None is so fierce that he dares to stir him up.
—Job 41
THE HOUSE WAS SMALL and got you used to bird life. There were mynahs most of all, common mynahs, roosting in mating pairs in the winter and in large flocks in the springs and summers on the beach. They had bright yellow beaks with banded white tails showing smartly from behind when they were on the wing. In addition, the honu, or Hawaiian green turtle, would draw itself out of the sea and gradually turn the color of lava that had cooled and sat for years beneath the sun. A brown color once black that became, in the brightness of noon, hard to see at all.
Whole lives had been lived like this, for all Cal knew. The aromatic calm formed an unwavering picture in his mind, and since he’d been a child on family visits to the island, roaming the inlets of lava on the beach, he had understood the ocean in only one way, as something slow and warm with enduring comforts. Occasionally it occurred to Cal that in winter, while he was on the mainland, there were storms. But he pushed this knowledge away.
Now he crept quietly off the lanai, or grand Hawaiian porch, onto the beach. The sand, even at this late hour, was hot and the heat seeped into the pads of his feet and made him hasten toward the water. He stood perched on the lava looking not at the ocean but toward the house, toward Harold, who was round at the belly and lay back asleep, his head lolling with the startled fury of the beard gushing massive and wild, until it was the thing most conspicuous from the tide line.
Harold was new to the sea, comparatively, though they’d been coming to the house Cal had inherited from his mother, a rich San Diego dowager of the 1960s, for twenty years together now. The sea still seemed to mesmerize Harold, who hailed from Ohio and belonged to lakes and ponds. Warm summer ponds you could approach via long wooden jetties and, as Harold told it, you could splash into, with gaping strides through the air, in your youth. Cal had the impression when Harold spoke of these things that it was still possible to be young, that it was a place rather than a time, and one, moreover, you could still travel toward if you sought ardently the desires that had lived there.
In any case, Harold had never swum in the water in Hawaii. He’d dipped his toes, sure; he’d responded to coaxing by laying his considerable bulk in the tide pools, yes; he’d been nibbled by tiny, carnivorous glass shrimp, nearly translucent, and by juvenile raccoon butterfly fish. But he had never swum out with Cal to the drop-off where occasionally you glimpsed large pelagics, a spotted eagle ray flying with her calf, a pod of spinner dolphins swallowing long circles of rest, or, very rarely, a white-tip reef shark cruising the bottom structures, seeking then finding a ledge of coral under which to pause and drowse.
Nonetheless, Harold was clearly intrigued by large predators and sea mammals. Dolphins intrigued him. It was rare that dolphins visited the bay in their languorous sweeps of the shoreline but occasionally Cal would hear Harold exclaim. Then his lover would point vigorously, eyes squinting with the brush line of his brows buckling. “Spinners,” he’d mutter a second time, collecting himself, in a voice that was calm and flat, belying his excitement.
“In that case, why don’t we take the kayak?” Cal would watch Harold carefully in such moments, wondering if he was tempted, knowing him to be unwilling to don a mask and sink his broad body into the ocean.
“Oh, they’ll be long gone,” Harold would say quickly. Or “No need to disturb their rest.”
Even so, Harold had clearly become a student of spinners, of the way they hunted at night and rested and bonded in their long circles during the days. They were smaller than bottlenose dolphins, more athletic, and Harold would watch them spin out of the sea, then crash back down with resounding slaps of what seemed to Cal like pure joy.
“Status and power,” Harold would correct him. “They’re either hunting or making displays.” Then Harold would drone on in a dry monotone about impressing mates, territorial war, and bachelor factions shaking the structures of dolphin authority. He was really quite knowledgeable, Cal thought, for a man who never ventured into the water. Cal himself knew only what it was to swim beside a pod of spinners thirty feet down, to look them in the large eye that was deeply far from the end of the nose, to see the bright-white gleam beneath the gray of their flesh, and to feel them slow and patient beside him, as though awaiting the long, curving strokes of his fins. The dolphins, with calves gliding silently beneath mothers’ bellies, with the thickness of their bodies slimming to thread whitely into broad tails, were the muscles of the sea, their gazes entering you through water and growing inside your lungs until you were forced to turn up for air.
Cal turned at last from Harold toward the water and scanned the bay. It was choppy with a seaward breeze that pushed at the incoming tide and made humps like the backs of things. This whole expanse, the ocean, would not make sense without the lanai and the stand of coconut palms he and his mother had planted and that now tilted and rattled in the wind. Nor would the placid bay live at all for him without the old man snoring in his chair. How could that be? Harold who never went into the sea. If it were up to Cal, after all, one would hardly get out of the ocean—
“Shark,” yelled Harold from behind him.
“What?” Cal turned to face the lanai and Harold was standing, staggering, then descending unsteadily onto the beach.
“Shark,” he yelled again, this time pointing with his whole giant hand as though it were a ventral fin, the thumb tucked in, palm downturned and level with the ground.
“Where?”
“There. Past the surge zone. Coming back in. That’s a big one now. Huge one.”
Cal turned and stared.
“Never seen one like that,” and Harold was still hoarse and bellowing. Burbling on. Coming up sweaty and grabbing him by the shoulders, roughing him in his excitement so that Cal, who was lithe and tall, nearly fell down.
“See it,” said Cal, straightening himself. “That does look large.”
The dorsal indeed stretched surprisingly high off the surface, was wide at the base, and swiveled slightly, aggressively, in a way that Cal had never seen.
“Big sucker,” whispered Harold, clearly fascinated. Now they could make out a shape beneath the water, again, surprisingly large, of a scale Cal had only seen in a young whale, in humpback calves he’d dived with off the northern coast of the island near Hawi.
“Jesus Christ,” blurted Harold excitedly. And at last the shark was close enough to the shore that they could see, squinting out across the lava breaks, that the dorsal was mottled, even banded at its base with jagged swaths of shadow crossing the blade. “Christ, that’s a tiger.”
Cal twisted free of Harold and ran to the side of the house. He grabbed the light hawser of the kayak and started hauling, running with it as best he could down the beach to the break and finally dipping the bow into the first crust of the waves.
“Get in here, Harold,” he hollered, expecting Harold to begin shuffling backward as he invariably did when challenged, to start shifting his bulky shoulders in retreat, tracing a line with his heels up the beach toward the lanai.
But Harold stood transfixed and Cal, turning quickly, could see the outline of the shark clearly now, the sun cutting across it from the west, the big snub nose small in comparison with the bulk behind it and the scythe of its tail tall and proud and immense, sweeping far behind the head as if a sailfish were trailing the body and propelling it at a distance.
“Get in here, Harold,” Cal yelled again, and Harold, to Cal’s amazement, began to sidestep, still staring at the shark, which had turned to the south and seemed to be moving back along the surge line in their direction. Harold, for whatever reason, perhaps because the shark had taken him from his dreams and just at that moment he remained poised between worlds, or perhaps because he’d suddenly awakened to his bravery and found himself at last to be redoubtable, a crowing beast, or, most likely, because he was utterly beside himself—Cal didn’t care what it was—now shuffled not backward toward the lanai but sideways. Then, as Cal steadied the kayak in the channel between lava floes, Harold stumbled in, nearly upsetting it. He even grabbed the paddle from the floor, as though it were a sword, still straining his eyes out toward the sea.
Cal had never seen a tiger shark in the wild and supposed, to the extent he supposed at all, that Harold, who seemed fascinated with anything large, found the prospect of witnessing the animal up close too tempting to resist. It was certainly true that tigers rarely, almost never, approached such shallow coral embankments during the daylight hours. Occasionally there were sightings by open-water swimmers along the shoreline south toward Kona and the odd attack on surfers, particularly when swells amped up and runoff from rains clouded coastal waters. But it remained an anomaly, something wild and mysterious, and Cal, for his part, did not hesitate to run for the kayak at the prospect of peering down at such power.
There was one other thing. Cal, who had dived with many sharks, had never been in the water with a tiger. They had a kind of mythical presence. When they did approach the shore, it was usually at dusk and they had been known to surf, literally to surf, to use their wide bulks to navigate wave troughs and fish along the break line when the sun had exited but still cast its gloaming rays. In other places, not Hawaii, Cal had sat on the beach and watched this happen. What had struck him then was not the danger of wading into the shallows but the need of such animals, the urgency that size brought to bear. There were stories of tigers slit open to reveal plow blades and tree branches and parts of cars.
Now he climbed in behind Harold to the seat at the stern and pushed off with his own paddle. They moved, incredibly, out toward the shark, as though they were one, as though the two of them had often, just before sunset, set off together in precisely this way, toward things you couldn’t exactly envision from land but that, having lived them together in a kind of complicity and synchrony, they’d known for years and thrust into their knowledge of each other.
“That’s it,” purred Cal from behind, watching Harold work his paddle carefully, avoiding the outcroppings of jagged, coffee-colored lava. Then, “Now, good work,” as they came to the surge zone, elongated and rough with breaks arriving in three irregular rows across the floe banks. Here, to his amazement, Cal watched Harold dig in, bending his broad back toward the water and hauling powerfully with his arms, the big bulk of him at work, the head lifted up as though seeking something, then the shoulders dipping back down to pull.
They were in a rhythm. It was maddening, thought Cal, to the extent that he was of a mind to think anything. Indeed, just at that moment he scarcely inhabited such a mind. He had almost no thinking in him at all except for a yearning for deep water, for the place he’d never brought Harold before where even from a kayak you could see depths, detect things displaced beneath other things, find animals passing beneath you and then, when you dove, gliding even above you, over you, between you and the air.
The shark was gone, so far as Cal could tell. Harold had stopped working his paddle and was sitting upright. The sun was blinding in the west and streaking through the surface of the sea into what was now a gorgeous blue, fine and clear at depth, marking out the place just ahead where the drop-off lay and beyond which other things, God knows what things, were alive and real, shooting into light you could scarcely see.
Out there, Cal knew, they would be beyond the tumult of the break line and the turbid, brown water of the shallows, past even the green of the lava holes and, because it was already July, outside the coral bloom that began along the structures at the surface and persisted until the reef gave off, where the substrate of the ocean floor bent down into the gloom.
Cal had dived out there on many occasions, equalizing three times and passing down toward the curve in the coral floor where it arched to a sandy bottom below sixty feet in places and descended across outcroppings from there. From those outcroppings he would turn, his lungs pulled tight while the sun at that depth fell through curved shafts into a set of slung hammocks against the sand. Then he’d sail upward, thrusting with his ankles locked together. Finally, as he rose above fifty feet, the air would begin to boom inside him.
But that had not happened for a while. It had been some time since he’d been down there like that. Perhaps years. In fact, Cal could not recall when he’d last felt alive in a way he’d once taken for granted, testing his body, feeling it wrapped around his mind like cords of energy he could alternately tense and release, tap into. Harold too seemed tired, had been tired, Cal suspected, for perhaps fifteen years. He had been terribly affectionate when they’d first met. Too affectionate, if anything. Making it difficult to sleep. Indeed Harold had been a wonderful lover, a great brute, a hurly-burly. And even now there were spurts of love, periods of grand warmth. But those too, if one thought it over, drew roots from an epoch of earthiness and treachery and reconfirmed belonging that had long passed. So at times it seemed to Cal as if they haunted separate spheres, as if for years he’d been walking slowly into the sea and the tide line was the breaking point where Harold left off and he began.
There was this, though—the impossibility of anything else was what you reached, what you earned. To Cal it seemed hardly conceivable that either of them at this late stage could ever renew or reset. Or be jolted. That too, he’d decided, was a kind of love, deep and trenching. And like the tide, it made grooves in you.
Now Cal could see Harold stiffen, the looseness in his limbs suddenly disappearing. Harold still held onto his paddle but it was in one hand rather than across his thighs and the blade dragged into the water, slicing the surface insignificantly. He was shifted awkwardly in his seat, craning his neck.
“Gone,” said Harold bemusedly, and Cal turned the kayak so they could see behind them, in the direction of the shore.
“I suppose so,” he agreed, not wishing to disturb the fact that they had alit here silently as though atop a wide sky, that they’d settled in the water as if on spreading boughs that were invisible and belonged to nothing.
“Christ,” blurted Harold suddenly, but Cal was not sure why.
Now they both stared outward and to the west, squinting, and were motionless. The wind was already coming down, eddying elsewhere, stirring beyond the bay somewhere in the offing before it would stiffen again just as they lay back to sleep in the small bed beside tall, screened windows that faced the sea.
Cal dipped his paddle and shoved them forward, farther from shore, watching Harold, who was still swiveling, scanning the surface, and looking downward into water at last clear and deep.
When the shark came, it was from behind and beneath them, rising and sweeping under the kayak from the back. Its bulk was perhaps a yard under their feet at its closest, the dorsal fin alone filling much of that space. It was just to the starboard, coming below their right hands and passing massively, for a long time, the snout abrupt, then the black, intelligent eye, gills vulnerable and white on their ruffling insides, and the skin mottled by huge, broken swatches of dun. The upper lobe of the tail was what moved, long and smooth like a sail.
Cal could not see the look on Harold’s face. He had not thought of Harold in the moment it took for the shark to pass. He himself was elated, as though a soft electric current had swept through him, had coursed through his insides, and he wanted to touch Harold, to make sure he too had felt this thing, this immensity.
“Fifteen, maybe sixteen feet,” he shouted to Harold. But Harold was already falling. Having twisted around in his seat, his hands to his right along the thin rim of the kayak shell that lacked the deep gunwale of a dinghy, Harold had jerked himself forward to see the broad swath of the tail glide beneath him. Now, for an instant, he was curved sideways, grappling to regain his balance, hips hulked dangerously out away from his shoulders and left hand shooting to grab his seat. It was too late. Harold’s bulk took him right, nearly overturning the kayak. Harold himself plunged into the sea, his shoulder in first then his jowls and head then the heavy rest of him, all of it disappearing for a moment before the pale back of the neck showed and he was bobbing at the surface, hallooing and monstrous, pouncing for the kayak as though there were something below him to leap from, tossing out his arms and letting them flop into the hollow below his seat before he was sinking back down again, returning to the ocean with his great throat sputtering and eyes in the waves.
Cal could see a moment of horror in Harold’s face that held all moments. This, after all, was why you swam in the sea—the thought flashed in Cal’s mind—so there was an element of readiness about you. As Harold had no experience of sharks, his legs, Cal imagined, would feel like bloodied meat, seeping even before their butchery, and Harold must sense them now hung languidly down for slaughter.
“Harold—reach out and take your paddle,” yelled Cal. Unlike other pairs who’d invented bedroom names or other flip endearments, he and Harold through a kind of tacit formality and his own inveterate shyness had never taken such license. Now Cal leaned forward but could not quite reach Harold’s paddle bumping on the surface of the blue ocean away from them.
“Swim out and grab your paddle, Harold.” But it was like talking to a fool. Harold was clamoring madly, stabbing for a hold of his seat in the kayak with both hands and pulling the rim violently to the starboard.
Cal leaned left to balance him and began to crawl toward the bow in an attempt to gain a purchase on Harold’s broad shoulders and heave him back aboard. But before he’d gone far he realized he would not have the strength to lift a man as big as Harold, and Harold, he knew, would soon spend himself in his panic and turn listless and dead-weighted. For now, the kayak wobbled dangerously as Harold flailed and vainly sought a handhold, an oarlock, at last a gunwale that was not there.
“Stop splashing,” shouted Cal. “It will attract the shark.”
And Harold ceased, already exhausted, his eyes bright and strange, contaminated with fright in a way that Cal had not witnessed in anyone, that did not fit with what he’d known. Initially he’d thought to drag Harold beside the boat, to paddle him into the safety of the reef structures. But now he changed course.
“I’m going to flip it,” he hollered. And Cal grabbed hold of the right rim of the kayak and shifted his weight to the left, letting himself splash down into the ocean on the far side of Harold and pulling the kayak with him until it was inverted. He guessed that the shark would be near, that there had been too much commotion for it not to circle and return, so he dove down several feet beneath the tide wash and gazed out, scanning into the water, his vision mask-less and bleary, before he lifted his head to surface.
“Now we’ll get on together,” Cal said more quietly, “at the same time,” trying to reach Harold with his eyes, Harold whom he could not see, as the broad yellow plastic of the kayak, built for tourists and novices, rounded out above the level of his vision. He weighted the back end and, to his surprise, there was Harold on the far side at the front, coughing and pulling himself up onto the inverted bow until the two of them were lying awkwardly in a line, facing the western horizon and the deep sea, their legs straddling the plastic and splayed out, chests full on the kayak bottom, and the whole enterprise sunk a foot, or a foot and a half, below the rocking surface of the waves.
Cal saw that Harold had a paddle wedged beneath his armpit. Cal had lost his own paddle, not thinking to grab it before he’d turned the kayak, and he cursed himself now for this omission. But Harold must have found it. Somehow, it must have floated to him. In any case, Harold had a grip on the paddle now, had shifted it into his right hand, and, to Cal looking across Harold’s back toward the crown of his head, his partner seemed suddenly armed, as though he were preparing for something, girding for battle.
“If it comes to it, go for the butt of the snout and the eyes,” Cal whispered. “If you can manage it, jab at the face, strike him above the mouth.”
But Harold looked to be concentrating on the water just in front of him, fixated on something that Cal, from his vantage, couldn’t quite make out.
“Stay close to the boat whatever happens,” Cal went on. “We make a larger shape together.”
Perhaps thirty seconds or another minute slipped by like this, with them lying on their chests, grasping the overturned kayak as though they were riding a wobbling missile through the air, their bodies largely submerged, the water covering their backs, and their heads moving on a swivel, eyes on both men scanning, feet and even knees hung more deeply in the sea on one side of the kayak or the other, then pulled up hastily, then dropped down again for balance.
“Stay quiet with your legs if he comes. Lift them out and shift them away from him.”
But Harold gave no indication, had given no indication, that he could hear Cal speaking from behind him in the stillness. He remained fixated on the water in front of the kayak, as though spinner dolphins were circling in the brilliant blue beneath them. Cal remembered that spinners and tigers were famously ill disposed to one another, that they were enemies. He thought perhaps in the winter they would laugh about all of this, the two of them holding one another on the beach like they had done regularly in those first years after his inheritance, basking in their good fortune. Harold, who was always more voluble in company, whom Cal would watch shyly and admire, would tell the neighbors the outrageous story of their humping a kayak and Cal would search out pieces of olivine in the sand and pile them on Harold’s stomach while it rumbled and shook as he came to the part about dolphins. Perhaps, he thought, there were spinners beneath them now.
As the shark rose, its dorsal slit the surface evenly, sixty feet in front of them, without the conspicuous swivel that would suggest aggression. He was moving on them directly, however, in a line. Cal could see the large scythe of the tail working well behind the dorsal and breaking the surface at intervals on either side of the body. The sun was in their eyes as the shark came in and what they could glimpse was limited by the glare. Though Cal could not make out the head just yet, he knew where it was in the water.
“Coming,” he whispered to Harold. “Stay steady.”
The shark left its course and built a slow circle, perhaps fifteen feet in its radius, and now Cal, as the shark made its first pass to his port side, could clearly see the eye, which was round and jet black and seemed to stare at him directly. It was a magnificent eye, old and patient. Then it was behind him and though the shark finished its circle and completed one more, Cal did not see the eye again but was caught instead by the ravaged field of the skin, by opalescent scars ripped above the mouth and tattering the left ventral fin, by the breadth of the fish in its middle where it was wide as his Toyota, and by the tiger swatches, faded and worn and making the sides pass on and on, shapeless, great decorated walls that narrowed only after a long time to the tail.
When Cal watched the shark veer after its two circles and start to swing its tail wide, he barked, “No,” but by then it was already in on Harold with its body arched upward and the head lifted nearly out of the water and Harold was falling backward and off to the left, the whole bow of the kayak momentarily jerked down from great weight and Cal himself raised up, grasping for the plastic as he came off into the sea then clumsily stroking for the stern and hauling himself back on before finally, reinstalled and safe, searching wildly for Harold, who had disappeared.
Reports of attacks in Hawaiian waters that had circulated over the years in which Cal had followed them tended to highlight the same things. There was generally surf involved, one way or another, and victims tended not to be diving but stretched upon the surface or occasionally wading to the shoulders. Spear fishermen reported encounters but mostly with smaller sharks like blues and oceanic white tips, which could be dangerous but rarely attacked divers. The tiger, on the other hand, was famously unpredictable. It was the foremost attack species in the Hawaiian archipelago. Most of the time it would circle and depart but if there was activity or fear it could remain, become aggressive. The key was to stay calm, not to turn your back, and so long as your eyes were in the water, drop both legs together to show your length. In any case, Cal had purposefully skimmed over the rare articles pronouncing incidents on the grounds that he, in the event of a sighting, would be in a kayak or well beneath the surface and Harold, in all likelihood, would be watching from the safety of the shore.
Now a kind of fuzz occupied segments of Cal’s vision, toward the peripheries, and a loud stillness sat in his ears as if the ocean had been amplified to the point where he ceased to hear it. He saw the shark surface to his right, perhaps thirty feet off. Seconds elapsed that he initially failed to register but that then filtered back as a vague gap in time. Harold, who somehow had been swept far left of Cal and slightly to his rear, emerged, surfacing loudly, still grasping the paddle and sputtering. In another moment he was performing the crawl, majestically and, for all that Cal could discern, steadily and calmly with the paddle crashing on the surface at the stroke of his right arm.
Yet inexplicably he was swimming outward, toward the depths, in the direction of the blue ocean. Cal hoisted himself forward to the center of the overturned kayak and called out to Harold in order to offer him direction. But, again, it was as though one or both of them could no longer hear, or as if the force of events had not only clogged Harold’s ears but in so doing made off with his mind.
“Harold,” Cal yelled, “over here.” But it was for naught. To his horror, Cal watched as the shark swam toward the kayak and submerged, sinking its bulk only just under, so he could nearly reach down and touch those irregular bands and follow the shadowy markings with his thumb. It continued beneath him, still submerged, toward Harold, who, bizarrely, horribly, was swimming out to sea in a beautiful, noisy crawl, pointed toward Maui and the deepening trench, moving like a great, slow van of milkshakes and sugar cones that was ringing all its bells.
“Harold,” Cal yelled again. “Shark!”
Now, as though this last word stirred something, awakened him, Harold lifted his head and peered in the direction of the voice, then sharply shifted course, his rough beard suddenly visible in the waves, his eyes heavily lidded at first, then wide open. He began swimming toward the tiger shark, and toward Cal, wielding the paddle out before him in awkward half strokes like a ridiculous spear. Then, without slowing his kick, which was shooting fountains behind him, Harold began jousting with his weapon, raising it absurdly and slapping the sea in front of him, spearing the space between him and the shark. If anything, it looked to Cal, lying motionless on the kayak, as though Harold was picking up speed and at last he was bellowing, making a noise that was unidentifiable but deep and final.
As the two of them converged, Cal could see the tall dorsal fin of the tiger shark that had been swerving on the surface rise mightily into the air and Harold begin to sink, as though he were cowering before a blow.
“No,” yelled Cal once again, slapping his own arm impotently against the ocean and nearly losing his balance.
But just before contact, Harold reappeared. Having lowered himself, he raised his whole chest out of the water, or nearly, and, once reared, brought the paddle, blade first, down like a javelin with what looked to Cal like tremendous force. There was a jerk and Harold was brought sharply into the air while the tiger flashed its tail and rolled seaward, turning abruptly, the dorsal sinking off and away.
Cal, meanwhile, watched in amazement as Harold, after vanishing again for what felt like ten seconds or more, surfaced twenty feet off, again farther to the left and closer to the safety of the lava floes. After briefly wiping his eyes, he resumed his slow, recreational crawl, his giant fountain kick, this time shoreward, the handle of the paddle still in his hand, the blade and much of the shaft now broken off and missing. Every so often, Harold would pause as he proceeded toward the lava and turn, dipping his head beneath the surface as if to gaze into the depths behind him, then lifting his eyes to scan the horizon. In these moments, he would raise the jagged shaft of the paddle and wield it threateningly and, having waited for an instant, turn back to the grand strokes of his crawl.
Finally, Harold stood in the shallows and was yelling out to him, “Stay where you are. Don’t move. I’m coming with the dinghy.” In another few minutes, there was Harold, having dragged the dinghy down to the shore from behind the house, the mynah birds quarreling over him in the jacaranda or swooping onto the sand to swagger like field generals at his feet. Then he was rowing swiftly through the lava breaks. A few minutes more and Cal found himself being helped onto the dinghy, Harold’s strong arms pulling him up over the gunwale and placing him gently onto the dry seat.
“Thank you, Harold,” said Cal, gathering himself and watching as Harold turned back to the oars, taking his sweet time now, his arms from that angle appearing particularly round and wide, pulling the two of them in to safety with long, powerful, leisurely strokes.
When they reached the shore, Harold beached the dinghy and they stood together, quiet, the two of them staring for a short time out toward the sea and shifting their bare feet on the lava. Cal could just see the rocking hull of the kayak, largely submerged, humped like the yellow rind of a melon.
“Tiger’s a brutal fish,” he sputtered at last, shaking his head. “He’ll kill you in an instant.” And he felt his whole body quivering, as though a wildness had corded his limbs until then, and only now, in a single moment, swung them back to his frame. Cal realized for the first time he could recall that he’d been fighting to hold himself upright. He decided, moreover, if he did not monitor his breaths and broaden his stance he would need to lean on Harold, or at least take him by the shoulder. Finally, so as not to fall over, he squatted down.
There was another long pause while the sun began to falter. The remaining light was slung low and sharp. A breeze had come up.
“Now everything has a belly,” said Harold softly, his voice even and serious. He placed his big paws on his own belly, which was beautiful, grand and drum-like, and began to chuckle so softly that Cal could scarcely hear him. Then Cal also began to laugh, glancing up at his lover, staring at him with a curious intensity, a kind of fascination, each of them coming to the other’s eyes, and for a moment they were laughing together before Harold was moving up the beach, looking every so often back at the ocean then swinging his grand neck forward toward the spreading shade of the house.
“Harold,” Cal called after him, but the sound got stuck in his throat. And he watched as that hulking form, still wet and scraped badly along one side of its ribs, the bright line of abrasion curving back almost to the spine, climbed surely, effortlessly, up onto the lanai as if it had only just stepped out from the froth of the waves, barnacled and metamorphosed.
“Harold, wait.”
Yet again he was voiceless, silent. Soon Cal was stumbling into the sand. Trying to keep up. Struggling to move closer to the house and farther onto land. Exhausted, he hung there out on the beach attempting to master himself but, as the pure soot of darkness rolled in from the sea, dropped first to his haunches and then to his knees.