Sharkey’s whole back smarted like a blistered sunburn with his fresh tattoo, UNDER THE WAVE, his skin still hot, stinging with the welts of a mass of unhealed needle punctures and bright ink. He stifled a gasp as he was nudged by someone pushing behind him. He stepped aside on the lanai to let the young chattering surfers pass by, and he growled in annoyance at their clumsiness, bumping him, oafishly and unlikely, unsteady in their gait, pigeon-toed and toppling, like amphibians—so sleek in the water, so awkward, stumbling on solid and unforgiving wood planks.
None glanced at him, none spoke, none saw him or commented on the blood that had leaked into the back of his T-shirt. He was old and inanimate. They were big reckless boys, with a scattering of pretty girls, wide shoulders, crazy hair, and bruised feet, pushing past him in a scrum of energy and health and, what was most remarkable, their youth, their gusto, a heedlessness that made them risk the biggest barrels at Pipeline or the winter swell at Waimea.
I was a punk like you once, he thought. But I surfed Nazaré, and no one here knows it.
The bungalow belonging to Hunter’s friend Franco faced Rocky Point—not large, but the lanai was wide and roofed, surrounding the whole house, and when it became obvious to the surfers that there was not enough room for them to circulate inside they spilled back onto the lanai, laughing, teasing, swigging beer and smoking joints in the sharp burned-vegetable smell of pakalolo and sour beer suds.
“That’s a man-sized blunt,” one of the boys said to Sharkey.
Sharkey showed his teeth as he held the smoke down, saying nothing, wondering whether he would be recognized. But the boy merely nodded in the torpid, seemingly slow-witted way of an uncertain sea animal, sleepy-eyed and tottering on a clod of earth. He seemed to look past Sharkey’s head at the breaking waves at Gas Chambers, animated by the sound of water sloshing on the shore, like pebbles swilling in a barrel.
“Custom-made,” Sharkey said, and tried to think of something more, but he was too buzzed to come up with anything clever. And talking to surfers involved the challenge of thinking in another language.
“I seen you with Moe Kahiko,” the boy said. “He got da kine. Killer buds.”
Sharkey was about to reply when he realized the boy was not listening, had begun to lurch away in the direction of four young surfers at the rail of the lanai, whooping at the arrival of someone from the street.
“Hi,” he said to a young woman, who looked surprised to be greeted.
“Hi,” she said guardedly, and hurried past him, her surprise becoming a kind of anxiety.
I look like an old man, he said in his mind, speaking to himself in a tipsy way, his nose full of smoke, his back burning with the unhealed tattoo. But I have surfed the monster wave at Nazaré.
Then he was alone, and looked inside the house through the big window on the empty lanai. But he saw nothing but a thin man, gaunt-faced with falcon features, in a stained T-shirt, one blue tattooed hand raised to his mouth for a hit on a sparkling doobie. The man’s face was creased, his neck leathery, his hair spiked and going gray, his mouth half smiling in puzzlement, the lips cracked and stung by salt, the long upraised fingers also sea-soaked and pink and pickled, holding the burned-tipped joint—a weatherbeaten man peering back at him from the inner room, a stranger, his own reflection.
Then he knew why no one recognized him: he was sinewy, too watchful to be trusted, lurking like an outlaw, an idle predator, not hungry but hopeful and alone, a nonentity but old. His skin was blackish and blotchy in places, and the tattoos on his hands and arms were no longer blue but grayish and porous, his skin tissuey from decades of waves slapping it, of sun scorching it. He was a scarecrow haunting the party, a wraith among the pretty girls and golden boys.
The man in the mirror of the window was crowded by gesturing boys, hooting, whistling.
“He’s here!”
“Yo!”
“Aloha!”
And he saw, still reflected in the window, the slight, smiling, crop-haired figure of Garrett, garlanded with leis, and his pale lovely wife, wearing a crown of blossoms, advancing behind him across the lanai, greeted by Franco.
“Here’s our hero,” Franco said.
But entering the house, Garrett looked aside and saw Sharkey standing by the rail of the lanai—he had backed away from the window and the cheering boys.
“Shark,” Garrett said, and reached to bump fists, but before Sharkey could meet him with his own fist, Garrett staggered, surrounded, and was pushed into the house, the young surfers following.
In an unexpected hush, the music shut off, Franco began to speak, praising Garrett, provoking bursts of laughter and some boyish hoots; and then Garrett, to applause, haltingly thanked Franco and the partygoers, who cheered as he introduced his wife. The awkward enthusiasm, the inarticulate hollering, were like a tribal rite, but a happy one, of simple celebration.
“Really happy to be part of the paddle-out,” Garrett was saying. “Though I never knew him.”
Franco interrupted, saying, “Hunter was one of us. He’d understand why it’s taken us so long to pull this thing together. How many years, eh? Try wait, doc! But we’ll give him a real sendoff, with lots of aloha.”
Sharkey sensed the bewilderment in the room, felt it on his skin, the murmuring, the confusion. They hadn’t known Hunter either. And he smiled, thinking how he and Hunter were either unknown or forgotten. But he couldn’t blame the new generation of watermen for their ignorance, because he himself had never read Hunter’s books and could hardly believe that such a restless man could sit still long enough to write anything.
Dusk was falling, lending a fragile luminescence to Franco’s garden, the white petals of the plumeria, the crimson torches of ginger, and he was studying them in the mild stupor of pakalolo when he was nudged—Garrett.
“Why didn’t you come inside, man? I wanted to introduce you.”
“That’s good. I like that. Introduce me.” Sharkey was thinking how, as a stranger now, he needed to be identified and his history explained.
“You did it! You surfed Nazaré!”
Sharkey said, “No one saw me.”
“Wrong! They told me—they saw you from the cliff, they saw you from the beach. Diogo, the jet ski guy, saw you.”
“Was that his name? Garrett, what I did isn’t news.”
“That’s better, that’s humble.”
“Everyone saw you, man—the whole world.”
Garrett said, “The only one who mattered to me was Nicole. She saw me. That was all I wanted.”
Hearing this, Sharkey became tearful, and blamed the blunt in his fingers. He hid his sorrow with sudden anger, saying, “My team didn’t show up!”
“You didn’t need them! If I’d done that with no one watching, I’d be stoked.”
“I could have wiped out bad. I only realized it when it was over.”
Garrett said eagerly, “Yes. Did you sense it? That you might die?”
“My mind was empty. I felt”—Sharkey took a hit of the blunt and held the smoke down, then exhaled—“I felt that because no one was watching, I didn’t exist. That I only came alive when I was in the shore break, pounded in the soup. And no one was waiting for me.”
“Your wave might have been bigger than mine,” Garrett said, teasing Sharkey with a poke in his arm.
“They’re gone—your wave, my wave. Gone forever,” Sharkey said. He put the blunt to his lips and drew on it.
Garrett nodded slowly. “You going back to Nazaré?”
Sharkey did not reply, he was holding his breath. Finally he said, “That was the one I was waiting for,” through clenched teeth. “I’m done.”
“Me too. But I want more. What’re you going to do now?”
The question was vague and ungraspable. It was like being asked, “Who are you?” He had not thought of What next? And in his confusion he became aware of a commotion inside the house, a swelling of shouts and bumping floorboards, as of sudden knocking feet. With that too, being crowded by hearty boys and laughing girls, the golden youths, jostling to get near Garrett as Garrett laughed, fending them off, calling out, “He did it too! The Shark was at Nazaré!”
But no one heard, or if they did, no one recognized his name, and Sharkey stepped aside as the surfers pushed past him.
But beyond this were the other cries—yelps, urgent shouts from inside the house, as Franco appeared at a side door and called out, “Olive—we need you here!”
Sharkey watched like a sleepy child as Franco called the woman’s name again to the next house, another bungalow behind the hedge of torch ginger and heliconia stalks and crooked plumeria branches.
A small but certain voice in the twilight responded, “I’m here.”
“Bring your kit. I think we have a situation.”
A woman in a pink patterned pareu parted the flowering hedge, a black valise under her arm. She brushed past Sharkey and he got a whiff of her, not perfume but a soapy aroma of damp hair and glowing skin and a tangle of sweetness, maybe from the crushed petals on the hedge.
“In here,” Franco said.
“Call 911,” the woman said, entering the house.
Sharkey in his semidaze drifted to the window and looked inside, relieved that it was open, no glass now to reflect his face. A boy lay doubled up on the floor and the woman knelt beside him and began talking to him, urging him to wake, taking his pulse, putting her ear to his chest and mouth. The boy was eerily bluish, his shirt unbuttoned, his toes feebly twitching.
“I just found him here like this,” a girl crouching nearby said.
“Did you see him take anything?”
“He does a bunch of stuff. China Girl. Tango. Batu. I don’t know. Is he going to be okay? Hey, what’s that?”
“Narcan,” the woman said, adjusting her pareu as she waved away the fretting girl. “Move, please.”
“They’re coming,” Franco said.
And Sharkey watched, breathing slowly, as the woman in the pareu bent over the boy, her face against the boy’s, her mouth locked on his in what seemed sudden passion, heaving her breath into him, pressing on his bare chest. The kiss of life. Then she sat up and frowned, her hands snatching at her bag, unwrapping a syringe, biting the tip off, holding it to the light, the window where Sharkey stared, drunk with fascination, a humming in his head, half smiling.
Half smiling—because of the kiss and the craziness. At the other side of the house loud music had started, with shouts and laughter; and here in this shadowy room, the little crowd of silent anxious faces, the boy on the floor, his chalk-white face and blue lips, the woman hovering and inserting the syringe into his right nostril, depressing the plunger, the boy’s head moving as though in protest, and then the left nostril, penetrating a bubble of snot and shooting the Narcan up his nose.
The music was still thumping the walls and the floor as the boy opened his mouth. No sound came out, his mouth was simply gaping, but he wagged his head in a sort of sluggish resistance and he gasped, choked a little, and, attempting to raise his head, he drooled on his chin.
“He’s moving,” Franco said, a flutter of panicky relief in his voice. “Is he all right?”
“No—this is going to take a while.” The woman was peering with a small flashlight into the boy's eyes, then wiping his chin, brushing his hair out of his eyes, tidying his shirt. “And if he’s been on fentanyl he’s going into withdrawal.”
Just then, over the sound of the music and her voice, and the shouts from the other room, and the laughter, the wail of a siren, growing louder, nearer.
“Tell them to take him to Kahuku. I’ll go with him. He needs to detox.”
Still slack-jawed and doglike in his stupor, Sharkey now filled the window, watching the frantic figures, admiring the efficiency of the small woman in the flimsy pareu—pretty wahine, he was thinking—and she seemed the only person in the house with a working brain, someone with a gift, in the sudden visitation from next door, a ministering angel taking charge.
What he first noticed from her physique was that she was not a surfer, and that confounded him, because this slight, small-boned woman had obvious power. She had flown into the room and hovered over the boy in his distress—muscular, blue-lipped, frozen in a convulsion, pale twitching toes—and she had kissed him with force, as insistent as a lover, pressing her mouth against his, and breathed life into him. Lifting her face from his, she had worked magic on his nose with a syringe while caressing him, all this time Sharkey gaping at the window. Even in his half-buzzed state, dead-eyed, his mouth open, his flesh like clay, Sharkey was aroused, as though a voyeur at a scene of unembarrassed passion.
“You’re blocking the light,” the woman called out to Sharkey.
“Sorry,” he said, and heard his voice as goofy.
But the woman had gotten to her feet and was shaping her hands in the air as though trying to grasp something.
“What’s all this fuss about?”
She meant the music, the shouts, the laughter from the other room.
Franco said, “Planning a paddle-out. You’re welcome to come along, Olive.”
“Anyone I know?”
Hunter, Sharkey said in his mind, and at the same time Franco said, “Hunter Thompson. It’s taken six years to arrange this.”
“My hero,” the woman said, putting the last of the vials and the syringe back into the small box and slipping the box into her bag, deft with her beautiful fingers. “I always fancied him.”
She looked around the room, at the tall tattooed girl crying in relief, another girl wearing a dog collar, the giggling surfer boys, the solemn face of Franco clutching his cell phone, the spilled food and vomit, the clutter of beer cans, the racket in the next room, brutal music and cackling laughter. All this with the slowing siren of the ambulance outside the bungalow, the gagging boy on the floor, and the sizzle of breaking waves just beyond the hedge at Rocky Point.
Then, staring disapprovingly at Sharkey, she tossed her head and said, “Hunter Thompson. How staggeringly appropriate.”
Silent, heads bowed, in the muted light of early morning, the young surfers gathered on the beach at Waimea, holding their boards under their arms, as Franco—old, limping, white-haired man—distributed the leis. Dawn was a milky gleam in the ragged clouds above Waimea Valley—no sunlight yet—and a pinkish vapor lifted and lightened at the horizon to the west, where the wide ocean looked flattened by the sky.
“Nice to see you, Shark,” Franco said, handing Sharkey a coil of soft yellow blossoms.
“Wouldn’t have missed it for anything. Too bad we couldn’t have done it sooner.”
But Franco had moved on, still distributing flowers. The surfer next to Sharkey spun his lei on his wrist and turned to Sharkey looking baffled—freckled, pinched face, flexing his toes in the sand. He said, “This guy—what’s his name?”
“Hunter.”
“From the mainland?”
“From all over.”
“Where did he surf?”
“Everywhere.”
“Gnarly?”
“You bet.”
“Sweet.” And the boy twirled his lei over his head, adjusted his board, and started down the beach, kicking the damp sand.
He had no idea. None of them did. And he would have been disillusioned if he’d met the man, especially in his last years, the frenzied, injured, addicted Hunter, who could barely walk. And the woman, Olive, who had said, “My hero,” looking up from the boy whose life she’d just saved—she too would have been bewildered by the wreck of a man whose books she obviously admired, whom she’d never met. He was a man who had never surfed and ended up baffled by the sea—crippled by pain, buzzed on drugs, stalled in his writing, hating his body—who’d blown his brains out. But he was a hero.
So that’s how it worked, Sharkey reflected as he flattened himself on his board and paddled toward the middle of the bay. Hunter’s physical self didn’t matter. His books stood for him—that madman genius, people called him, his furious voice of defiance—the man in the books was the one people loved and talked about; the man himself had vanished into his myth now.
None of these paddlers knew him, the nurse—Olive—at the bungalow, the spectators here on the beach—none of them could have had any idea of Hunter’s timidity, his vulnerability, his whispers, his frailty, his clinging to life, and with a gunshot his letting go, dropping himself over the falls for an eternal hold-down.
But though no one in the paddle-out knew him, they would remember him, as a spirit, at the dawn of this lovely day, in the imagery of floating flowers, the surfers ranged in a great circle on the bay while the long-haired Hawaiian priest, seated on his board—a blossom behind one ear, a crown of flowers on his head, a haku lei of pikake—chanted prayers in full-throated Hawaiian. All the surfers slapped the water, pounding the sea with open hands, and cheered. Then it was over, a formal effort ended, the ritual creating someone to remember, a bit more of the myth.
Sharkey turned as soon as the slapping stopped and the water was stilled. Paddling to shore, he saw her waiting on the beach, a small figure in green hospital scrubs, holding a lei, looking helpless, but smiling when she saw him slipping off his board and approaching her.
“I was at work, in surgery—they wouldn’t let me off. I’m sorry I missed it. A paddle-out is so awesome. I cry sometimes.”
“It’s all pau,” Sharkey said. “It was beautiful—a good turnout. He’s been honored. A good memory.”
“What to do with this?” she said, lifting her arm on which the lei hung. Then she smiled and lifted the lei and, standing on tiptoe, looped it over Sharkey’s head.
“You’re supposed to get a kiss with a lei.”
“I know that,” she said, and kissed him, warming his lips with hers on the cool morning.
“Don’t go,” he said, seeing her turn away.
She faced him then, squinting, dipping her head, an exaggerated What now? smile.
The panic Sharkey felt just then was the urgent need he experienced when he wanted a drug or a drink, a thirst he felt convulsing his whole body. It was not lust, it was a need much deeper, a desperate sense that he was being abandoned, that at last he’d found someone who could save him.
“Don’t leave me,” he said.
She took it to be a joke and smiled again.
“Please,” he said, and with that word Olive lost her smile and took a step closer to him.