Under the Wave at Waimea

by Paul Theroux

  “Funny old lot you are with the wonga, twenty bucks a bung,” Olive said, holding a twenty-dollar bill between the two front seats until Fonoti pinched it in his fingers and flicked it away from her. “I still have a few more questions.”

  “Tanks.”

  “So does Joe,” she said. And in a deliberate way, as though formally introducing him, “Joe Sharkey.”

  Frawley humped and heaved in his seat until he was turned around, staring at Sharkey.

  “One more house,” he said, and directed Olive back into the traffic and up the main road past the high school to a junction where he said, “Mauka here.”

  Olive turned inland on a wide road rising on a long slope to a bluff of two-story houses. They were faced in stucco, pink and pale yellow, some with pillars and porches, all with lanais projecting toward the ocean.

  “The one with the big breadfruit tree in front,” Frawley said, as Sharkey ducked to get a better view through the windshield.

  Olive said, “Max lived here?”

  “No,” Frawley said. “I did. That was my house. That was my ‘ulu tree. I lost it all when I had some issues. Nice place, huh?”

  “Smashing,” Olive said.

  “When you see me at my tent at the beach, I know what you’re thinking—the guy’s a bum. This was my house once, but it wasn’t me. That tent isn’t me. I’m still me. So you want to see all the places Max lived in, but it’s a goose chase. Those places aren’t him—those houses and shacks. He’s still himself, no matter what.”

  Olive began to speak, but Frawley raised his hand.

  “Take us back to Pokai Beach,” he said, and as she drove away he kept talking. “Most of us are alone in life. But if you’re real lucky, you got one person you can talk to without staying afraid they’ll judge you. You can say anything to this person. He’s true to you—I don’t say ‘like a brother,’ because a brother can let you down. My brother was a buggah. This person, this true friend, is someone like your own self. It’s not love I’m talking about—love is insane. No, it’s trust.” He used his whole face to utter the word, making it sizzle, as truss. “Max is that guy for me. I wish I knew where he stay. I miss him. There’s so much I want to tell him that I can’t tell no one else.”

  Fonoti said, “Hey, you don’t know trouble till you lose your best friend.”

  By then they were back at the parking lot, Frawley sighing and snatching at his face, his voice having gone croaky and sorrowful from his talk.

  Sharkey put out his hand. He said, “Joe.”

  But Frawley’s hands stayed in his lap, obscured by the protrusion of his belly. He said, “I know who you are. Big Joe. North Shore guy, da Shark. Fonoti so stoked to see you because you went to school together.”

  Fonoti said, “Plus hung out.” He sniffed, remembering. “Wilfred Kalama. Nalani. Vai. That little psycho haole, forget his name.”

  “But I’m not stoked,” Frawley said, not listening. “I seen you surfing—you’re nothing special. Lots of guys like you—long board, monster wave—some of them more better.”

  He straightened in his seat. All his talk—some of it lapsing into pidgin, some of it preachy—had given him dignity. Now he seemed to have an air and a presence approaching grandeur, in spite of his burned face and scarred arms, his dirty clothes and frizzy, dusty hair.

  “I know that,” Sharkey said, looking beaten.

  “They don’t get endorsements. No big life for them. Just mokes and baboozes in Makaha, waiting, like locals always wait. But Joe Sharkey—big fricken deal.”

  “It’s not what you think.”

  “I seen you at the Big Board Classic, way back. You got points. But I’m not impressed. You was junk. Max got less points, but he surf with heart.” Frawley put his face closer to Sharkey’s and said with force, “He was a dog off his leash.”

  Looking pained, his features crumpling, Sharkey said, “He was at that meet?”

  “Sure. But you snobbed him.”

  Sharkey tried to speak, to acknowledge what he’d just heard, but he was unable to make a sound. He had no breath in his mouth to form a word.

  “So maybe you got more questions?” Frawley said. And now, reflective, he took the twenty-dollar bill he had crushed and placed it on his thigh and smoothed it against his sweaty flesh, pressing the wrinkles out of it. “Ask Max.”

  With a retching hack, like the onset of nausea, Sharkey began to sob.

  Frawley loosened the car door, then thrust it open with his elbow, saying, “Go boo-hoo somewhere else, haole.”

  10

  A Protected Class

  The stranger had shimmered into focus, a flat shadow at a distance, a silhouette swimming to shore, the dark speck in the far-off chop, simple as a water dog bobbing in the fetch of waves, slapping the water and swelling to a muscular body with reaching arms and, closer, becoming lighter, swifter, almost angelic, trawling with cupped hands in the sun-splash, making his way across the pleats of water in the bay, and finally a buoyant creature resolving itself to a man with a face—eager features, wide eyes, beautiful teeth, gasping in the shore break, calling out, “It’s me—Max.”

  The dead man had a name now, and a past, and friends, and a community—those other shadows swimming from the depths behind him, the man in Floristan, the camper Frawley, old Fonoti, who knew so much and who wondered where Max was now.

  No one had known anything of the dead man, and then it seemed everyone did—or enough people to provide a profile. And what struck Olive as odd—and she emphasized this to Sharkey—was that though he had served nobly as a benefactor to many people, he’d also had run-ins with the police. According to Frawley, he’d been stopped, reported, written up, and warned but never arrested, never charged with any offense. And so he’d remained unknown and out of official files.

  “It would have been ever so much easier for us if he’d been convicted of something,” Olive said. “Frawley sort of hinted that he’d committed some serious offenses. But nothing stuck. He’d slipped away—blameless. And why?”

  “Bulletproof,” Sharkey said.

  “How does that happen?”

  Max Mulgrave had been stopped, he’d been cautioned, but he’d always been let off, it seemed. A man living on the edge—a vagrant—subjected to stops or searches, with a history of drug use, who’d never been busted. He had no rap sheet, and yet if he’d had one, how simple it would have been to add detail to his life in Hawaii.

  That he’d been stopped was a help in knowing more, but he was blameless as far as the law was concerned.

  Ask the cops, Frawley had said, with the smirk of admiration some men have for lawbreakers who escape arrest. The cops know him.

  Olive reminded Sharkey of that. Sharkey said, “My memory’s junk.”

  “What about that cop who wrote the report—the one that came to Waimea the night it happened?”

  “My head’s not right.”

  Sharkey had thrown himself onto his sofa, looking broken, in an odd twisted posture of visible discomfort, his eyes turned toward the window, his body slashed by sunlight, something sacrificial in the way he lay slumped and vulnerable, like a man abandoned. He was staring at a tree in the gully below his house.

  “I saw an owl there once—a pueo,” he whispered, too softly for Olive to hear. “It’s good luck to see one, because they’re endangered.”

  Olive said, “He told us his name.”

  “I totally spaced.”

  “He said his father was a surfer.”

  “Ray-Ban,” Sharkey said, after a long silence. “Goofy-foot.”

  “I don’t even know why I’m asking. That guy Stickney made us a copy of the police report. His name will be on it.”

  New to the United States, a malihini—a newcomer—they called her at the hospital, and still new enough in Sharkey’s life to be insecure, often surprised by his moods, uncertain of the depths in his mind, and uneasy in the disorder of the house—his house, his plants, his chickens, his geese—she kept
her composure by using her nurse’s training as a meticulous record-keeper. You did not exist as an alien without paper to prove it: every scrap added to your identity, every ticket and receipt to your plausibility. And since the accident she’d begun to regard her attention to the details of her life with Sharkey as the diagnostic notations at the top of a fever chart.

  She was a girlfriend, without provable status, and she often thought of Sharkey dying in his bed and the authorities saying to her, “Who are you—what are you doing in this house?”

  She saved all the bills she’d paid, the receipts for household items, all the hospital bills, and the prescriptions in one file, the insurance claim in another file, and in that a copy of the police report, “Details of the Accident,” “Action Taken,” “Summary”—paragraphs of evasions and half-truths and outright lies, signed by Sharkey and the reporting officer, the lines under “Victim”—name, race, physical appearance, date of birth, home address, marital status, Social Security number—all blank. The only item entered, the one certainty, was the “Injury Code,” 04, in a box: fatal.

  Beneath the reporting officer’s illegible signature, a blue scrawl, his name printed in a child’s block letters: Ronald DeSouza.

  “We have to see this guy.”

  Sharkey’s expression was unreadable, perhaps one of boredom, perhaps one of agony, or he might not have heard. Preoccupied, he sometimes seemed breathless or deaf, as patients in pain often were. But Sharkey’s absence was extreme, as though he were underwater.

  * * *

  Rounding Waimea Bay, late afternoon, in the southern quadrant of the sky billows of soot-black clouds dragged long gray curtains of rain across the distant ocean. To the west was a gaudy flare at the horizon around the crimson mouse hole of the setting sun, its hot ferocity puddling the sea around it, the fire blazing on the water of its finality. The waves were distinct—backlit as they advanced—and Sharkey thought, Waves are thresholds.

  Sharkey resisted saying this, and adding, You learn to step over them and become someone else on the other side. But what did that mean? Thoughts like these bewildered him, and kept him silent.

  Olive was driving again, with thoughts of her own she could not share. On the way to Wahiawa, through the darkening pineapple fields, in the traffic at the bridge, and then parking at the police station—near the entrance steps, because it was raining—she was keenly aware of Sharkey crouched beside her. She hoped he wasn’t sulking. Guiding him through the parking lot into the station, she had felt a heightened sense of him as someone fragile, and another little glimpse of what motherhood must be like. Sharkey was reduced, he was numb, he needed to be reassured and humored and reminded to be careful. He scuffed next to her, obedient but vague, his arms swinging loose, unusually conspicuous in his tattoos and yet looking fraudulent, shuffling shyly with all that outrageous ink. In the rain, sudden gouts of it lashing him, his wet face framed by his lank hair, he bent over in a futile effort to avoid it, the big clumsy child.

  “Officer DeSouza,” Olive said to the desk clerk.

  But the man in uniform looked past her and spoke to Sharkey. “He expecting you?”

  Sharkey’s feeble smile of confusion indicated that he had not registered the question.

  “I called this morning,” Olive said. “I was told he’d be off-duty at six.”

  “Please take a seat.”

  They did so, not speaking, just breathing audibly as they waited, the breaths like marking time. But when, at a little past six, DeSouza appeared at the desk and waved to the clerk, he walked past Olive and Sharkey, his workday done, with an air of someone fleeing.

  “Excuse me.”

  DeSouza compressed his lips in impatience, and before Olive resumed he was already backing away, as though hoping to avoid a further question, straining to go home.

  “I’m off-duty,” he said in a peevish voice.

  “Joe Sharkey,” Olive said.

  The name stopped him. He cocked his head in concern and leaned closer to Sharkey’s expressionless face.

  “Shark?” He still looked uncertain, as though the name might wake Sharkey and make him familiar.

  Instead of speaking, Sharkey slowly nodded.

  “You been sick, brah?”

  In a whisper, his head bowed, confiding to the policeman, Sharkey said, “I’m drowning.”

  Alarmed—she had last heard him say that in a panic to the grommets at the community center—Olive took charge, saying, “We need to talk to you.”

  DeSouza took them to the outer lobby, where they sat in a corner, Olive showing DeSouza the accident report with his signature on it, DeSouza tapping the lines with his fingers, saying, “Sure I remember. Waimea. All that rain. The guy on a bike. The fatality. No ID. Open case—there was no follow-up.”

  “We found out his name. You can fill in the blanks now.”

  “This report’s already been filed. We’d have to make out a new report, refile it, or maybe file a supplement. Try come back tomorrow.”

  “It was a man named Max Mulgrave.”

  DeSouza sat up straight, jerked his head back, then smirked in disbelief. He said, “You’re joking, right?”

  “For real.”

  “That was Max?” DeSouza said. “You sure?”

  “The mortuary ran a check on his prints.”

  “He’s still in the morgue?”

  “He’s ashes now,” Olive said. “We’re looking for his next of kin. We went to the mainland—his hometown.”

  “Better off looking in Wai‘anae.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Max was famous there.”

  Sharkey said, “Famous for what?”

  “Famous for being a good guy,” De Souza said. “But he kept a low profile. We knew he was down on his luck, but we didn’t know he was on the North Shore.”

  “You told us you’d seen him—you’d picked him up before. That’s what you said at the time.”

  “The guy you hit, yeah—he had no ID. How was I supposed to know? I seen him around the camp near the bypass road, but it was just vagrancy, looked like a bum. Not worth the trouble of a ticket. And that night, the rain, the guy lying all bust up.”

  “But the prints,” Olive said.

  “That’s the medical examiner’s thing, at the morgue. We sent them the remains.”

  “I killed him,” Sharkey said in the same confiding whisper.

  The whisper startled the policeman more than a shout would have done. He turned away from Sharkey, to Olive, with a plea tensed on his face.

  “Max,” he said, sighing a little, snatching at his ear. “Not many people knew him by sight, but everyone on the force knew his name. Like a monk seal.”

  “Good swimmer,” Olive said.

  “No—no. A protected species.”

  Olive saw the man on the ground at Waimea in the rain near the black brimming pothole, broken, twisted, pale in death, unprotected.

  “Forbidden by law to harm or destroy,” DeSouza said. “You can do serious time, plus a big fine, for messing with a monk seal. Any cop bust Max Mulgrave, he gonna get serious lickings from the chief.” He turned to Sharkey and studied his gray grieving face. “Funny thing. As far as HPD was concerned, he was more better than you, Shark.”

  “In what way?” Olive said, because Sharkey was stunned by the words.

  “In a good way. Long time ago he did some kind of favor—some kokua.”

  “That’s what we were told in Wai‘anae—he helped people, bought computers for the school.”

  “Not that. This was something else—something major. Big-deal kokua.”

  “What was it?”

  “I don’t know—before my time. But I can hook you up at headquarters with the guy that put out the word. Maybe he’ll tell you.”

  “The chief?”

  “Deputy chief, field operations. Name is Malo. I’ll make an appointment for you. He probably doesn’t know that Max wen’ make.”

  * * *

 
“I was real sorry to hear he pass,” Deputy Chief Malo said when they told him they’d come to discuss Max Mulgrave. The man’s simple statement did not match the sorrow and incomprehension that showed on his face, convulsed in grief. Sitting behind his desk he was an imposing Hawaiian presence, with an enormous, oddly geometric head, as though carved in wood by an amateur, with odd flat planes on his skull, his black hair lustrous in the sunlight from the window, and under his bony brow eyes shining with tears. He lifted his big hands to his face and held on, stifling a sob, gagging a little, loosening a lock of hair that dropped past one ear.

  “Good guy,” Olive said.

  “Pono guy,” Malo said, insisting. “The best.”

  “You know how he died?” Sharkey asked.

  “I saw the report—DeSouza just sent it. Was, what? Coupla months ago?”

  “Yeah, Waimea, that bad corner. It was raining,” Sharkey said. “All my fault. I killed him.”

  “You was sober?”

  “Half drunk,” Sharkey said.

  “You was driving impaired,” Malo said, losing his grief in a rush of anger and regaining his voice of authority, pushing his hair back. “You killed a good man.”

  Olive said, “Joe is trying to make it right. We want to know as much as we can about him.”

  “So much to know,” Malo said. “He was in ’Nam. Had a business on the mainland—sold it for big bucks. He came here to live a great life—so many friends. So generous. Everybody loved him. Never mind he’s a haole, the guy was so pono.” He paused a moment, then added, “Plus a surfer.”

  Olive said, “I’m sure all that is true, but Officer DeSouza—and other people, his friends—say he had some issues.”

  Lowering his head, shortening his neck, looking bull-like, Malo said, “No clouds in your life, sister? And this guy—”

  “Joe Sharkey,” she said.

  “No clouds in Joe Sharkey’s life?”

  “Plenny clouds,” Sharkey said. “And one of them a big cloud.”