They wagged their okoles and fluttered their fingers and did mocking hula on the beach near the lifeguard stand and called out “Joe” to him. They watched him surf and met him as he came ashore. They brought him bowls of poke and rice or Spam musubi as presents and watched him eat under the palm trees. They challenged him to take smaller waves and sometimes surfed beside him with more grace than he could muster. They were not strong and so they needed to be more agile, they were light on their boards, they were gleaming mermaids in the water, they knew their limits and so stayed out of the monster surf and rode like nymphs on the waves they chose—surf bunnies.
Unexpectedly, they were his friends. He did not have to pretend to love them, yet he desired them. It was a relief to him that he did not need to woo them or contrive a reason for meeting them secretly—and when it happened, which was after work, most days, they were as eager as he was, and more straightforward.
Snatching his hand, one said, “I stay hanawai.”
He pushed her hand aside and hugged her.
“My period.”
“Want to forget about it?”
“Plenny other ways.” And she laughed softly, groping him as he had just groped her and shoving his hand onto her okole.
Most of the time it was hurried, a swift grappling and then a convulsive gasp, and when it was over, giggles. They knotted her pareu, lit a joint, and talked about the surf. No memory of what had just happened—it was mutual relief, a frantic hug.
This was the life he craved. It did not matter whether he excelled at riding the wave—he was relaxed, surfing when he was off-duty or on his free days; he found a rhythm in his climb into the wave, a way of appraising it, jamming his board onto it, and planting himself on it, so that the wave and the board were one. And why so smooth? Because he was happy.
This was play, sex was play, lifeguarding was friendship—a team, and that involved play too. None of it was work. He was paid enough that he never had to ask his mother for money. That he was independent confused her, thwarted her in her hovering, since his accepting money from her had held them together, and now he didn’t need her.
“I can give you more,” she said.
“I don’t need more. I don’t need any.”
Girls had money and sleek bodies, girls had cars, girls had rooms where he could crash, girls had parents who encouraged him. He surfed with Rhonda’s father, Kawika, who said, “You got a job. You got respeck.”
The pink C-shaped scar on Sharkey’s face set him apart, it masked him, it gave the illusion that he was less a haole than the others—someone with a story, a secret, an altered face, the scar a distinction like a badge of honor, as though he’d been injured in battle, more proof that he might be a hero.
From the loneliness of lingering on a swell, waiting for a wave to ride, he became aware that he was being watched, that someone—probably a girl—saw what he was doing and understood the difficulty; and the very fact that he knew someone was watching him—someone onshore to surf to, an appreciative spectator—helped him put forth his best effort. So he rode the wave to the girl on the beach and that night lay in her arms.
It was so simple, this notion that there was someone watching him, someone who desired him—more than one, perhaps many: this attention drove him to perform, the play became serious, and he was reminded of how he wanted to win and had a reason for winning, not for money but to impress a girl, to possess her for a night, or more.
He saw that the other surfers had the same idea, competed against each other to be noticed—less warriors battling for a trophy than a pack of poi dogs nipping each other and lolloping for a favor. Sharkey usually came second or third. He was complimented—so young, smaller than most of them, a haole, but distinguished with a scar.
One day he won at a surf meet at Sunset. He was crowned with a lei, a ring of flowers on his head. The prize was a new surfboard and a ticket to Tahiti, and a girl that night murmured to him, “Watch me, watch me, watch me—what I do to you.”
The neglected aspect of his growing up, what was missing in his childhood, was a girlfriend; and now, with money, he slipped out of his mother’s grasp and eluded her control. He had lovers.
“Them Tahiti wahine better be careful.”
“I’ll come back to you,” he said.
“Maybe I no stay here. Maybe I no wait.”
He was now used to their playful defiance—it made them whole and equal and more desirable.
Tahiti was his first trip away from Hawaii, on his own, away from his mother—she saw him off, looking sad. He arrived in Papeete, set against old mountainous volcanoes, overgrown and thickened in rainwashed green, steeper than the pali of O‘ahu. But the town itself was much smaller than he’d expected, no tall buildings, a human scale. The plane had circled and come in low across the reefs, Sharkey scanning the breaks for surf spots, his face pressed against the window.
“New board,” said the taxi driver, Hawaiian in his big brown bulk but with a French accent.
“A prize.”
“You win this board?”
“Oui, mon ami.”
“Vous êtes un grand champion.”
“That’s me!”
He was someone else, someone exceptional; no one knew him here. He was happy in the freedom of being able to say anything he wished about himself, and still remembered a little French from Roosevelt. He discovered the first day in Tahiti the transformation of travel, liberated in a far-off place.
This is all mine, he thought. He possessed the island with all his senses. The town smelled of sea-rotten wood and old rope and decaying fish, and the women were lovely in their bright pareus, knotted at their breasts, walking beneath the arcades of the shop houses in a stamping, assertive way, as though to show they weren’t owned by the French. Food smells, the blatting of motorbikes, and a strange and fragrant cigarette smoke—all new. Another odor he could not identify, from great woven baskets and burlap sacks—blackened husks. He saw it was the sourness of broken coconuts. “Copra, m’sieur.”
The taxi driver found him again, calling out, “Champion!”
He strapped Sharkey’s board on pads on the roof of his purple Renault Dauphine and drove him along the coast, Sharkey in the backseat, a pretty woman in the front; he was fascinated by the simple knot of her pareu at the back of her neck, which he mentally untied.
“What country?” she asked.
“Hawaii.”
The word cheered her; she relaxed, as though he’d announced himself as a relative. And then she was narrating, “Maraa . . . Papara,” indicating the surf beyond the reef, and farther on Sharkey saw a wave rising on an outer reef and no one surfing it.
“Stop,” he said, but already the taxi had begun to slow down.
“Teahupo‘o,” the driver said, and got out with the girl, who helped unload the board. Her hair was thick; she had a flower on her ear; her face was sculpted, thin-lipped, a pretty chin. A slender neck; the pareu still neatly in place, with a simple knot.
The guesthouse was near the beach. He paid extra to stay in the thatch-roofed cottage on the grounds, like a dollhouse. He propped his surfboard outside and threw himself on the bed, taking a deep breath of the fragrance from the open window—fragrant even in the musty room, the bedposts damp and salty with sea air. He felt freedom in the fragrance of every new aroma.
And then a knock. “Yes?”
It was the driver, looking shy, trying to form a sentence.
“Ma soeur—elle veut être ton amie.”
He understood “sister,” he understood “friend.”
That was all he needed to know. He saw the girl from the taxi waiting on the beach the next day, in the late afternoon, as he rode in the last of what he imagined would be the good waves. The surf had been dropping since lunchtime. But he’d been alone on the break, and he had the renewed sense that it was all his, this day was his, the beach was his, and the girl on it, barefoot in the red-and-yellow pareu—different from yesterday’s—fluttering as she walked back and forth, something in her hand. When he came closer he saw it was a rusty machete.
“Now I kill you,” she said, swiping with the blade, looking reckless, her eyes flashing.
“Wait,” he said, quickly putting his board down.
She screeched, laughing, and ran on skinny legs to where the grassy bank had been eaten away by the sea, forming a ledge, undercut by the tide.
“Votre tête,” she said, falling on her knees and selecting a coconut from a pile of green coconuts. Holding it at arm’s length, she slashed at it in oblique strokes, narrowing its end with quick chops to open a hole.
Sharkey had been frightened by the sight of the knife. Now, as she handed him the coconut, he felt only joy. The taste of the cool coconut water brought a sweetness to his soul.
Meanwhile the girl had sat down on the grass, cross-legged, and placed a smaller coconut in her lap.
“Can I have this one?”
“Take,” she said, and opened her legs.
The coconut lay between her legs, on her silken wrap. Sharkey reached but could not grasp the coconut without disturbing the cloth or grazing her thighs with his fingers. She sat back, resting on her arms, and widened her legs more as he leaned and looked into her eyes and slowly grasped the coconut, his knuckles bumping the warmth of her inner thighs. But he merely held it, he did not lift it, he sensed her body bumping it. When he tried to lift it she brought her legs together and clasped it.
“You like to taste that?”
His mouth went dry. He licked the sea salt from his lips, the sweetness of the coconut she’d cut for him. But now they were alone in the shadow of the palms, half hidden by the bushes of big leaves that grew just behind them.
He nodded, and fearing that she had not seen him clearly enough, he spoke. “Yes—yes.”
“J’aime,” she said, reaching for his hair and clawing it slowly, “vos cheveux d’or.”
He made an attempt to pick up the coconut, but when he did she closed her legs on it again, and on his hands, and she laughed softly. Her thighs were warm against his hands as she laughed again, teasingly. She was staring past him at the setting sun—her cat eyes gilded by it—and the sun sank, too slowly he thought. When they were in darkness she put her face near his—did not kiss him but inhaled deeply, against his nose.
“Where?’ he said. “When?”
“Ici,” she said. She flung the coconut aside and pushed his head into her lap, clasping it as she had clasped the coconut, and whispered, “Maintenant.”
Her name was Fillette, she told him after they’d made love and were lying half asleep on the grass. And that became the pattern of their days—she greeted him in the morning and then was gone—“J’aide ma mère dans le jardin”—his school French was a help, but there was much she said that he did not understand. “Garden” meant gathering coconuts and bananas. He surfed all day, she met him at sundown in the bower beneath the palms, and when his week was over she was laughing, he was tearful.
Before her brother drove him to the airport, Sharkey said, “I’ll come back.”
“Je serai une vieille femme alors.” And she laughed again.
“Fillette she say, she be old woman then,” her brother said, settling behind the wheel.
At home, in the circle of lifeguards after work, he told his story to the others, who listened intently. He was the adventurer, with the power of the sexy tale of the Tahitian girl at the break at Teahupo‘o.
Then Eddie said, “What about the waves?”
“Awesome.”
He described the configuration of the break, how solitary it was, the good days, his rides, how the girl had said that in winter it was huge. But his mind was not on the waves, because all he could think of was the expression she’d taught him, which he was too shy to share with these boys, words he had not learned at school: “Goûtez-moi”—taste me.
The surf subsided in early spring and the ocean flattened, shimmered as a lake of blue—more swimmers, easier rescues, later sunsets, and still the girls lingered by the lifeguard chair, calling to him, teasing him.
“Haole boy!” But it was affectionate, flirtatious.
To avoid the long drive from town he rented a room in a house near Rocky Point, surfed at Velzyland on his days off, and sneaked girls into the room for . . . what? To him it was never more than play, and for the girls too; blameless, joyous, brief.
He was with a girl on the late afternoon his mother stopped by the beach. His mother was with a man he’d never seen before.
“Puamana, this is my mother.”
“Glad to meet you,” his mother said. And to the man, “This is my son, Joe.”
“Jamie Kunzler,” the man said. “I was in your father’s outfit in ’Nam, running recon patrols.”
“Jamie wants to talk to you about school,” his mother said.
“I’m done with school,” Sharkey said.
“You’ll be in good shape with a high school diploma.”
“I’m in good shape without one.”
“Can’t enlist without one,” the man said. “But if you get one and join up, the army will look after you. Put you through college on the GI Bill. That’s pretty much a free ride.”
His mother stared, saying Answer that with her severe gaze.
Sharkey said, “The Colonel—my dad—said we were just helping out in Vietnam. Advisers. Recon. But now there’s all kinds of fighting. He didn’t see that. A lot of guys are getting killed, and lots of injured men are at Tripler. I don’t want to go.”
“You don’t want to help your country.”
“Ever ask yourself, ‘Why are we dying there?’” Sharkey said. Then he smiled. “My dad said they got waves.”
The man winced, and what angered Sharkey was that his mother was on the man’s side—a new man, a new date—and not on his.
“Think of your future,” she said. “What will you do?”
Sharkey was holding his board, standing near Puamana. Now he put his arm around her waist and drew her to him, and he faced his mother, who had edged away from Jamie Kunzler, who stood, hands behind his back, at ease.
“This,” Sharkey said.