And she knew from his pauses and his drawl that he was telling the story his own way, slowed by beer. Drinking made him solitary and slow and deaf, the combination of beer and weed simplifying him. He became ponderous, punctuating his speech with pauses. He narrated in one-sentence paragraphs, each one like an announcement, ploddingly—“with care,” someone might say, but Olive knew he was drunk. Though she felt safe with him when he was drunk, his drunkenness turning him into someone milder; he became a person she did not know well. An inner self was released with alcohol, as though he needed to be pickled to come to life. And drinking, far from impairing him, increased his concentration and made him more deliberate.

“I done a bad ting.”

Repeating himself was another feature of his drunkenness—and most people’s—but she could see he was distracted, negotiating the narrow bridge out of Hale‘iwa, squinting at the lights of an oncoming car, past the wipers smashing at the rain. But once he was beyond the beach park and moving faster on the straight road, he resumed.

“I says, ‘What is it?’

“He says, ‘I don’t want to tell you.’”

Olive laughed at his mimicry of the forlorn voice on the phone.

“He says, ‘I was getting some deliveries from the Big Island. Two, tree packages a week. Da kine, all taped up, all plastic inside, no can smell ’um.’

“I’m thinking ‘packages from the Big Island’ means pakalolo. But of course who am I to raise an objection? He knows I’m one of the more serious stoners on the North Shore.”

“Which is why I’m wondering what made you give up buying from him.”

“I’m coming to that.”

He was leaning forward to see, the strain of peering through the splash and beat of the wipers giving him a false smile.

“Take your time,” Olive said.

“‘Two, tree packages a week for one haole guy. Maybe it more better if I not send ’um one week to my mail can.’ I can’t see much through this rain,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the drumming on the car roof. “‘Maybe more better if I send two, tree to you.’”

“Your mail can?”

“My mail can.”

“But you’re in California.”

“That’s the whole point. Moe comes up with the brilliant scheme of diverting his packages of pakalolo to me.”

“Addressed to who?”

“To me, from his grower.”

“Is that legal?”

“I said—” Growling at the rain, Sharkey then sighed. “That glare is driving me nuts.” He winced again. “I said, ‘Did you send them?’

“‘One, I send. Da kine.’ I’m in Santa Cruz at a pay phone, putting coins into the slot, holding an old-fashioned black receiver, and I can’t believe what I’m hearing. A package of pakalolo sent to me through the U.S. Postal Service.