He was ageless in the water, on a wave. On land it was a different story, the anonymity of old age—though sixty-two wasn’t old; Clyde Aikau and Jock Sutherland were still surfing, and they were older. His on-demand virility in the sack had never failed him, what Olive called “your hurricane fuck.” But the sun had turned him to leather and the sun-brightened hair of his youth was now gray, and there was less of it. He was sinewy, almost gaunt in his leanness, beaky, with deeply freckled hands and a mass of ink on him, the look of a lifer in prison, or an old sailor. He resembled so many of the aging surfers, battered by waves and the hard drinking and drugging of the past, his whole life showing on his face and his body.

The great waves he’d surfed so well had rolled toward shore and broken on the beach, and there was no memory of them now except in the talk of the other reminiscing surfers—and they had trouble with the truth. The waves kept coming, the younger surfers riding them, and now bigger money and more hype and high visibility.

As a teenager on the Pipe, he had surfed big waves alone, unobserved, to the empty beach. That was the mystical quality of surfing—the self-possession and obscurity. For all the talk today, and all the glamour, no one rode the waves any better. He was consoled by the idea that he wasn’t alone: Hawaii was full of old surfers who were forgotten.

So he was heartened—absurdly, he knew—when the insurance man recognized him and apologized for being a week late in looking at his car.

“I never realize it’s Joe Sharkey’s car,” the man said, and covered his face with his hands, like a shamed boy.

“You a surfer?”

“Not in your league.”

That was nice, not for his ego but because he had the man’s attention, and his respect would mean the whole messy business would be finished fast and efficiently.

“How does this thing look?”

“It might be fixable,” the man said. “But I’ll need to see the accident report. And we’ll have to get an estimate for the damage on the car.”

He was a man of about forty, in a white shirt and tie, as rare on the North Shore as a woman in a dress wearing high heels. He was a claims adjuster, he said, he lived in Pearl City, he sometimes surfed at Ala Moana, his wife was in real estate, two children—and Sharkey thought, The other world.

His name was Ben Fujihara. He said he’d stop at the police station in Wahiawa on his way back to town to get a copy of the accident report.

“In the meantime, here’s a list of approved body shops. You can drive it, the car?”