“You ain’t going to find anything,” the man said. “You on the wrong road, buddy.”

“Where’s the right one?”

“The one that leads somewhere,” the man said, and jammed his handlebars against the overhanging grass and pushed into it, calling out behind him, “This one don’t lead nowhere.”

When he was gone, Olive said, “I don’t like this.”

“Might as well check it out,” Sharkey said, without conviction. He was glum from the encounter but walked on, shoving at the grass, taking the lead.

The air was hot and windless on the path, enclosed by the tall grass, but further on—only minutes, slapping at the insects whirling in the stillness—they were at the edge of a clearing and saw the tents, the blue tarps stretched on poles and slumped like heavy awnings. Two cars were parked on flat tires under the big tree, one car with a whole wheel missing from its back axle, and it was obvious from the cardboard taped on the windows that they served as shelters. Tipped-over cereal boxes littered the top of a wooden picnic table; a cat was asleep on a tin tray.

A woman in a baseball cap poked at a pot propped on boulders, the pot and the boulders blackened by the fire.

“Yaw,” she called out, and opening her mouth in objection showed her blackened teeth. A man who had been sitting camouflaged by the leafy shadow on a sofa stood up and became visible—not a sofa, Sharkey saw, but a whole car seat askew on the stony ground. The man was fat and fierce-faced, his head enlarged by a frizz of hair in which tiny white scraps of lint were entangled.

Two small children stirred inside one of the cars, and a woman in a beach chair waved her arms and shouted, “You no see the sign?”

“What sign?” Olive said.

“Da kapu sign.”

“We never see it, sister,” Sharkey said.

“I telling you,” the woman said. “Dis all kapu here.”

This woman was younger than the others, with thin hard-muscled legs, wearing a man’s shirt and old faded surf shorts, and yet for all the tears and stains in her clothes and her dirty feet, she had lovely eyes—greeny-blue—and an appealing manner, coarse and up-front, that suggested the willing surf bunny she might have been thirty years earlier.

Now the man said loudly, “You haoles gotta go.”

The children roused inside one of the cars began to laugh, jostling each other, perhaps playing a game, and then flinging toys through the car’s open door—broken toys, fragments of plastic.

The fat man took a few steps forward. His dirty T-shirt was lettered ALOHA FUN RUN. He opened his mouth, worked his big jaw in reflection, then said, “What you want?”

“We’re looking for someone who maybe used to live here,” Olive said in a reasonable voice.

“He got a name?”