“Give you a lift,” the policeman said, and opened the rear door of his cruiser. On the way back to Hale‘iwa, he monitored his crackling radio, and only spoke once on the way: “Gonna be epic tomorrow too.” He dropped them at Olive’s car, saying, “I’m Ronny DeSouza—you ever need anything, get in touch,” and bumping fists with Sharkey said, “The Shark!”

Olive took the wheel and drove to the house. She watched Sharkey cross the lanai to the wicker sofa, where he sat, his hands on his knees, palms facing up, as if in a yoga pose.

“I ran into a drunk homeless guy.”

“You said that already. You pranged that poor bloke on his push-bike.”

It was not his repeating the statement that bothered Olive. It was the sentence itself, and his tone—relief tinged with resentment—when what she expected him to say was “I killed a man.”

She approached him, not so much to console him as to console herself. He stared into the night. He looked supremely relaxed, in a posture of reflection—he might have been composing a poem in his head, she thought. She went closer and saw that his body seemed uninhabited.

5

The Search for the Hundred-Foot Wave

You’re so happy,” a journalist had said to him once, a woman from a surfing magazine, wearing a T-shirt with his face on it and lettered DA SHARK! She meant, You’re impossible—and she seemed to be complaining, because she wanted a different story. “And you’re younger than I thought.”

“Days you spend on the water are not deducted from your life,” he said, and laughed. “Surfing keeps you from growing old.”

A life of happiness was too easily summed up, and who cared? In books, in gossip on the tour, in life generally, a happy man was a rarity—usually someone minor, one-dimensional, shallow, careless, often a fool. And with surfing’s emphasis on struggle and risk, they were dopers, they were stoners, they were beer drunks, but they were happy when the surf was up. He did not contradict the interviewer. He smiled and snapped his fingers as he did in idle moments, mouthing a song.

Bum

Bum

Bum

Biddly-bum . . .

Yet for a long time—years perhaps—a shadow had been creeping across his life. This advancing darkness had been preceded by ominous mutters, and a sticky damp as of stinking fingerpads, the prickle of hairy hands, a rising odor—an animal smell, or that of a desperate tramp—overripe, like decay. It was the sense that a creature had been stalking him, and he took this shadow to be a premonition—of what, he could not say.