“You saw that he bought a big expensive house for his mum. He ended up with money.”

“He didn’t end up with money. He ended up drunk, on an old bike, in the rain at Waimea. He ended up dead.”

They had passed Weed Circle and the narrow track to Snake Road, which Olive took to avoid the traffic at Helemano. She cut through Schofield to Kunia Road, a ribbon of pavement across the lower slopes of the hills and the mountain, the old volcano, deeply scored, its tubes of lava cold and densely forested. Concentrating on the narrow road and avoiding potholes, Olive had not answered, so they were passing the plowed fields at the Ewa end when Sharkey spoke again, as though finishing his thought.

“And I’m dying too.”

“We’ll find him,” Olive said, in her hearty bucking-him-up tone.

“I used to drive this way to go to Wai‘anae and Nānākuli to surf,” Sharkey said. “I was strong. I knew I’d get hassled by mokes in the lineup, but I’d think, ‘Bring it on, brah.’ I earned respect.”

“I wish I’d known you then.”

“Good thing you didn’t.” He seemed cheered by the memory. “I was a dog.”

“Lucky me,” Olive said. But she thought how she hated the way men boasted of their stupid maleness, the way they thought that women were impressed by the boasts. But only other men cared, or laughed, while women concluded, Another reason not to trust you.

He was not a man, he’d become a child again, and she felt sorry for him, especially at those times, more frequent now, when he admitted he was afraid.

“It was all different when I came this way before,” he said. “Because I was different.”

“We’ll go straight to his house,” Olive said, to change the subject, because she knew that he’d talk about how everything was different, and that would lead to him talking about being old, then he’d talk about dying, and she hated that. She wanted him to understand that they were still on a quest and that a new life for him might be possible at the end of it.

“I’m staying in the car,” Sharkey said, suddenly deadened—the fear was physical. They had passed through Wai‘anae on the highway, the shops on the right—yellow walls, scrawled signs—the sea shimmering on the left, the waves like enemies, the thresh of water scooping at tree roots, toppling palms—they lay across the beach—and cracking cement revetments, tossing gouts of sand on the highway. The glare of sunlight exposed the squalor of Wai‘anae and made it sinister, the graffiti more hostile for being so visible, the detritus—driftwood, household garbage—like mayhem. The gray coconuts piled in the high-tide trash on the grassy dunes looked to him like severed heads.