Hunter was sober most mornings. But when he insisted on Sharkey’s driving him to the gun range at Koko Head he was drunk, and the range attendant, alarmed by his shouting, would not let him shoot. Hunter swore at him and, when the attendant turned his back, shouted at the man, his demon voice rising in his anger. He threatened the man, and only relented when Sharkey dragged him away. Later Hunter made it a story, added guns to it, and “demonic muzzle flip,” and barking dogs, and Hawaiian chants. He read it to Sharkey. What had happened was embarrassing. But the story was funny.

That was his magic, to make an awkward episode into a kind of fable. Sharkey had not known that there was a public firing range at Koko Head, that Hunter was a gun nut, that he had access to pistols and assault rifles from his cronies on O‘ahu. The sight of the guns in Hunter’s pale trembling hands worried Sharkey. Hunter’s moods shifted too; he complained of muscle aches, a bad back, insomnia—up all night, he needed a nap in the middle of the day.

“Great guy,” he said to the nurse-girlfriend, this one named Bonnie.

“He’s amazing,” she said.

“I wish I’d known him years ago,” Sharkey said.

She took it as a compliment to the man, but he meant that Hunter was faltering, in decline—repetitive, his memory misfiring. Even Hunter said so. “What do you expect?” he screamed into the phone one day—Sharkey guessed at an editor. “My brain’s fried. There’s a guy here who’s feeding me toxic mushrooms!”

Sharkey wanted to show him North Shore waves. The marathon always took place in the big-wave season. “Monster waves!” he said. “Maybe something to write about.”

“Scary waves,” Hunter said. “I want to see who you are when you’re scared. A different guy!”

“I’m myself on a gnarly wave. Not scared. That’s who I am,” Sharkey said.

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

But he couldn’t pin Hunter down. No one could, not even the people who’d flown him to Honolulu and paid for his hotel suite. He was reckless, and like many reckless surfers Sharkey had known, he was superstitious.

“No, no, no,” he’d say, entering a hotel room. “It’s all wrong.” And he would threaten to leave unless the room was arranged his way. He needed flowers, a view of the ocean, an ice bucket. And he was fickle, meeting Sharkey’s friends. “I don’t like the way your Samoan pal looks at me.”

“Moe Kahiko. He’s Hawaiian. He’s mellow.”

“No. He has a hairy feral quality. Ratlike cunning. Yellow eyes. He always looks like he’s planning some kind of caper.”