In the morning, exhausted by the shocks in his dreams—always over the falls into heavy water, under the wave, and suffocating just before he woke—his body was like clay. But he was grateful for sunlight. After he got up and sat in his rocker on the lanai, soothed by green tea Olive had brewed (“Cuppa,” she said, and kissed him), he became alert to the sounds of the morning, the roosters’ crowing, the twisted chirp of the myna birds, and the geese fussing, a chorus of competing squawks beneath the house. The fragrant breeze rattled the bamboos, in the blaze of sunshine the dew winked on drooping grass blades. But he thought, Why am I so sad?
“I promised we’d go back,” Olive said.
Sharkey shut his eyes as though to expel a memory. He said, “Fonoti, from long ago. Crazy Samoan.”
“He told me what happened to you at school—the gang. He said he was sorry.”
“Apologies are funny shit. I laugh whenever I hear one.” He looked at her with a faint smile. He said, “Those punks made me strong. They made me want something better. They gave me a purpose. All my life I wanted to get away from people like that—to swim out and catch a wave. And dismount before I got to shore, and paddle back and find another wave. Stay in the water, live in the water.”
Olive knelt and took his hands to comfort him, not submissive but concerned, a gesture Sharkey always took to be a nurse’s reaction, steadying an anxious patient, and his hands had a patient’s tremors and sick pallor.
“And now I’m afraid of the water,” he said, not consoled, feeling trapped by her touch. “That guy Frawley knew it. He dared me to surf with that crappy board, all those dings on it. I couldn’t do it. He knew I was chicken.”
“I talked to him, the roly-poly one,” Olive said. “He’s down on his luck, he pongs something awful, but he’s pretty clever—a bright spark. He kept saying Max was hamajang. What is that?”
“My life these days,” Sharkey said.
Olive kept her hands on his. She said, “In his telling, Max was a boffin. He wants to show us where he lived, introduce us to people he knew. Fill in the Max Mulgrave details.”
“Max was a boffin?”
“Techie,” Olive said, and squeezed his hand, “Supersmart.”
Sharkey went quiet after that. Without any further explanation or prodding, he allowed himself to be steered to the car.
On the way back to Wai‘anae, Olive stopped at Zippy’s in Wahiawa, leaving Sharkey in the car. She came out carrying three Styrofoam boxes, which she put in the backseat. When they got to the camp on the beach she presented them to the men, who hooted when she handed them over.
“Plate lunch,” Frawley said, flipping up the hinged lid. “Spam musubi. Portogee sausage. Two scoops macaroni. Egg something. Good grinds, sister.”
They ate, Fonoti laughing softly, pushing aside the food he could not chew, Alex stabbing at the meat on Fonoti’s plate, Frawley grunting as he swallowed. Sharkey stared at the sea.
“The tour,” Olive said, seeing them finishing, gasping with satisfaction.
“The walkthrough,” Frawley said, cocking his head. “I show you the whole Max thing. Due diligence.”
At the car, Alex saw them off, standing at attention and saluting. Frawley snatched open the front door and sat next to Olive, so Sharkey took the backseat with Fonoti, who elbowed him, saying, “Like old times, brah. Too bad Wilfred and Nalani not here. Nalani, she liked you, man!”
Sharkey turned to the sea again, for relief, though Fonoti went on chattering. His stink filled the car as he scratched his scabby knees.
Frawley reached for the dashboard and fumbled with some knobs, bumping them with his knuckles.
“What are you playing at?” Olive said.
“Turning on the AC. Hot in here, sister.”
She resisted remarking on the fact that he had just come from pigging it in his ragged tent on the beach, exposed to the morning sun. She said, “I’ll be delighted to turn it on, but in that case you can’t smoke. If you insist on smoking, we keep the windows open and the AC off.”
Frawley shouted into the backseat, “The wahine one hard-ass!” He lit a cigarette and said to Olive, “You see the original house?”
“That two-story house—yes,” Olive said.
“Was one story already when he bought it. He put on the second floor and made a major renovation.” And as they passed it, Olive driving slowly, the black dog stalking them along the chain-link fence, Frawley said, “He lived up top. He let all kine people crash on the first floor—surfers, homeless people, families from the beach. Was like a hotel.” He leaned out the window and yapped, mocking the dog’s bark. “Back then was no fence.”
“He didn’t charge them anything?” Olive said.
“No charge. He had overhead costs and they sleeping and sitting on his tangible assets! Some stayed for weeks, for months. That’s how he got the name.”
“What name?”
“Uncle, the rich haole.”
“They called him Uncle?”
“Out of respect. Even later, when he had no receivables, like the past few years, always Uncle. Maybe he got money now, passive income or something. Smart buggah.”
“The cop said he was bulletproof.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Why would he say that?”
“Ask the cop,” Frawley said. “The cops know him.”
Fonoti spat out the window and said, “Kind of insane, us showing you the Max world here. More better he showing you himself.”
To fill the silence that followed, Olive said, “But we’re here.”
“Keep going straight,” Frawley said. “To Makaha.”
“He lived in Makaha too?”
“No—we pay respects. Uncle Buffalo stay there. Plus his keiki.”
“Buffalo Keaulana?” Sharkey asked, lurching forward.
“Was his kupuna,” Frawley said. “Take this right.”
As Olive drove slowly through a grid of sleepy streets to a back road of small flat-roofed houses, Frawley leaned over to look out her side window. He squinted and said, “His car not there. Maybe in town. Keep going.”
Sharkey said, “Buffalo. I met him a few times.”
“He respect Max so much,” Frawley said. “And Max, he respect him back. Go mauka here.”
It was a side road, which after fifty yards became a country lane, jogging the car with its potholes, a scattered herd of cows swinging their tails and chewing behind a wire fence as they watched the slowly passing car.
“That van,” Frawley said. “Max stayed there for almost one year.”
A blue van was parked under a tree at the edge of a field of wet greasy clay, its tires flat, the rims sunk into the dirt, its side windows punched out, shards of glass glinting on the ground beside it, cardboard stuck into the window frames, the windshield painted black.
“The rich haole,” Olive said.
“This van was later—I’m giving you evidential matter. He stay here around the time he got busted.”
“What was he arrested for?”
“Never got booked, as such,” Frawley said.
“Cops respect Max big-time,” Fonoti said.
“Even though drugs maybe a significant factor,” Frawley said. “Or speeding, or vagrancy, or whatever. Always gets off. If you do due diligence, you’ll see he got no rap sheet. If you ask him, he’ll tell you. He didn’t even get a misdemeanor. Me, like I said, after the external audit, I ended up with a fraud case. Fonoti here, he got a felony. But Max, he’ll tell you straight, ‘I’m clean, brah.’”
“Hang a U-turn here,” Fonoti said; then, in an affronted voice, “They calling it a felony. It was a bad rap, relating to the so-called abuse of a family member. Would have been one misdemeanor, but they claim it happened in the presence of a minor.” He spat out the window again. “Making it upgrade to one felony. But that part about the keiki watching the beef was bullshit.”
Back on the highway, Frawley pointed to a compound of yellowish buildings with red roofs behind a chain-link fence and said, “Wai‘anae High School. The Seariders. Max gave them all computers, he set them up with software.”
“Buggah should be doing one victory lap,” Fonoti said.
“Maybe that’s why the police gave him a pass,” Olive said. “Because he was generous.”
Frawley said, “Sister, a lot of people generous. I did estate planning, way back, when my life was normal. Before bad choices.”
“White-collar crime, Fraw-boy,” Fonoti said, and giggled, his discolored gums showing greenish in the car. Something in his slushy toothless delivery made the expression even more mocking in its absurdity.
“Back then I knew plenny generous clients. They still had to face the music. But Max—he never. Go ask him.”
“Drugging?” Olive said.
Frawley shrugged. He looked peeved, he sighed, he blew out his cheeks. “All kine.”
“What happened to his money?” Olive asked.
“What always happens to money? It goes away. Doesn’t stay still.” He lit a cigarette as though to allow himself time to reflect. “Gave a ton of it away. I set up trust funds for him. Some of his money got cockaroached.”
“That little humbug house,” Fonoti said—it was a small weathered shack, surfboards propped against it, a Hawaiian flag flying upside down on a pole in front—“Max stay there for a lilly bit.”
“After the van?”
“Was before,” Frawley said. “We not giving you chronological sequence. Like Makaha—he lived in the nice hotel there for a long time—luxury, writing checks. He had a big life.”
“What about his family?” Olive said. “A wife?”
“You gotta ask Max.”
“He had one?”
“Maybe still has one,” Frawley said.
“Plenny wahine,” Fonoti said. “The wahine like him.”
“Because of his money?”
“Because he’s a good guy,” Frawley said in a stern correcting tone.
In that mood, Frawley was the dominant CPA again, his pen tapping a ledger, niggling at a detail, not the fat man in the dirty T-shirt but an authority figure, strict and forbidding. Olive was reminded that the man he had been was the man he was now, in spite of torn clothes and sweaty arms and tangled hair. He still saw the world in terms of “receivables” and “passive income” and “evidential matter.” Beneath the dirt and sweat and cracked fingernails, a certified public accountant.
“I wish Max was here now, so I wouldn’t have to explain. You’d see, you’d know.” Frawley hitched in his seat as though suddenly finding the car too small for his body, his knees jammed against the glove box. “Past couple of years he came, he went. But never mind—good guy, pono guy.”
Back on the highway, in traffic, halted behind a bus picking up passengers, Olive said, “Where do you think he is now?”
Frawley folded his arms and frowned and did not look at her. He said, “I think I showed you enough. Pull over here at the stop, after the bus go.”
“What about the rest?”
“Max can show you the rest.”
In the backseat, Sharkey began to stammer, half-formed words like urgent breaths failing in his throat.
“We don’t have a lot of time,” Olive said, hesitating, then pulling forward and parking at the forward end of the bus stop.
A berm at the roadside formed the edge of a dune, and when Olive switched off the engine, killing the fan, they sat in heat and glare. Even with the windows open the car was hot. Just ahead, beside the berm, an old woman trawled through a trash barrel, selecting soda cans, while two boys on dirt bikes seemed animated by having something to watch—the car of gabbing people, pretty haole woman at the wheel. A shirtless man wearing a wool hat and surf shorts lay on the sandy berm, his body perfectly still, only his toes twitching, tickling the air.
“Not a lot of time,” Frawley said mimicking Olive’s English accent, smacking his lips, fingering a cigarette, preparing to light it. “You know we say, ‘Try wait’?”
Sharkey said, “What she means is—”
But Frawley cut him off. “We’re not like you, sister.” He lit the cigarette and savored the pause he was creating and blew smoke out of the side of his mouth. “We stay waiting. We do nothing but stay wait. Our whole life is wait—from little keiki to big adult, always wait. I sometimes try due diligence to figure out the difference between locals and haoles. The simple answer I come up with is, haoles no wait. And all we kanaka maoli do is, what? Fricken wait. Even when I stay in my office on Bishop Street, the haoles come and go, never wait. And Frawley at his desk—wait. You got no idea what it’s like. You always have what you want. We never. Fonoti?”
“We never,” Fonoti said, amplifying the word like a cry, Nevah.
Olive allowed them a respectful silence, and then said, “I didn’t mean to rush you.”
“And plus, the other thing,” Frawley said. “What are we waiting for?”
Fonoti said, “I waiting for Max.”
“Ass right,” Frawley said. “We used to say ‘Max—he to the max,’ like an expression. Maybe we waiting for him.”
In his aggrieved rant about waiting, his talk had shifted from his accountant’s precision to a blunter lingo, more local, especially on that last word, heem.
He sat grunting, as though digesting the meaning of what he’d said, the echo of it rumbling through his big body.
“In the meantime, we ho‘omau,” Frawley said, and looked at Olive. “Push on. Persevere for Max sake.”
Sharkey turned to look out the window, seaward, where the surf had risen, chest high, and beyond the gouts of foam in the breaking waves a boy at sea, swaying on top of the water, too far out for Sharkey to discern his board, the disjunction making it seem as though the boy was dancing in the ocean.
“Hot like hell,” Fonoti said, breathing through his nose, a crackling sound.
“Give me twenty bucks,” Frawley said.
“For what?”
“For the”—he puffed his cigarette—“for the indenture. What we call the agreement.”
Olive fumbled in the bag at her feet and brought out the money.
Crushing the bill in his hand, Frawley said, “And Fonoti. For his knowledge. His mana‘o.”
“Funny old lot you are with the wonga, twenty bucks a bung,” Olive said, holding a twenty-dollar bill between the two front seats until Fonoti pinched it in his fingers and flicked it away from her. “I still have a few more questions.”
“Tanks.”
“So does Joe,” she said. And in a deliberate way, as though formally introducing him, “Joe Sharkey.”
Frawley humped and heaved in his seat until he was turned around, staring at Sharkey.
“One more house,” he said, and directed Olive back into the traffic and up the main road past the high school to a junction where he said, “Mauka here.”
Olive turned inland on a wide road rising on a long slope to a bluff of two-story houses. They were faced in stucco, pink and pale yellow, some with pillars and porches, all with lanais projecting toward the ocean.
“The one with the big breadfruit tree in front,” Frawley said, as Sharkey ducked to get a better view through the windshield.
Olive said, “Max lived here?”
“No,” Frawley said. “I did. That was my house. That was my ‘ulu tree. I lost it all when I had some issues. Nice place, huh?”
“Smashing,” Olive said.
“When you see me at my tent at the beach, I know what you’re thinking—the guy’s a bum. This was my house once, but it wasn’t me. That tent isn’t me. I’m still me. So you want to see all the places Max lived in, but it’s a goose chase. Those places aren’t him—those houses and shacks. He’s still himself, no matter what.”
Olive began to speak, but Frawley raised his hand.
“Take us back to Pokai Beach,” he said, and as she drove away he kept talking. “Most of us are alone in life. But if you’re real lucky, you got one person you can talk to without staying afraid they’ll judge you. You can say anything to this person. He’s true to you—I don’t say ‘like a brother,’ because a brother can let you down. My brother was a buggah. This person, this true friend, is someone like your own self. It’s not love I’m talking about—love is insane. No, it’s trust.” He used his whole face to utter the word, making it sizzle, as truss. “Max is that guy for me. I wish I knew where he stay. I miss him. There’s so much I want to tell him that I can’t tell no one else.”
Fonoti said, “Hey, you don’t know trouble till you lose your best friend.”
By then they were back at the parking lot, Frawley sighing and snatching at his face, his voice having gone croaky and sorrowful from his talk.
Sharkey put out his hand. He said, “Joe.”
But Frawley’s hands stayed in his lap, obscured by the protrusion of his belly. He said, “I know who you are. Big Joe. North Shore guy, da Shark. Fonoti so stoked to see you because you went to school together.”
Fonoti said, “Plus hung out.” He sniffed, remembering. “Wilfred Kalama. Nalani. Vai. That little psycho haole, forget his name.”
“But I’m not stoked,” Frawley said, not listening. “I seen you surfing—you’re nothing special. Lots of guys like you—long board, monster wave—some of them more better.”
He straightened in his seat. All his talk—some of it lapsing into pidgin, some of it preachy—had given him dignity. Now he seemed to have an air and a presence approaching grandeur, in spite of his burned face and scarred arms, his dirty clothes and frizzy, dusty hair.
“I know that,” Sharkey said, looking beaten.
“They don’t get endorsements. No big life for them. Just mokes and baboozes in Makaha, waiting, like locals always wait. But Joe Sharkey—big fricken deal.”
“It’s not what you think.”
“I seen you at the Big Board Classic, way back. You got points. But I’m not impressed. You was junk. Max got less points, but he surf with heart.” Frawley put his face closer to Sharkey’s and said with force, “He was a dog off his leash.”
Looking pained, his features crumpling, Sharkey said, “He was at that meet?”
“Sure. But you snobbed him.”
Sharkey tried to speak, to acknowledge what he’d just heard, but he was unable to make a sound. He had no breath in his mouth to form a word.
“So maybe you got more questions?” Frawley said. And now, reflective, he took the twenty-dollar bill he had crushed and placed it on his thigh and smoothed it against his sweaty flesh, pressing the wrinkles out of it. “Ask Max.”
With a retching hack, like the onset of nausea, Sharkey began to sob.
Frawley loosened the car door, then thrust it open with his elbow, saying, “Go boo-hoo somewhere else, haole.”