On a day of heavy traffic, on their way to the airport, they took a side road, Olive driving, Sharkey slouched in the passenger seat, his head lolling like an invalid’s. But his eyes were alert to the shanties half-hidden in the trees, the ragged tents off the bypass road, the cluster of huts aslant in the muddy valley just before the bridge at Wahiawa, the shelters of blue plastic along the bike path at Pearl City, the lean-tos and piled-up cardboard buttressed by rusted shopping carts and splintered crates under the freeway at Nimitz, and at each scattered rat’s nest of sticks and plastic, bearded men and women with greasy strings of hair, sticklike themselves, skin burned to leather, in sweaty rags, in the glare of sunshine, standing in tall grass or under shade trees. The homeless of the island.
“Those shonky huts,” Olive said.
On a hot stretch of the freeway, a shirtless man in torn shorts pushed a shopping cart piled high with rags along the gravel shoulder, a dark futile figure scowling at passing cars.
“Samuel Beckett,” Olive said.
“You know him?”
“Figure of speech. Lost soul.”
“He came here like them,” Sharkey said after a while, approaching the airport road. “From the mainland. Like them—when he had nowhere else to go.”
He seemed to speak in an accusing way to a man crouching slack-jawed on the sidewalk, his skinny arm flung around the neck of a dog with stiff dirty fur and a fat twitching tongue.
Seeing Sharkey, the man extended his arm, cupped his hand, begging. But Olive drove on.
“We don’t know that. Right?”
He grunted, an unwilling no.
“All we know is that he had a life. We owe it to him to find out what it was, and why he ended up at night on a bike in the rain and then dead in Waimea.”
“I hate going to the airport here. Every flight you take is so long. I’m not in shape to fly.”
“If we don’t do this, your life won’t be worth living. It’s awful now. Look at yourself. You don’t eat, you hardly sleep—and you don’t surf anymore.”
“You think I’m cursed,” he said, giggling mirthlessly to show he didn’t believe it.
“Wrong word.”
“What would you say?”
“No one did anything to you. The thing’s inside you.” She was glad to be driving so that she didn’t have to see his face when she spoke. “I think you’re in trouble.”
“Whatever.” He covered his eyes, masking himself, feeling nagged again.
“The worst of it is you don’t know it.”
“Arkansas,” he said. “It’s so far away.”
“You’ve flown to South Africa. To Portugal. To Indo.”
“There are waves in those places. There’s no waves in Arkansas.”
He spoke softly, keeping the words in his mouth as though he were chewing, so that what he said was a vibration rather than a clear statement. He objected to the trip but, weakened, he was docile, mildly stubborn, too slow in his movements to object. It seemed to be his usual state now, ineffective, more like a child than a man.
But Olive was used to that—with Sharkey, and in her work. The sick at the hospital who raised their eyes piteously to her as she made her rounds from bed to bed—they were childlike. Fearful, helpless, haunted, they needed her to soothe them, to encourage them and make them hopeful.
Sharkey had become like them, a semi-invalid, dependent on her. And so he hated going to the airport and whispered his objections and said the homeless people by the roadside disgusted him—“Why don’t they go back where they came from?” Still, he did not have the strength to oppose her with any conviction. He followed her because he needed her.
What heartened Olive, and appalled Sharkey, was the knowledge that he would follow her anywhere now. But it was not love—it was need. He had nowhere else to go.
In the terminal, the woman checking them in held up his driver’s license and said brightly, “Joe Sharkey,” then handed him the license with his boarding pass, beaming as though presenting him with a gift.
Sharkey rallied a little at the thought that she’d recognized him; he stood straighter and managed a thin smile and snatched at his belt, pulling up his pants—his weight loss meant that his clothes bagged and flapped.
“Gate five,” the woman said, then looked past him, raising her hand. “Next in line.”
She had no idea. Sharkey said, “I hate being with all these people,” and gestured to the other travelers, jostling him. They oppressed him, he was one of them, he found them clumsy and slow, burdened by bags and cases. You left home and then you were in the world, and the world was full of people pushing past you who didn’t know who you were. And it was as though you didn’t exist.
He was muttering, on the verge of cursing out loud, when he saw a woman approaching with a wheelchair.
“Is that thing for me?”
“I asked for it,” Olive said. “We’ll get through quicker,”
Sharkey was at first confused, but he sat, and, pushed by a Filipina attendant, a young woman in a uniform, her nametag LAKAMBINI, was eased through the security zone. When their flight was called, the woman wheeled him down the jetway and tipped him through the doorway, then helped him to his seat. As Olive had hoped, he was calmer as a result; the efficiency quieted him.
In the window seat beside him, Olive said, “This is the right thing to do.” She took a folder labeled FLORISTAN from her bag and began to flick through the papers inside: travel brochures, hotel and rental car confirmations, lists of offices and locations. On top, in a separate stack, the papers that Stickney had copied for them, the details of the dead man’s history. “You might think it’s melodramatic for me to say this, but your life depends on it. That’s how I feel.”
Sharkey grasped the folder and opened it on his lap. He looked at the top sheet of paper, running his eyes over it but not reading it, merely allowing himself to be impressed by the close print and the detail. It was as though he were not looking at words at all but rather at a thickened mass of complex equations that amounted to a kind of formal magic for those with the time and patience to separate the lines and translate it. But the idea of doing that himself—reading it—fatigued him.
“We’ll make a schedule from this.”
“Shed-jewell,” he said, mocking her.
“Plonker,” she said.
But he was comforted by the fact that Olive understood the challenge—the quest—and was taking charge. He placed his hand on that top sheet as though drawing warmth from it.
“I’ve mentioned Hunter Thompson,” he said.
“Many times.”
“I really related to him.”
“You told me you never read his books.”
“Right,” Sharkey said. “But it’s not about reading his books. It’s that he wrote them. Lots, I think. He did journalism. Writing—that’s all he really did. The drugs, the women, the crazy—yes. But the writing was all he really cared about. That one thing.”
He was nodding, jogged by the movement of the plane, which had begun to speed down the runway, and suddenly lifted. Then they were in the air, tilted over Waikiki, in the distance the vast hollow battlements of Diamond Head, which when they passed it seemed like a gigantic barnacle. Sharkey was murmuring, his hand still pressing the papers, as though rehearsing what he would say next.
Olive leaned nearer to him. “Where are you going with this?”
Sharkey did not look at her. He seemed more earnest facing forward, squinting in the roar of the plane. When he spoke it was with a voice of certainty, raised to be heard above the noise of the engines.
“My one thing,” he said, “the only thing I ever did, was surf. That was my life, all I cared about. That’s all I did. Monster waves.”
He smacked the folder and pressed again, and in its thickness it seemed to pulse with life, to hold more warmth than when in his hand.
“Unlike him,” he said.
“He’s got a name, Joe.”
Sharkey lifted his hand and lowered his head to the label at the top of that stack of papers. “Max Mulgrave.”
“The man you killed.”
Sharkey bent his head, inclining it closer to the name, his eyes squeezed shut, his lips twisted in confusion.
“We’ll find him.”
In a pained whisper of self-reproach, Sharkey said, “He did so much in his life.”
Olive stroked his cheek but, daunted by the howl of the air rushing against the plane, could not think of anything more to say.
“All I did was surf.”
Then he slept, and they flew into darkness, waking hours later with a sudden bump of turbulence and the pinpricks of lights below them, meaning they’d crossed into California, and he dozed again. Dawn over the desert woke him. A wheelchair was waiting for him in Dallas, and the next flight, to Little Rock, was short. They were soon in a rental car, Olive at the wheel, in the paler light and bushier trees of the mainland, flatter hills, a chill in the air, October in the Ozarks.
Always, away from Hawaii, the world looked older and darker, in muted light under a lower sky, the landscape lumpier, and fenced, much of it gouged by plows. But the trees were taller, the houses bigger and more solid and severe than any in Hawaii. The road through the flat-topped hills was lined by blackish woods, and in some hollows they saw a white-painted house and what looked like a farm, planted fields or a tethered horse, a dog rushing to the perimeter fence when they slowed the car.
“Parts of the West Country look like this,” Olive said. “Devon. Dorset.”
Meadows, rivulets running through them, browsing cows. The woods were leafier and softer, the trees agitated by the breeze, and where the land was low-lying it was muddy. Yet it didn’t have a visible edge, as Hawaii did—you weren’t confined, you could keep driving.
“I’d die in a place with no water.”
“Voilà, there’s some water.” In the depth of a valley the shining folds and corrugations of a shallow river tumbling over water-smoothed boulders.
“How much farther?” Sharkey asked, then sagged and slept.
It was early evening when they reached Floristan, Sharkey coughing himself awake as the car stopped. They found the motel Olive had booked, and, too tired to eat, heavy with jet lag, they slept, waking before dawn, lying in each other’s arms.
Sharkey said, “What would I do without you?” in a whisper. “I’d be lost without you.”
She had no reply to this. She was too moved to speak, grateful for his acknowledgment.
“I’ve never said that to anyone.” He breathed it into her ear. “I’ve never felt it.”
“Lovey,” she said.
“My father used to tell his men, ‘Consider yourself already dead, and you’ll be fine.’”
He’d told her that before, numerous times, fixed in the trauma of his repeating-himself phase. She did not remind him. She kissed him; she said, “Buck up, mate, we’ll muddle through this.”
But over breakfast at a diner next door to the motel—“A real breakfast,” Olive said—he sat, looking futile once more. Olive took a sheet of paper from her folder and pushed it across the table to Sharkey, who was licking pancake syrup from his fingers.
“Read it to me,” he said.
She didn’t need to consult it, she knew what was written on it. She said, “We’re going to his school, to the town hall, to the registrar of deeds, to the police station—all the places that might have a record of him or his family.”
“We could have found records online, like that moke Stickney did.”
“Just bumf.”
“Bumf?”
“Bum fodder. Paperwork. You say you hate it and you’re probably right. We have to talk to people who might have known him—family, friends, anyone. We need to find out who he was.”
“Where do we go first?”
“Swings and roundabouts,” she said, with a shrug. “Cop shop, I reckon.”
Sharkey felt small and ineffectual in her presence, admiring yet intimidated by her conviction. She was brisk and downright, in the English way—“Buck up, mate” was her mantra, and, now and then, “Pull your finger out.” No wonder she was such a capable nurse: she was decisive, dealing with injured and suffering people, always conscious of time passing, motivated by a sense of urgency, her whole being possessed by the necessity to save a life—to rescue; and now she was rescuing him.
But though he was grateful, and murmured his thanks, he was helpless, as when, under the wave at Waimea the last time he’d risked surfing, he’d been trapped in the water, aware both of drowning and of being surrounded by swimmers, unable to help himself. And that helplessness had terrified him, because he’d thought I’m drowning and yet could not move, as in a dream, paralyzed by sleep, and surrendering to the heaviness of the water, rolled in the coffin of the wave and, looking up, was taunted by the dim daylight far above, on the surface.
Seeing him brooding, Olive asked the waitress for directions to the school, the town hall, the police station. Removing a pencil from her bun of hair, the waitress circled them on the map Olive had printed from the Internet. After that—the waitress saying, “Y’all come back, hear?”—they headed down the main street, Sharkey tagging along behind Olive. Passing a whitewashed house with green shutters and an old wheelbarrow serving as a planter, geraniums spilling from its tray, and on its own island in the center of town, surrounded by flowerbeds, the granite statue of a Civil War soldier clutching his musket, Olive said, “Pure Americana.”
“Mulgrave—sounds familiar,” the desk sergeant said at the police station. “I think there was a kid at our school with that name.”
But when Olive spelled it, the policeman said, “That’s not it. It’s your Yankee accent, ma’am.”
“Hear that, Joe? My posh Yankee accent.”
The sergeant agreed to tap the name into his computer, but found no matches.
“Anything before the early nineties, it won’t be in our database. We didn’t get computers hereabouts till then. You could check at the town hall—right across Main Street.”
The lawn fronting the Floristan Town Hall was planted with apple trees, some of them still hung with fruit, and the façade of the building was shaded by a high-roofed porch lined with white columns. Inside, the lobby was cool, a fluff of dust on the varnished floorboards. Seeing TOWN CLERK lettered in gold on a door, Olive entered and greeted an elderly man in a swivel chair, reading a newspaper at a desk.
“Nice trees out front.”
“Floristan’s famous for its flowering shrubs. You have to come in springtime.”
Olive asked see the voting rolls. The man selected a ring binder from a shelf, saying, “This is up to date,” but the name Mulgrave did not appear in any of its pages.
Olive said, “The family definitely lived in Floristan.”
“They own property?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“Registrar of deeds—down the hall, just past the drinking fountain. They might have something for y’all.”
Olive rapped on the counter and a powdered white-faced woman appeared, her cheeks crimped like piecrust when she smiled at them. She was kindly beneath her makeup. She wore a yellow silken dress, a floppy bow at her collar, a blue flower pinned just beneath her billowy shoulder. She said she didn’t hear too good—“Hearing-impaired,” she clarified. When Olive wrote the name Max Mulgrave on an office While You Were Out pad, the woman said, “Give me some time-frame idea of the date you think he lived here, please.”
“Could have been fifty years ago.”
“That’s a help,” the woman said. She was perhaps sixty—old enough to be a contemporary of Max Mulgrave’s. But when they asked, she said, “I’m from Fayetteville. I married a Floristan boy.” In a softer voice, “He passed.”
She went to a cabinet and pulled out a drawer. Using the fingertips of both hands, she flicked through the cards, searching for the name.
“Little bitty old cards,” she tut-tutted.
The process took so long that Olive and Sharkey sat down in chairs by the wall.
“Y’all check the voter rolls?” the woman called out, still looking down at the cards.
“Yes. They sent us here.”
“No one by that name presently owns a residence in Floristan district.” The woman shoved the drawer back into the cabinet.
“But thirty or forty years ago, or more?”
“If they did, the records would be in the annex, where we keep the old files. I can look. I’ll let you know if I find anything. I’m fixin’ to do that after lunch. I’m Rose.”
“Thank you, Rose.”
“I love your accent, miss.”
“I love yours,” Olive said.
“But yours is like the movies.”
They traded phone numbers and set off for Floristan High School. Brick, squarish, as stately as the town hall, it was two blocks down Main Street. They walked, Olive wondering whether she should simply stop when she saw anyone of sixty or so and ask whether he or she knew the name Max Mulgrave.
“All this way from Hawaii,” Sharkey said, wondering at the town, shaking his head.
The receptionist at the high school took them to the office of the deputy principal, who was Black—a tall man in a dark suit and floral tie who introduced himself as Dr. Johnson.
“Those records would be in storage,” he said when Olive told him the graduation date. “You need to go online.”
Sharkey lifted his hands to his face and groaned into his fingers, turning away.
“Is he all right?” Dr. Johnson looked sour in his sudden confusion.
“We’ve come rather a long distance.”
“This is the new high school.” Dr. Johnson had turned away from Sharkey. “Your friend might have attended the old high school.”
“Where’s that, Doctor?”
“On Cherry Street. It’s a museum now.”
“How old are you, Doctor?”
“Forty-seven—and by the way, please call me Purnell.”
“Purnell, did you know a family named Mulgrave when you were a teenager?”
“I take it they were white folks?”
“Yes, sir,” Olive said, and heard Sharkey mutter “Haoles” through his teeth.
“I didn’t know any white folks at all when I was a youngster. I lived out at Yellville—but not in Yellville proper. Countryside. First white person I ever got to know was at college. I was around twenty then.”
“What about the yearbooks? He might be in one of them.”
“Maybe have a look at the school library. What did you say was the year this gentleman graduated?”
“’Sixty-nine.”
“Ancient history,” Dr. Williams said in a pained voice, tightening his face. “Library’s the big room on the second floor. Miss Ruffin will be glad to help you.”
Miss Ruffin, a soft-faced woman, chalky with makeup, was seated at a computer; her welcoming voice said, “Come right on in.” She tapped the keyboard with a gesture of finality, stabbing at it, then turned to face them and listen to Olive’s question.
“Excuse my apron,” she said. It was starched and white, with yellow flowers embroidered on the bib, and made her look like an elderly child.
Olive wrote Max Mulgrave’s name and his graduation year on a slip of paper and handed it to Miss Ruffin.
“Tell you one thing for certain,” Miss Ruffin said. “You won’t find anything of that kind on this here computer. All the yearbooks is over on those shelves. Ain’t got but one file copy on hand, and none of those early years been digitized.”
“So we came to the right place,” Olive said.
“Yearbook-speaking,” Miss Ruffin said, “you’re at ground zero.”
“That’s a lovely apron.”
“It’s to keep the dust off. Books are just a caution for dust.”
“Apron? Dust?” Sharkey said. “What is all this talk? What are we doing here?”
Hugging him, to comfort him, to restrain him, Olive felt the tension in his body, his hard arms tensed as though about to lash out. Soothing him, she heard Miss Ruffin speaking.
“The Apple Blossom, 1969,” the woman was saying in a new tone—brisk, efficient—selecting a blue volume from the far end of the shelf. “You can use it on the table yonder. Just return it to me when you’re done.”
Sharkey’s outburst had spooked her, stung her, made her wary, and impelled Olive to hold on to him until she felt him relax, a softening of his posture. She led him to the table, where they sat side by side, Sharkey with his head in his hands as Olive leafed through the yearbook. She turned first to the section headed SENIORS, the graduating class, and there he was, blond, thin-faced, solemn, in a white short-sleeved shirt with an oversized collar, a stain on the pocket. The other boys on the same page wore jackets and ties, and most were plump and smiling. He looked forlorn.
The caption under his photograph read: Max Mulgrave . . . “Buzz cut”. . . Good with numbers . . . Slide Rule Club . . . “I’m real busy” . . . “Hey Joe” . . . Future astronaut.
Olive read it to Sharkey in a low voice, but he remained holding his head and did not react. The entry was much shorter and less detailed than any of the others, and unlike them there was no listing of his participation in sports or student politics or the prom. Others mentioned football, baseball, Apple Blossom Achievement, Future Farmers of America, cheerleader, cadet.
But two items stood out: “Hey Joe” and the Slide Rule Club.
“It’s a song,” Sharkey said.
“Fancy that, Joe,” Olive said. “Not in my repertoire.”
“Loved that song,” Sharkey said. “Kind of an anthem for me. ‘Hey Joe, where you gonna run to now?’”
Olive had found the page headed SLIDE RULE CLUB and the group photo, eight students, four girls seated on chairs, knees together, their hands on their laps, fingers laced together, and standing behind them, four boys, Max Mulgrave on one side, pale, haunted-looking, a face of apprehension, the same short-sleeved white shirt with the big collar, the same stain.
“Some of these kids might still be alive,” Olive said, writing their names in her notebook.
When she was done—there were no more mentions of Max Mulgrave in the yearbook—she handed the volume back to Miss Ruffin, open to the Slide Rule Club page, and thanked her, saying, “Do you know any of these people? They’d all be late fifties, early sixties now.”
Adjusting her apron, Miss Ruffin settled the book on the counter and studied the page, touching each name with a pale finger, murmuring to herself.
“Those girls is most likely married,” she said. “Probably grannies by now. But this Terry Baggett, he’s in town—Baggett Insurance. And this fellow Ray Siggins, you’ll find him somewhere. It’s a good family, lots of Sigginses hereabouts. Curtis Rickards—lots of Rickards too. Could be one of the Rickards at the dairy, or the filling station.”
Baggett Insurance was nearest, on Main Street, beyond the Civil War memorial, but Terry Baggett was not there, the secretary said. Olive said it was urgent. The secretary offered to call him, saying, “This about a policy?”
“In a way,” Olive said.
The woman hesitated, and then Olive saw that she had been eating a sandwich, which she still held in her right hand, half concealing it below the level of her desk. A bit breathless in her confusion, she said, “Missed my breakfast,” then placed the unfinished sandwich on her blotter and dialed the number. She handed the ringing receiver to Olive.
“This is Terry,” came the voice.
Sharkey had been staring out the window at the planter on the sill, the browned late-season blossoms. But as though to turn his back on Olive, he crept to an aquarium bubbling on a shelf, the yellow and blue fish flashing at his approach.
“You don’t know me,” Olive said into the phone. “I’m at your office, inquiring about a man named Max Mulgrave.”
In the long silence that followed, Olive wondered whether she’d been cut off.
“Hello?”
“I’m thinking,” the man said. “I haven’t heard that name for years. You kind of blindsided me with it.”
“You were in high school with him.”
“Coon’s age ago.”
“Were you friends?”
“What’s this concerning, miss?”
“My name is Olive Randall. I’m trying to trace old friends and acquaintances of Max Mulgrave’s.”
“I don’t reckon you’ll find any.”
“Why would that be?”
“He didn’t have but two or three to begin with. And when he left town he never come back. Or maybe once, but not more than that.”
“So he did come back?”
“That was the talk. It would have been years ago. Maybe it was to see his mother.”
“Is she still in town?”
“She passed.” The man sighed, a scraping sound in the phone. “I’m sorry, miss. I don’t have time for this.”
“Can I run a couple of names past you?”
“Do it real quick.”
Olive read from her notebook, “Curtis Rickards. Ray Siggins. Mary Lou Gordon.”
Interrupting her, the man said, “Mary Lou’s married. Moved long ago. Ray’s still in town, but he’s busted up about his wife’s passing. Curtis, you might find him at his garage. Gotta go. Bah now.”
The phone went dead. Olive handed the receiver back to the secretary, who said, “Mr. Baggett’s real busy.”
“Curtis Rickards,” Olive said. “Could you direct me to his garage?”
But the secretary was looking fretfully at Sharkey, who was twirling his finger in the bubbling aquarium, poking at the darting fish, his tongue clamped in his teeth in concentration.
“Sir, y’all mind leaving them fish be?”
Sharkey, still with his finger in the water, said sharply, “Do I tell you what to do?”
“Joe!” Olive said in sudden fury, and Sharkey shrank like a scolded child and sidled away from the aquarium.
“Rickards’ Garage,” the secretary said. “It’s set back a piece, behind the Piggly Wiggly, big ole Texaco Star up top. But he don’t pump gas no more,” and seeing Sharkey creeping back toward the aquarium, said, “Sir!”
Olive led him outside, but before she could warn him to behave he said, “Something about this place. You get the feeling that half of it is buried.” He meant the state, what he had seen of it, the sense he’d had on the drive from Little Rock. The life of the land was hidden under the hills and hollows and the trees thrashed by the wind, in the muddy creeks, an inner darkness of ghosts and corpses and bones, the dirty water and stagnation in the roadside ditches, the faded shirts and ragged underwear hung out to dry on the laundry lines of the poor farmhouses, a haunted landscape of secrets and resentments. He did not have the words to explain this vision to Olive. He said, “I found that fishbowl a relief.”
Farther up the street, passing Belle’s Diner, she saw the Piggly Wiggly store and smiled at the name—“Extraordinary,” she said—and behind it the Texaco sign the secretary had mentioned.
“I’m hungry,” Sharkey said, pointing at Belle’s Diner.
“Let’s see this guy first.”
Inside the open-fronted garage a man in blue overalls was tinkering with a car upraised on a block lift.
“Looking for Mr. Curtis Rickards,” Olive said.
“In the office,” the man said, and seeing Sharkey behind her, added, “You got some serious tats, bro.”
“You too,” Sharkey said.
In the manner of someone surrendering, the man lifted his arms, showing his forearms, in one of his greasy hands a socket wrench that he held like a weapon.
“Four years in Cummins Unit,” he said. “That’s where I learned to do this,” and wagged the wrench. “What’s your excuse?”
“Surfer tribal,” Sharkey said, but Olive was at the office door, calling to him, and when he joined her inside, she said, “This is Mr. Rickards. He’s going to tell us about Max Mulgrave.”
“Call me Curtis—pleased to meet you,” the man said, reaching for Sharkey’s hand. He wore a battered baseball cap and a T-shirt with red lettering, GO HOGS. The man spoke slowly, with a lazy mouth, his lips so loose and awry Olive couldn’t lip-read his words. “So you know Max?”
Olive said, “In point of fact, we don’t know him at all. We’re doing a bit of research on his background.”
“Something happen to him?”
“He passed away.”
“Sorry to hear it,” Rickards said, and adjusted his ball cap in a formal reflex of grief.
“Mr. Baggett told us where we could find you. We understand you were in high school with him. The Slide Rule Club.”
“Oh boy, that takes me back.” He sniffed in reflection, then seemed to remember something. “Please have a seat. Can I offer you folks a soda?”
“No thanks,” Olive said, sitting, Sharkey pulling another chair next to her. “And we don’t want to waste your time.”
“This is Floristan,” Rickards said. “All we got is time.”
“Max Mulgrave,” Olive said, prompting him.
“Very smart—supersmart. Very quiet, grew up real poor. Clothes all tore up. Got teased at school.”
“For being poor?”
“For being smart,” Rickards said. “Got whupped by his pa.” He tugged at his ball cap again, leveling his visor, the visor stained from his tuggings. “One thing I recall is he was restless—set on leaving Floristan. And he did. Joined the army out of high school. I believe he served in ’Nam, like some others in our class. Never came back.”
“We heard from Mr. Baggett that he might have returned to see his mother.”
“That could be so. But old Widder Mulgrave, she’s long gone.”
“Where did she live?”
“Off Seven South. One of them roads that crosses the creek. That’d be Indian Creek. I don’t get over there unless I have to tow someone or light up a battery.”
“Do you remember anything else about Max Mulgrave?”
“Math whiz. A brain—imagine that, a brain in Floristan. Real quiet type. Could have gone to Fayetteville, but he didn’t have the money. And look at me. I had the money, but I took over my daddy’s business instead.”
Sharkey cleared his throat to get Rickards’s attention. He had been staring at the man’s head as though trying to locate a thought inside it. He said, “He was teased at school?”
“You know how kids are,” Rickards said.
“I sure do,” Sharkey said.
“Had to fight his battles.”
“I know all about that.”
“What about other friends like you?” Olive asked. “Are there any of them in town?”
Rickards’s half-smile drooped on his loose lips, rueful in reflection. He said, “I can’t rightly recall if he had a girlfriend. Smoked a lot of weed after school, but that was no big deal. All of us was stoners then.” He tapped the ragged blotter on his steel desk as though indicating that he was struggling to think hard. “It was so long ago. I wish I could tell you more, but darned if I can remember.” Then he glanced up but looked severe, narrowing his eyes. “One interesting thing. I went over to his house once. It was to bring him a book—it was a little old book of logarithm tables, like we used before computers. Max was sick in bed, and we had a test coming up. This was his old house, shotgun shack, not the one his mother moved into later.”
“You took him a book,” Olive said. “What was interesting?”
“Interesting in a sorry way,” Rickards said. “The house was all cattywampus. Max was ashamed. He hadn’t expected me. He didn’t like me seeing it—the house cattywampus, and his life no better. His ma smoking on the front stairs. Off to the side a beat-up Eleanor.”
“Eleanor?”
“Outhouse—privy. Particular kind. They didn’t have no plumbing, the Mulgraves,” Rickards said. “By then his daddy had run off. And after that visit he avoided me, like I’d seen things he didn’t want me to see. Out of shame, I guess. He stayed away from me. I wasn’t too surprised when he joined the army. Folks from Floristan, that’s one way to move up—the service. I imagine he was a lot better off wherever he went.”
“After the army he went to college in California,” Olive said. “Started a successful business. Then sold it. Relocated to Hawaii.”
“I’m so fetched to hear that,” Rickards said, and choked a little and fussed with his cap, then pressed his fingers to his eyes.
Olive saw that the man was weeping, using his fingers to stop his tears, murmuring but not able to speak clearly, his effort showing in his crumpled shoulders.
“I’m sorry to upset you.”
“No, I’m happy,” Rickards said, but in a suffering voice. “It’s just remembering his poor old shack, and Max sick in bed, and how ashamed he was. I’m glad for the happy ending.”
“Thanks for your help,” Olive said, rising from her chair and moving to the office door.
Just as they were leaving, Sharkey turned to face Rickards, his mouth opening wide, his neck reddened under his tattoos.
“I killed him,” he said, keeping his mouth open, panting furiously. “I killed Max Mulgrave.”
Rickards huffed and seemed to swell, and stood up at his desk, kicking his chair back. He snatched at his hat, and out of his pain-filled face, his bulging eyes glazed with tears, came a strangled helpless honk that might have been an anguished word.
Too tired to look further, they went back to the motel, telling themselves they needed a nap, but they slept on, waking in the dark, bewildered by the strangeness, the stale breath of the air conditioner, the smell of the decaying carpet. They lay in silence, open-eyed, until the stained ceiling became visible in the next morning’s daylight.
At breakfast Sharkey was silent. Olive said, “I know what you’re thinking. Waste of time. Wild goose chase. But this is where he came from. This town made him. These people, these streets, that man. We know him better. This was his world.”
Her cell phone sounded, its ring and vibration causing it to fidget on the table.
“Is that Miss Olive? This is Rose, from Deeds. How you folks doing? I just found something.”
The woman was where they’d left her, in the small office, a folder on the desk before her. She plucked it open with satisfaction.
“This is the title deed we found in the annex. For a house in the name of Ebba Mulgrave, Indian Creek Trail, right here in Floristan. And this here, another document certifying payment in full, some serious money, with the notarized signature of the gentleman you inquired about, Mr. Max Mulgrave. And his address.”
Olive examined the names, mother and son, impressed by the flourish of the son’s signature, in great contrast to the mother’s irregular scrawl, less a written name than something pictorial, a doodle in blue ink.
“Funny old address,” Rose said.
“Kaulawaha Road,” Sharkey said.
“You know how to say it. What kind of word is that?”
“Hawaiian.”
“That zip code,” Olive said. “It’s in a place called Wai‘anae.”
Rose clapped her hands and said, “Looks like you found what you was looking for.”