Free Suspended Sentences by Brian Garfield Page A

flow of the hula. Behind her, behind the surf, a whaling ship was poised to approach the shore, its square-rigged sails bold against a polished white sky.
    The scene was depicted meticulously upon ivory: a white fragment of tusk the size of a dollar bill. The etched detail was exquisite: the scrimshaw engraving was carved of thousands of thread-like lines and the artist’s knife hadn’t slipped once.
    The price tag may have been designed to persuade tourists of the seriousness of the art: it was in four figures. But Brenda was unimpressed. She put the piece back on the display cabinet and left the shop.
    The hot Lahaina sun beat against her face and she went across Front Street to the Sea Wall, thrust her hands into the pockets of her dress and brooded upon the anchorage.
    Boats were moored around the harbor — catamarans, glass-bottom tourist boats, marlin fishermen, pleasure sailboats, outrigger canoes, yachts. Playthings. It’s the wrong place for me, she thought.
    Beyond the wide channel the islands of Lanai and Kahoolawe made lovely horizons under their umbrellas of delicate cloud, but Brenda had lost her eye for that sort of thing; she noticed the stagnant heat, the shabbiness of the town, and the offensiveness of the tourists who trudged from shop to shop in their silly hats, their sun-burnt flab, their hapless T-shirts emblazoned with local graffiti: “Here Today, Gone to Maui.”
    A leggy young girl went by, drawing Brenda’s brief attention: one of those taut tan sunbleached creatures of the surfboards — gorgeous and luscious and vacuous. Filled with youth and hedonism, equipped with all the optional accessories of pleasure. Brenda watched gloomily, her eyes following the girl as far as the end of the Sea Wall, where the girl turned to cross the street. Brenda then noticed two men in conversation there.
    One of them was the wino who always seemed to be there: a stringy unshaven tattered character who spent the days huddling in the shade sucking from a bottle in a brown bag and begging coins from tourists. At night he seemed to prowl the alleys behind the seafood restaurants, living off scraps like a stray dog: she had seen him once, from the window of her flyspecked room, scrounging in the can behind the hotel’s kitchen; and then two nights ago near a garbage bin she had taken a short cut home after a dissatisfying lonely dinner and she’d nearly tripped over him.
    The man talking with the wino seemed familiar and yet she could not place the man. He had the lean bearded look of one who had gone native; but not really, for he was set apart by his fastidiousness. He wore sandals, yet his feet seemed clean, the toenails glimmering; he wore a sandy beard but it was neatly trimmed and his hair was expensively cut, not at all shaggy; he wore a blue denim short-sleeved shirt, fashionably faded but it had sleeve pockets and epaulets and had come from a designer shop and his white sailor’s trousers fit perfectly.
    I know him, Brenda thought, but she couldn’t summon the energy to stir from her spot when the bearded man and the wino walked away into the town. Vaguely and without real interest she wondered idly what those two could possibly have to talk about together.
    She found shade on the harborfront. Inertia held her there for hours while she recounted the litany of her misfortunes. Finally hunger stirred her and she slouched back to her miserable little third-class hotel.
    The next day, half drunk in the afternoon and wilting in the heat, Brenda noticed vaguely that the wino was no longer in his usual place. In fact, she hadn’t seen the wino at all, not last night and not today.
    The headache was painful and she boarded the jitney bus to go up-island a few miles. She got off near the Kapalua headland and trudged down to the public beach. It was cooler here because the northwest end of the island was open to the fresh trade winds; she settled under a palm tree, pulled