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.
I’m sick, he told himself. I’m going surfing. I’ll feel better in the water, I’ll get well.
The surf at Waimea was head-high and clean, but even so he decided on the simpler predictable break at Pua‘ena Point in Hale‘iwa. He felt better driving down Kam Highway and promised himself a good day. When he parked he vowed not to look at the scrape on the fender, but a man on an old bike near the wall at the parking lot called out to him.
“Nice ride. Too bad it mess up. You hit one tchree?”
Sharkey shrugged, unstrapping his board, telling himself he didn’t care; but his annoyance was like heat suffusing his body and pressing against his eyes. The man had one leg slung over the bike, and the very sight of the rusted bike, the man clinging to junk, made Sharkey furious.
But he said, “I like it the way it is.”
“Da fender kapakahi. It look humbug.”
Tucking the board under his arm, making for the beach, Sharkey heard the man call out behind him.
“I know one guy do body work. He stay mauka side of ‘Ehukai, near Ted’s Bakery. Can fix, brah.”
The man was still muttering as Sharkey knelt to fasten the leash to his ankle, and then he dropped onto his board and paddled out. So as not to betray his weakness to the man he had marched to the shore and now paddled, asserting himself. But he had not gone far when the effort of it slowed him. The water was chilly, like cold metal against his skin, and the twist in the small of his back that Olive called a spasm kept him thrusting hard with his arms.
Easing up, he lost his momentum and was pushed sideways and slowed by the slap of a low blunt wave like a speed bump. He tried to right himself, lost his grip, and the board crushed with a chewing sound against a coral head. He felt through his fingers on the board the scrape of his fins and hoped they hadn’t snapped. Another set of waves lifted him and helped him straighten, but the force of it took all his attention, so that he couldn’t tell whether the fins were damaged.
He headed for the empty wave of the break, glad that he had it all to himself, because he knew he would be struggling. The sets kept coming, and he rode them, straddling his board, waiting for a likely one, misjudging several before he caught the crest of a good one and was swept up, paddling, and then canted on the face of it, and he stood to surf it. But just as he mounted the board, positioning his feet to angle it, the thing slipped from beneath him, and he could tell as he toppled that two fins were gone and the third broken.
He thrashed to regain his board and hugged it and paddled to shore in dark water as the sun was blurred by rags of drifting cloud. He was cold again, and cursing his board and the sharp coral head he’d hit, and the wave that had swung him sideways.
His board seemed heavier for being damaged and useless, he had to stop twice on the beach to kneel for rest, and the second time he saw a man on a bike pedaling away—the man who’d spoken to him near the wall.
It seemed odd for anyone on such an old bike to be pedaling so fast, and he smiled at the urgency of the man, because he himself was feeling so winded and slow.
But then, nearer the car, he knew why. His side window had been smashed, his expensive sunglasses stolen—that was all—and the thief was gone.
After he’d strapped his broken board to the roof rack and started out of the parking lot he looked for the man on the bike—he was certain he was the thief. He saw no sign of him, only the obvious fact that it was easy for anyone on a bike to vanish down a narrow dirt track that led through the mass of ironwood and kiawe trees banked by guinea grass on the far side of the road.
Still, Sharkey gunned the engine, hoping to catch a glimpse of the thief, and as he imagined sideswiping him and knocking him sideways off his bike, the effort of pressing his foot on the accelerator caused a stabbing pain in his big toe. He could only relieve it by easing up on the pedal. And it was then—his foot throbbing, the car slowing—that he saw the last of the thief, his dirty shirt, his rear tire, disappearing through the bank of guinea grass at the roadside and enfolded and hidden by the dense trees.
Sharkey’s foot was so sore that even if he’d been able to park near that pathway, he knew he would not have been able to chase the man. He howled in frustration and drove home slowly, infuriated by the broken glass at his feet. In his garage he swung his legs out and saw that his toe was swollen, probably aggravated by the seawater and his awkward stance on the board. And the reddened bulge still bore two marks like eye slits, the piercings of the centipede’s jaws. So the bite of the centipede had become infected, enlarged, mottled pink, pale yellow, and purple, like a poisonous creature inhabiting his toe, making him clumsy, causing him to limp and stumble.
“It’s like a carbuncle,” Olive said later. “I’ll have to lance it and drain it. You’d better stay out of the water.”
Sharkey did not mind the pain of the narrow blade slicing his flesh; the cut was like a flame, cauterizing the wound, a ritual of punishment and forgiveness. He’d always regarded incisions and tattoo needles, blood-drawing and stabs, as small deflowerings, always with a blossom smear of crimson. He liked Olive’s medical term, “bloodwork.”
But he was still angry. “He broke my window for a pair of sunglasses. I could have killed that guy.”
Olive lifted her face and looked at him with wonderment that became a disbelieving smile.
“He excites my contempt, as my dear mother used to say.”
“My mother never said that.”
He limped more thumpingly now, his bandaged toe chafing in the thong of his flip-flop. He took such care that his overcautious gait dragging and hesitating to protect the toe caused him to stumble, and in one of those stumbles he fell.
He’d been shutting the henhouse door with one hand, latching it, and holding a bowl of eggs with the other. He missed hooking the nose of the latch to the fitting’s eye, and leaning away and attempting it again, he snagged his sore toe on the overhang of the brick step. It was as though his foot had caught fire. He raised it and lost his balance and toppled forward, the bowl breaking on the bricks, the eggs smashing in a mass of yellow mingled snotlike yolk and goo and fragments of shell.
He cursed again, louder than ever, and heard his helpless howl echo in the gully below. The chickens squawked back at him and he heard their racket as blaming.
His days were fraught with accidents, many of them minor, like dropping the bowl of eggs—but such clumsiness made him feel old and futile. Some were more serious—he left a burner on the stove alight and scorched a pot (Olive: “That’s a sure sign of senility”—she was joking but he was stung). More serious still, he very nearly hit another cyclist, swerving as he reached for his cell phone, horrified that he had come so close that the man called out and pedaled after him, catching him at a red light and thumping the car roof, screaming, “Howlie!”
So after all these years that was what it had come to. Over fifty years in the islands, years of big-wave surfing, of beer-drinking on the beach, and handing out free weed, and party-going. He wasn’t Joe Sharkey of Waimea fame, or the Shark, or Braddah Joe, or Joe-Boy or Uncle Joe. He was a haole, another white guy in a new car, an unwelcome alien.
And because he was injured and couldn’t get into the water, and his new car was unreliable—possibly a lemon—he did not go far. He rolled down the hill to Three Tables and sat in a beach chair with binoculars, looking for the blowhole vapor of a whale offshore.
While he was sitting there one day, a man approached him, a fat man carrying fins and a face mask.
“Saw three whitetips,” the man said. “Under that ledge.”
“Really.”
“You got three types of sharks here in Hawaii—your tiger shark, your great white, and your whitetip. But your whitetip is mellow. They just stared at me, like ‘Who’s this guy?’ and I swam right past them.”
The man was pale and flabby, with rented fins and a mask, and he stood beside Sharkey, his feet planted in the sand, still talking about his encounter with the sharks. He was earnest in a salesman’s way, selling his information, and now he was talking about the configuration of the clouds in the distance.
Sharkey stared with defiance. He thinks I’m a tourist.With his bandaged foot and his binoculars he might have looked the part, but how did that square with all his tattoos? He became indignant, insulted to be unrecognized and, worse, having to listen to this ignorant man lecture him, telling him what he knew.
“Why are you giving me a fucking weather report?” Sharkey said. “I’ve lived here my whole life.”
“Take it easy.” The man was rattled by Sharkey’s sudden outburst. “All I said was I saw some sharks.”
“I’ve seen a million sharks! I’m a shark!”
Backing away, the man said, “Know what, pal? You got a problem. You need help.” And walking off, attempting to be brisk, he sank and stumbled in the sand, a clumsiness that—Sharkey saw—spoiled the effect of his scolding.
The next day a young man with a camera approached him. Sharkey believed he had recognized him and was going to take his picture. He was not sure whether he should cooperate or snub him. But the man said, “Mind taking my picture?” and handed him his camera. Sharkey obliged; the man lingered, standing too close.
“This sand is so coarse. It’s not like this in Louisiana, where I come from. We got a more powdery kind of sand—real soft. But this stuff is amazing, the way it feels on your feet, gritty-like. I guess it’s a different kind of sand altogether. I thought there was only one type of sand. But there’s more. The way I see it . . .”
I have traveled the world, treading the sand of a thousand beaches, Sharkey thought, and this man is lecturing me, like that other man with the sharks, not listening, no questions, just assuming that I am, like him, another tourist from the mainland, an old retiree on an island vacation.
He laughed at the thought, throwing his head back, but in an obscure way he was hurt—as he had been with the stumbles and the broken eggs and the theft and the misunderstandings—and that gave his laugh an edge of bitterness. These intrusions upon the serenity of his life amounted to assaults; made him overcautious, even a bit timid, and here he was in his beach chair on the sand, his sore toe upraised, and the young man still drawling.
Ludicrous. But there was an element of the ridiculous in the bewilderment of sadness. What were these intrusions telling him?
“You think that’s funny?” The man beside him was fierce, blinking, his jaw chewing his anger.
And Sharkey realized how he had been laughing.
“No, I don’t,” he said, sounding suddenly fearful. “Not at all.”