Under the Wave at Waimea

by Paul Theroux

  Wilfred and his boys at school kept away. Nalani said, “You no like for dating me no more”—sucking his dick in a van was dating?—all of them seeing a new Sharkey over the next weeks, not the pale stoner who’d become their friend but a dark and dismissive and more muscular Sharkey, once again remote, another unreadable haole, but someone they left alone, because he seemed like a stranger again. And there were always other boys to bully.

  So Sharkey had a new routine—away from home and his mother, away from school and the other boys—a renewed solitude and a mission.

  Uncle Sunshine said, “I see what Duke seen—something in you. You can be good. You can be more better than good. You can be a winner—not to beat the other surfers but compete against youself, to get more better with each wave. To be you best. Who is your competition, your enemy? It is youself. Always against youself.”

  In the time since he’d first met Uncle Sunshine he’d grown. Nearly sixteen, he was taller, stronger, better able to read a wave. The training on land had toughened him and made him impatient to get back into the water, but Uncle Sunshine said that only when he appreciated what a privilege it was to ride a wave would he be allowed to surf.

  Submit, the man was saying.

  “You need to be worthy,” he said. “You need to be pono.”

  That word again, but now it had a meaning, because it was spoken by someone who was himself pono.

  “Those boys from Roosevelt—those girls,” he said. “No respeck nothing. They drowning and they don’t know it.”

  Sharkey now saw that he knew very little. He had taken his natural ability for granted and it had made him overconfident. He assumed that he could smoke weed and that he would eventually find his way back onto the board. He had not foreseen how hard it would be, how he would have to prove himself to Uncle Sunshine, who was more severe than any teacher at Roosevelt.

  “I not you friend,” the man said, unblinking in his lizard look. “I’m you teacher. I’m too old to be you friend. I know more than you. You need to respeck me, to obey, to do what I say. I you kupuna.”

  He was fierce—where had it come from? The jovial teasing Beach Boy had become a tyrant. He was gentle with everyone else, telling stories under the palms, giving surf lessons, renting boogie boards to tourists, talking about his friendship with Duke, and his ohana, and his memory of Pearl Harbor—describing that Sunday morning, delivering newspapers, seeing the planes, hearing the explosions, running for cover. Strumming his ukulele, he was the very image of the jolly carefree Hawaiian.

  But there was someone else inside him. The inner Uncle Sunshine was a warrior, with no sense of humor and no patience. With Sharkey he was unforgiving, demanding that he exercise—run laps on the sand, do push-ups, and help with chores, carry boards to the tourists, wash them and rack them. And when at last, after demanding that he recite a Hawaiian prayer, he let Sharkey back into the water, he refused him a surfboard. “Swim into the waves, body-surf, practice breath control. Board is kapu. No board until I say so.” And Sharkey ran and swam until he was exhausted, until his throat burned and his arms ached and he found himself half weeping with fatigue.

  “I will turn you into a water dog,” Uncle Sunshine said. “First you need practice. Rehearsing.”

  This convergence—the old surfer and the boy—was the most important episode in his life; it was the making of him, though he did not tell anyone about it at the time, not the boys at school, not his mother. It was a solemn initiation, too complex to explain. “My father died. I met a guy who became a kind of father figure,” he later said. “He got me off drugs.” He did not say that Uncle Sunshine examined every aspect of his behavior: his swimming, his surfing, his schoolwork, his dealings with everyone on the beach. “Father figure” didn’t explain him. The man was his mentor, his teacher, hiskupuna, his tormentor, his scold. Sometimes Sharkey hated him, was afraid of him—feared most of all displeasing him, always having to be at his best. But he also knew that if he had not met him his life would have been quite different—he would have been a surfer, yes, but a different one, without Uncle Sunshine’s voice in his head, guiding him.

  Most frustrating of all was Uncle Sunshine saying, “I know what you can do. I know more better than you. You have one big future.”

  And Sharkey knew that as yet he had done nothing, and nothing in the future was apparent to him.

  “You will be a water dog. You will ride monster waves at Waimea.”

  At last the day came when Uncle Sunshine said, “Today you surf,” and handed him a board.

  * * *

  Head-high waves tumbled in looping rollers toward Magic Island from the distant ocean, where the sun flashed from behind a cloud and blinded him on the way out. “Find you feet,” Uncle Sunshine had said, and walked away to deal with the tourists and his friends. “I see you bym-bye.” He turned his back on Sharkey and swam across the Ala Wai Harbor entrance to his stand on the beach at Waikiki.

  Released to surf, to plunge into the incoming waves, flat on his board, paddling out, Sharkey was liberated from land, from the plodding and the push-ups, the hot hard earth and the sour trampled grass. He was weightless in the water, slipping under the faces of the waves, and he paddled with such gusto that he forgot he’d intended to surf and instead rode past the surf zone to the bluer ocean and bellying swells, the widening water that gave the illusion of being a dome of liquid that lifted him to show him how far he was from shore, and then dropped him into a trough where he was lost, seeing nothing but the sloping walls of the swell.

  He was in his element, a waterman, dwarfed by the ocean and buoyant, splashing onward into the golden path the low sun had fretted on the surface of the water. An overwhelming sense of freedom enlarged him, as though he had been launched into the air, was experiencing flight, with no prospect of falling, only soaring toward the flat seam ahead where the sky met the sea.

  On that first day, his reentry to the water, he was possessed by the thought that the farther he swam, the more he would change, of the transforming effects of the sea, its health-giving properties, its mothering power to strengthen and purify him. Stepping on earth stunned and aged him, but surfing was a cleansing and the slap of waves a blessing. He fought the urge to turn back to shore.

  An hour of this, or more—no one visible on the beach, or on the protrusion of Magic Island—until he was a speck on the ocean, stroking toward the shipping lanes and black freighters piled three layers high with orange containers.

  Then he slipped sideways on his board and rode the swells for a mile into the surf zone and the break at Bomboras and swam onto the back of a wave, staying with it until it rose under him and he was teetering on the boil. He scrambled up now, steadying the board, then got to his feet and sped slantwise down the face, braced upright, surfing again, whooping with joy, reborn.

  He surfed until the sky was sunless and purple and a smudge like a dust haze gathered low in the sky, and darkness fell. He reluctantly swam ashore, feeling clumsy, his board heavy, stepping over the rocks to the clay at the base of the cliff, stumbling a little.

  The first of many days.

  * * *

  His mother seemed to realize that he was steadier now, sober, more careful in the way he dressed, tidier too—and perhaps this was what created a distance and a sobriety in her. After so long alone, stubborn and inert in her chair, drinking to face the day, drinking to get through the day, drinking so that she could sleep, she stirred from the house, accepted the invitations of some officers’ wives she’d known at Fort Shafter, and went to parties. “Just for grins,” she said, so as not to seem as though such outings mattered in the least.

  Within weeks she was being escorted.

  “Imagine, Joe,” she said. “What a hoot. I’m dating.”

  He hated the teasing way his mother spoke the word, he was embarrassed by the girlish way she used it, as Nalani had; and whatever it meant, he did not want to know. She no longer drove herself, and Sharkey was glad of that—she�
�d never been a good driver, and her drinking made her dangerous. So Sharkey was relieved that she was escorted, reassured that she had some sort of masculine friendship, and bewildered by her happiness—seeing these men brought her a kind of joy and protection that he had never been able to provide. He wondered if at heart he did not want to make her happy but instead contrived to upset her, or to take revenge by sneaking Nalani to his room. She seemed to know this, sometimes muttering, “Why do you do this to me?” but never specifying.

  He missed the Colonel, who had occupied the roles he was not able to fill—father, husband, friend, support, fellow drinker, lover. But the Colonel was gone.

  The men dating her were her age or older, nearly all of them military, he could tell; even when they wore an aloha shirt, they were stiff-backed, heads up, the shirts tucked in, and she showed an intuitive sense of rank in choosing to see only senior officers. They picked her up, usually in the early evening, not long after Sharkey got home from surfing or school, and they dropped her off before eleven, both of them a bit tipsy, whispering, giggling, but the men didn’t linger, except to exchange a few words with Sharkey, the usual greeting: “And this must be Joe!”

  They were kind to him and always complimentary, excessively so at times. Maybe it was their way of proving to Sharkey’s mother what good men they were, what good husbands and stepfathers they might be, as though rehearsing to be his father. Used to military housing, they always remarked on the bungalow, its garden, its seclusion on the leafy street. Did they know how much money his mother had? Probably. There were no secrets at the base, and the Sharkey family was the subject of whispers—the dog attack, the disgrace of the dog’s owner, the financial settlement, the move to Manoa, the Colonel’s death, and the scrutiny of Sharkey’s mother, the sightings of her at parties.

  The uncertainties of army life, the enigmas of command, made gossip inevitable, especially among those left behind, the wives and children; the whispers were a response to the army’s code of silence. Sharkey was ashamed to think that his mother, who was in her midforties, might be talked about as a partygoer, a dater, and a drinker—ashamed for the Colonel’s sake. He saw his mother in a new way, as a woman vain about her looks, her body concealed beneath her carefully chosen dress, her heavily made-up face, someone’s date.

  “This is Major Crandall,” his mother said one day when Sharkey arrived home from the beach. It was around seven, dark, his mother in a party dress and pearls.

  “Hi,” Sharkey said, averting his eyes and trying to get past the man.

  “Your mom tells me you’re a surfer.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been doing it for a while.”

  “Yes, sir,” his mother corrected. “Remember who you’re talking to.”

  He thought, I am talking to a man who is taking my mother on a date, to a party or a bar or the officers’ club, to get drunk, and I don’t want to know more than that.

  The man, Major Crandall, said, “I’m from San Diego. I’ve done a little surfing. ‘Hang ten.’ That’s what we always said.”

  That was another thing—their way of relating to Sharkey was competitive and patronizing. They would talk about the amazing things they’d done, surfing or swimming; and some said, “I knew your father well—he was a good soldier,” as though they were competing with Sharkey, claiming to know the Colonel better than the son did. “We were in some tight situations together—firefights and insertions. I wish I could give you details but no can do—they were black ops.”

  “Maybe we could catch some waves together,” Major Crandall said.

  And Sharkey smiled at the presumption, because he surfed either with Uncle Sunshine or alone, and it was never a question of “catching a few waves” but rather of thrashing for hours with an intensity that was both visceral and spiritual—not a recreation, it was a life choice, a commitment. Nothing else mattered.

  But Sharkey said, “Yes, sir. Sounds good,” because his mother wore her anxious expression, pleading eyes, looking fragile.

  How odd and disconcerting it was for him to be at home, to meet the men, to watch them take his mother out, to see her so eager and grateful, calling out as she left, “There’s some chicken salad in the fridge.” The men were uneasy with him; they knew they needed to be respectful, to have his blessing more than his acknowledgment. It was so strange to see them take her by the hand or steer her with her elbow. Strangers touching his mother, taking possession—but more than that he did not want to know—could not bear to imagine. It was important to him that they made her happy, and though he felt she was betraying the Colonel, whose death was such a painful memory to him, her seeing them gave him some peace; it was a relief from the weepy evenings when she was drunk and drawled, “You never listen to me,” or “Say something.”

  This dating by his mother, seeing her wooed and catered to, distanced him from her, matured him and made him worldly. His mother became secretive and silly, evasive when he asked where she was going, for how long, who else would be there? They were not his questions; they were the questions the Colonel would have asked. But she didn’t answer, except to say, “I’ll be fine, darling.”

  He sat up in his father’s chair, a saddening whiff of long-ago cigarette smoke still clinging to it, waiting for her to come home, and in that time did his homework. When there was a clatter at the door of a certain kind, a fumbling, a clumsiness, he knew she would be drunk, and the red-faced men would be sheepish and ingratiating—“Joe, I’d like to get to know you a whole lot better.”

  He remembered Uncle Sunshine, sounding like the Colonel, saying, I’m too old to be you friend. I know more than you. I not you friend.

  So Sharkey found himself humoring the men—what did they want?—and regretting that he was not more protective of his mother. At the same time he became more passionate about surfing, to be away from home, to remove himself from his mother’s evasions.

  One of the men, another officer, suggested they go out to eat together, the three of them. This was Captain Van Buskirk, who showed up in uniform, to be greeted by Sharkey in shorts and flip-flops and a T-shirt. He could see that the soldier was dismayed, blinking at him with a barely perceptible tightening of his mouth.

  “Dickie!” his mother called out when she saw him, and turned to allow him to kiss her cheek. Then: “Joe—you can’t go like that.”

  “We don’t have to go to Fort DeRussy,” the captain said. “We can go to the Moana Surfrider.”

  Sharkey said, “It’s all right. I’m cool. I’ll stay home.”

  “I’d rather you joined us,” the captain said. “That’s an order, son,” and he laughed.

  But riding to Waikiki, seated in the backseat of the captain’s car, Sharkey felt all the old ambiguity and confusion—his mother on a date, the man looking at him in the rearview mirror and sizing him up.

  “Table for three?” the hostess asked. She wore a frilly blouse, a flower behind her ear, her hair drawn back like his mother’s.

  “Near the beach. Edge of the lanai,” the captain said.

  “Mai-tais at sunset,” Sharkey’s mother said. “Maybe we’ll see a green flash.”

  But when they looked across the beach they saw a Hawaiian man in board shorts staring at them, a lei around his neck, and he too had a flower behind his ear. He walked toward the rail of the lanai.

  “Aloha.” He was smiling. “How’s it?”

  Uncle Sunshine, a softly smiling Uncle Sun, in a clean shirt—laughing, but respectful and a little subdued.

  “I know this keiki,” he said.

  Sharkey had wanted to keep Uncle Sunshine his secret, his other life, his real life—the tough kupuna teaching him moves on the board and insisting on his being in shape, guiding him, and counseling him in his dealings with the boys at school.

  “He da kine—kolohe,” Uncle Sun said with a giggle.

  It was a different Uncle Sunshine—a little silly, submissive, speaking in a broader comical pidgin, standing with his bony knees together, his dark
sinewy arms folded, playing the role of a genial Beach Boy. Sharkey’s secret was safe.

  “You know kolohe—mischeevious,” Uncle Sun explained.

  “I hope you keep him out of trouble,” Sharkey’s mother said.

  “He keep me out of trouble,” Uncle Sun said, saying tchrubble. “We talk story. We—”

  Captain Van Buskirk said sharply, “You’ll have to give us some space. We haven’t ordered yet.”

  And then Uncle Sun did an extraordinary thing—he apologized.

  “Sorry, sir,” he said, and he saluted, saying, as he turned to walk away, “Me, I was military.”

  “Thank you for your service.”

  But it was too late—the captain had lost him, and the captain had failed Sharkey. What was apparent was that Uncle Sunshine had behaved like a colorful Hawaiian, goofy and a bit bumbling and inarticulate, and Sharkey held the captain responsible. So he would never know what Sharkey knew, that Uncle Sun was a brave big-wave surfer, a great teacher, a fierce soul, and a decorated veteran of battles in the Solomon Islands.

  “He sweet on you mother,” Uncle Sun said the next time they met at Magic Island.

  “How do you know?”

  “My mana‘o. The way he sitting, how he stay. His feets. His hands. His eyes.”

  But when Sharkey asked about the captain, his mother said, “I’m not dating him anymore.”

  “He’s not interested?”

  “He’s too interested. He’s talking about marriage. I don’t want that.”

  Sharkey’s hesitation was like a question, a querying silence.

  “Because I have you,” his mother said.

  7

  Wipeout