Uncle Sunshine said, “I cannot teach you surf. You can only teach yourself surf. If you stay akamai and surf every day, you improve. I can tell you what you doing wrong, that’s all.”
“What am I doing wrong?”
“You too much smoking, boy. Try stop.”
“So I’ll stop.”
“It more better if you wen’ stop. You need good lungs for swim, for surf, for paddle out, for win. Kids too much smoking, is more worse.”
Uncle Sunshine—his nicknames were Sunny or Feesh, he said “sweem” not “swim,” he said “keeds,” he said “ween”—was an old Hawaiian with a wicked grin and kindly eyes who sat with the other men his age at the rack of long boards at Waikiki, where Sharkey surfed on some days. Harry had introduced him and vouched for him, saying My kupuna.
“You got one fadda?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where you fadda stay?”
When Sharkey told him that he was in Vietnam and said, “Special Forces—he’s a colonel,” Uncle Sunshine softened and said, “E komo mai,” patting his shoulder. “I stay army too—all over the Pacific,” and pointed to the sea, dabbing with his fingers.
He was brown, very lean, his skin wrinkled and slack, with brown bony legs and weeds of yellow-gray hair. Though he was probably in his fifties, he could have been any age, and was always boyish and agile on his board. His boast was that he had surfed with Duke Kahanamoku and that everything he told Sharkey was the wisdom of wave-riding, passed down from the ancient Hawaiians.
“Duke, he talk story with me. He say . . .”
The first time Sharkey heard the name, spoken with reverence and awe, he had no idea who the man was, but he learned about him from Harry Ho and realized how lucky he was. Uncle Sunshine pointed him out on the beach, the tall brown man, his neck looped in leis, posing beside his thick board for photographers. He’d won medals swimming in the Olympics, Uncle Sunshine said. He was the living link to the ancient Hawaiian surfers, he had met Jack London, he was the most famous surfer who’d ever lived, and there he was, twenty feet away, in a bathing suit.
“How’s eet!” Uncle Sunshine called out.
The towering figure of Duke Kahanamoku loosened, the man smiled and flashed a shaka with his free hand, and it seemed like a blessing. And Sharkey again felt that he was part of a larger group, more important than the school, which now seemed merely an unavoidable interruption in the day, between the parentheses of waking and surfing.
“You have to get to the point where the board stay like part of you body, attach to you feet, and you feel the wave power through the board. You not riding on the board. You and the board one ting, walking on water. That what the great Duke say to me.” And saying so, he smiled at the muscular man.
Later, to avoid Uncle Sunshine’s scrutiny, Sharkey surfed off Magic Island, paddling from Waikiki through a succession of breaks, and across the Ala Wai Harbor entrance to Bomboras. But the idea had been Uncle Sunshine’s: to learn the variations of one break, to master it and know its moods.
“Know what the big man say to me?” Uncle Sunshine said to Sharkey one day. “Duke see you swimming from break to break on your board and say, ‘Ilio holo i ka uaua—he the dog that run in rough water.’”
“He said I’m a dog?”
“Water dog,” Uncle Sunshine said. “He say you a monk seal. He see something in you. Some people he say, ‘She a surf bunny’ or ‘He a malihini.’ But to the big man you a monk seal. I cannot say nothing more better.”
Like the smile, like the shaka, another blessing.
Swimming sustained him; he swam in his dreams, buoyant in the world, or braced on his board, sliding through barrels at Bomboras. He could not run in his dreams, or cry out, or hurry, but he could swim, and he swam in the effortless tumbling way of a seal. Even on his worst day at school—the mumbled threats, the spitballs, “I was sitting here, haole!” and the attempted shakedowns in the schoolyard—he was heartened by the thought that as soon as the school bell rang he would be on his way to the beach and the freedom of the sea—the blue limitless ocean.
Water was a promise of pleasure, and the bigger the waves, the more space he had to swim and surf, because only the better surfers attempted them, and no one swam for pleasure in any breakers. His sense of weightlessness in the waves; the propulsion of his stroke, water filling his cupped hands; the solitude that enveloped him, and then upright, alone on his board—all of it gave him happiness and hope and the conviction that nothing else mattered. It was as if in surfing he was carving his name in water, invisibly, joyously. He knew now that all the other surfers felt the same—Harry Ho and Uncle Sunshine and Duke—though they never spoke about it and probably did not have the words to describe it, because really there were no words, only the action mattered, the ritual of it all, which was a ritual of purification.
You couldn’t puzzle it out or learn how in books; no logical description fitted it. It was a rush, a feeling, a dance.
Stopping smoking was not hard, except for the first week of brown sweats and food tasting sharper and a slight headache. Waking in the morning without a nicotine hangover was odd, giving him unusual clarity, and within a month the smell of someone else’s cigarette smoke was so sour it reinforced his vow. He was able to breathe more deeply, without a whistle in his throat. Feeling stronger in the water, he realized how smoking had impeded him—Uncle Sunshine was right. The odd thing was that while smoking weed had gotten him expelled from Punahou, the only punishment at Roosevelt was a three-day suspension.
Not smoking set him even further apart from the boys at Roosevelt, but he still saw Harry Ho after school and at the beach.
“Your guys always hassling us,” Harry said.
“What guys?”
“Roosevelt mokes, picking fights at the bus stop with the Punahou kids.”
Sharkey laughed, thinking how he was now associated with the tough school, the Roosevelt boys, when he knew he had no status except that of a haole in a school that was mostly Hawaiian and Polynesian—the Samoans and Tongans from Papakolea; the boys like Wilfred and Fonoti, who lived in cars, sleeping in the backseat.
Not smoking had another advantage—no one came up to him now and poked him in the chest with a filthy finger and said, “Geev ’um, haole—one cigarette.”
When his father came home and hugged him, Sharkey gasped and held his breath—the man was saturated with smoke-stink, the dead-leaf smell of burned earth, and the sweet-sour tang of whiskey. It was an odor of decay and cold ashes, and like the risen fumes of sickness, his yellow fingers, his stained teeth, his endearments growled in his bad breath.
“Joe, you’re getting bigger by the week.” His father seemed admiring of him, because his father was smaller and slightly shrunken, exhausted after the long flight, short of breath, grinning like a corpse as he sucked smoke out of a cigarette. He moved more slowly, although always stiff-backed, his head high, pinching the cigarette in his fingers.
“I swim and surf almost every day.”
“What about school?”
“It’s okay. I do my work.”
“If you don’t keep your grades up, you’ll never get into the academy.”
For the Colonel, always, the only aim of a high school education was that it prepared a boy for West Point, and West Point was preparation for the world.
“You gotta be smart.”
“I thought exercise was supposed to be important too,” Joe said.
Over dinner his mother said, “But every day!”
“When there’s no surf I don’t go.”
The Colonel smoked at the table, between courses and sometimes while he was eating, a forkful of food in his right hand, a cigarette in his left. He was smoking now, and often his manner of smoking indicated that he was thinking, a certain way of inhaling or blowing smoke out of the side of his mouth, like a process of thought. He was taking puffs, reflecting.
“My men—not the ARVN but my Special Forces,” he said, “some of them surf. We have landing craft near a place called Danang. Just north of it on a lovely shoreline, China Beach, where we bring up our boats. Some of the men surf there—with boards, or body surfing. It’s quite a thing to see.”
“I’d like to try it there.”
“It’s deceptive. The most beautiful places in Vietnam are the most dangerous.” He was still smoking. He pushed his plate away and tapped ashes into the remains of his mashed potato and spoke past Joe to the shadows at the back of the dining room. “I don’t know where this thing is going.”
“I worry,” Sharkey’s mother said. “Sometimes I’m a wreck.”
The Colonel picked a fleck of tobacco off his tongue and spat smoke. “Don’t start.”
On that visit he was home for a week, busy in meetings most days at Fort Shafter, but one morning he said, “Joe, I want to see you doing it. I want to see your moves.”
They drove to Ala Moana Beach Park later that day and walked under the palms across the expanse of lawn to Magic Island, where Sharkey lifted his board from the rack.
“I let them surf for a day or so, because they’re chopper pilots—they’re great at what they do,” the Colonel said, as though finishing an interrupted thought.
At the low grassy bluff on the shore above the break the Colonel stood in uniform, feet apart, watching Sharkey paddle out—and Sharkey took care to paddle efficiently, ducking under the incoming sets until he was sitting on the swell, lifted by the boil, waiting for a good wave.
The Colonel moved to the lip of the bluff, in the attitude of reviewing his troops, his khakis glowing yellow in the afternoon sun, his posture, the angle of his head, his visor yanked down, giving him an interrogating look of severity. Because he was wearing sunglasses, his expression was unreadable—he was motionless, enigmatic, peering out to sea, watched by his son, who was rising and falling on the succession of swells. The Colonel was his posture, standing upright, awaiting an order. That was how all soldiers seemed to Sharkey—like men listening for a command, waiting to be told what to do. But studied by Sharkey on his board from the height of the swell, the Colonel looked small and solitary, isolated on the bluff, in a way Sharkey had never seen him before, not like a soldier but like any other man, fragile, decaying in the failing light.
Sharkey tipped his board to catch an oncoming wave, paddled hard to stay on it, then grabbed the rails and got to his feet and rode it, angling himself so that he remained visible to his father until, as the barrel narrowed, he slipped into the foam and swam near to where his father was standing.
“That took guts,” the Colonel said in the car. And when they got home he heard him tell his mother, “He’s a brick.”
Sharkey had never before heard his father praise him with such force; he loved him for it, and despaired of the stink of tobacco smoke and his yellow-stained fingers.
“You’re drown-proof,” the Colonel said the morning he left. “You’re going to be all right.”
A few days later Uncle Sunshine said, “I see you fadda. I checking up on you. I see him and I think, ‘Bugga no need Sunny.’ Just the way you fadda standing I think, he a soldier for sure. And he proud of you. What he doing up there in Vietnam?”
“I asked him. He said, ‘I can’t tell you.’”
“That more worse. It mean really important,” Uncle Sunshine said. “More dangerous, the operation.”
“Helicopters.”
“Gnarly,” Uncle Sunshine said. “I wish I woulda met him, to talk story.”
Uncle Sunshine was more attentive to Sharkey after that, kinder, more concerned, as though taking the Colonel’s place. Sharkey detected something fatherly in Uncle Sunshine’s tone, a note of firmness that was also a note of protection and encouragement, a gruff sort of love. And some days Uncle Sunshine left the Beach Boys and the surfboard stand at Waikiki to paddle across the breaks to Magic Island and watch Sharkey on the waves.
“Loosen up,” Uncle Sunshine said. “The wave not your friend but da kine, companion like. It let you do what you want to do. Don’t fight the wave, don’t try to beat ’um—ride the bugga.”
And no matter how tense a day he’d had at school, how severe a standoff with the other boys—because he was always outnumbered, and sometimes sucker-punched or slapped in the face, “fucken haole,” as they grabbed his sandwich and spat on it, and because now Blaine the snitch was on their side—no matter how many taunts he had to endure, the prospect of surfing calmed him and gave him hope. And after he’d had some good rides he felt relaxed, uplifted and alive on the wave, and at the end of the day washed clean.
It helped too that Uncle Sunshine was Hawaiian, that Sharkey had been praised by Duke Kahanamoku, because at Roosevelt Sharkey was bullied for being a haole—singled out and told he didn’t belong. “Fucken haole, fucken haole”—it was the chant. “Go back to the mainland, fucken haole. Geev ’um dirty lickings!” He couldn’t defy Wilfred’s gang of ten or twelve locals or Vai’s screeching girls, but the bullying drove him to surf; made him a loner; made him strong in the water. And being accepted by Uncle Sunshine meant everything, because Uncle Sunshine was, as he said, a kanaka maoli, “real people, here fo’evah.”
When in his stammering way Sharkey attempted to thank him for his kindness, the old man said, “You ohana.”
His mother fretted; she had nothing to do but sit and wait for the Colonel to send a message or to come home. His messages were few; his visits were not vacations, as he said, but always a result of meetings, planning, crises, urgencies, his needing to explain in person to the command at Fort Shafter the progress he was making.
“If they only knew what my men had to put up with,” the Colonel said. He was grim, habitually biting his cigarette, holding it in his teeth, square-mouthed, exhaling around it, squinting through the smoke, his eyes puffy from being stung.
“But the enemy is in the north,” his mother said. “And you’re in the south.”
“Have I told you where I am?” his father said, raising his voice. And in that same sharp tone, “The enemy is everywhere. They have trails, they have caves, they have tunnels. Don’t make me tell you this!”
And he smoked to calm himself, sulking in his armchair in the front room, with the shades drawn, sitting upright in his uniform.
“I told my men you’re a surfer,” he said to Sharkey through blue smoke. “They said it’s good training for special ops, night insertions.”
And the next morning he was gone. Uncle Sunshine seemed to understand when Sharkey’s father was away. He was more attentive, he made an effort to watch him, he urged him to surf Waikiki, the breaks at Pops or Queen’s, where he could see him more easily. But Magic Island had saved him, and he usually had Bomboras to himself, and he always went home exhausted and happy, and shut himself in his room away from his mother’s drunken talk, saying, “Homework”—another escape.
He heard his mother scream one of those evenings, her voice carrying to his room. Looking down the corridor, he saw his mother’s back turned to him, a man at the door, in black, a chaplain.
“No, no, please,” the man said. “It’s not what you think. Your husband’s alive, but he’s been in an accident. A helicopter—a hard landing. Colonel Sharkey is being flown home. He’ll be at Tripler tomorrow.”
His mother was clutching her ears and whinnying with such force the chaplain had stepped away. But he kept repeating the message and said, “He’s in good hands,” and finished by saying, “This must be your son,” which silenced his mother for a moment, and then she sorrowed again, an agonized gagging, in a voice Sharkey had never heard from her before.
They found the Colonel behind a curtain at Tripler, yellow-faced, a tube in his nose, another in his arm, mouth open, his lips dry, in hospital pajamas. He was asleep.
“He’s got some pretty serious internal injuries, from the force of the crash,” the doctor told Sharkey’s mother. “But he should be out of the woods in a few weeks.”
“We’ve noticed some improvements,” another doctor said the next day. But the Colonel was still asleep, his hands on the sheet, palms up, making him look helpless. “We’ll call you if there’s a change. Go ahead, talk to him. I’m sure he can hear you.”
Sharkey’s mother pressed her face to the Colonel’s and sobbed. When she was done, Sharkey leaned over and spoke into his father’s ear, saying, “I’m getting better. I’m hanging ten,” and tearfully, “I love you, Dad.”
When the call came, the phone rang in darkness, the sound filling the house in Manoa, and Sharkey knew that a call at that hour of the night had to be bad news. He covered his ears as his mother began to scream.