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.
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.