Franco said, “Planning a paddle-out. You’re welcome to come along, Olive.”

“Anyone I know?”

Hunter, Sharkey said in his mind, and at the same time Franco said, “Hunter Thompson. It’s taken six years to arrange this.”

“My hero,” the woman said, putting the last of the vials and the syringe back into the small box and slipping the box into her bag, deft with her beautiful fingers. “I always fancied him.”

She looked around the room, at the tall tattooed girl crying in relief, another girl wearing a dog collar, the giggling surfer boys, the solemn face of Franco clutching his cell phone, the spilled food and vomit, the clutter of beer cans, the racket in the next room, brutal music and cackling laughter. All this with the slowing siren of the ambulance outside the bungalow, the gagging boy on the floor, and the sizzle of breaking waves just beyond the hedge at Rocky Point.

Then, staring disapprovingly at Sharkey, she tossed her head and said, “Hunter Thompson. How staggeringly appropriate.”

Silent, heads bowed, in the muted light of early morning, the young surfers gathered on the beach at Waimea, holding their boards under their arms, as Franco—old, limping, white-haired man—distributed the leis. Dawn was a milky gleam in the ragged clouds above Waimea Valley—no sunlight yet—and a pinkish vapor lifted and lightened at the horizon to the west, where the wide ocean looked flattened by the sky.

“Nice to see you, Shark,” Franco said, handing Sharkey a coil of soft yellow blossoms.

“Wouldn’t have missed it for anything. Too bad we couldn’t have done it sooner.”

But Franco had moved on, still distributing flowers. The surfer next to Sharkey spun his lei on his wrist and turned to Sharkey looking baffled—freckled, pinched face, flexing his toes in the sand. He said, “This guy—what’s his name?”

“Hunter.”

“From the mainland?”

“From all over.”

“Where did he surf?”

“Everywhere.”

“Gnarly?”

“You bet.”

“Sweet.” And the boy twirled his lei over his head, adjusted his board, and started down the beach, kicking the damp sand.

He had no idea. None of them did. And he would have been disillusioned if he’d met the man, especially in his last years, the frenzied, injured, addicted Hunter, who could barely walk. And the woman, Olive, who had said, “My hero,” looking up from the boy whose life she’d just saved—she too would have been bewildered by the wreck of a man whose books she obviously admired, whom she’d never met. He was a man who had never surfed and ended up baffled by the sea—crippled by pain, buzzed on drugs, stalled in his writing, hating his body—who’d blown his brains out. But he was a hero.