“Yeah,” Sharkey said. “You were supplying him?”

“Big-time—when he had bucks, and an insane spendy car,” Moe said. “Later I see him all over on his junk bike. All the time when the surf up we sit on the beach, smoking, talking story, tripping, watching you shred the monster wave. You his hero, Joe—he so stoked, seeing you surf.”

12

The Release

One person remained—faceless, distant, spectral, but necessary. Maybe she was stricken with grief, or maybe not. The quest to know the dead man had turned up so many surprises. Yet when Sharkey mentally rehearsed the confrontation, his confession, the okay he required on the release form, he stalled. She was the ex-wife, in California, next of kin. She knew from a message from Stickney at the morgue that Max Mulgrave was dead, but nothing further than that. She had to be told who was responsible for his death. And Sharkey needed more than her signature; he needed to see her face. But he went on procrastinating.

“The mainland,” he said, tasting the word, wincing at its bitterness.

All of Hawaii’s ugliness and none of its beauty comes from the mainland, he thought—every sack of cement, every piece of paper, every plastic bag and soda can, every hard drug, every chain-link fence and pane of glass and rusted rebar, every roll of barbed wire and yellow crime-scene DO NOT CROSS tape. The cheesy Christmas ornaments, every plastic toy, all the hats and T-shirts, the high-rises at Kakaako, golf clubs, TV sets, books, Styrofoam cups, every car, every gallon of gas, every bicycle, the fiberglass and epoxy for surfboards, every single haole. Me.

“You have to go.”

“I feel futless there,” he said. “And everything’s wrong.”

He meant, away from the surf—and miles of mainland surf were infected with runoff, sewage contamination, needles in the shore break, oil slick. And the traffic, the talk, the foul smell and freeways. He remembered the fleeting visit to Floristan. No wonder Max Mulgrave went to Hawaii! The mainland was bewildering and intimidating and uncomfortable; and you had to wear shoes.

“But even after fifty years in Hawaii, I’m still a fucken haole,” he said, his head in his hands. “The only people who really belong here are Hawaiians. The rest of us are from somewhere else.”

“What are you saying, Joe?”

In a grieving whisper of reproach he said, “That when I killed that drunk homeless guy, I was also a drunk homeless guy.”

In the two weeks it took to visit the bank in Hale‘iwa and provide the death certificate and call the ex-wife to ask her to sign the form for the burial—her name was Libby Aranda, she’d remarried, she lived in Santa Monica—in those two weeks Olive was called back to the hospital; the leave of absence she’d taken to help Sharkey through the crisis was over. He’d have to go alone.

“You’re better,” she said.