, braddah.”

  The board he had not used for how many months? He knew he was too out of shape to swim into a big swell or manage heavy surf, much less to ride a wave, which made the board seem superfluous. But he felt sentimental—it was a link to a life he had not wished to abandon.

  Yet he said, “How much for my board?” and at the same time thought, I can always buy another one.

  “Maybe good for fifty bucks.”

  So he agreed to sell his surfboard for a stash of pakalolo, and after school, when he trooped with Wilfred and the others to Ala Moana and Magic Island, he was reminded of how this had been a regular after-school route, and it seemed that it was someone else’s habit, the boy he had been, brisk and efficient, almost unrecognizable now. He was surprised and relieved to find his board on the rack as he had left it, crusted with dirt-flecked sea salt and old wax from being unused, the visible neglect shaming him and making it easier to abandon.

  “Dis one good stick,” Wilfred said. “Dis been shaped more better.” And he ran his thick fingers over the board, brushing the blunt rails clean. “Put some sex wax on dis and it fly.”

  Wilfred lifted it from the rack and, holding it in both hands, grunted in admiration.

  “I used to catch waves,” he said. “In Wai‘anae—Yokohama Bay. Pray for Sex Beach. My calabash cousin Clay place.”

  “Put the board down.” The voice was gruff and assertive. “Put it down and step away from the rack, boy.”

  It was Uncle Sunshine, striding barefoot across the grass.

  Startled by the man’s command and his fierce posture—head down, elbows out—the boys backed up and Wilfred jammed the board into the rack.

  “Anyone like beef, I take you on—otherwise get out of here,” Uncle Sunshine said. And as he watched the boys sidling away, he called out, “Not you, keed”—gesturing to Sharkey—“you stay here. I got one bone to pick with you.” Sharkey hung his head as Uncle Sunshine walked past him, calling out to the others, “Git!”

  Then they were alone, Sharkey and Uncle Sunshine, and Sharkey felt woeful, worse than he ever had when faced with a reprimand by the Colonel or his angry mother. They stood half turned away, not facing each other, in the harsh midafternoon sun, under the tall slender palm trees. In what was a ragged thought, not fully formed in words, Sharkey was ashamed in the beauty of that setting—the palms, the ribbed sea, the sun—the sun most of all, making him feel futile and breathless. Nothing could be hidden here—he was naked in this pitiless light.

  He found refuge and distraction in considering the incoming waves, how they rose and fell, unrelenting, traveling toward him from the sea, always at the same speed, a kind of consolation.

  “You think I huhu,” Uncle Sunshine was saying. “But no. I real disappointed.” He breathed through his nose, snorting for emphasis. It embarrassed Sharkey for being the reason Uncle Sunshine was forced to make this awkward speech, for which he didn’t have the words.

  “I’m sorry,” Sharkey said, hoping to end it.

  “Don’t say sorry. Don’t say nothing. Don’t make ass. Fricken do something, keed. You look terrible. You got red eyes, you got fish-belly skin. You smoking, and what I tell you? Don’t smoke. Smokers don’t surf.”

  Sharkey put his hands to his face as though to hide it, clawing at his cheeks.

  “What you father wen’ say?”

  “My father died,” Sharkey said.

  Uncle Sunshine went silent, seemed to stop breathing, and was still for a long moment. He then put his hand on Sharkey’s shoulder.

  “You father no wen’ make,” he said, and with his free hand he pointed to the sky. “He up there looking at you. He inside you and all around. He lillybit disappointed, like me. But he know bym-bye you can get back on your board.”

  “I want to,” Sharkey said, but he felt puny and pale and insincere and did not see any way he could surf. He was not rescued by this man—he’d been ambushed. He wished he’d sold his board, he wanted to get stoned with Wilfred and the others, he wanted to meet Nalani in the van or else sneak her past his drunken mother into his room; he wanted a smoke.

  But Uncle Sunshine still had a grip on his shoulder. He said, “Take a look at those boys. I know boys like that. I know they get you pakalolo, and maybe other drugs like speed or batu. But what I want you to do is look at them good, look at their faces, look at their rotten teeth and bad skin and fatness. You buy drugs from people who look like that, you guarantee end up looking just like them.”

  Sharkey was still considering the pace of the incoming waves, the slosh and drop and regularity of them. But he had heard.

  “So you want to look like that?”

&nb
sp; Sharkey reached for his board and leaned on it.

  “Not now,” Uncle Sunshine said, and slotted the board into the rack, then walked with Sharkey to the shore and led him into the water, going deeper, steadying him while a wave broke over him, and making him stagger with the force of its collapse, dousing his head.

  6

  Rehearsals

  After that sudden spell in the water, which was less a baptism than a near drowning, Uncle Sunshine dragged Sharkey to the sand and wouldn’t let him go near the water. “You out of shape. You will drown. You will shame youself. You will shame me,” the man said. He was spidery, with slick lizardy skin and squinting eyes, his fingers and toes pickled from constant soaking in seawater. An old man, but he was tougher than Sharkey, a new side of him just revealed—a benign bully, an intimidator to Wilfred and the others.

  He saw what the man was made of, the inside of the man, like the inside of Hawaii: no sweetness, but the sinew and survival skills of an islander; and suspicion. He understood sharply the obvious truth, that people have two sides, that the islands just beneath the shaggy green surface were not earth but black rock, that the inner life of Hawaii was molten lava.

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Stay away from those more worse so-called friends . . .”

  It was what the Colonel would have said.

  “. . . and stay away from the surf.”

  This was at the Beach Boys’ surf stand at Waikiki, after dark on a school night. And behind those words he heard the big surf crashing in the distance like something solid moving downhill, a slow and interminable avalanche.

  Uncle Sunshine said, “Me, I’m brutal,” and made him run from one end of the beach to the other, Sharkey slamming his feet on the sand, to build his stamina, to rid him of his urge to smoke. “You gotta replace one ting with anodda.” Uncle Sunshine supervised Sharkey doing push-ups; he ordered him to carve a skateboard up and down the Ala Moana Beach walkway, riding the concrete as if it were a wave, in surf simulation, ducking under the hedges as if getting tubed. He exhausted him, and still he said, “No surfing until you in shape.” The training was indistinguishable from punishment.