He laughed at the thought, throwing his head back, but in an obscure way he was hurt—as he had been with the stumbles and the broken eggs and the theft and the misunderstandings—and that gave his laugh an edge of bitterness. These intrusions upon the serenity of his life amounted to assaults; made him overcautious, even a bit timid, and here he was in his beach chair on the sand, his sore toe upraised, and the young man still drawling.

Ludicrous. But there was an element of the ridiculous in the bewilderment of sadness. What were these intrusions telling him?

“You think that’s funny?” The man beside him was fierce, blinking, his jaw chewing his anger.

And Sharkey realized how he had been laughing.

“No, I don’t,” he said, sounding suddenly fearful. “Not at all.”

9

Repetitions

Hunter Thompson used to repeat himself.”

“Queen Anne’s dead,” Olive said.

“What?”

“An expression,” Olive said. “You’ve told me that before.”

“And what he said was often about me.”

“So you’ve said. You’re a mesmerizing raconteur.”

“Always stayed in a luxury suite, either in Waikiki or at the Kahala, half-eaten meals all over the place, bottles of brandy and his stashes of weed nearby. Coke in his shirt pocket, usually the same plaid shirt.”

Olive stared at him. He wasn’t fazed. She said, “And he always checked in under the pseudonym Mr. Joe.”

“I think you know why.”

Squinting at him as though he’d just teased her, but with a half-smile of forgiveness illuminating her face, Olive began to speak in a hot whisper of impatience. “Look—”

Sharkey cut her off, saying, “But Hunter was a fan and a recreational socialite. He didn’t know squat about surfing, but he was reckless and had an instinct for risk—for the drama of sport, for physical effort.”

“Right,” Olive said. “He looked you up.”

“He looked me up.” Sharkey was staring into the shadows at the corner of the room, as though by speaking earnestly he might bring the man to life and see him emerge from that darkness. “He’d been given my name by a big-wave rider.”

“So you told me.” Olive wondered where this was going—the urgency, the story she’d heard before. She said, “Absolutely spellbinding.”

She had a wary guarded look, watching him through heavy lids, the look she might have had for one of her patients who’d come to the emergency room with slashes on his arm and a story about how he’d fallen down—fallen down? Or the man with deep scratches on his face, in handcuffs, charged with shooting his wife, saying, “I was cleaning my gun.” But she listened rather than contradicted what was obviously a story, watching without seeming to doubt or mock, because there was no telling what the injured person might do.