Sharkey did not mind the pain of the narrow blade slicing his flesh; the cut was like a flame, cauterizing the wound, a ritual of punishment and forgiveness. He’d always regarded incisions and tattoo needles, blood-drawing and stabs, as small deflowerings, always with a blossom smear of crimson. He liked Olive’s medical term, “bloodwork.”

But he was still angry. “He broke my window for a pair of sunglasses. I could have killed that guy.”

Olive lifted her face and looked at him with wonderment that became a disbelieving smile.

“He excites my contempt, as my dear mother used to say.”

“My mother never said that.”

He limped more thumpingly now, his bandaged toe chafing in the thong of his flip-flop. He took such care that his overcautious gait dragging and hesitating to protect the toe caused him to stumble, and in one of those stumbles he fell.

He’d been shutting the henhouse door with one hand, latching it, and holding a bowl of eggs with the other. He missed hooking the nose of the latch to the fitting’s eye, and leaning away and attempting it again, he snagged his sore toe on the overhang of the brick step. It was as though his foot had caught fire. He raised it and lost his balance and toppled forward, the bowl breaking on the bricks, the eggs smashing in a mass of yellow mingled snotlike yolk and goo and fragments of shell.

He cursed again, louder than ever, and heard his helpless howl echo in the gully below. The chickens squawked back at him and he heard their racket as blaming.

His days were fraught with accidents, many of them minor, like dropping the bowl of eggs—but such clumsiness made him feel old and futile. Some were more serious—he left a burner on the stove alight and scorched a pot (Olive: “That’s a sure sign of senility”—she was joking but he was stung). More serious still, he very nearly hit another cyclist, swerving as he reached for his cell phone, horrified that he had come so close that the man called out and pedaled after him, catching him at a red light and thumping the car roof, screaming, “Howlie!”

So after all these years that was what it had come to. Over fifty years in the islands, years of big-wave surfing, of beer-drinking on the beach, and handing out free weed, and party-going. He wasn’t Joe Sharkey of Waimea fame, or the Shark, or Braddah Joe, or Joe-Boy or Uncle Joe. He was a haole, another white guy in a new car, an unwelcome alien.

And because he was injured and couldn’t get into the water, and his new car was unreliable—possibly a lemon—he did not go far. He rolled down the hill to Three Tables and sat in a beach chair with binoculars, looking for the blowhole vapor of a whale offshore.