Everyone stupidly believed it to be the other way around—“the mainland’s huge, man”—the cities and long roads and distant hills in places like Nevada and Utah, or where they’d just been, in the bushy woods and low hills of Arkansas. Those places pressed on his head and imprisoned him with bad smells, the air thick with sour vegetation and decay, with diesel fumes that reeked of poison, the cities stinking with too many people. He had hated the dark woods on the drive to Floristan, the disorder by the roadside, the junked cars rusting in tall grass. In every crowded town he’d imagined witchlike faces staring from the windows of houses. The mainland was a place of muffled voices and intimidating buildings and overdressed strangers, all those baggy clothes and big shoes—you never saw flesh, never bare feet.

He could not rid his mind of the sense of failure he felt, trapped in mainland narrowness, suffering an obscure thirst, the dust like a disease. The mainland was a place of threat, of danger, of whispers—yes, the roads were long, but they were all dead ends, the mainland was an underworld of shadows and strangers.

Hawaii was huge and sunlit and sweet. It was not just the mountains and the cliffs and the green vertical pali, rising like organ pipes, under the sky-high arches of enormous rainbows—it was the water. The sea was also Hawaii, the sea was its world. The islands did not end at the shore. They were part of the luminous ocean, and the ocean was endless and life-giving and, just offshore, empty of people. No one on the mainland knew that. “Cali’s got waves,” they said, but the rest of California was jammed against all those other states, of wreckage and desert. Hawaii was a gorgeous green woman reclining on her side, sensual, sloping, allowing you to rest against her softness.

So he was where he wanted to be. Yet he knew he was fractured and feeble, stumbling at times like an old man who could not swim to save his life. And he was exhausted too—all that way to a dot on the mainland map, only to discover that the plot led to Wai‘anae.

Guessing at his frustration, Olive said, “We needed to go. We know him better now, because of that trip. We have something to go on.”

They were in Olive’s car, passing Chun’s Reef, barefoot grommets crossing the road, their boards slung under their arms.

Sharkey said, “What do we know.” It was not a question, it was an exasperated remark.

“That he was poor, and restless—you saw his sad face in the yearbook. That he wanted something better. That he was determined to leave. That he’s not the corpse in the mortuary now—he’s a man in motion.”

“That he got teased at school,” Sharkey said with feeling.