The following year, after ten months of travel and struggle, Sharkey saw Hunter again. Both men were limping. Sharkey had injured his knee on a wave in Brazil—Cacimba do Padre—and the hospital in Pernambuco had discharged him with a knee brace that had split apart on the flight home. Hunter said he’d had back surgery.

But Hunter had a new woman by his side, attentive, lovely, much younger, nurselike in her concern. Hunter said, “This is the guy I was telling you about, the original Mr. Joe.”

Anita had a beautiful smile, and while Hunter sat and smoked and talked, Sharkey watched her and envied Hunter for having someone so patient and pretty looking after him. She was knowledgeable too.

“I want Joe to see that thing I wrote about Nixon,” Hunter said. “Where is it?”

“It’s in Better Than Sex.”

“That’s surfing,” Sharkey said. “Better than sex.”

“Find him a copy,” Hunter said. He tottered to his feet and hugged Sharkey. “You trigger-happy little shit. What have you been doing?”

“Blew out my knee in Brazil,” Sharkey said. “But I met a guy from Portugal there. Apparently there’s this humongous wave that breaks off a place called Nazaré. It’s so gnarly they call it the wave of death.”

“Yaaah!” Hunter’s mouth was open wide. “I love it!”

“Not from surfers—from the local fishermen that have died in it. Their widows are in the town, lots of them, all in black, giving the wave stink-eye.”

“You can ride it. I’ll write about it,” Hunter said. He sat back on the sofa and gave Sharkey a drowsy smile and mumbled, “Wave of death.”

At his best Hunter was an enthusiast. He didn’t know much about surfing, but he had a love of wild words and a frantic eagerness to please his friends, and he had always admired Sharkey’s surfing. Surfing was celebrity, surfing was glamour to Hunter, but it was also risk. Because he was no swimmer himself, at least not in a choppy ocean, perhaps he saw it as flirting with death, in the way his own life was self-destructive, comic and macabre.

Sharkey was able to convince him that the opposite was the case, that he never felt more alive than when he was on a wave; that death was unthinkable when he was skidding through a barrel.

“Monster wave,” Hunter said. “What if you wipe out?”

Sharkey said, “I’m a dog in the water.”

“You’re falling off a fucking cliff,” Hunter said.

“In surfing you fall off the cliff and then the cliff chases you.”

“Right. The wave is Mr. Death.”