A notion that made Sharkey laugh was to name a place, any place on earth—Paraguay, Albania, Baluchistan—and the Hawaiian surfer, innocent on his tiny islands far from the world, looked hopeful and asked, “Got waves there?” But Sharkey could be innocent too, and that was how he heard there was a wave at Christmas Island. He was certain that it hadn’t been ridden, at least not by anyone on the tour, because the wave had no name.
The mention had been casual, not the explosive blurt of a surfer with news of a big swell but offhand, from a fisherman he met, who’d flown down from Honolulu, the only route to Christmas Island, seeking bonefish in the flats of the lagoon.
“At the harbor mouth of the atoll, pretty awesome—rocked my boat.”
“So you could surf it into the lagoon?”
“I guess.”
Sharkey was reassured by this vagueness: a surfer would have known for sure. Sharkey wanted to know. The island now seemed virginal for its unnamed wave, a blue plow blade sliding in from the sea.
It was the spring of his biggest achievement so far, as the youngest winner of the Pipeline Masters. He used his prize money to buy a ticket. He zipped his board into its padded bag, triumphant in his second trip away from Hawaii, to surf the wave and maybe to name it. And at the end of the three-hour flight he pressed his face to the window as the plane banked for its descent. The island was shaped like a bulky magnifying glass, with a thick crusted coral handle, the lagoon serving as the lens, glacial milky blue, a smooth vitreous pool of magic in contrast to the dark ocean around it, frothy and windblown. In the distance, at the break in the reef, a rolling wave lifted, white-maned, and—he was still squinting—no one on it.
As for the rest, the island was narrow beaches and coconut palms, some smudges of villages, a perimeter road without vehicles, no large buildings, a place outside time but with a landing strip much wider and longer than he’d expected.
Off the plane, onto the glare of the tarmac, the passengers awaited their luggage—mostly older men, some of them islanders in white shirts and long pants, and a contingent of fishermen in khaki shorts traveling together. The luggage yanked from the plane was piled in the sunshine to be claimed. A woman standing apart, a brown Madonna in a billowy green long-sleeved dress that reached to her ankles, holding a baby, was trying to get the attention of one of the porters, who was intent on retrieving a duffel bag for a fisherman.
Sharkey caught her eye. But a man in an aloha shirt stepped between them. “Can I help you?”
“That box”—she gestured with the baby—“it mine.”
Sharkey watched as the man seized the heavily taped cardboard box.
“It my toaster.”
“And there’s your bread,” the man said with a grim smile—a large carton labeled as forty loaves of white bread from a Honolulu bakery. Fresh-Baked, Home-Sliced. The Taste of the Isles.
Then the man turned to Sharkey and said, “Congratulations.”
Sharkey smiled to cover his confusion.
“I saw you at the Pipe,” the man said. “You killed it. Gerry didn’t do too bad either.”
“Thanks.”
“You guys have youth on your side.”
Saying that, the man sounded rueful. He wore flip-flops, board shorts, his feet dirty, his nose burned, but he had the broad shoulders and slim sinewy legs of a surfer, and though his hair was wild it was thick and sun-scorched, and when he extended his hard-knuckled fingers—showing a pale, peeling, almost amphibious paw—Sharkey knew he was a waterman.
He shook hands, the complex Masonic grip of North Shore surfers, but resented being compared with Gerry Lopez, whom he felt he’d outscored on the day.
“Doc Bowers,” the man said.
“I know why you’re here,” Sharkey said.
The doubting way the man cocked his head and smiled reminded Sharkey of how the older surfers had always regarded him until he’d proved himself at the Pipeline. The old have a special smile they use on the young, and it is the more pitying and patronizing when nothing more is said.
So Sharkey said, “This your first time here?”
“They only started regular flights here a year ago,” the man said, and when Sharkey didn’t ask why, he added, “I’ve been looking at the weather. When there’s a big southerly swell, like now, that wave’s insane.”
He hated hearing the man’s enthusiasm and seeing his gusto in the tightening gulp of his throat, because it was how he too felt, and any discovery shared was a discovery diminished. He thought of himself as a loner, and he felt mocked and subverted, as when he believed he had an original thought or impulse and he came across someone else who had the same one.
Wanting always to be first, he felt undermined by everything the man was telling him, especially “Maybe we could ride it together.”
That the man had not given the break a name gave Sharkey hope.
“First I need to find a place to stay,” he said.
“I know some people.”
Sharkey resented that too. The man was way ahead of him; Sharkey had no names.
“Please identify your bags,” a man in a gray uniform said to them.
They indicated their boards in the big padded sleeves, and their duffels—Sharkey noticed that the man had brought some boxes of food, but did not remark on it, or anything more; he felt already the man knew too much.
“I guess we’re the only two freaks here,” Doc said.
Outside the small airport building, which was no more than a shed, onlookers stood behind a fence, their fingers hooked on the mesh. One ragged islander in a misshapen bush hat held a square of cardboard, crudely printed BOWERS.
“That’s my man,” Doc said, and waved.
The man touched his hat, greeting Doc, then introduced him to an older man in a white gown next to him. “This is our fadda priest”—Doc shook the man’s hand—“and this our dive master Tofinga”—another handshake—“and my friend Tawita.”
Excluded from the familiarity and friendliness, Sharkey said, “There’s a hotel here, right?”
“Captain Cook,” the priest said.
“Also known as Main Camp,” Doc said. “Or you can join me in the village.”
“I’m okay,” Sharkey said. He hoisted his board bag and jammed it under his arm, and when one of the islanders, stepping forward, said, “Taxi?” Sharkey handed him his duffel and tried to push past the waiting men.
“If I can help,” the priest said, reaching and touching his arm.
“I’ll be fine,” Sharkey said. Again he resented being crowded and imposed upon, when all he wanted was to ride the wave alone. He wished to separate himself from these people, to be away and on his own.
He found the hotel, and a room smelling of its painted cinder blocks; he rented a pickup truck, and he set off the next morning to drive to the far corner of the island, to find his own way of getting to the wave.
There was only one road, dead flat, paved for a few miles, then rutted coral and loose stones and packed sand, and after twenty minutes he slowed to a halt and got out to determine what progress he’d made by taking a look at the lagoon. He walked in the direction of the water through the head-high saltbush scrub, big-winged birds flying up from where his elbows bumped the branches, and he smelled the sour sun-dried seaweed and the sting of salt before he stepped onto crystalline boulders of coral and beheld the great gleaming lagoon. More beaky birds took flight at his appearance on the stony shore. He saw that he was less than halfway to the far side of the lagoon.
Turning his back to the lagoon, he hurried to his pickup truck and in his hurry became lost in the hot air and speckled shadow trapped beneath the low canopy of thorny bush and twisted scrub that stank of marine decay, dead fish and dried barnacles. The broken coral at his feet looked like bleached and shattered bones. What had seemed like the path he’d taken was a rut of packed-down coral dust like a game trail. He saw movement ahead—the fidget of a feral cat, another panicked bird, and the sunlight burning through the meager dusty leaves.
He could not climb the spindly stalks to see where he was; the thorns tore at his arms and he was mocked again—a hundred feet into this vegetation and, ducking and thrashing, he saw no way out, no access to the road and his truck. He ran and stumbled, then sat and, short of breath, wondered whether he was impatient or afraid. Perspiration smeared the blood on his arms. He heard a squawk and called out, as though in reply; but it was a bird.
And then at the height of his panic, flushing another bird—roosting frigate bird—and scarcely able to breathe, he saw the red of his truck through the bush and credited that ’iwa bird with saving him, the bird an omen, directing him. He sat in the truck, simply breathing, hot with anxiety, glad to be alone with his shame at having become so easily lost.
Back on the road, he resolved to stay with his truck and followed the road for several miles, until he came to a grove of coconut palms. The rows and ranks of palms reassured him with their symmetry and their abandonment—they had been set there by a human hand, but it seemed the humans had fled, leaving the place to him.
There were no people anywhere here; the road was overgrown with weeds, and the only vehicle he saw was a wreck, resting on its axles, its front end sunk in sand. Farther on he found a deserted village—empty roofless huts of what had been a coconut plantation—and a barrier of mangroves, their exposed roots opening onto a view of the lagoon. He considered looking for the wave, but seeing that the sun was setting, he feared becoming lost again. He pitched his tent, and in the gathering dusk the mosquitoes and blowflies began to bite. He lit his camp stove, boiled some water for noodles, then crawled into his tent and zipped it against the insects and lay listening to the chatter and whine of night creatures and tried to sleep, insisting to himself that the day had not been a failure.
This neck of the atoll, which had once been wild and then planted with palms, was wild once more. The night air was like black silk, the crescent moon was bleached and pitted and coralline too, and at last he forgave himself and gave thanks for the darkness, the muffled bird squawks, the distant lap of waves against the mangrove knees. The earthen odor, of decaying palm fronds and blackening coconuts and the tang of dead fish—all this, hidden in the thickness of brush and scrub, caused him to rejoice in being alone on this empty spit of coral.
In the morning, hot at seven, under a cloudless sky, he fired up his stove again and made tea, ate one of the energy bars he’d brought from Hawaii, and, leaving his board and his truck, set out to find the wave. This time he noted carefully the way to the edge of the lagoon. He walked slowly, memorizing the path, and when he came to the pocket beach in the slot between the mangroves he saw the low promontory that was one pincer tip of the atoll—a density of palms on tumbled coral—and the white lip in the water that was probably the wave. It was so distant he could not determine its height, though its face was good-sized, and in the glassy conditions it slid from the sea between the pincers of coral that formed the mouth of the atoll before breaking where the water was smooth, another one lifting behind it, and more, a set of six. He saw himself crouched on the leading wave, jamming his board into the blue tube, making a dramatic entrance, riding into the lagoon.
Beyond the sliding wave and the pale blue water, on the far shore, was a small scattered village, low buildings of rough boards, fronds stacked on the roof, looking plunked down and ugly among the graceful palms, and farther on, taller than the palms, the square spire of a church.
It was too far to paddle to the wave, so, looking for access, Sharkey walked along the irregular edge of the lagoon, slapping at branches and stumbling on the rubble of broken coral. But even an hour of walking brought him no closer, and his walking convinced him that the wave was inaccessible from this side of the atoll. He knew the deception of sea distances, and even if he reached the promontory ahead, it was a mile or more paddle to the wave—too far. And so he picked some passionfruit from stringy vines that were twined on the spindly saltbush branches, and that was his lunch. He dozed for a while but was woken by flies on his face, and then—taking care—made his way back to the pocket beach and the beaten trail and his little camp.
Telling himself it was wrong to hurry, he decided to spend another night, and again he gloried in the wildness of the place, the scrape of the palm fronds, the nameless birds that squawked in the night, the slosh that carried from the lagoon’s edge, and he congratulated himself: surfing was not only the search for a great wave or a shore break; it was in its essence the discovery of a place like this.
After his early start the following morning he saw, with surprise and pleasure, something he had missed before—a profusion of rusted machinery, old tractors and dump trucks and bulldozers, their paint peeled off, falling to pieces in the jungle beside the road, disintegrating into heaps of reddish flakes, becoming part of the planet again.
But he could see they had been serious machines, perhaps the equipment of the coconut plantation, used for clearing and plowing the land. Some had metal tanklike treads rather than rubber tires. And as though defying their decay, the palms were heavy with clusters of unpicked nuts, and the fallen ones darkened the floor of the groves, some of them newly sprouted.
He drove on, satisfied that he had seen the wave and identified it as rideable. It was too hard to access from the inner shore beyond the camp he’d made, but it seemed approachable from the village on the far side of the harbor mouth. With this in mind he drove for another hour, past the airport and the hotel and some roadside settlements that might have been villages, and saw that he had rounded the atoll. This side was inhabited, with flimsy huts and fences, a few scrawny dogs sleeping in the road, chickens pecking under the palms, and children playing.
He was disappointed by the sight of the huts and the litter: it was not possible to be alone here, and he realized with his first glimpse of the children in the road and the men squatting among the trees, motionless, like vegetation themselves, that he had been buoyed at his camp in the palm grove because it was uninhabited. But idyllic was an unattainable state, even on this small atoll, and he told himself that it was the squalor and the idleness here and the skinny kids and the lame dogs that made it real.
Just ahead he saw the church he’d spotted from across the lagoon, and what had seemed like solid granite from a distance was gray-painted wood, simple clumsy carpentry on a large scale, the blunt and splintery steeple, the great flat front of the church mimicking a cathedral, and above the double doors a circular window painted green and yellow to resemble stained glass.
The priest he’d seen at the airport was standing with some children, peaceful in conversation, his hand on the shoulder of one of them.
Sharkey thought, as he had at his camp, what did it matter if there was surf or not? The rumor of a wave had enticed him, but what mattered was that he had found this peaceful island.
He greeted the priest and said, “I saw you at the airport a few days ago.”
“Yes, I remember.”
But Sharkey had been brisk with him, and he hoped the priest had not remembered his rudeness in wishing to get away.
“I was on the other side of the island,” Sharkey said. “No people.”
“Because of the bombs,” the priest said.
“Right,” Sharkey said. “I’m trying to find the best way to the wave.”
The priest nodded, saying, “Your friend was saying the same thing.”
Sharkey tried to hide his annoyance. Affecting to be casual, he said, “He’s probably ridden it by now.”
The priest’s face gave nothing away. He said. “You can ask him. I saw him going into town this morning.”
“There’s a town here?”
“We call it a town,” the priest said softly. “It’s just over there”—and he pointed to where the road curved into more palm groves. “The bar and the dive shop and the boatyard where they do some repairs. Your friend won’t be hard to find, though he seemed to be in a hurry.”
Sharkey leaned toward the priest with a question in his eyes.
“People move slowly here,” the priest explained, having read Sharkey’s expression. “Your friend was walking fast.”
Sharkey said, “Have you ever seen anyone ride that wave?”
The priest shook his head. “We have some divers and fishermen, all of them i-matang—outsiders. The people here seldom swim.”
“What do they do?”
“They do what people do on small islands. They fish in the lagoon. They gather coconuts. They play. They quarrel.”
The town was as the priest had said—one street, a few shops, a pier, a bar with a veranda that overlooked the harbor, some beached and broken boats, a low-tide odor of decayed fish and slime drying from green to black. Sharkey parked his pickup truck, and as soon as he got out and slammed the door he heard, “Joe Sharkey.”
The man who called himself Doc had darted from the bar—and Sharkey was gratified to see that he was unchanged, wild hair and trampled flip-flops and the same aloha shirt but unbuttoned. Yet even under the rags he had the physique of a surfer—the shoulders, the legs, the burned hair, the hands pink and boiled-looking from soakings in seawater.
The man said, “Doc,” as though to reassure him.
“How’s it?”
“Insane, man,” Doc said, but in a soft wondering way, and he went on, speaking in a disbelieving tone that was the more alarming for being a near-whisper. “The place where I was staying? It’s just a hut in the palms. But the first night I’m there I hear these noises, someone getting hosed, that rocking sound and those unmistakable sighs. I think, ‘Beautiful.’ But at breakfast I’m talking to the guy—that one you saw, with the hat—and we’re being served by this young teenaged girl—eggs, tea, papaya.”
The man stopped and shook his head.
Sharkey said, “I’m listening.”
“I said, ‘Your wife’s young.’ He looks at me. ‘My daughter. My wife’s off-island.’ I was thinking how I once had a daughter that age. So I left. I found a room here in town behind the bar. It’s nothing, but the vibe is better.”
Doc looked hard at Sharkey, sadness in his eyes, helplessness in his posture, his arms to his sides, flexing his empty hands.
Sharkey said, “You been on the wave?”
The man didn’t speak, he was thinking of something else, but Sharkey was elated when with just the slightest toss of his head the man said, “Nah.” Then he straightened and added, “I’ve been watching it. Grinds out some steep barrels.”
“You stoked?” Sharkey asked.
But Doc just smiled that older man’s smile.
Sharkey said, “I’ve been on the other side of the island. No one there.”
“Because of the bombs.”
It was what the priest had said. Sharkey said, “Was this place in the war?”
“I’m having a beer,” Doc said, turning away and walking to the bar.
And that was another thing that older people did—didn’t answer a question, said something else entirely, as though you hadn’t spoken, to make you small.
“Soft drink for me,” Sharkey said on the veranda of the bar, and when Doc ordered a beer, Sharkey had the urge to see the man drunk. He wanted to see him incapable of riding the wave today, too drunk to stand, hungover tomorrow.
“Big bombs,” Doc said. He kicked off his flip-flops and rested his feet on the veranda rail. Now Sharkey saw a bandage on Doc’s foot, but it was so dirty he had not noticed it until the foot was raised.
“How big?”
“The first tests were three-megaton H-bombs, but the yield-to-weight ratio made them more destructive—measured in terajoules, they were bigger by far than the one we dropped on Hiroshima. First the Brits in the fifties. Then us. In the sixties we set off twenty-four shots.”
“I didn’t see any craters.”
“Atmospheric tests,” he said, pointing upward with his bottle of beer. “Some from planes at eighteen thousand feet, some suspended from tethered balloons. No craters, unless you count genetic damage, genomic instability in DNA, birth defects, high levels of ionizing radiation, and radioactive contamination.” He swigged his beer. “Cancer.”
“There were people here on the island?”
Bearded, sweating, he went on drinking, but he was unexpectedly full of information. “Not many, a few hundred. They were instructed to put blankets over their heads so they wouldn’t see the flash. No one told the birds. All the birds were blinded.”
“And you know this how?”
“I’m a physicist, man. Cal Tech. I went to Hawaii to surf fifteen years ago and never looked back.” He drank again but held the beer in his mouth for a moment as though in reflection. Finally he swallowed and asked, “This bombing is news to you?”
“I heard something. I thought it was Bikini where the tests were.”
The man didn’t answer at once, though when he did, he spoke casually, dismissively, disgustedly. “Way west of here, in the Marshalls. Another nuclear disaster.”
“I saw a lot of heavy equipment on the other side of the island.”
“Abandoned by the military. They dug huge holes and buried a lot of it, the rest they left to rot—too expensive to take it away.” Now Doc smiled, a drunken smile. “It’s a hole.”
“What happened to your foot?”
“Gashed it on the beach yesterday when I was scoping out the wave.”
“Coral’s sharp.”
“Broken bottle. There’s glass everywhere. Rusty cans. Plastic.”
“So,” Sharkey said, and paused and nodded, “you make it to the wave?”
“Didn’t want to risk it with this foot. The priest bandaged it—the clinic was closed.” He smiled again. “This island is freaking me out,” and what he said was the more disturbing for being whispered.
Sharkey said, “I was beginning to enjoy it. Now I’m not so sure.” He leaned toward Doc and said in a low voice, “I got lost in the bushes by the lagoon.”
Doc laughed loudly. “That’s funny. When Captain Cook came here, some of his men went ashore. They immediately got lost—for a couple of days! It’s the freaky vegetation. The island was uninhabited. It was perfect. But Jimmy Cook named it and put it on the map. Other ships visited. It became a coconut plantation. Then a bomb site and a junkyard. Now it’s what you see—a dump.”
Sharkey looked around and sniffed. “What’s that smell?”
“Oil spill on the slipway—someone must have dropped a barrel.” He finished his beer, then said, “Do me a favor? Help me move my board? It’s still at that guy’s hut.”
“Are you going to surf with that foot?”
“Maybe not. But I don’t want to leave my board with that criminal. His own daughter, man!”
So Sharkey drove Doc down the road past the church and into the palm grove on a rutted track to the hut, which was a tin-roofed plywood box, painted green, sitting on cinder blocks. A man sat on the front steps, smoking a cigarette.
“That’s Dad,” Doc said under his breath.
He was a dark frowning man in a torn T-shirt and shorts, his elbows resting on his knees, the cigarette in one hand, an open can of sardines in the other, and what Sharkey noticed was the size of his hands, the thick fingers, the way they dripped with oil.
“I’m here for my board.”
The man hesitated, moved his mouth as though to speak, then went on chewing.
In its padded sleeve bag it leaned against the hut, but the bottom edge of the bag was torn, the stuffing pulled out.
“Who messed with my board?”
The man chewed, then, twirling one finger into the can of sardines, he said, “Was a rat,” and went on chewing.
Nothing more was said. Doc lifted his board into the bed of the pickup, and as they drove away from the palm grove and were nearer the road, Doc said, “There she is.”
A young girl in a school uniform, white blouse, blue skirt, was walking toward them. Sharkey slowed and stopped. Doc leaned out of the window.
“Remember me?”
“Yah.”
The girl’s thin face was set in a resentful, almost sulky expression, her underlip protruding. But perhaps she was shy, guarded, averse to questions.
“How’s school?”
The girl made a face, not at the question but at the man who asked it, and said nothing.
“Everything all right?”
Now she did seem resentful, and she nodded, then turned and walked up the path where the man, her father, was waiting.
Doc sighed, and as he did Sharkey saw the island anew, as if for the first time. He had been thinking only of the wave and the best way to approach it. Nothing else had mattered to him. But now he was seeing the island with Doc’s eyes, another place entirely, and he wished he had not known.
He had always surfed alone. History and customs and holidays didn’t interest him, except when they impeded his surfing. He was proud of surfing every Christmas Day—the surf was always up in December. “Surf is my religion.”
He did not want to know what Doc knew. He told himself that Doc was trying to impress him. Doc was a dropout, and like most dropouts he retained his old instincts and habits. He was not a competitive single-minded surfer. Doc’s problem was that he knew too much.
But the next day, Doc with a newly bandaged foot helped him carry his board down the slipway, and he watched like a proud parent as Sharkey paddled out to the wave and sat rocking on the back of the swell, now and then riding it, exploding through the barrel.
And for Sharkey the wave was pure and ageless and eternal; no matter how badly the island had been abused, the wave remained the same, unspoiled, the same shape it had been centuries before, when it had rocked the sailing ship of Captain James Cook. Sharkey surfed for the remainder of his week on Christmas Island, claiming the wave as his own, rejoicing in it. Now and then he saw Doc onshore, a tiny figure in an aloha shirt sitting on the pier.
He saw that he’d been wrong—wrong about Doc. Wrong about the island, wrong in his judgments and his sarcasm, wrong about himself. But in this small, flat, crusted, and contaminated atoll, humming with flies, the itch of dog fur rising from its rotting coconuts, its littered beaches and reeking villages—the glowering man with the big oily fingers—in all this the wave was a muscle of water that lifted him and carried him forward, a thing deserving of a name. The wave at least was pure. He hadn’t been wrong about that.
One of those nights, stinking of diesel and chattering with the racket of the bar’s generator, under the glare of fluorescent tubes, Sharkey fist-bumped Doc and said, “Call it Jimmy’s.”