Under the Wave at Waimea

by Paul Theroux

  But they saw they had strengths too—Harry the surfer, Joe his friend with the forbidding scar, Opunui always had money, Fifita had access to pakalolo. From this mutual protection a close friendship emerged, even a kind of sweetness, and as they smoked murmuring, remembering incidents from school, how Willy found a mistake on a math equation on the blackboard or Harry said to the chaplain after a Hawaiian prayer in Bible studies, “But Akua means spirit too, not only God—can also mean devil, or ghost,” or the day the English teacher said, “Where do we find true aloha?” and Sharkey raised his hand: “Only on the shirts.” He was scolded in the class but praised for his wit behind the wall near the monkey pod tree.

  “You so kolohe,” Harry said, passing him the butt.

  One day in the cafeteria a senior boy attempted to talk to Harry, singling him out, as though to separate him from the group.

  Harry said, “Keep walking.”

  The others were grateful to him for that. They were sensitive to slights. But though they felt weak as individuals and miserable at home, they were strong as a group and liked to think of themselves as a hui, a new word for Sharkey, explained by Harry as a little gang.

  It was through Harry Ho that Sharkey at last learned how to manage the bewildering Hawaii world, and to move on. In spite of his father’s warning, Harry was his friend, but by silent agreement they never spoke the word. It was an understanding. Other than the boys in the hui, Harry had no friends at Punahou. But he had many in town; he knew his way around Honolulu, the surf spots especially, and he favored the less popular ones, avoiding Diamond Head and Waikiki and using the breaks off Ala Moana, at Magic Island, where he kept his board chained to a rack. Harry’s surfer friends became Sharkey’s friends, and though Harry’s friends were dropouts and stoners, they were connected.

  On one of the early days at Bomboras, the break off Magic Island, a local surfer saw Sharkey paddling into the wave and called out, “Eh, haole—try wait!”

  And a boy in the lineup whom Sharkey did not know said, “He’s cool. Let him ride.” Then loudly, “Take the wave, Joe!”

  The boy who defended him was Ashley, one of Harry Ho’s friends, and after that no one questioned Sharkey’s right to be on the wave. They all became Sharkey’s defenders, and in time his surf buddies.

  He kept this knowledge from his father, that you managed here by having a friend, who trusted you and defended you and taught you the island ways. Without a friend, you remained on the outside and were excluded, and sometimes tormented. As a friend you became attached to a hui, ultimately to an ohana, a family, because you were trustworthy and willing to share what you had. And once you were part of an ohana no one questioned your right to be on the island.

  Sharkey saw that Harry Ho had chosen him from the Punahou hui and introduced him to his friends outside the school—surfers, divers, fishermen, watermen generally. Uncle Sunshine was one of the old surfers who called himself a Beach Boy—older than the Colonel, yet age made no difference. He was a friend, he gave Sharkey surfing tips. All that mattered was trust, and Sharkey was happy.

  The Colonel had been wrong. As a consequence of having one good friend, Sharkey had many friends. Sharkey found a balance with his friends; he greeted them on arriving at school, which was a fifteen-minute walk from his Manoa house, and they kept together in the playground—the nonjoiners, the stoners, the outsiders. They met after school and smoked, and, laughing—buzzed—Harry and Sharkey walked to Ala Moana and went surfing, no matter the conditions, even if the only wave was a foot-high crumbly mushburger frothing toward the shore. Afterward, under the palms, they smoked some more and studied the sea, which was limitless and stretched to the horizon, to where the late-afternoon sun pooled and became molten, the low clouds like flesh, bulging and blushing as the day waned, and finally crimson, the color bleeding from them, until the last gold blob dropped and a green flash glowed as an afterimage.

  “Eh ka nani,” Harry said. “Beautiful.”

  They kept to themselves. They did not think anyone took any notice of them. Sharkey believed himself to be so mediocre he was invisible.

  So he was surprised when one day Dr. Chock approached him and said, “You’re Joe Sharkey?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Empty your pockets.”

  3

  The Mark of the Beast

  It seemed a cruel and sideways question, the headmaster—Dr. Emmett Chock—saying to Sharkey’s mother, “I wonder if the young man understands why he’s here?”

  With his fingers on his cheek, his hand hiding that side of his face, the badly healed scar like the letter C, still livid with teeth marks and stitches, Sharkey had been staring out of the office window. The day glowed with the last spatter of the shower. The morning was now drenched in light, the splashed blossoms on the plumeria tree thickened by the dazzle. Small simple raindrops were enlarged by sunlight to honey-colored syrup. The way they lingered and drooped, as though for him alone, gave him hope.

  It took some moments for his sun-dazzled eyes to adjust to the shadowy room. His mother came into focus, looking ill, and the beauty of what he had just seen had the effect of making Dr. Chock doglike, his gray face and coarse hair, his loose jaw chewing in disapproval, exaggerating his underbite. The man poked at the papers on his desk with his yellow nails, then sniffed his fingers.

  “Yes, sir, I do,” Sharkey said.

  Dr. Chock probably wanted him to say more. What was the point? Sharkey knew he was being expelled.

  “Maybe he hasn’t lived in Hawaii long enough to learn our concept of pono—goodness, virtue, righteousness, sense of duty,” Dr. Chock chanted, as though Sharkey were deaf or absent. “Kuleana means responsibility. Being pono is being true.”

  He knew that: they talked of nothing else at morning assembly; the word was repeated in the state anthem, “Hawai‘i Pono‘i,” they sang most days. Yet that did not keep the older students from smoking pakalolo.

  Kick me out, just let me go, he thought. But in his solemnity and slowness Dr. Chock seemed determined to make a big deal of it and deliver a lecture. And Sharkey could see that the headmaster was enjoying it, seeing himself as pono and Sharkey wicked and untrue, whereas he regarded himself as neither good nor bad but only fourteen and foreign in this place, a haole among locals.

  In her humiliation, his mother was afraid, tipsy with confusion, and when Dr. Chock said, “I was hoping your husband would also be here,” she got tearful, sounding drunk, saying in a trembling voice, “My dear husband, Colonel Sharkey, is in the army, on a tour of duty, serving his country in Vietnam,” as though pleading for sympathy.

  “We have many children of servicemen of all kinds,” Dr. Chock said, and “army brat” was implied in “all kinds.” He tapped his cheek to call attention to the corresponding part of Sharkey’s cheek, the waxen flesh of the C-shaped scar and the roulettes of the oversized stitches, as though indicating disobedience.

  “That was an accident,” Sharkey’s mother said. “That was a dog bite.”

  Blinking at “dog bite,” Dr. Chock recovered and said, “And they don’t habitually dabble in drugs.”

  But they did, all the time, everyone did, one corner of the parking lot was a haze of blue smoke after school. The only difference was that they did not get caught. And “dog bite” to Sharkey made him wince at the memory of the hoarse choking bark that gnawed at his throat, the bark saying I am coming for you.

  “I wonder if he’s listening,” Dr. Chock said. “If he understands his kuleana.”

  The way he put it, with a jowl shake, enraged Sharkey, so he said nothing. It was over, he was finished.

  “I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this,” his mother said. “I don’t know what to do with him.”

  “Joe is not the first of our students to be involved in drugs.”

  Sharkey’s mother clasped her handbag tighter on her lap and leaned forward, looking hopeful.

  “But the others showed some remorse,” Dr. Chock said. “An
d they were more cooperative because they understood their kuleana. They demonstrated kokua—help, in the Hawaiian way.”

  “I know he’s sorry. He told me—didn’t you, Joey?”

  The petals of the plumeria seemed to blink as more honeyed raindrops fell.

  “How would I know that?” Dr. Chock said, tapping a fingernail like a claw onto the expulsion form. And before Sharkey’s mother could speak, he added, “Sorry is just a word. I am looking for a deed. What I want to hear is real contrition, something pono.”

  Sharkey’s mother canted her head to the side, as though assessing Sharkey’s remorse, but she frowned, unable to read him.

  “We are ohana—family—at this school. If the young man perhaps showed kokua—shared more information with his ohana, as to the source of the drugs— I might be inclined to a more lenient view.”

  Now a raindrop from a drooping petal struck a petal on a lower branch, and the tap of one syrupy drop was enough to dislodge it. Sharkey watched the pinkish blossom fall, lighting like a butterfly on the dewy tips of some slender grass blades, making them bend.

  “Joey, tell the headmaster what he wants to know.”

  So this was the reason for the ritual. Dr. Chock was asking Sharkey to snitch on the other stoners, especially his friend Harry Ho, who was a fellow surfer. Everyone had weed, it was easy to find, the headmaster must have known that. But he wanted Sharkey to submit. This wish gave Sharkey strength: he realized that he had power to deny the bossy man what he wanted.

  “Are you going to show kokua?” Dr. Chock said. “You’d also be helping yourself. And that would be pono. In the true Hawaiian way.”

  Now Sharkey smiled, for the only time that morning, no longer feeling small and cornered, eavesdropping on his fate.

  “No, sir.”

  “He should be punished,” his mother said, and recoiled, looking fretful, as though shocked by the words she’d just uttered.

  “Are you in military housing?”

  “No. We live off base. We—” She began to explain, as though giving a reason, but became flustered again and said, “We’re in Manoa.”

  “You’ll have to enroll him at Stevenson Intermediate, or maybe Roo­se­velt,” Dr. Chock said, his jowls registering satisfaction with a shake, and not a smile but a show of bonelike teeth. “Roosevelt’s your nearest high school. A private school won’t take him, with his record. A public school might be just what he needs.”

  Even that was not the end of it. Dr. Chock slid papers across the desk and gloated, his mouth open, as Sharkey’s mother signed them, and before the session was over she was in tears.

  “The boy is pau here,” Dr. Chock said. “Finished.”

  Outside the school, before his mother could gather her wits to speak, Sharkey said, “I’m going to catch some waves.”

  He hurried away from her squawk—she was calling out, “But why?”—escaping down the sloping still-wet sidewalk, in sunshine, to Ala Moana, where, at Magic Island, he kept his board. And there, just off the beach at Bomboras, he surfed until sunset, alone, because everyone else was in school. Sliding on water, leaving no trace, he was stirred to the thought that the surface of the sea was forever unmarked, ageless, mirroring the purity of the sky, and could never be scarred.

  * * *

  They paused outside Roosevelt High School, before the lawns, the bell tower, the entrance, the big, neatly printed sign HOME OF THE ROUGH RIDERS, and under the portrait of a Hawaiian with an upraised shark-tooth club the words E KOMO MAI—WELCOME. The carved sign and gateway made it seem dignified—the equal of Punahou. But inside—the doggy smell of bare feet, of hair stiff with dirt, of unwashed clothes, of disinfectant and cheap perfume—the stink hung like a threat. Three heavy Hawaiian girls, bigger than Sharkey, lingered in a corridor, staring at him, and when his mother asked the way to the office, one of the girls pointed with her face to a doorway.

  A woman, announcing herself as a secretary, greeted them from behind a high counter as though they were shopping at an old-fashioned store. A wide gilded cuff, engraved ALOHA, on the secretary’s wrist dinged the counter as she shuffled papers. After signing them and handing over Sharkey’s transcript, Sharkey’s mother fretted and said, “My husband’s in the military, serving his country. Is there anything more?”

  “You pau,” the secretary said. “He gonna come with me.”

  She led him—that smell again—to a small classroom, where the smell was stronger. Interrupted in her lesson, the teacher, a young Japanese woman, grinned in frantic annoyance, and when the secretary gave her Sharkey’s papers she tossed them onto her desk and said, “Take a seat—over there.”

  He sensed like a flare-up of heat the heightened attention, all eyes on him, as he walked to the empty desk and sat; but more than anything he was aware of the size of the students—bigger, darker, slouched and sitting sideways. And when the teacher resumed, turning her back to write on the board, Sharkey felt something hit his arm—the bitten stub of a pencil, like a chewed bone.

  “Haole,” came a growl from behind him. He knew the word from Punahou—howlie, whitey—but never spoken with such contempt. He heard it again like a harsh echo from another throat. He turned aside; a Hawaiian girl in a red dress pursed her lips as though mimicking a kiss. She was lovely, with yellowish glinting eyes, thick black hair to her shoulders, and a flower behind her ear. When Sharkey smiled, she spat at him, then wiped her chin.

  “Four x,” the teacher was saying, scraping with her chalk, “equals sixteen.”

  At lunchtime he found an empty table, but three boys pushed him aside and said, “We stay here, haole.” The cafeteria looked so crowded, all the other tables occupied, elbows everywhere, Sharkey decided to skip his meal and made his way to the playground. A group of girls sat under a tree, covertly smoking, passing a cigarette butt. Some younger children with wild hair kicked a ball. Sharkey walked to a bench at the far side of the space. He sat in full sunlight and put his head in his hands to avoid the glare.

  “You the new kid?”

  The sudden voice startled him. A boy stood nearby, and at once Sharkey could see the boy was frightened—the way he stood, slightly bent over, something in his blinking and his pinched face, as though he were preparing to flee.

  “Hi. I’m Blaine. I saw you in class this morning. That kid behind you, Wilfred, he’s psycho. A real moke.”

  “Moke?”

  “Big Hawaiian guy. He always gives me side-eye.”

  Sharkey said, “I’m Joe.”

  “Wilfred lives in a car at the back of the valley,” Blaine said. “Did you just come from the mainland?”

  “I got kicked out of Punahou.”

  “I wanted to go there. My folks didn’t have the money.” And now Blaine took a deep breath and began backing up.

  Four boys, led by Wilfred, were walking slowly toward them, scuffing the gravel. What made them particularly fearsome was that their mouths were full and they were chewing, probably the last of their lunch. Seeing that Blaine was attempting to sidle away, one of the boys pushed him against the fence. Blaine crouched and clutched his stomach, as though to make himself small. Wilfred stepped near him and flicked a finger against Blaine’s ear, stinging him.

  “What you wen’ telling the fucken haole?”

  Blaine whimpered and held the ear that Wilfred had flicked.

  Wilfred confronted Sharkey, his big belly near Sharkey’s face. He was fattish, his T-shirt stained, his shorts dirty, his hair tangled, flecks of food on his lips, and he had a dog odor of dirt. “He wen’ say something to you?”

  Sharkey said, “I don’t know anything.”

  “He a panty,” Wilfred said. The other boys laughed, too loud, their teeth large, their tongues scummy. “You a panty too?”

  Blaine fidgeted, still crouched, his hands now near his face, as though expecting a slap.

  “You got something for me?” Wilfred said, and now he seemed to be staring at the scar on Sharkey’s cheek.

 
Sharkey was still seated. He calculated that if he got to his feet the boy would take it for defiance, or a challenge. So he continued to sit as Wilfred repeated his question, this time coming close—his odor was so strong it made him bigger and meaner. The boy was still focused on the scar, seeming to question it with his open mouth.

  “I guess you’re the boss,” Sharkey said.

  “What? Yeah, me da luna,” Wilfred said, almost in wonderment. “See this mahu?” And he gestured at Blaine, extending his reach to flick Blaine’s ear again where it was reddened. “He real futless. See how he make ass? If he don’t shape up he’s going to get lickings,” he said, and pushed him. Then he leaned toward Sharkey. “We da kanaka ohana. And know what, haole?”

  “What?”

  “We hate fucken haoles.”

  And then Sharkey stood up. He was taller than Wilfred but thin, already at fourteen with the suggestions of a swimmer’s physique, his second season on a surfboard, the thickening shoulders, the slender legs. Wilfred stepped back, the four other boys looking watchful. But Sharkey did not advance on them. He went over to Blaine and put his hand on his shoulder. He could see why Blaine was being bullied—he was small and pale and scrawny, and he had a girl’s soft unmarked cheeks. He knew from Punahou that the small boys got the worst of it. And out of the corner of his eye he sensed that Wilfred, unsure of him, was hesitating, looking closer.

  “How you get that bite mark, brah?”

  Sharkey touched the scar on his cheek. “Mark of the beast.” Then he leaned and said, “Get up, big guy,” and helped the cringing boy to his feet.