She’d hoped for dirty rain and just a scrub of moonglow, but the visibility was poor enough to suit her, the car’s headlights diffused by misshapen ghosts of drifting sea mist, one of them twisting like a wraith in the road. Beside her, Sharkey sighed and squirmed like a small boy in a big chair, kicking to get comfortable, wishing to be elsewhere. Two weeks after his wipeout he was still too rattled to get behind the wheel. Struggling to break free of the hold-down, snatching at his leash, he’d somehow whipped his hand and sprained his wrist. He was gripping the wrist now, cuffing it with his good hand as he fidgeted, discontent obvious in his cramped unwilling posture.
“This sucks.”
But Olive did not reply. She drove downhill to the shore in silence, then along the narrow road next to the slosh of the sea.
At last she said, “Bloody right. That’s why we’re here.”
Near Waimea a pothole the size and shape of a manhole opening shone in the lights of an oncoming car, water from the morning’s rain shimmering silver in the hole.
“I hate being here.”
“Ask yourself why.” When he didn’t answer she went on. “And yet you pass this spot practically every day on your way to town or surfing.”
“I don’t stop.”
“That’s why we’re stopping.”
“I don’t even look.”
“You have to—now.”
He struggled in the seat. “I don’t want to do this.”
“Pull your finger out, mate!” she said, and gasped in frustration.
That got his attention. When he sensed the car slowing down he covered his face, but clumsily, favoring his injured wrist.
“It was right here,” she said, “on a night a little like this.”
She rolled onto the shoulder of the road, a narrow strip of sand, broken coral, and stones grinding beneath the tires. Her yank on the handbrake had a force with the sound of a demand in it, in the ratcheting a jerk-squeak of finality.
Sharkey sat in silence. After a deep breath that he expelled as a sigh he said, “I didn’t see him.”
“That was your first lie. You did see him—you said, ‘Oh God’—and then you hit him.”
Olive unclicked her safety belt and got out of the car, Sharkey following her, slowly, in reluctance. Now Olive was kneeling in the dark, the sound of waves breaking in Waimea Bay, sea-slop draining from the deep fissures in the lava rocks on the low cliffs.
“He was lying here,” she said. “I could see his neck was broken. Head trauma. He had no pulse.”
“He was drunk.”
“You were drunk,” she said, standing up to face him.
“I was buzzed.”
“Buzzed is drunk.”
“He was riding down the wrong side of the road.”
“You’re blaming him. A lot of bike riders ride that way.”
“I didn’t mean it,” Sharkey said softly.
“I know it was an accident. But it might have been avoidable if you’d been sober. Remember, I wanted to drive.”
“Why didn’t you say so?”
She stared at him, a passing car lighting her face, her expression of defiance.
“Don’t tell me you don’t remember—please, not another lie,” she said. “The cop came and asked for details.”
“I knew his father. Ray-Ban. Goofy-foot.”
“You didn’t tell him you’d been drinking. He asked you if you’d been buckled up. You lied about that. He asked you how fast you’d been going. Another lie. How many lies so far?”
“People say those things all the time.”
“Yes. But a man died,” Olive said. “You killed him. And there’s some sinister shadow over you—over us. And you think it doesn’t matter? You don’t eat, you can’t sleep, you hardly surf these days.” She paused and took his hand. “Your life has somehow gone into reverse.” She tugged his hand for emphasis. “We have to make it right.”
He turned away from her and clutched his face again. “I said I was sorry,” he whispered into his hand.
“A lie. You never said that.”
“I want to go home,” Sharkey said. “My wrist hurts. I feel terrible. I’m tired.”
They stood in darkness, hearing the sea, the low breaking waves at Waimea, seconds apart, like a vast tureen of thick soup somewhere beyond the palm trees, the plopping sound of it being slowly emptied. And when a car approached and the road was lit, they saw the ugly broken pavement and the loose stones, the litter of soda cans and plastic bags snagged on low bushes, and their own car, parked at an angle on the sand, tilted on the shoulder, the pothole like a brimming sewer, the nearby tree trunks slashed with initials.
“It was right there,” Olive said. “That hole filled with rainwater. I hadn’t realized how deep it was.”
Sharkey squinted past the palms to the bay, scowling at the dribble of moonlight on the blobs of froth. No wind, only the slop and plop of the soupy sea on sand and rocks.
“Kneel down with me,” Olive said.
“All the drama,” Sharkey said, and made a sibilant scoffing, seeming to spit.
“A man died here,” Olive said. “On this spot.”
Sharkey glanced to the left and right, and seeing no cars, he walked near the pothole, kicking his flip-flops. Then he lifted his swollen wrist with his good hand to favor it and knelt next to Olive.
Bowing her head, Olive said, “Three beers at the bar and a hit of pakalolo. ‘We’ll get your car tomorrow,’ you said. No seat belt. Driving in the rain, you began that long story about Moe Kahiko. Then ‘Oh God.’ You hit the man and kept sitting. You didn’t get out of the car. I did, and saw that he was dead.”
“I checked him out,” Sharkey said in a tone of protest.
“Wait. The cop comes,” Olive said, still narrating the order of events. “You tell him that you weren’t drinking. That you were buckled up. That you didn’t see the man on the bike.”
In the distance beyond the curve of the bay a car’s headlights lifted from the surface of the road, making a tunnel of the trees. Sharkey rolled back to a squat and began to get to his feet.
“Stay where you are,” Olive said. “Is that what happened?”
“Something like that.”
“Is that a yes?”
Sharkey sighed—the small boy’s sigh, a whimper with a yes fluttering through it.
The oncoming vehicle slowed down—an old pickup truck, a surfboard slung in the back—and when it rolled to a stop the driver cranked down the window.
“You guys all right?”
“We’re fine,” Olive said.
But the man was watching Sharkey, who had dropped to his knees again.
“Sure you don’t need any help?”
Olive said, “We lost something.”
“Eh,” the driver grunted, with confidence. “Joe Sharkey—how’s it?”
Sharkey lifted his hand slowly, a tentative salute. “Like the wahine say, we wen’ lost something.”
“Some bugga cockaroach you stuffs?”
“Nah.” Sharkey touched his face, keeping his hand against it as though he didn’t want to be scrutinized. “Was maybe my fault.”
When the man had driven off and they were in darkness again, Olive said, “How many lies is that?”
“I don’t know. Couple, three.”
“Seven,” she said. “But there were more.”
Back in the car, she pulled onto the road and drove toward Hale‘iwa, then onto the bypass. The tension of visiting the scene of the accident, her intense concentration, her anxiety—all the emotion—nerved her to be efficient rather than uncertain. And Sharkey’s halfheartedness stiffened her resolve. It was like being in Emergency, hyperalert at midnight, receiving a casualty on a gurney, controlling the moment, in triage.
“Where are we going?”
Home was in the opposite direction. Olive had taken the way through the cane fields and was ascending to Helemano on the steep country road, no streetlamps, little traffic, twelve miles of darkness.
“Wahiawa,” she said. “The cop shop.”
Sharkey nodded; he seemed to accept the logic of retracing their steps, reconstructing the timeline of the accident. But he didn’t speak; he lapsed into the dullness Olive had come to see as his usual mood since killing the man, not unwilling but bleak and detached and luckless.
“When did it happen?” she asked.
He bobbed his head as though marking time. He said, “I honestly don’t know.”
“Think,” she insisted.
She could hear a slow growl of frustration. Sharkey didn’t speak, only made an audible gripe, but it was a grunt of futility, not as distinct as a word.
“Over a month,” she said. “It’ll be five weeks on Thursday.”
“That long?” he said in a whittled tone of loss, his voice trailing off.
“And in that time nothing good has happened. You’ve gotten repetitive. Incoherent sometimes. I lost the baby—your baby. You almost drowned.”
He was slumped, holding his hands to his eyes. She wanted to say more but was overcome by pity, the big tattooed man with muscular shoulders sitting hunched over in silence, his posture that of a child sorrowing for a wrong he’d done.
He was fragile, he was broken, she had to be careful, and she drove as steadily as she could, so as not to jar him with sudden acceleration or braking. She lulled him with the monotony of the straight road and, on the outskirts of Wahiawa, just before the bridge at Lake Wilson, she slowed the car.
Sharkey still slumped, Olive looked over and saw scattered rags at the base of the embankment, a tipped-over supermarket shopping cart, a baby carriage, and she knew that this was not junk or discarded but the elements of primitive domesticity, the camp at the top of a steep path where, beneath the eucalyptus trees and the Norfolk pines, there were people in dirty tents or under tarps, a cluster of homeless people, cooking over wood fires, muttering in the dampness, and children too, living like jungle folk, hidden by bushes—the Hawaii she hadn’t expected, of bad days. The woodsmoke and tang of burned meat from those huddled poor gave off the misleading odor of a picnic.
After the bridge, another light and the low town, she turned left and at the top of the hill another left, Sharkey groaning with each turn.
“Oh God.”
“We have to do this.”
The police station was a one-story, flat-topped building at the street’s dead end, behind a well-lighted parking lot.
“I don’t want to go in.”
“Just try to remember what happened, and we might not have to.”
She parked the car and led Sharkey to the open terrace where, on the night of the accident, she’d approached him, the rain falling hard, and he’d said, “I ran into a drunk homeless guy.”
That is wrong, she’d thought, but she hadn’t acted, hadn’t corrected him. And afterward his life stalled, went sideways, seemed to drag to a halt, and he’d become hopeless.
I have to revisit that scene, she’d thought, his dishonest statement.
They climbed the stairs to the terrace where the police station sat like a fortified building atop a swale of sloping grass, a lava-rock wall at its perimeter. Seeing her pass him on the stairs, Sharkey paused, but she gestured for him to follow, insisting with her beckoning hand.
Sharkey obeyed, digging his toes ahead of him—the reluctant child again—and when he drew near her he whispered, “I’m not going in there. You can’t make me.”
She turned to him, took him by his two hands to calm him, brought him closer, and as he bowed toward her she touched her forehead to his and said softly, “All you need to do is tell me what you said in the accident report.”
“You mean what happened that night?”
“What you claimed happened that night,” Olive said. “The lies, the half-truths, everything that got you off the hook.”
He hesitated, then said in a small shallow voice, “I explained the accident.”
“Was it the truth?”
“It was what I remembered.”
Olive said, “Joe, listen. If you don’t tell me the whole truth, I’m going inside. I’ll get a copy of the report and I’ll show you that it’s full of lies.”
He stood flat-footed and solemn on the terrace, glancing at the station entrance, then turning to look outward, beyond the rock wall, to the parking lot—the lights in a nimbus of drizzle, the wet street, the night glow over Wahiawa, the air muddy and chilly, a twinkle of red lights and the stutter of a rotor, a helicopter bumping low in the sky in the distance, going lower to land at Schofield Barracks. Sharkey pretended to be interested, he fidgeted, rubbed his arms in the chill, sniffed a little, blinked and breathed hard, unsure of what to say.
Olive said, “You told them you hadn’t been drinking. Was that true?”
“No. I’ve already said that.”
“But you dictated it to the cop who was writing it down in the accident report. You saw him writing it.”
“Okay, I’d had a few drinks.”
“Three drinks. Over the limit. And the pakalolo.”
Still watching the starless and indifferent sky, Sharkey nodded.
“You were in a good mood—talking—but you were toasted.”
“Yeah.”
“Seat belt?”
Sharkey jerked his head, an unwilling negative.
“So the cop wrote another lie on the report.”
“Guess so.”
“Did you see the man on the bike?”
In a thin breathy voice Sharkey said, “I guess.”
“Former lifeguard, trained in first aid. Did you administer help to the victim?”
“Kind of,” Sharkey said, beginning to object. “Okay, you got out of the car and checked on him.”
“What did you do, Joe?”
He took a deep breath and with an effort of will that was audible said, “Nothing.”
“But in the report it says that you hurried to his side and checked his vital signs.”
“I meant that you did.”
“All those lies,” Olive said.
“The cop never asked the right questions,” Sharkey said. “He saw who I was, he mentioned his old man—I knew the guy. And here at the station the same deal. ‘You’re Joe Sharkey.’ It’s happened lots of times before—you’ve seen it. Locals respect a waterman. They know the risks I’ve taken.” He muttered a little, then said, “My rides.”
“They gave you a pass. They were dazzled. You could have set them straight.” Olive stepped away from him. “The worst of this isn’t that you lied to them, or concocted a false accident report. The kicker is that you lied to yourself.” Her voice frail and tearful, she said, “I loved you—and you lied to me.”
He walked away from her, into the half-shadow at the corner of the station. She watched him for a while and, standing there, she saw a squad car pull in. After a slamming of car doors, a policeman marched a barefoot, handcuffed man up the stairs to the terrace. The man’s long hair was flopped over his face, his shirt torn. Another policeman met them at the station entrance with a flashlight, which he shone on the face of the handcuffed man, who averted his gaze.
“This the ten-sixteen?”
“Yah. Lemi Street. Domestic.”
Seeing Olive, the cop with the flashlight turned it on her and called out, “Can I help you?”
“I’m fine, but can I ask you question?”
“Make it quick—we gotta book this guy.”
“When you get a fatality—accident or homicide—you send the body to the medical examiner, am I right?”
“Yeah. In town—Iwelei.”
“How long do they hold the body?”
“Till they ID it, so they can issue the death certificate,” he said, standing against the door, propping it open for the other policeman to lead the handcuffed man into the lobby of the station. “That all you need to know?”
“Thanks. That’s it.”
When they had gone inside, Olive walked over to Sharkey, who was still half in shadow, his upcast face peering into the darkness.
“That night,” Olive said, “you were standing right there on the terrace. Do you remember what you said?”
Sharkey began to speak, then sighed, an irritable fumbling to make a reply, thought better of it, and finally lowered his head.
Using his careless voice, Olive said, “I ran into a drunk homeless guy.”
Sharkey nodded, rubbing his face with the back of his hand, chafing his mouth with his knuckles.
“Tell me what you did.”
“Killed him,” he said. “I killed a guy.”
“Who was he?”
Sharkey’s hands went to his face as though to mask it.