“No one seems to know, or care, that he’s a box of ashes on a shelf in the mortuary in Honolulu.”

She released him then. He got to his feet, staggered a little, and bumped the table as he backed away.

“But it’s not only him. I’m worried about you. Joe, nothing has gone right since that happened.” She thought a moment, looking pained, thinking, Voodoo death. “Sometimes at the hospital a person checks in. ‘Don’t feel good.’ We run tests, we review the paperwork, we do what we can. But we know what’s going to happen. There’s this horrible shorthand expression we use. ‘He’s terminal.’”

Sharkey began to speak but thought better of it. He wandered to the lanai and sat in his usual chair, the bentwood rocker, and stared at the chickens pecking on the lawn. Olive did not join him at once. She watched him from a little distance, and it seemed to her that he was diminished—older, somewhat shrunken, the shadow on his face giving him a look of sorrow. Tattoos on such a man looked absurd, the big man reduced, the man of action in repose, very still and smaller. The impression she’d had weeks ago, that his body looked uninhabited.

She went to him, softly. He shut his eyes when she touched his shoulder.

“Think of it as a quest.”

He nodded and spoke in a whisper, as if to himself. “I know what a quest is. I used to look for big waves.”

7

Floristan

On a day of heavy traffic, on their way to the airport, they took a side road, Olive driving, Sharkey slouched in the passenger seat, his head lolling like an invalid’s. But his eyes were alert to the shanties half-hidden in the trees, the ragged tents off the bypass road, the cluster of huts aslant in the muddy valley just before the bridge at Wahiawa, the shelters of blue plastic along the bike path at Pearl City, the lean-tos and piled-up cardboard buttressed by rusted shopping carts and splintered crates under the freeway at Nimitz, and at each scattered rat’s nest of sticks and plastic, bearded men and women with greasy strings of hair, sticklike themselves, skin burned to leather, in sweaty rags, in the glare of sunshine, standing in tall grass or under shade trees. The homeless of the island.

“Those shonky huts,” Olive said.

On a hot stretch of the freeway, a shirtless man in torn shorts pushed a shopping cart piled high with rags along the gravel shoulder, a dark futile figure scowling at passing cars.

“Samuel Beckett,” Olive said.

“You know him?”

“Figure of speech. Lost soul.”

“He came here like them,” Sharkey said after a while, approaching the airport road. “From the mainland. Like them—when he had nowhere else to go.”