In the distance a glowing canopy of high leafy boughs in a grove of brittle albizia trees, rising rags of oily smoke, the flare of a campfire, light without much illumination, the whole of it hidden by tall scrub and guinea grass, enclosed by evening shadows. At the edge of the road next to the guardrail a supermarket shopping cart lay on its side, with a rusted broken baby carriage, the limbless torso of a child’s plastic doll, a burst-open plastic bag of trash, its contents strewn and picked over, probably by feral cats or wild pigs. And painted on a board in the goop of what looked like peeling nail polish, the word KAPU.
“We should have come here sooner,” Olive said, but disgustedly turning aside. The junk pile had an aura of hostility and violence, and the sign meant go away.
“Probably weeks ago,” Sharkey said.
But they knew, standing there at the head of the path, why they hadn’t. The place looked forbidden, if not haunted. There was no road. The path was narrow and seemed to lead into the pinched darkness of an ambush.
It was almost six o’clock, an hour from sundown, the day after their visit to the medical examiner’s office. On the way home, passing this spot, Olive had said, “Homeless camp.”
“What do you think?” she said now, lingering at the roadside—the bypass road, cars flashing past. She kicked at the shadowy overgrown footpath, near a tulip tree in flower, its fallen blossoms littering the ground like red rags.
“It’s getting dark,” Sharkey said, in the insincere, too-emphatic tone of an excuse.
“Maybe come back,” Olive said, fumbling for a reason not to enter the path and stepping away. “Maybe earlier next time.”
They got into their car and went home, into the dying light, not saying what was on their minds, the thought they shared, that a place so near and so familiar, just a few miles from their house, close to Hale‘iwa and the main road, not far from the beach, some of it visible—the woodsmoke, some patches of plastic tarp and laundry on some of the branches of the bigger trees—here was a place that was unknown and maybe dangerous, like a jungle village in Indo, away from the beach.
But these people were poor, they were homeless and unemployed and ragged; they were the filthy bearded men and gaunt women that drivers saw crossing the bypass road at that point, hurrying on dirty feet, slipping into the muddy rut of a path, elusive and seemingly desperate, clinging to the edges of the town, crouched in the tall grass. They washed, if they washed at all, in the sinks in the changing rooms at the beach park and scared the tourists. They didn’t panhandle, they didn’t beg, they were reputed to be thieves yet were seldom caught in the act. Their overwhelming intention, it seemed, was to remain hidden, anonymous, out of reach, and in the uniformity of their raggedness they preserved a kind of anonymity—no one could name them, they looked alike in their poverty, they were a constant presence. Yet they were unknown.
And that was odd in a beach community where everyone had a name, or at least a nickname.
On the night of the accident the policeman had said, “We seen him near the homeless camp on the bypass road.” Stickney too had said, “Homeless. I can always tell by da kine dirt.”
Without saying so, both Sharkey and Olive had avoided going to the place, but they knew—once they had stopped on the road and studied it—that they were committed to paying a visit. Stickney had said he’d found no personal possessions other than the man’s rags, the policeman had found no ID. But there was more to know, more to uncover, which might lead to their learning the man’s name.
So after that first tentative assessment of the place—their glimpse of the smoke, the path, the junk pile—they went again, heartened by a sunny morning and fewer cars on the road. The passing traffic the previous time had made them conspicuous and self-conscious, standing by the guardrail. They were embarrassed to be seen there by passersby, raising suspicions, and they felt awkward too, being in a place where they didn’t belong and—since kapu meant forbidden—were not welcome.
More rejection. Sharkey felt the awkwardness more than Olive. He’d once been welcome everywhere, living his surfing life as the Shark. He was accustomed to being recognized and greeted, as the policeman, as Stickney had done; and it surprised him—bewildered him—when someone asked him his name and didn’t say, “The surfer,” as soon as Sharkey spoke it. He’d taken it for granted that he would get a smile or a hug. But this had been so frequent in the past few years that he now saw it as indifference, confirming his sense that no one knew him anymore, or if they did know his name, they didn’t care—dismissed the risks he’d taken, the prizes he’d won, the monster waves he’d survived.
The thought of trespass was unformed in his head, just a pulse of hesitation, but it became clearer when, starting down the path, his bare legs cut by the sharp edges of the tall grass, brushing it aside, walking ahead of Olive, he saw the bobbing head of a man approaching—bearded, with matted greasy hair, sunburned in blotches, pushing a rusty bike.
“Hi—how’s it?” the man mumbled through cracked lips without a smile. He prodded with his bike, shoving the handlebars before him, nudging Sharkey and Olive. Then they were beside him, close enough to smell the man, his dirt-sweat, his damp hair, the stink of his rags. A decaying haole, blocking the path.
Sharkey reached for the man’s hand and shook it and gripped the hard dusty fingers and said, “Joe Sharkey.”
The man squinted at him, sizing him up, then frowned, looking toasted or tipsy—vague, anyway, in the bright sunshine. Breathless, unsmiling, he opened his mouth, then closed it, swallowing his name as neatly as a cane toad snaring an insect.
“We’re visiting,” Olive said.
“Looking for someone,” Sharkey said, his right hand humming with the man’s dirt.
The man leaned back and scratched his neck. The tattoo on his neck was large but unreadable. He spoke to Sharkey. “You a cop?”
With a surprised giggle of incredulity, Sharkey said, “No, man, we’re just cruising.”
Extending his hand, his yellow fingernails upright, making a cup of his palm, the man said, “Give me something.”
Olive had been preparing for this, clutching a dollar. She handed it to him.
“Come on!” the man said sourly, pinching the dollar bill and gesturing, as though handing it back. “Give me five.”
The man was thin, and smaller than Sharkey, yet there was about him an air of menace—his teeth, his dirty, demanding fingers—and a twitch of the unpredictable. Sharkey knew he could shoulder him aside, push him off the path, but the man would howl and push back, scratch like a cat, maybe bite, and what was the point of fighting him?
Handing him another dollar, Sharkey said, “It’s cool—we’ll just slide by,” and slipped behind him.
“You ain’t going to find anything,” the man said. “You on the wrong road, buddy.”
“Where’s the right one?”
“The one that leads somewhere,” the man said, and jammed his handlebars against the overhanging grass and pushed into it, calling out behind him, “This one don’t lead nowhere.”
When he was gone, Olive said, “I don’t like this.”
“Might as well check it out,” Sharkey said, without conviction. He was glum from the encounter but walked on, shoving at the grass, taking the lead.
The air was hot and windless on the path, enclosed by the tall grass, but further on—only minutes, slapping at the insects whirling in the stillness—they were at the edge of a clearing and saw the tents, the blue tarps stretched on poles and slumped like heavy awnings. Two cars were parked on flat tires under the big tree, one car with a whole wheel missing from its back axle, and it was obvious from the cardboard taped on the windows that they served as shelters. Tipped-over cereal boxes littered the top of a wooden picnic table; a cat was asleep on a tin tray.
A woman in a baseball cap poked at a pot propped on boulders, the pot and the boulders blackened by the fire.
“Yaw,” she called out, and opening her mouth in objection showed her blackened teeth. A man who had been sitting camouflaged by the leafy shadow on a sofa stood up and became visible—not a sofa, Sharkey saw, but a whole car seat askew on the stony ground. The man was fat and fierce-faced, his head enlarged by a frizz of hair in which tiny white scraps of lint were entangled.
Two small children stirred inside one of the cars, and a woman in a beach chair waved her arms and shouted, “You no see the sign?”
“What sign?” Olive said.
“Da kapu sign.”
“We never see it, sister,” Sharkey said.
“I telling you,” the woman said. “Dis all kapu here.”
This woman was younger than the others, with thin hard-muscled legs, wearing a man’s shirt and old faded surf shorts, and yet for all the tears and stains in her clothes and her dirty feet, she had lovely eyes—greeny-blue—and an appealing manner, coarse and up-front, that suggested the willing surf bunny she might have been thirty years earlier.
Now the man said loudly, “You haoles gotta go.”
The children roused inside one of the cars began to laugh, jostling each other, perhaps playing a game, and then flinging toys through the car’s open door—broken toys, fragments of plastic.
The fat man took a few steps forward. His dirty T-shirt was lettered ALOHA FUN RUN. He opened his mouth, worked his big jaw in reflection, then said, “What you want?”
“We’re looking for someone who maybe used to live here,” Olive said in a reasonable voice.
“He got a name?”
“We don’t know—we’re not sure.”
“You don’t know who you looking for? Is insane,” the woman in the ball cap said from her creaking chair. She shrieked at the children, yelling for them to be quiet, and the children sank into the darkness of the car’s interior.
In that moment of distraction, Sharkey looked around and saw the fat man leaning against a tree, his arms folded on his potbelly.
“The man died,” Olive said. “We think he was staying here at the time.”
“Ask ’em what they got for us,” the fat man called out.
The woman in the baseball cap stepped forward. “You hear him. What you got for us?”
“If you have any information, we’ll help you,” Olive said. “The man was riding a bike and got hit by a car just over a month ago on Kam Highway at Waimea.”
“He wen’ make?”
“Yes.”
“I know dis buggah.”
“What’s his name?”
The woman smiled. She put her hand out and twitched her fingers. Olive folded a dollar into the woman’s hand and she made a fist, enclosing it.
“That Jeff. Haole guy.”
The children in the car began to scream in the backseat, kicking the seat back, one beating the other and pulling his hair.
The other woman spoke up, not whole words but denying noises, a kind of whinnying, as she sidled close to Olive. “He not Jeff. I know the guy wen’ make.”
Olive held out a dollar. The woman took it and held it to her face in two hands, examining it. “He name Oncle Mack.”
“Did he have a bike?” Olive asked.
Watching Olive closely, the woman said, “He have one bike. He ride dis bike.”
“This Uncle Mack,” Olive said, “was he a haole?”
“Jeff da haole,” the first woman said. “She a bull liar.”
“Oncle Mack, he a fucken haole too.”
“Dis all kapu!” the fat man shouted from beneath the tree, and gestured, spreading his arms. “Time to go.” He pointed to the path. “Show’s over.”
Before Sharkey could react there was a commotion in the dense grass and four children emerged, walking into the clearing, a girl and three boys, all of them neatly dressed, wearing small backpacks. Seeing them, Olive smiled, feeling somehow reassured by their solemnity and neatness, the way they nodded at the strangers as though showing respect. Just as quickly the children became shy, averting their eyes, awkward in the disorder of the camp.
“We not homeless,” the fat man called out, protesting. “We houseless. Big difference.”
“Who is this Uncle Mack?” Olive asked the woman who was fluttering her dollar bill.
“This our home. They try to kick us the hell out. How you can kick people off their own ‘aina?”
“Uncle Mack not the man. Jeff the man,” the woman in the baseball hat said.
“All kapu!” the fat man shouted, waving his arms, his gesture taking in the whole camp.
“We’re going,” Sharkey said as the man started to walk toward him and the woman in the baseball hat pressed against him. He said, “Joe Sharkey.” He said it distinctly, as though uttering a formula for protection, but it had no effect.
“Give me something,” the woman said.
At the picnic table the four children had slipped off their backpacks. They seated themselves, two on each side, and were sorting books and papers as though preparing to do homework. It was hard for Olive to tell through their dirt and their gaunt faces if the adults were haole, but these children being young, in clean T-shirts and shorts, were certainly haole, and the tallest of them, a boy with a splash of ink on his arm, had a thatch of light hair, streaked blond by the sun.
“They go to school?” Olive asked.
“Yah. Elementary—by the old cane fields, pass Ali‘i Beach,” the fat man said. “Give me some money—buy books, buy stuffs for them.”
And now Olive considered the schoolchildren seated and scribbling, and the two small children in the car playing again, reciting in singsong voices, and the first woman back stirring the blackened pot, raising her ladle, lifting white bones and black meat and slimy greens.
“Is that soup?” Olive asked.
“Is not,” the woman said in an indignant tone, chucking her chin upward in a gesture of superiority and twisting her lips. “Is adobo.”
In that moment, with that word, Olive saw it anew, as a whole coherent settlement. The place had come into focus. What had seemed random, makeshift, a thrown-together huddle of shelters and junk, cast-off people and their broken things, now seemed unified, something fixed and whole. It had a purpose, and a sense of permanence. Was it the neatly dressed children that completed it? Tarp shelters side by side, beach chairs, the car-seat sofa, the inhabited cars, the cooking fire and the pot of adobo, especially that—a meal with a name.
It was primitive but it served them, and in the trailing smoke and the trampled earth, the bypass road out of sight, the camp existed in a parallel world, a dirty improvised version of the other one, self-sufficient. And the trash pile—old bottles and plastic bags—like an anchor, in the shape of a great scab of indestructible squalor.
Frightful, Olive was thinking, impossible to clean up, and also, We don’t belong here.
Glancing back, she saw the fat man leaning against the big tree, cradling something in his arms, a creature that came awake and raised its head: a small dog, but with the pinched face and the flaring ears of a bat.
Sharkey seemed to be loitering, looking around, as though at any moment he would be recognized and admired. He then passed a barrel and looked in, seeing empty bottles and cans. Someone had collected them to redeem at the supermarket.
“This is all money here,” he said, praising them.
But, hearing him, the man holding the small dog made a pushing gesture that was unmistakably “Go away.”
The completeness of the camp disturbed Olive—being purposeful, it seemed more of a threat, more tenacious and potentially hostile. She signaled to Sharkey, and he followed her to the path, making a shaka sign to the people, but it was not returned. Then, a few steps into the path, they looked back and saw high grass and nothing of the camp.
In the sudden heat of the narrow path, its humid confinement, the bunched upright grass blocking the breeze, the whole passage a stifling tunnel of razor-edged grass blades and thornbushes, Sharkey tripped on a low post, regained his balance, then kicked it in fury.
It was another signpost, another splintered board daubed KAPU.
“We should have obeyed it,” Olive said.
Sharkey sniffed. He said, “Did you see those kids doing their homework? They go to school! School costs money—where do they get it? I wanted to give them something. That boy, the older one with the hurt eyes—I saw myself in him.”
“What do you mean?” She was ahead of him, calling over her shoulder.
“Haole kid. He has a tough time at school. He has to stick up for himself. Fight for everything he has.”
And Olive remembered the children, the big boy with the solemn face, the tense way he sat, like a boy on a bike, a little apart from the others, his sun-scorched hair, his delicate hands, and that was not ink on his pale arm—her memory came into focus—but a blue bruise.
“Joe Sharkey got bullied at school?”
“Every fricken day.”
“Must have been horrible.”
“Made me want to win,” he said. “They were local punks. All I cared about was surfing. I’d never be able to fight them—too many of them. But there were the waves. They took me away. You could be a very tough guy and wipe out on a wave. I learned to ride monsters. It was my way of escaping from them.”
But Olive had hardly heard that, or rather, she’d heard that boast so many times she was deaf to it. She was thinking of the bruised boy with the conspicuous blond hair and the wounded eyes and I saw myself in him. And a surge of love and sorrow for Sharkey that she’d never felt before made her throat ache, a constriction that kept her from being able to say she loved him. So instead she paused on the path and rested her head against his chest briefly, chafed it with her cheek, the clumsy touch of mute animal tenderness.
At the end of the path, just ahead, where it gave onto the bypass road and their parked car, they saw a woman from the camp—the younger sinewy one, with the wild hair and the man’s shirt and dirty surf shorts. A bath, a comb, and clean clothes might have made her desirable—she wasn’t old, late thirties maybe, and though she had the leathery look of the others, and their watchfulness, she had health, a sturdy posture, and an air of defiant confidence.
She called out “Hey!”
“How did you get here so fast?” Olive asked.
“I take the other way. We got a quick way out in case the cops come and we gotta make a quick escape.”
But they walked past her.
“I can help you. I know the guy.”
Olive turned to face her.
“Give me some money and I can find his stuffs.”
Olive said, “You know the guy that was killed?”
The woman squinted, pursed her lips, looking grave, and nodded slowly. “Was a great guy. Haole guy. Was a shame he pass.”
“The other woman back there said his name was Jeff.”
“Rhonda stupid. She don’t know nothing.”
“What was his name?”
“They don’t have names here, just nicknames.”
“What was his nickname?”
“I forget—my memory junk. Being as it’s my medication.”
“You have his things?”
“Most of them. I was afraid the other ones might cockaroach his stuffs, so I hide them. Even the cops, I didn’t show them.”
A smiled floated at the woman’s lips and trembled there, and when she winked at Sharkey, she seemed younger, flirtatious, a look of canny calculation altering the light in her complexion. Then she turned to Olive, fixing her eyes on her—sisterly, conspiratorial, seeking an answering smile. The woman was about Olive’s height but bony, legs apart, her dirty feet in frayed flip-flops, her posture insistent. She put one hand out, level with her waist. The dirt was dark in the ingrained lines of her palm, her fingernails black—a skinny hand asking to be filled.
“What’s your name?”
The woman pressed her lips together, hesitating. Then ungummed them and said, “Lindsey.”
Olive put a twenty-dollar bill into her hand and the fingers trapped it and closed over it.
“When?”
“Give me a few days. And another twenty.”
“We’ll be back Thursday. To the camp,” Olive said. “You’ll get the other twenty then.”
“Thursday’s good,” the woman said, and she jammed the money into the pocket of her shorts.
In the car Sharkey said, “The cops could have done that. Why didn’t they?”
“Because the man didn’t matter,” Olive said. “Don’t you see? Homeless, poor, living under a tree. Why should they care?”
“But you heard the woman. They went there looking for personal effects.”
“She probably figured they were worth something to her.”
“She guessed right. I promised her forty bucks. I’m sure she’ll hold out for more.”
The two days they spent waiting to return to the homeless camp they speculated on what the woman might bring them—clothes, papers, books; not valuables, but items they could use to identify the man she had called Mack.
Having emboldened themselves—Sharkey smoking a joint—they went back, choosing midafternoon, a time when they imagined the children would be home from school, counting on their presence to bring an air of calm to the place that was menacing in its clutter and stink.
And the children were there, as they’d hoped, seated at the picnic table over their papers and schoolbooks, doing homework, looking diligent, though they’d slipped off their flip-flops and kicked the dirt beneath them as they worked. The way they sat, with their backs turned to the world, seemed their way of shutting out the sight of the disorder. Nor did they glance up when Olive and Sharkey entered the clearing, not even when the small dog with the batlike ears and the pinched snout began to yap, shaking its head.
“Ola,” the fat man said, and scooped up the dog, smiling at the tense expression on Sharkey’s face. He said, “You got big maka‘u. Is the dog or me?” and showed his teeth.
“I’m not afraid,” Sharkey said, but he stepped away.
“Ola wen’ smell you fear.” He snorted, affecting superiority. “You panty.”
One of the children gasped, then looked away.
“We’re looking for Lindsey,” Olive said.
“No names here. We like the Foreign Legion.”
“Lindsey had a name.”
“She split. Not in the legion anymore.”
“We were supposed to meet her.”
“You got appointment, yah?” The man mocked them with his body, dropping the dog and crossing his arms while the dog darted at them, yapping.
Olive said, “Do you know where she is?”
“She high somewhere,” the man said—he hadn’t stopped smiling in his grim way, though it wasn’t really a smile, it was a scowl of defiance. “I think maybe someone give her some money. Wonder who?”
“She junk.” The words were distinct and near, but whose?
It was the other woman. Now they saw her, so still on the torn car seat under the tree that, camouflaged by her rags, she seemed like a lumpy part of it, or a heap of rotting cloth. The children at the table crouched with lowered heads, averted eyes, scratching at open notebooks, ignoring the strangers, the dog yapping and slavering.
Olive saw again that the disorder of the camp was fixed and featureless, and so it was not a camp at all but a settlement, like the ruin of a scattered household. The burst cushion was left where it had been, those empty cans had not been picked up or kicked aside, the beach chair, the chewed boogie board, the mildewed mattress, the shredded plastic bags—all of it remained as they had seen it before, nothing moved or cleared, giving the squalor the look of solidity. The same piercing smell too, as before, woodsmoke and damp rags and decaying food. Olive was struck—not that it was ugly but that it seemed indestructible and everlasting.
The fat man had not moved, though at some point he must have unfolded his arms, because he was pointing at the path and mouthing the word kapu.