Later, when he was much older, dominating the tour, he’d see a barefoot boy of sixteen or so, deeply tanned, the glow of sunshine on him, golden salt-crusted shoulders, thin legs, wild blond hair like crushed feathers, his underlip thrust out in defiance, in a torn T-shirt and faded shorts, a big board under his arm, and he’d feel a pang for this fallen angel. He wanted to say to the boy, “Don’t listen to your mother—keep doing what you’re doing,” but the boy wouldn’t listen and didn’t care and would of course do whatever he wanted to do. He also wanted to say to someone—anyone—“I see myself in that boy.”
But there was no one to tell, no one who would understand. He was alone with the thought. The boy, that gangly twitching amphibian, half civilized, a fanatic, jumpy with ambition, didn’t know what was going to happen to him; his whole life ahead of him, he only knew that he had a passion to be on a wave. He was alone too, and happier that way, with fantasies of glory in his head.
Whenever his mother was nearby Sharkey would chant in his mind, With you I’m more alone than when I’m on my own. A single mother, he saw, was like a bossy older sister, and she distrusted him, she hovered, and inflicted the worst sort of intrusion: she said no, and then she was gone, out of the house, on a date. His wish to be alone she took to be inspired by his streak of cruelty.
The Colonel had believed in him, and that belief had made Sharkey confident. The Colonel had also had a sense of proportion—some things mattered, others not so much. He had seen men die in battle; next to that, what else was worth lamenting? Being under attack in a firebase mattered more than cutting your thumb on a tuna-fish can or even crashing your car. Losing meant more than winning, but putting forth your whole effort mattered most. Were you shit scared? “Consider yourself already dead” and take the leap, no retreat.
To his mother, everything mattered equally. “A strange thing happened today,” Sharkey had once said to her, preparing to tell her how a pretty Chinese girl in his class, seeing him alone in the school playground, had come up to him holding two cans of soda. She was small, slender, kitten-faced, chinless, and she crouched obliquely with a little bow. “This one for you.” It was a day when, reverting to their bullying, Wilfred and his friends had been brutal to him. “Fucken haole!” And the girl, Mee Ling, was an angel.
His mother said, “Wait”—staring, she wasn’t listening, she rummaged for a pair of tweezers and plucked a hair from between his brows. “You can’t go around like that.” When that was done, she said, “What were you going to tell me?”
“Nothing.”
For those who believed that everything mattered, nothing mattered. They lived in a smothering clutter of concern and were never happy.
“Look at the time. I have to put on my face.” She dressed for men, for other people.
When she was gone, he was glad; his confidence returned, he was himself again.
Uncle Sunshine’s motto was There’s always another wave. Sharkey’s mother sometimes alluded to the loss, because it was the only time she’d seen him surf. She did not know that he’d begun to win—not contests, but the daily rough-and-tumble in the waves at Sunset and Waimea. In the tribal rites of surfing, the young surfers were merciless in their quest to be warriors. Other surfers knew better than anyone who the up-and-coming surfers were—Sharkey could see that he was gaining respect, because they matched themselves against him. It was better that his mother didn’t know, better that he was detached from her, detached from school.
He dated the onset of his adulthood from this period. His mother was preoccupied with her boyfriend. Sharkey dropped the pretense that he went to school every day; his many absences meant that there was no going back, no way of catching up with schoolwork, as in the dream he often had of being naked and unprepared and late for class. He quit entirely, saying so in a short scribbled note of farewell, ridding himself of the uncertainty and the sense of failure, leaving behind the skirmishes in the playground and the exasperation of teachers, though he wondered what would become of Mee Ling, who had risked the taunts of the class by offering him a can of soda.
He said to his mother, “I’m quitting school,” and when she howled he left the house and went surfing. His decision to quit gave him a great day on the water. His mother was calmer when he got home, exhausted by her hysteria.
“What will you do?”
“Maybe be a lifeguard.”
Eddie Aikau had vouched for him—Eddie had quit his part-time job at the cannery and was now a full-time lifeguard at Sunset. Sharkey passed the test and earned a Red Cross certificate, and was assigned to Ali‘i Beach in Hale‘iwa. His mother was bewildered that he had gotten a job so quickly, that he had responsibility and a uniform and a salary—amazed that he knew people who helped him. Becoming a lifeguard on the North Shore was another rite of passage for lucky surfers—more like being a member of an exclusive club or a secret society than a city job, and with greater status. But it was not his ultimate aim, only a strategy to stay near the water.
The lifeguard chair was a throne, upraised, eight feet in the air, under a red canopy. He sat, his legs out straight, in the shadow of the canopy, wearing sunglasses, not emerging except to warn the tourists—Japanese girls in floppy hats and summer dresses—of the surf on big days. Using a megaphone, which gave him an older voice that crackled with authority, he called out, “Keep away from the shore break. You can be knocked down and swept out.”
And now and then a Japanese tourist, a girl usually, perhaps not hearing or not understanding—or heedless—was knocked over by the push of a wave and slipped and was dragged away by its outgoing wash, and Sharkey leaped from his tower, carrying a float and a coil of rope. He dashed down the beach and dived for her, encircling her with his arm across her chest so that she lay on her back against his hip, and brought her to shore.
The first time it happened, it set off a series of events that changed him. A Japanese girl in a yellow dress was swept out. He swam for her. He stayed with her and she clung to him, sobbing, Sharkey whispering to calm her while her friends fretted at a distance. And feeling the softness of her flesh, the tremor of her helplessness, Sharkey was aroused. He had not touched a girl since the last time with Nalani, and had longed to. But Nalani had a new baby and all the desirable girls had boyfriends.
Soaked, moaning in fear, her thin dress clinging to her slender body and the outline of the seams of her underwear, her hair tangled and her face crumpled in terror, the rescued girl at Ali‘i Beach looked naked and powerless, and, sobbing on the hot sand, with Sharkey kneeling over her, she seemed sacrificial.
When she recovered and dried her face and sat up, she seemed ashamed of what she’d done—touching him, holding him in the water. She hid her face, and then ran to her friends and was gone.
But that experience, the drama of rescue, grasping the girl’s body and hugging it, gave him the choking sensation, the wordless clumsy groping he came to know as desire, and he wanted more.
“I heard you wen’ done a rescue,” Eddie said later in the week, at their Friday pau hana—beers on the beach. “That’s good. That goes on your record. That’s big points for you.” And peered closely at Sharkey. “You no look happy, brah.”
“She made me horny,” Sharkey said.
Eddie laughed at the unexpected word.
They were sitting cross-legged in a circle, Sharkey, Eddie, and four other lifeguards, at the far end of the beach at Waimea, where they met every Friday at sundown to see the green flash, to drink beer, to smoke pakalolo, to talk story—seldom stories about being a lifeguard, usually about the surf: was it rising, was it dropping, was a new swell expected?
Sharkey enjoyed the ritual, feeling that he belonged to this little band of watermen. School had not worked, his mother didn’t know him; in town he was reminded of his failures. Here on the North Shore, among his fellow lifeguards, he was among friends. His was a job that came with distinction and authority; the lifeguard commanded the beach, he was obeyed, he sat upraised in the open, and whenever he made a rescue it was a spectacle.
He was the only haole among the lifeguards; as Eddie’s protégé he was respected. Eddie often told the story of how they’d met that evening on the road to Hale‘iwa and how in that meeting they’d felt a bond. Eddie made the meeting sound momentous. He did not remember saying, “Gas, grass, or ass—no one rides for free,” and Sharkey giving him a dollar.
At the perimeter of the circle of boys in yellow lifeguard T-shirts and red shorts, some girls had begun to gather and kneel, more numerous on Fridays because the weekend loomed. Like an extension of the boys’ tribal rite, the girls sat a little distance apart, pretending to be uninterested but often glancing over at the lifeguards. Sharkey resisted staring at them, fearing that he might choose the wrong one. He knew from Roosevelt High School that though the girls kept to themselves, whispering, and allowed themselves to be teased by the boys, each girl had a lover among the boys. It was only after dark that they met and paired off, and it was dangerous to presume and flirt, since every girl was spoken for.
“Hear that?” Eddie said. “Haole boy wen’ rescue one Japanee wahine and he come horny.”
“She had no muscles,” Sharkey said. “She was so soft, her flesh like something I could eat. And she was all wet, her clothes sticking to her.”
“Ha! You see surf bunnies with plenny papaya in little bikinis all day long and you get horny when you see one Japanee wahine in a wet dress.”
Sharkey laughed and tried to deny it, but it was true, just as he said. The dress alone made her sexy: a wet one on a soft little body filled him with desire.
“Thass crazy,” one of the other boys said.
Sharkey said, “I can’t explain it.”
“Is a mystery,” Eddie said.
He had gotten to his knees. He wagged his head to see across the patch of sand, where the girls had gathered beneath the feathery overhang of an ironwood bough.
“Eh—Rhonda,” he said, leaning, then putting his fingers to his lips and whistling.
A small figure emerged from the shadow of the tree, the glow of her white shorts making her visible.
Sensing a moment that might involve him, Sharkey said, “I’m heading into town. Friday traffic,” and jammed his beer bottle into the sand.
“Not yet, haole.”
Now the girl was beside Eddie, and as though in a gesture of respect she dropped to her knees, looking like a child beside him, with a soft smile and a face like a seal pup’s.
“Rhonda—dis haole Joe Sharkey.”
Sharkey awkwardly got to his feet but could not think of anything to say, not even “Hi.” He felt so conspicuous among the other boys.
“Go wid him.”
“Aloha,” Sharkey said, swallowing hard, and walked across the sand to the parking lot where he’d left his car, glad for the darkness that closed over him. He was careful not to look back, but when he got to his car, the girl was behind him. She slipped into the backseat, leaving the door open.
Sharkey got into the driver’s seat and gripped the steering wheel.
“What are you doing back there?” he said.
“Taking my clothes off.” Her first words, a squeaky island voice, singsong, baby talk.
“Why?” he said, and did not recognize his thick throaty voice.
“Come here and find out.”
He was trembling as he sat beside her, taking care to close the door so that it hardly made a sound. As he began to hug her, leaning to kiss her, she took a wad of gum out of her mouth and flicked it through the window.
“What are you doing?”
“I don’t want it,” she said, her breath thick with the sweetness of bubble gum.
“What do you want?”
“I want you in my mouth.”
The spoken words worked on him with more force than if she had caressed him, and she said them again in a hot urgent whisper. Then her little hands were snatching at his shorts and her head was nuzzling his lap, until he lay back and rested his hands on her bobbing head, her warm hair in his fingers.
Like the first time he’d surfed a barrel, shooting to the end as the wave closed over him, flinging himself into the sunlight, this was explosive, a relief, filling him with joy and promising more—promising happiness.
The Colonel had warned him, his mother had warned him, and now he knew why. Desire was dangerous to them; they knew they’d lose him to it and never learn his secret.
Rhonda sat up and sighed, shrugged her breasts back into her torn T-shirt and at the same time passed a fingertip across a gleaming snail trail on her cheek, drew it to her lips, and licked it. Then she let out what Sharkey heard as a giggle of wickedness and complicity, but it was only a shy girl’s laughter.
“I want more,” he said into her hair.
“Me too.” Her mouth warmed his ear.
“I have to go now, Rhonda.”
“I see you tomorrow, Joe.”
“You know me?”
“Everybody see Joe Sharkey, but you nevah pay no attention.”
So he was known, he was desired, he had friends, and now, just like that, a lover. He was not a conqueror. He was an initiate—he’d been admitted to a mystery and saw inside the rosy recesses of it, red as the flesh in a mouth. He understood now what was allowed, and knew the wonderful truth: his innocence of girls had been ignorance—what he wanted, they wanted too. That was the solemn secret. No wonder they smiled, no wonder Rhonda wanted more.
Not experience delivering him to maturity—sexual desire made him a child again, a happy boy, free to do as he wished. And now he knew that the girls weren’t afraid. They were like him, his equals. It was play, it was joy, it was the childhood he thought he’d missed, to be lived again.