by Paul Theroux
Wilfred grunted, and just then, at the moment of confrontation, the school bell rang. A teacher in an aloha shirt called out to them and began loudly to harangue them to go back to class.
The ninth-grade teacher was Miss Matsuda. Wilfred was Wilfred Kalama. Most of his little gang sat at the back of the class—Clarence, Fonoti, Sammy Boy, and Braddah Jay, all Hawaiians or Samoans from nearby Papakolea. The pretty girl in the desk next to Sharkey’s, the one who had spat at him, was Vai. Vai’s friends were Leena and Nalani. Leena was Samoan. The Chinese and Japanese students left him alone, but all the rest were tormentors—muttering at him in class, jostling him in the corridor, the girls as foulmouthed as the boys; “Fucken haole” was Leena’s refrain, Vai still the spitter, Wilfred the intimidator, threatening Sharkey with lickings in the parking lot after school. The only relief for him was their persecution of Blaine Langford, the skinny boy who sought refuge at the front of the room, nearest the desk of Miss Matsuda.
Sharkey kept his head down, he said nothing in class, the work was easy, nothing new—the math and history he’d already done at Punahou. Roosevelt was chaotic and noisy, but it was harder to be anonymous here, because he was a haole and there were so few at the school. He was jeered at and threatened—the threats sounding crueler when they were mumbled in pidgin. “Pretty soon we gonna have ‘kill a haole day.’” His books were scattered, his locker scribbled on with crayon, yet he was not touched. He felt pity for Blaine, who was physically bullied—pushed, elbowed aside, tripped, his ears flicked—and he saw how Blaine suppressed his cries, not wishing to reveal his terror.
Sharkey was stared at for his scar, and it seemed to caution the other boys. It was a mark of distinction, a source of power, all the greater because its history was hidden, though there was something in its ragged stitches and discoloration that suggested violence, and so it served as a deterrent.
“That’s quite enough,” Miss Matsuda said whenever there was a commotion in the classroom. But she never saw the subtle torments and had no idea of what happened in the corridors or the cafeteria or the playground.
Each afternoon Sharkey walked home rather than risk the bus and more taunts: the length of Nehoa Street and then up the hill and left into Aleo and on to Ferdinand, where his mother waited, to ask, “Nice day at school?” and he said, “Yup,” and kept walking to his room, where he changed. “Going surfing.” And it was then that he caught the bus or walked to Ala Moana, and at Magic Island he was in the water and free again.
But why? his mother asked in a pleading voice when he hurried away, and even when she didn’t say it, the question was in her squint whenever he left. It was something he never asked himself, nor could he give any reasons for running to the beach and plunging into the water, or flopping on his board and paddling into the waves, ducking as they washed over him and thrusting into the next trough until he was bobbing beyond the break.
It was play, it was joy, it was as natural and unexplainable as breathing, a pleasure and a relief to be uplifted in the sea. Never mind surfing; just sitting on his board and rising and falling on the plump belly of a swell, far from shore and the tiny people there, behind him the flat Pacific, empty as far as the smooth true seam of the horizon.
Why did he wish to be buoyant in the mild milky ocean until early evening, when the surface wrinkled in a sea breeze and shone, scaly under the slanting sun—sliding like mad in the barrel of a wave to the last kick-out on the reef, when the lip of the tube collapsed in a boil of foam, then tipping himself into the riptide to head back to the purity of the sea, sometimes a beaky turtle’s head staring at him with its side eye, and now and then the gulp and snort of dolphins passing in a pod, and never a human voice?
“I don’t know,” he told his mother.
“It’s dangerous,” she said.
And he laughed, because offshore, isolated on his board, away from Wilfred and his gang, he’d never felt safer.
It was only in the third week that he saw Blaine on his way home, the same route, walking fast. He moved as if pursued. Sharkey understood: he also was avoiding the bus, and he fled the school as soon as the bell rang. Sharkey followed him closely but said nothing, simply watched the hurrying boy, his hunched-over gait, his arms working. He turned off at Ventura Street, and after a few steps he called out and a faint barking began from somewhere within a small white frame house of peeling paint, a car with a rusted bumper in the driveway, which was partially hidden by an overhanging bougainvillea.
And perhaps with the confidence of being home, Blaine straightened and looked around and saw Sharkey behind him on the sidewalk, backing away.
“Hey.” He opened the low garden gate. “You live around here?”
“Up on Ferdinand,” Sharkey said, being vague, so as not to reveal that he had followed him.
“Want to come in?” Blaine looked pathetic; he was pleading.
Sharkey hesitated, but as soon as the front door opened the barking began again, and though Sharkey stepped back the dog leaped on him, first raking his face with his paws, then snapping at his feet, all the while barking in that choking slavering way, his jowls shaking.
“Wags, stop,” Blaine said in an admiring rather than a scolding tone, and Sharkey found it odd that this small boy was so confident around the fierce dog, and how he seemed to smile in relief when he saw that Sharkey was helpless, fending off the dog by raising his shoe against him.
“Don’t be afraid,” Blaine said.
Sharkey was terrified; the dog was trying to bite him, leaping to chew his foot.
“He wants you to pat him,” Blaine said. “Don’t you, Wags?”
The dog was slavering, barking, snapping at Sharkey’s foot. And only then, when the dog got hold of Sharkey’s shoe, wetting it with the froth of his saliva, did Blaine grasp his collar and pull him away.
“Bad dog!” This loud shout from the boy whom Sharkey had seen as a whisperer and a whiner. Sharkey was impressed, but he was also still terrified. The dog whimpered and licked Blaine’s hand and yapped. “See? He’s really friendly when he wants to be. But he could tell you were afraid.” This was a reprimand, from the boy who cringed when Wilfred Kalama flicked his ear.
Sharkey said, “I was attacked by a dog. At Fort Shafter. That’s why we moved.”
“Is that how you got that scar?”
“Yeah,” Sharkey said, and traced the livid gouge on his cheek that was like the letter C. “I had to get a ton of shots.”
“Come on in,” Blaine said, almost hearty.
But Sharkey said, “Maybe some other time,” and walked away, sorry that he had detoured here and determined to go surfing. He glanced back at the corner of Ferdinand and saw that Blaine was watching him, holding his dog’s collar, looking triumphant.
* * *
That night he wished he had not said anything about the dog attack at Shafter and instead had spoken to Blaine of surfing, how waves did not faze him. The thump and crush of water, the fetch of waves, were like the rhythm of life. Even when he’d been tumbled in a break as a child and his father had pulled him to safety, he had had no fear of water—he was buoyant, the sea was freedom. He felt cornered on land. Dogs thickened their muscly necks and barked behind fences and leaped, making the chain link clatter.
The dog at Shafter had made straight for him, bounding across the street, his fat tongue drawn aside by his speed, and he had jumped as he approached, pouncing, knocking Sharkey to the grass, and begun greedily to chew at his face, snapping his jaws.
Not a dream, but a memory, and even the dog’s name, Max, seemed sinister. Sleep saved him, brimmed around him like the sea, and he was submerged. Sharkey slept soundly, but when he woke each morning and blinked and yawned and remembered that he had to go to school, something like a sickness gripped him, a feeling of woe and weakness that was like a stricture in his throat that made him breathless. On many days his hatred of school was a heaviness, like sorrow. At breakfast his mother said, “Did you sleep all right, Joe
y?”—an absurd question. He always slept well. It was the waking up that was hard, saddened by the knowledge of what he faced.
If he took the bus, it was the loud rowdy boys teasing the girls and throwing spitballs, sometimes calling out “Hana batta!” and flinging snot. Or the chant of “Haole!” So he walked, setting out alone, but often Blaine hurried to join him, as though for protection, looking quite defenseless without his dog.
“You should take your dog to school,” Sharkey said. “Set him on Wilfred and those big mokes.”
“The thing of it is,” Blaine said, “he’s really a good dog.”
And that seemed like a rebuff to Sharkey, as though he’d timidly overreacted.
“Want to come over after school?” Blaine said, and it sounded to Sharkey like a dare.
“I’m busy.” He did not want to explain that he was going surfing, because he was still learning, and to speak of surfing so soon after arriving in Hawaii would seem like a boast. But it was a private satisfaction, his secret pleasure, taking refuge on the waves.
Blaine said, “He won’t hurt you.”
“It’s not that,” Sharkey said. They both knew it was the dog. They were still walking, Blaine limping slightly. “Did you hurt your foot?” Blaine said nothing but still he walked, dragging his right foot. “Blaine, are you okay?”
The boy stopped and flexed his leg, and then, as Sharkey watched, his head cocked to the side, Blaine took off his shoe and poked at something inside, straightening it, a thickness of wadded paper.
“That looks like money.”
“My hiding place. Don’t tell anyone.”
And Sharkey saw at once that it was Blaine’s pitiful strategy to prevent the school bullies from finding his money and taking it.
Soon they were among other students walking toward the school, all marching in silence, then gathering at the playground like spectators assembling for a ceremony of savagery or an execution, something wicked to watch. Sharkey took a deep breath, as he did before paddling into a big wave, knowing he faced another whole day of “fucken haole” and “malihini” and “panty.” Lately it had been “Elvis,” because Elvis Presley had just given a concert at the Honolulu arena. He was menaced by the ugly faces of the boys, and it was worse somehow if a girl happened to see him or hear the taunts. The teachers were either indifferent or didn’t see, and some of them quarreled with each other. It sometimes seemed to Sharkey that they depended on the tougher boys to keep the others in order. It was all misery, and the only relief was hurrying away at the last bell.
For some weeks they shunned him, turned their backs on him when he passed them. It should have given him some peace to be left alone, but the isolation made him anxious, and their laughter and whispers were hostile. He did not exist. But he knew they’d resume, jostling him, and they did, making ugly faces, screaming, “Fucken haole!”
At lunch break Sharkey sat alone or with Blaine, eating the sandwich his mother had made for him. He finished quickly and went outside to the playground and sat on the hot cement bench in the far corner that he had found his first day, avoided by the other students because it was hot, in full sunshine. There he watched the other students fooling with each other, and hated them. Blaine sometimes came over—often limping, because of the money in his shoe—and tried to start a conversation, looking to Sharkey for protection.
“Haole!”
They were usually yelling it at Blaine, who was weak, and whimpered, and cowered. Sharkey’s scar seemed to make them wary, and he was resigned to the shouts. But out of desperate pride, if one of them snatched at his lunch bag he snatched back, and it was like a challenge. But he also saw that they were poor, and they roamed like a pack because they were hungry.
One of those days on the playground, Wilfred accosted him with his little gang, saying, “Where you panty friend?”
Sharkey nodded slowly but said nothing. There was no way to win against five of them.
“He never tell us where he hiding his money,” Wilfred said, as always staring at his scar. “You his fucken haole friend. You know.”
Sharkey said, “If I knew, maybe I’d take it off him myself.”
They left him alone then, and pestered Blaine, and Sharkey understood that because Blaine was a haole they believed his parents were wealthy, but Sharkey had seen the little house on Ventura Street, the peeling paint and the old car, and his dog had looked starved too. It seemed crueler that they wanted what little money the weedy boy had.
But they continued to follow Blaine and flick his ear, and they encouraged the girls—Vai and Leena—to slap him. Nothing was worse than to be roughed up by a girl. But because of this concentration on Blaine, the taunts, the demands, Sharkey was mostly left alone. And when after a few weeks some other boys came after Sharkey, trying to corner him as he was hurrying through the playground after school, Wilfred stepped in.
“Haole,” he said. “You know kokua?”
Sharkey frowned at the Punahou word.
“It mean help. Help us get the panty money,” Wilfred said. “He hiding it in his stuffs.”
Sharkey said, “Why don’t you leave him alone?”
That was defiance, but the mention of Blaine made them glance around, and they saw that he was at the far side of the playground. So by the time Wilfred recovered, saying, “Elvis, you want dirty lickings?” and “Where you going, haole?” Sharkey had slipped through the gate in the fence and was hurrying across the school lawn. When he looked back he saw the gang of boys advancing on Blaine, and Blaine—white-faced and small and piteous—lifting his skinny hands and pleading.
But the following day, walking to school, Sharkey saw Blaine on Nehoa Street and waved. Blaine did not wave back, and the next time Sharkey looked, Blaine was nowhere to be seen. He wondered if Blaine had been beaten up, but in class the boy was unmarked, and in the playground he heard Blaine laugh—he had never heard him laugh before, and it was a strange sound, like a sudden snorting honk. No one approached him or spoke to him. Sharkey took this to be a good sign—perhaps they were growing wiser, being pono. And he laughed when he remembered the word and the way Dr. Chock had spoken it, popping it on his lips.
Wilfred kept away from Sharkey that day too. The routine of classes, cafeteria, playground, dismissal was relieved by the absence of any aggression. Sharkey remained, as always, alone, and when the last bell rang he hurried across the playground and ducked through the gate in the chain-link fence.
It was when he came to the perimeter of the school grounds that he heard the barking—the choking yap that recalled to him the frantic sound of starvation. He looked back and saw Wilfred with a dog straining ahead of him on a leash, because Wilfred was slow, treading on battered flip-flops, and the dog was eager.
Wilfred’s gang was behind him, calling out, their flip-flops slapping the sidewalk—there were too many of them for Sharkey to give them names, but Fonoti and Clarence were visible for their size and their swinging arms. The dog had big shoulders and square jaws and a fat droopy tongue that swung as he trotted. Sharkey saw the dog clearly and was afraid, and wanted to run.
Instead of heading home he turned in the opposite direction, walking fast, to Punahou Street, and then to the overpass across the freeway, to Beretania, where he felt he was losing them. Down Kalakaua and through the maze of streets that led to Ala Moana, his heart beating fast—from running, from fear—he fled.
Crossing the grass to Magic Island, he was startled by the barking again—they must have taken a shortcut, and there seemed more of them now, the dog ahead of them, that gagging bark, those teeth—and Wilfred now calling out, “Haole—you got something for me!”
By then Sharkey had found his board in the stack, pulled his shirt over his head, and kicked off his sneakers, and when the dog was at last released and bounding at him he’d hit the water, the first wave of the shore break, the board under him, and was paddling to where the wave lifted, with froth at its lip. And he rose into it and turned, and at this hei
ght he saw the dog foundering, helpless, gagging in the thickened foam. Wilfred was on the beach, his gang behind him, and at the back a pale shadow: Blaine.
They were shouting, probably “Haole!” or worse, but at this distance he couldn’t hear it, and anyway it didn’t matter, because, buoyant in the mild milky ocean, all he heard was the consolation of the waves.
4
Father Figures
Uncle Sunshine said, “I cannot teach you surf. You can only teach yourself surf. If you stay akamai and surf every day, you improve. I can tell you what you doing wrong, that’s all.”
“What am I doing wrong?”
“You too much smoking, boy. Try stop.”
“So I’ll stop.”
“It more better if you wen’ stop. You need good lungs for swim, for surf, for paddle out, for win. Kids too much smoking, is more worse.”
Uncle Sunshine—his nicknames were Sunny or Feesh, he said “sweem” not “swim,” he said “keeds,” he said “ween”—was an old Hawaiian with a wicked grin and kindly eyes who sat with the other men his age at the rack of long boards at Waikiki, where Sharkey surfed on some days. Harry had introduced him and vouched for him, saying My kupuna.
“You got one fadda?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where you fadda stay?”
When Sharkey told him that he was in Vietnam and said, “Special Forces—he’s a colonel,” Uncle Sunshine softened and said, “E komo mai,” patting his shoulder. “I stay army too—all over the Pacific,” and pointed to the sea, dabbing with his fingers.
He was brown, very lean, his skin wrinkled and slack, with brown bony legs and weeds of yellow-gray hair. Though he was probably in his fifties, he could have been any age, and was always boyish and agile on his board. His boast was that he had surfed with Duke Kahanamoku and that everything he told Sharkey was the wisdom of wave-riding, passed down from the ancient Hawaiians.
