It seemed a cruel and sideways question, the headmaster—Dr. Emmett Chock—saying to Sharkey’s mother, “I wonder if the young man understands why he’s here?”
With his fingers on his cheek, his hand hiding that side of his face, the badly healed scar like the letter C, still livid with teeth marks and stitches, Sharkey had been staring out of the office window. The day glowed with the last spatter of the shower. The morning was now drenched in light, the splashed blossoms on the plumeria tree thickened by the dazzle. Small simple raindrops were enlarged by sunlight to honey-colored syrup. The way they lingered and drooped, as though for him alone, gave him hope.
It took some moments for his sun-dazzled eyes to adjust to the shadowy room. His mother came into focus, looking ill, and the beauty of what he had just seen had the effect of making Dr. Chock doglike, his gray face and coarse hair, his loose jaw chewing in disapproval, exaggerating his underbite. The man poked at the papers on his desk with his yellow nails, then sniffed his fingers.
“Yes, sir, I do,” Sharkey said.
Dr. Chock probably wanted him to say more. What was the point? Sharkey knew he was being expelled.
“Maybe he hasn’t lived in Hawaii long enough to learn our concept of pono—goodness, virtue, righteousness, sense of duty,” Dr. Chock chanted, as though Sharkey were deaf or absent. “Kuleana means responsibility. Being pono is being true.”
He knew that: they talked of nothing else at morning assembly; the word was repeated in the state anthem, “Hawai‘i Pono‘i,” they sang most days. Yet that did not keep the older students from smoking pakalolo.
Kick me out, just let me go, he thought. But in his solemnity and slowness Dr. Chock seemed determined to make a big deal of it and deliver a lecture. And Sharkey could see that the headmaster was enjoying it, seeing himself as pono and Sharkey wicked and untrue, whereas he regarded himself as neither good nor bad but only fourteen and foreign in this place, a haole among locals.
In her humiliation, his mother was afraid, tipsy with confusion, and when Dr. Chock said, “I was hoping your husband would also be here,” she got tearful, sounding drunk, saying in a trembling voice, “My dear husband, Colonel Sharkey, is in the army, on a tour of duty, serving his country in Vietnam,” as though pleading for sympathy.
“We have many children of servicemen of all kinds,” Dr. Chock said, and “army brat” was implied in “all kinds.” He tapped his cheek to call attention to the corresponding part of Sharkey’s cheek, the waxen flesh of the C-shaped scar and the roulettes of the oversized stitches, as though indicating disobedience.
“That was an accident,” Sharkey’s mother said. “That was a dog bite.”
Blinking at “dog bite,” Dr. Chock recovered and said, “And they don’t habitually dabble in drugs.”
But they did, all the time, everyone did, one corner of the parking lot was a haze of blue smoke after school. The only difference was that they did not get caught. And “dog bite” to Sharkey made him wince at the memory of the hoarse choking bark that gnawed at his throat, the bark saying I am coming for you.
“I wonder if he’s listening,” Dr. Chock said. “If he understands his kuleana.”
The way he put it, with a jowl shake, enraged Sharkey, so he said nothing. It was over, he was finished.
“I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this,” his mother said. “I don’t know what to do with him.”
“Joe is not the first of our students to be involved in drugs.”
Sharkey’s mother clasped her handbag tighter on her lap and leaned forward, looking hopeful.
“But the others showed some remorse,” Dr. Chock said. “And they were more cooperative because they understood their kuleana. They demonstrated kokua—help, in the Hawaiian way.”
“I know he’s sorry. He told me—didn’t you, Joey?”
The petals of the plumeria seemed to blink as more honeyed raindrops fell.
“How would I know that?” Dr. Chock said, tapping a fingernail like a claw onto the expulsion form. And before Sharkey’s mother could speak, he added, “Sorry is just a word. I am looking for a deed. What I want to hear is real contrition, something pono.”
Sharkey’s mother canted her head to the side, as though assessing Sharkey’s remorse, but she frowned, unable to read him.
“We are ohana—family—at this school. If the young man perhaps showed kokua—shared more information with his ohana, as to the source of the drugs— I might be inclined to a more lenient view.”
Now a raindrop from a drooping petal struck a petal on a lower branch, and the tap of one syrupy drop was enough to dislodge it. Sharkey watched the pinkish blossom fall, lighting like a butterfly on the dewy tips of some slender grass blades, making them bend.
“Joey, tell the headmaster what he wants to know.”
So this was the reason for the ritual. Dr. Chock was asking Sharkey to snitch on the other stoners, especially his friend Harry Ho, who was a fellow surfer. Everyone had weed, it was easy to find, the headmaster must have known that. But he wanted Sharkey to submit. This wish gave Sharkey strength: he realized that he had power to deny the bossy man what he wanted.
“Are you going to show kokua?” Dr. Chock said. “You’d also be helping yourself. And that would be pono. In the true Hawaiian way.”
Now Sharkey smiled, for the only time that morning, no longer feeling small and cornered, eavesdropping on his fate.
“No, sir.”
“He should be punished,” his mother said, and recoiled, looking fretful, as though shocked by the words she’d just uttered.
“Are you in military housing?”
“No. We live off base. We—” She began to explain, as though giving a reason, but became flustered again and said, “We’re in Manoa.”
“You’ll have to enroll him at Stevenson Intermediate, or maybe Roosevelt,” Dr. Chock said, his jowls registering satisfaction with a shake, and not a smile but a show of bonelike teeth. “Roosevelt’s your nearest high school. A private school won’t take him, with his record. A public school might be just what he needs.”
Even that was not the end of it. Dr. Chock slid papers across the desk and gloated, his mouth open, as Sharkey’s mother signed them, and before the session was over she was in tears.
“The boy is pau here,” Dr. Chock said. “Finished.”
Outside the school, before his mother could gather her wits to speak, Sharkey said, “I’m going to catch some waves.”
He hurried away from her squawk—she was calling out, “But why?”—escaping down the sloping still-wet sidewalk, in sunshine, to Ala Moana, where, at Magic Island, he kept his board. And there, just off the beach at Bomboras, he surfed until sunset, alone, because everyone else was in school. Sliding on water, leaving no trace, he was stirred to the thought that the surface of the sea was forever unmarked, ageless, mirroring the purity of the sky, and could never be scarred.
They paused outside Roosevelt High School, before the lawns, the bell tower, the entrance, the big, neatly printed sign HOME OF THE ROUGH RIDERS, and under the portrait of a Hawaiian with an upraised shark-tooth club the words E KOMO MAI—WELCOME. The carved sign and gateway made it seem dignified—the equal of Punahou. But inside—the doggy smell of bare feet, of hair stiff with dirt, of unwashed clothes, of disinfectant and cheap perfume—the stink hung like a threat. Three heavy Hawaiian girls, bigger than Sharkey, lingered in a corridor, staring at him, and when his mother asked the way to the office, one of the girls pointed with her face to a doorway.
A woman, announcing herself as a secretary, greeted them from behind a high counter as though they were shopping at an old-fashioned store. A wide gilded cuff, engraved ALOHA, on the secretary’s wrist dinged the counter as she shuffled papers. After signing them and handing over Sharkey’s transcript, Sharkey’s mother fretted and said, “My husband’s in the military, serving his country. Is there anything more?”
“You pau,” the secretary said. “He gonna come with me.”
She led him—that smell again—to a small classroom, where the smell was stronger. Interrupted in her lesson, the teacher, a young Japanese woman, grinned in frantic annoyance, and when the secretary gave her Sharkey’s papers she tossed them onto her desk and said, “Take a seat—over there.”
He sensed like a flare-up of heat the heightened attention, all eyes on him, as he walked to the empty desk and sat; but more than anything he was aware of the size of the students—bigger, darker, slouched and sitting sideways. And when the teacher resumed, turning her back to write on the board, Sharkey felt something hit his arm—the bitten stub of a pencil, like a chewed bone.
“Haole,” came a growl from behind him. He knew the word from Punahou—howlie, whitey—but never spoken with such contempt. He heard it again like a harsh echo from another throat. He turned aside; a Hawaiian girl in a red dress pursed her lips as though mimicking a kiss. She was lovely, with yellowish glinting eyes, thick black hair to her shoulders, and a flower behind her ear. When Sharkey smiled, she spat at him, then wiped her chin.
“Four x,” the teacher was saying, scraping with her chalk, “equals sixteen.”
At lunchtime he found an empty table, but three boys pushed him aside and said, “We stay here, haole.” The cafeteria looked so crowded, all the other tables occupied, elbows everywhere, Sharkey decided to skip his meal and made his way to the playground. A group of girls sat under a tree, covertly smoking, passing a cigarette butt. Some younger children with wild hair kicked a ball. Sharkey walked to a bench at the far side of the space. He sat in full sunlight and put his head in his hands to avoid the glare.
“You the new kid?”
The sudden voice startled him. A boy stood nearby, and at once Sharkey could see the boy was frightened—the way he stood, slightly bent over, something in his blinking and his pinched face, as though he were preparing to flee.
“Hi. I’m Blaine. I saw you in class this morning. That kid behind you, Wilfred, he’s psycho. A real moke.”
“Moke?”
“Big Hawaiian guy. He always gives me side-eye.”
Sharkey said, “I’m Joe.”
“Wilfred lives in a car at the back of the valley,” Blaine said. “Did you just come from the mainland?”
“I got kicked out of Punahou.”
“I wanted to go there. My folks didn’t have the money.” And now Blaine took a deep breath and began backing up.
Four boys, led by Wilfred, were walking slowly toward them, scuffing the gravel. What made them particularly fearsome was that their mouths were full and they were chewing, probably the last of their lunch. Seeing that Blaine was attempting to sidle away, one of the boys pushed him against the fence. Blaine crouched and clutched his stomach, as though to make himself small. Wilfred stepped near him and flicked a finger against Blaine’s ear, stinging him.
“What you wen’ telling the fucken haole?”
Blaine whimpered and held the ear that Wilfred had flicked.
Wilfred confronted Sharkey, his big belly near Sharkey’s face. He was fattish, his T-shirt stained, his shorts dirty, his hair tangled, flecks of food on his lips, and he had a dog odor of dirt. “He wen’ say something to you?”
Sharkey said, “I don’t know anything.”
“He a panty,” Wilfred said. The other boys laughed, too loud, their teeth large, their tongues scummy. “You a panty too?”
Blaine fidgeted, still crouched, his hands now near his face, as though expecting a slap.
“You got something for me?” Wilfred said, and now he seemed to be staring at the scar on Sharkey’s cheek.
Sharkey was still seated. He calculated that if he got to his feet the boy would take it for defiance, or a challenge. So he continued to sit as Wilfred repeated his question, this time coming close—his odor was so strong it made him bigger and meaner. The boy was still focused on the scar, seeming to question it with his open mouth.
“I guess you’re the boss,” Sharkey said.
“What? Yeah, me da luna,” Wilfred said, almost in wonderment. “See this mahu?” And he gestured at Blaine, extending his reach to flick Blaine’s ear again where it was reddened. “He real futless. See how he make ass? If he don’t shape up he’s going to get lickings,” he said, and pushed him. Then he leaned toward Sharkey. “We da kanaka ohana. And know what, haole?”
“What?”
“We hate fucken haoles.”
And then Sharkey stood up. He was taller than Wilfred but thin, already at fourteen with the suggestions of a swimmer’s physique, his second season on a surfboard, the thickening shoulders, the slender legs. Wilfred stepped back, the four other boys looking watchful. But Sharkey did not advance on them. He went over to Blaine and put his hand on his shoulder. He could see why Blaine was being bullied—he was small and pale and scrawny, and he had a girl’s soft unmarked cheeks. He knew from Punahou that the small boys got the worst of it. And out of the corner of his eye he sensed that Wilfred, unsure of him, was hesitating, looking closer.
“How you get that bite mark, brah?”
Sharkey touched the scar on his cheek. “Mark of the beast.” Then he leaned and said, “Get up, big guy,” and helped the cringing boy to his feet.
Wilfred grunted, and just then, at the moment of confrontation, the school bell rang. A teacher in an aloha shirt called out to them and began loudly to harangue them to go back to class.
The ninth-grade teacher was Miss Matsuda. Wilfred was Wilfred Kalama. Most of his little gang sat at the back of the class—Clarence, Fonoti, Sammy Boy, and Braddah Jay, all Hawaiians or Samoans from nearby Papakolea. The pretty girl in the desk next to Sharkey’s, the one who had spat at him, was Vai. Vai’s friends were Leena and Nalani. Leena was Samoan. The Chinese and Japanese students left him alone, but all the rest were tormentors—muttering at him in class, jostling him in the corridor, the girls as foulmouthed as the boys; “Fucken haole” was Leena’s refrain, Vai still the spitter, Wilfred the intimidator, threatening Sharkey with lickings in the parking lot after school. The only relief for him was their persecution of Blaine Langford, the skinny boy who sought refuge at the front of the room, nearest the desk of Miss Matsuda.
Sharkey kept his head down, he said nothing in class, the work was easy, nothing new—the math and history he’d already done at Punahou. Roosevelt was chaotic and noisy, but it was harder to be anonymous here, because he was a haole and there were so few at the school. He was jeered at and threatened—the threats sounding crueler when they were mumbled in pidgin. “Pretty soon we gonna have ‘kill a haole day.’” His books were scattered, his locker scribbled on with crayon, yet he was not touched. He felt pity for Blaine, who was physically bullied—pushed, elbowed aside, tripped, his ears flicked—and he saw how Blaine suppressed his cries, not wishing to reveal his terror.
Sharkey was stared at for his scar, and it seemed to caution the other boys. It was a mark of distinction, a source of power, all the greater because its history was hidden, though there was something in its ragged stitches and discoloration that suggested violence, and so it served as a deterrent.
“That’s quite enough,” Miss Matsuda said whenever there was a commotion in the classroom. But she never saw the subtle torments and had no idea of what happened in the corridors or the cafeteria or the playground.
Each afternoon Sharkey walked home rather than risk the bus and more taunts: the length of Nehoa Street and then up the hill and left into Aleo and on to Ferdinand, where his mother waited, to ask, “Nice day at school?” and he said, “Yup,” and kept walking to his room, where he changed. “Going surfing.” And it was then that he caught the bus or walked to Ala Moana, and at Magic Island he was in the water and free again.
But why? his mother asked in a pleading voice when he hurried away, and even when she didn’t say it, the question was in her squint whenever he left. It was something he never asked himself, nor could he give any reasons for running to the beach and plunging into the water, or flopping on his board and paddling into the waves, ducking as they washed over him and thrusting into the next trough until he was bobbing beyond the break.
It was play, it was joy, it was as natural and unexplainable as breathing, a pleasure and a relief to be uplifted in the sea. Never mind surfing; just sitting on his board and rising and falling on the plump belly of a swell, far from shore and the tiny people there, behind him the flat Pacific, empty as far as the smooth true seam of the horizon.
Why did he wish to be buoyant in the mild milky ocean until early evening, when the surface wrinkled in a sea breeze and shone, scaly under the slanting sun—sliding like mad in the barrel of a wave to the last kick-out on the reef, when the lip of the tube collapsed in a boil of foam, then tipping himself into the riptide to head back to the purity of the sea, sometimes a beaky turtle’s head staring at him with its side eye, and now and then the gulp and snort of dolphins passing in a pod, and never a human voice?
“I don’t know,” he told his mother.
“It’s dangerous,” she said.
And he laughed, because offshore, isolated on his board, away from Wilfred and his gang, he’d never felt safer.
It was only in the third week that he saw Blaine on his way home, the same route, walking fast. He moved as if pursued. Sharkey understood: he also was avoiding the bus, and he fled the school as soon as the bell rang. Sharkey followed him closely but said nothing, simply watched the hurrying boy, his hunched-over gait, his arms working. He turned off at Ventura Street, and after a few steps he called out and a faint barking began from somewhere within a small white frame house of peeling paint, a car with a rusted bumper in the driveway, which was partially hidden by an overhanging bougainvillea.
And perhaps with the confidence of being home, Blaine straightened and looked around and saw Sharkey behind him on the sidewalk, backing away.
“Hey.” He opened the low garden gate. “You live around here?”
“Up on Ferdinand,” Sharkey said, being vague, so as not to reveal that he had followed him.
“Want to come in?” Blaine looked pathetic; he was pleading.
Sharkey hesitated, but as soon as the front door opened the barking began again, and though Sharkey stepped back the dog leaped on him, first raking his face with his paws, then snapping at his feet, all the while barking in that choking slavering way, his jowls shaking.
“Wags, stop,” Blaine said in an admiring rather than a scolding tone, and Sharkey found it odd that this small boy was so confident around the fierce dog, and how he seemed to smile in relief when he saw that Sharkey was helpless, fending off the dog by raising his shoe against him.
“Don’t be afraid,” Blaine said.
Sharkey was terrified; the dog was trying to bite him, leaping to chew his foot.
“He wants you to pat him,” Blaine said. “Don’t you, Wags?”
The dog was slavering, barking, snapping at Sharkey’s foot. And only then, when the dog got hold of Sharkey’s shoe, wetting it with the froth of his saliva, did Blaine grasp his collar and pull him away.
“Bad dog!” This loud shout from the boy whom Sharkey had seen as a whisperer and a whiner. Sharkey was impressed, but he was also still terrified. The dog whimpered and licked Blaine’s hand and yapped. “See? He’s really friendly when he wants to be. But he could tell you were afraid.” This was a reprimand, from the boy who cringed when Wilfred Kalama flicked his ear.
Sharkey said, “I was attacked by a dog. At Fort Shafter. That’s why we moved.”
“Is that how you got that scar?”
“Yeah,” Sharkey said, and traced the livid gouge on his cheek that was like the letter C. “I had to get a ton of shots.”
“Come on in,” Blaine said, almost hearty.
But Sharkey said, “Maybe some other time,” and walked away, sorry that he had detoured here and determined to go surfing. He glanced back at the corner of Ferdinand and saw that Blaine was watching him, holding his dog’s collar, looking triumphant.
That night he wished he had not said anything about the dog attack at Shafter and instead had spoken to Blaine of surfing, how waves did not faze him. The thump and crush of water, the fetch of waves, were like the rhythm of life. Even when he’d been tumbled in a break as a child and his father had pulled him to safety, he had had no fear of water—he was buoyant, the sea was freedom. He felt cornered on land. Dogs thickened their muscly necks and barked behind fences and leaped, making the chain link clatter.
The dog at Shafter had made straight for him, bounding across the street, his fat tongue drawn aside by his speed, and he had jumped as he approached, pouncing, knocking Sharkey to the grass, and begun greedily to chew at his face, snapping his jaws.
Not a dream, but a memory, and even the dog’s name, Max, seemed sinister. Sleep saved him, brimmed around him like the sea, and he was submerged. Sharkey slept soundly, but when he woke each morning and blinked and yawned and remembered that he had to go to school, something like a sickness gripped him, a feeling of woe and weakness that was like a stricture in his throat that made him breathless. On many days his hatred of school was a heaviness, like sorrow. At breakfast his mother said, “Did you sleep all right, Joey?”—an absurd question. He always slept well. It was the waking up that was hard, saddened by the knowledge of what he faced.
If he took the bus, it was the loud rowdy boys teasing the girls and throwing spitballs, sometimes calling out “Hana batta!” and flinging snot. Or the chant of “Haole!” So he walked, setting out alone, but often Blaine hurried to join him, as though for protection, looking quite defenseless without his dog.
“You should take your dog to school,” Sharkey said. “Set him on Wilfred and those big mokes.”
“The thing of it is,” Blaine said, “he’s really a good dog.”
And that seemed like a rebuff to Sharkey, as though he’d timidly overreacted.
“Want to come over after school?” Blaine said, and it sounded to Sharkey like a dare.
“I’m busy.” He did not want to explain that he was going surfing, because he was still learning, and to speak of surfing so soon after arriving in Hawaii would seem like a boast. But it was a private satisfaction, his secret pleasure, taking refuge on the waves.
Blaine said, “He won’t hurt you.”
“It’s not that,” Sharkey said. They both knew it was the dog. They were still walking, Blaine limping slightly. “Did you hurt your foot?” Blaine said nothing but still he walked, dragging his right foot. “Blaine, are you okay?”
The boy stopped and flexed his leg, and then, as Sharkey watched, his head cocked to the side, Blaine took off his shoe and poked at something inside, straightening it, a thickness of wadded paper.
“That looks like money.”
“My hiding place. Don’t tell anyone.”
And Sharkey saw at once that it was Blaine’s pitiful strategy to prevent the school bullies from finding his money and taking it.
Soon they were among other students walking toward the school, all marching in silence, then gathering at the playground like spectators assembling for a ceremony of savagery or an execution, something wicked to watch. Sharkey took a deep breath, as he did before paddling into a big wave, knowing he faced another whole day of “fucken haole” and “malihini” and “panty.” Lately it had been “Elvis,” because Elvis Presley had just given a concert at the Honolulu arena. He was menaced by the ugly faces of the boys, and it was worse somehow if a girl happened to see him or hear the taunts. The teachers were either indifferent or didn’t see, and some of them quarreled with each other. It sometimes seemed to Sharkey that they depended on the tougher boys to keep the others in order. It was all misery, and the only relief was hurrying away at the last bell.
For some weeks they shunned him, turned their backs on him when he passed them. It should have given him some peace to be left alone, but the isolation made him anxious, and their laughter and whispers were hostile. He did not exist. But he knew they’d resume, jostling him, and they did, making ugly faces, screaming, “Fucken haole!”
At lunch break Sharkey sat alone or with Blaine, eating the sandwich his mother had made for him. He finished quickly and went outside to the playground and sat on the hot cement bench in the far corner that he had found his first day, avoided by the other students because it was hot, in full sunshine. There he watched the other students fooling with each other, and hated them. Blaine sometimes came over—often limping, because of the money in his shoe—and tried to start a conversation, looking to Sharkey for protection.
“Haole!”
They were usually yelling it at Blaine, who was weak, and whimpered, and cowered. Sharkey’s scar seemed to make them wary, and he was resigned to the shouts. But out of desperate pride, if one of them snatched at his lunch bag he snatched back, and it was like a challenge. But he also saw that they were poor, and they roamed like a pack because they were hungry.
One of those days on the playground, Wilfred accosted him with his little gang, saying, “Where you panty friend?”
Sharkey nodded slowly but said nothing. There was no way to win against five of them.
“He never tell us where he hiding his money,” Wilfred said, as always staring at his scar. “You his fucken haole friend. You know.”
Sharkey said, “If I knew, maybe I’d take it off him myself.”
They left him alone then, and pestered Blaine, and Sharkey understood that because Blaine was a haole they believed his parents were wealthy, but Sharkey had seen the little house on Ventura Street, the peeling paint and the old car, and his dog had looked starved too. It seemed crueler that they wanted what little money the weedy boy had.
But they continued to follow Blaine and flick his ear, and they encouraged the girls—Vai and Leena—to slap him. Nothing was worse than to be roughed up by a girl. But because of this concentration on Blaine, the taunts, the demands, Sharkey was mostly left alone. And when after a few weeks some other boys came after Sharkey, trying to corner him as he was hurrying through the playground after school, Wilfred stepped in.
“Haole,” he said. “You know kokua?”
Sharkey frowned at the Punahou word.
“It mean help. Help us get the panty money,” Wilfred said. “He hiding it in his stuffs.”
Sharkey said, “Why don’t you leave him alone?”
That was defiance, but the mention of Blaine made them glance around, and they saw that he was at the far side of the playground. So by the time Wilfred recovered, saying, “Elvis, you want dirty lickings?” and “Where you going, haole?” Sharkey had slipped through the gate in the fence and was hurrying across the school lawn. When he looked back he saw the gang of boys advancing on Blaine, and Blaine—white-faced and small and piteous—lifting his skinny hands and pleading.
But the following day, walking to school, Sharkey saw Blaine on Nehoa Street and waved. Blaine did not wave back, and the next time Sharkey looked, Blaine was nowhere to be seen. He wondered if Blaine had been beaten up, but in class the boy was unmarked, and in the playground he heard Blaine laugh—he had never heard him laugh before, and it was a strange sound, like a sudden snorting honk. No one approached him or spoke to him. Sharkey took this to be a good sign—perhaps they were growing wiser, being pono. And he laughed when he remembered the word and the way Dr. Chock had spoken it, popping it on his lips.
Wilfred kept away from Sharkey that day too. The routine of classes, cafeteria, playground, dismissal was relieved by the absence of any aggression. Sharkey remained, as always, alone, and when the last bell rang he hurried across the playground and ducked through the gate in the chain-link fence.
It was when he came to the perimeter of the school grounds that he heard the barking—the choking yap that recalled to him the frantic sound of starvation. He looked back and saw Wilfred with a dog straining ahead of him on a leash, because Wilfred was slow, treading on battered flip-flops, and the dog was eager.
Wilfred’s gang was behind him, calling out, their flip-flops slapping the sidewalk—there were too many of them for Sharkey to give them names, but Fonoti and Clarence were visible for their size and their swinging arms. The dog had big shoulders and square jaws and a fat droopy tongue that swung as he trotted. Sharkey saw the dog clearly and was afraid, and wanted to run.
Instead of heading home he turned in the opposite direction, walking fast, to Punahou Street, and then to the overpass across the freeway, to Beretania, where he felt he was losing them. Down Kalakaua and through the maze of streets that led to Ala Moana, his heart beating fast—from running, from fear—he fled.
Crossing the grass to Magic Island, he was startled by the barking again—they must have taken a shortcut, and there seemed more of them now, the dog ahead of them, that gagging bark, those teeth—and Wilfred now calling out, “Haole—you got something for me!”
By then Sharkey had found his board in the stack, pulled his shirt over his head, and kicked off his sneakers, and when the dog was at last released and bounding at him he’d hit the water, the first wave of the shore break, the board under him, and was paddling to where the wave lifted, with froth at its lip. And he rose into it and turned, and at this height he saw the dog foundering, helpless, gagging in the thickened foam. Wilfred was on the beach, his gang behind him, and at the back a pale shadow: Blaine.
They were shouting, probably “Haole!” or worse, but at this distance he couldn’t hear it, and anyway it didn’t matter, because, buoyant in the mild milky ocean, all he heard was the consolation of the waves.