Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

When he came home early that night and caught us naked, all in the bed, the overhead light on, his gun pointed at us, I went dead all over, first chicken-skin, then just numb. And afterward I didn’t believe he’d really gone. I thought he was waiting for us to come outside so he could ambush us.

“Buggah wen go or what?” Ledward asked in a whisper.

We sneaked out by the back door.

“Junior. I tink we makeh-die-dead,” he said in the pickup.

I heard that Erskine was transferred to Hilo, and with him on a neighbor island, things quieted down. It was Chief Moniz who told me. He made a few visits to Verna, gave her some money, like he felt sorry for her.

“She no can get food stamp,” he said to me. “Wass the happs?”

The happs was I never smoked another joint from that day and I got a job digging, working an excavator, but because of my police record, not at the landfill, a state job, where I could have made more money. Ledward said she could have gotten us killed, but I said, “It was our own fault. We were the ones that set her up.”

“Because she wen ask for da kine chrabol.”

I was annoyed that he was blaming her. I saw things I’d never seen before, that Verna was in a bind, and after a while I married her on the beach at Hanalei, her kid Kanoa there in a little aloha shirt, a luau, the sunset, a green flash. I never saw Ledward again, because he went to Molokai.

And Verna would get a call from time to time, I guessed from Erskine, she didn’t say, and we’d go stay with my cousin in Kapaa until Erskine gave up and went back to the Big Island. He wanted custody. But I would have said, “Tough. You left her. I married her. This is my hanai kid now.”

Ledward used to say, “Yes, I want to catch waves in a foreign country, maybe Brazil, if I can snort coke there and have sex on the beach.”

He is in Kaunakakai, maybe shaping boards, maybe hanging out. And Verna talks about taking flying lessons, which will never happen. Kanoa is on Oahu, where Chief Moniz retired, and got him apprenticing as a roofer. Kanoa still doesn’t see much of his father, and never knew how his mother almost got shot one night. Erskine’s ex, Noelani, sends Christmas cards and sometimes a pineapple.

I’m glad Erskine just walked away. He did the right thing by not shooting us. Yet he wasn’t innocent. I’d never be able to convince him, but he was responsible. Instead of revenge I ended up with Verna. She makes pickled mango, one of those older women on a back road, selling it in jars, and you’d never guess from her smile the things that have happened to her.

But what was it after all? It was island style, a period of drugs and freaky sex and getting out of hand that all people go through before they settle down, especially on the neighbor islands. Then it passes. But it was all dog luck, because I would have shot me.

IN THE CAR on the way home from the Willevers’, Bree said, “It’s funny—” and Harry Dick knew she was about to object to something. She became chatty and opinionated at the wheel, and he was sorry he’d had three drinks because he hated being a passenger, especially her passenger. And what was that odd smell in the back seat?

Harry Dick Furlong, the travel writer, dedicated his books to his wife, Bree; he praised her for her patience in awaiting his return, and the way she ran the house, and coped with the demands of his office when he was on one of his trips — and tonight, as always, at the Willevers’ she had listened to his stories as though hearing them for the first time. He liked to say their marriage was a partnership that worked.

The evening had gone well. The Willevers were good hosts, and grateful to Furlong for agreeing to the dinner so soon after arriving back from his last long trip. In addition to being a reader and a friend, Ed Willever was the Furlongs’ attorney. He was also a tease, and it was a mark of his trust in their friendship that he dared to tease Furlong.

At the meal, Furlong had done most of the talking. He was full of new stories, and though most of them were boasts they sounded authentic. “You couldn’t make this stuff up!” About being starved, stranded, threatened by some rowdy boys, propositioned by a drunken woman at a bar. One about a snake, another about a scorpion. “As a traveler I often feel like a castaway.” At times it seemed it was not Harry Dick at all, but a fictional wanderer named Furlong whom he was recalling with amazement and admiration.

His trips had given him an aura of wizardry, as sudden vanishings and reappearances often do, travel in his way like an accumulation of magic, overcoming dangers as he plunged deeper into the murky world. His books were reports on the extraordinary, news from distant places. His criticism of most travel books was “You could see that sort of thing without ever leaving home.”

He immediately thought “It’s funny—” meant Bree doubted one of the stories he’d told at the Willevers’.

“You don’t believe I had a scorpion in my shoe?” It had leaped out, he’d said, just before he slipped the shoe on.

“Not that,” Bree said. “It was when you talked about not wanting to be known.”

Furlong refused all interviews; he never appeared on television; he avoided book tours — no autographs, never elaborated on his trips, did not answer questions. “It’s all in the book.”

Exasperated, he said, “Haven’t we been through that?”

“But when Ed said, ‘It’s kind of a cheat, isn’t it?’” Bree was driving efficiently, glancing in her rearview mirror, tapping her turn signal. “And then, ‘Being well known for your desire to be unknown.’”

“He was trying to be funny.”

“It got me thinking.”

She had never doubted him before. Never questioned him. And it cut him, because her point — Ed’s teasing remark — was too logical to refute. Was she doubting him now?

He said, “I like my privacy.”

“And everyone knows it. And they talk about you because of it. Like Ed said, ‘The well-known recluse.’”

“You’re taking him seriously.”

Ed had also said something about having it both ways, but she did not remind him. They were in the driveway now, yet Bree remained in the driver’s seat, holding the wheel as though gripping it gave her authority.

“I’m just asking.”

“I got stuck in that village. I told you. I wanted to come home sooner.”

Still she hung on to the steering wheel. “And when Ed said that going on a trip was maybe not leaving at all but making yourself more conspicuous?”

“He was drunk,” Furlong said, sounding drunk himself.

“Making a big deal about hiding from the limelight was a way of attracting the limelight.”

“Please.” The word meant everything, but especially it meant, “This conversation is at an end.”

Bree said lightly, “I don’t know.”

But before he got out of the car, Furlong sniffed and said, “Do you smell something?” He made the clownish face of someone interrogating a smell. He said, “Cigarette.”

“I had a smoke,” Bree said.

“You— what? ”

It was the explosive tone he would have used if she had said, I have a lover. He was shocked, almost disbelieving, but the odor lingered as proof, and I had a smoke sounded worse than I had a cigarette —more knowing.

“At Ed and Joan’s, while you were talking. I went outside. Probably my coat still smells. It’s on the back seat.”

“I cannot believe this. No one smokes anymore.”

“I took it up.” She spoke promptly, as if she’d rehearsed the reply.

“I stopped twenty years ago.”

“I had never tried it.”