He straightened in his seat. All his talk—some of it lapsing into pidgin, some of it preachy—had given him dignity. Now he seemed to have an air and a presence approaching grandeur, in spite of his burned face and scarred arms, his dirty clothes and frizzy, dusty hair.

“I know that,” Sharkey said, looking beaten.

“They don’t get endorsements. No big life for them. Just mokes and baboozes in Makaha, waiting, like locals always wait. But Joe Sharkey—big fricken deal.”

“It’s not what you think.”

“I seen you at the Big Board Classic, way back. You got points. But I’m not impressed. You was junk. Max got less points, but he surf with heart.” Frawley put his face closer to Sharkey’s and said with force, “He was a dog off his leash.”

Looking pained, his features crumpling, Sharkey said, “He was at that meet?”

“Sure. But you snobbed him.”

Sharkey tried to speak, to acknowledge what he’d just heard, but he was unable to make a sound. He had no breath in his mouth to form a word.

“So maybe you got more questions?” Frawley said. And now, reflective, he took the twenty-dollar bill he had crushed and placed it on his thigh and smoothed it against his sweaty flesh, pressing the wrinkles out of it. “Ask Max.”

With a retching hack, like the onset of nausea, Sharkey began to sob.

Frawley loosened the car door, then thrust it open with his elbow, saying, “Go boo-hoo somewhere else, haole.”

10

A Protected Class

The stranger had shimmered into focus, a flat shadow at a distance, a silhouette swimming to shore, the dark speck in the far-off chop, simple as a water dog bobbing in the fetch of waves, slapping the water and swelling to a muscular body with reaching arms and, closer, becoming lighter, swifter, almost angelic, trawling with cupped hands in the sun-splash, making his way across the pleats of water in the bay, and finally a buoyant creature resolving itself to a man with a face—eager features, wide eyes, beautiful teeth, gasping in the shore break, calling out, “It’s me—Max.”

The dead man had a name now, and a past, and friends, and a community—those other shadows swimming from the depths behind him, the man in Floristan, the camper Frawley, old Fonoti, who knew so much and who wondered where Max was now.

No one had known anything of the dead man, and then it seemed everyone did—or enough people to provide a profile. And what struck Olive as odd—and she emphasized this to Sharkey—was that though he had served nobly as a benefactor to many people, he’d also had run-ins with the police. According to Frawley, he’d been stopped, reported, written up, and warned but never arrested, never charged with any offense. And so he’d remained unknown and out of official files.