“I mean, staying in shape,” Hunter said, unfazed by the shout. “Being in Hawaii. Riding the monster waves. Water is life, man.”

“I believe that.”

Hunter coughed—a terrible pain-filled cough, and when it subsided, he said, “Remember the time we went shooting at that outdoor gun range? And I was drunk, and they threw us out?”

“Yeah. They weren’t happy. And you with a loaded gun.”

“It was a forty-five-caliber Colt Buntline. Locked and loaded. Like me.”

“You puked in my car.”

“That’ll happen,” Hunter said. “Duke of Puke. My signature move. God, you put up with a bunch of shit from me.”

“I learned a lot.”

“So we’re even,” Hunter said, and began to cough again, and, gagging, struggled to speak, saying, “Gotta go.”

Two days later, the news that Hunter, without warning, had shot himself; and Sharkey knew that in the phone call he had been saying goodbye.

He was a man who had lived his life explosively, in bursts. As he had weakened, dabbing and snorting, in the frenzy of fueling his habit, he had become inward, and Sharkey had not seen until the very end that in his inattention, his lack of interest, his not listening, he was withdrawing from the world that had lost its novelty for him, and, preoccupied with his pain, he was readying himself to die.

18

The Ultimate Wave

Your friend dies, Sharkey thought, and takes part of your being away, and you live on, smaller, with an unfillable hole in your life. The worst of it for the living is that the friend has vanished: the one person you loved listening to, the one who would have understood and taken pleasure in hearing about what you’ve discovered; the one person who’d believe you. Your well-wisher, dead.

The great self-pitying sadness for Sharkey was that he had found the wave but had no one to share it with, no one he trusted enough. It had to be a secret from other surfers, all of whom were looking for the ultimate wave themselves, the Big Mama. Just Sharkey’s mention of its vast size had seized Hunter’s attention—made him howl, his baboon bark of pleasure, because he was a man who celebrated the biggest, the best, the loudest, the weirdest, the craziest; someone who gloried in extremes. Hunter would have loved to hear of the monster wave, massive and strange and brief; an intrusion that swelled and broke and fell and was gone. He was like that outrageous wave, the one that Sharkey had searched the world for, that he’d prepared for throughout his surfing life; the one to crown a career.