by Paul Theroux
On these weekdays of his playing hooky the beach was usually empty, so he was surprised to see a gathering of workmen one morning putting up a white canopy and a staging for seats—men with tools assembling and bolting pipes, tightening the guy ropes of the tentlike shelter, which gave to the beach a gaudy air of clutter, circuslike, the setting up of an encampment.
“If the surf stays up, we got a contest,” Eddie said, and named the sponsor.
“Are you in it?”
Eddie shrugged and tossed his hair. “Just like every other day out here except some people they wen’ try judge us—give us points. But you gotta sign up.”
Before the day was over, Eddie took Sharkey to the tent where the organizers sat and introduced him, vouching for him.
“Dis my braddah Joe Sharkey—he a shark, like his name. Try put him down.”
Among the Hawaiians watching, Sharkey still felt like a skinny white kid. He laughed nervously as he signed, paid his fee for competing, filled out the forms. Walking away, he realized that though he had laughed a little, he had not said a word.
When he arrived home that night—past eight o’clock, because of traffic—Sharkey’s mother was waiting, looking stern, something on her mind, the muddled severity she often displayed when she was drunk.
“Sit down, Joe, please,” she said, sounding sober. But he knew her tipsy tone. She spoke more daintily and slowly when she was very drunk.
She had an envelope on her lap, her splayed fingers pressing it flat. As she spoke she lifted it and picked the flap open, her head wobbling as though with effort. She drew out a folded sheet of paper and opened it in a stagy way. Drinking turned her into a ham actress.
“‘Dear Mrs. Sharkey,’” she read, with an exaggerated fluting of concern. “‘It has come to my notice that your son Joseph has been absent from school since classes resumed after the Christmas break. As it is now January twenty-fifth and his absence continues, I must request that you meet for a conference in my office.’”
And then she fluttered the letter like a hankie and said, with emphasis on each word, “Where have you been?” Belching slightly, a burp that jogged her head, she rapped on the arm of her chair, disturbing a pair of white gloves folded there.
Sharkey wanted to say, “Where have you been?” but he knew: she’d been dating Major Crandall once again—she’d disposed of Captain Van Buskirk. And it had been a great convenience to him that she’d been preoccupied, out early in the evening, home after midnight, asleep when he set off for the North Shore. He did not want any details; the very sight of the men his mother dated made him squirm.
“Did you hear me?”
She was dressed to go out, in a costume that was so odd in the heat, a green silk dress with a lacy collar, frilly sleeves, the white gloves on the arm of her chair, black heels. She was white-faced—masked with powder—and had a pillbox hat on the side table, where her empty glass sat, its rim smeared with lipstick. She selected a cigarette from a tray near the glass, twiddled it in her fingers, and poked it between her lips.
“I’ve been training.”
She twitched at the unexpected word, as though he had flicked her face with his insolent finger, and she snatched the cigarette from her mouth.
“Training—for what?”
“Surf meet.”
“What do you know about surfing?”
“A few things.”
She nodded at this disapprovingly. “Ronald said it’s dangerous.”
Ronald was Captain Crandall, who said he’d surfed in San Diego. His mother quoting him as an authority angered Sharkey, but he decided not to reveal his anger, nor to give anything away.
Although his mother was alone in her chair, it seemed he was facing two people, both of them hostile witnesses.
“Maybe it’s dangerous for Ronald.”
She snorted and clumsily lit the cigarette, snapping her lighter. “And not for you”—blowing smoke at him.
“It’s a challenge, I guess.”
“And this surf meet,” she said in a mocking singsong, “I suppose you think you’re going to win.”
“I don’t know. That’s why I signed up. To see if I’m ready.”
Because his mother was smoking a cigarette, tapping it in the ashtray, sometimes blowing and sometimes chewing the smoke, Sharkey had a better idea of her mood. The way the smoke left her lips told him she was agitated and confused, and now and then puffing and inhaling instead of replying, as she did now.
“Dad always said, ‘Big risk, big reward.’”
“And look where it got him,” she said, expelling smoke.
“Dad was a hero,” Sharkey said, the first time he’d raised his voice, though his voice broke in grief.
“What about me? I’m a widow. He left me to look after you.” She seemed to fortify herself, puffing again. “And you’re such a disappointment.”
Sharkey was not dismayed. He smiled at her for rejecting him, because it freed him from her. How much worse it would have been if she’d clung to him. She’d spent more than two years since the Colonel’s death seeing men—army officers—apparently enjoying herself. Sharkey wasn’t fooled by their bonhomie. They knew she was wealthy, they were looking to replace the Colonel—or even if that wasn’t their plan, they were romancing his mother, another sort of competition. He was glad she was preoccupied; he was happy when she left, happy when he came home to an empty house to find her note: Gone out—won’t be late. But she always was late. So what? It left him in peace. He enjoyed the solitude of the house after exhausting himself surfing. Alone, he reflected on the joy of being on his own wave.
“I know I’m a disappointment to you.”
She exhaled smoke through her lipstick-stained teeth—a blue plume of satisfaction—then nodded, puffing again, a sort of mute agreement.
“But I’m not a disappointment to myself,” he said. “I like what I’m doing. I’m learning.”
“Skipping school,” she said. “Your marks are terrible. I have no idea who your friends are. I get this letter”—she slapped it on her thigh, where it had lain all this time.
“I’m happy. I’m doing what I want to do.”
“You have no ambition!” she said, and mashed out her cigarette in the ashtray.
He laughed a little—angering her more—because she was wrong. He would never be able to explain it to her, so why try?
* * *
She asked, the day of the surf meet, where it would be held; and when he told her, “North Shore—Pipeline,” she said she probably would not be there. But after Sharkey arrived and signed in and got his number, he saw her a little way down the beach, incongruous at Sunset Beach in city clothes—his mother in a dress, and beside her, holding her hand, Ronald, in an aloha shirt and slacks, the captain in civvies.
They looked out of place and awkward, the wrong shoes, the wrong clothes, his mother in a pillbox hat, Ronald looking military in his posture, his shirt tucked in, his shoes shined, signaling to him with a thumbs-up.
Sharkey kept his distance, annoyed that they had come, distracting him, calling attention to themselves. He wandered beyond the spectators and the canopy and crouched beside his board, waiting for his name to be called.
In the sequence of six heats, Sharkey’s number was last. He sat alone, watching the others—Eddie in the first heat, the others he knew before him—and saw them trying to outdo each other. Eddie’s persuasive advice had always been, “Stay mellow, brah,” but he was jamming his board, swiveling on his wave, slicing through the barrel with his arms out, emerging in a squat stance before racing, until he reversed and vaulted over the wave, and at last slowed to step off in shallow water, looking joyous.
The others seemed to take cues from Eddie, echoing his moves, going him one better with repeated cutbacks, and there were cheers for them from the clusters of spectators seated on the sand. Sharkey’s mother and Ronald stood at the back of the beach, under the palm trees, near the judges’ canopy, frowning at the sea.
No one onshore could have seen them clearly enough to understand the mood of rivalry or heard their snorting at him; but it didn’t matter. What mattered was waiting for a wave and choosing the right one before the horn blared and he was out of time.
So he paddled hard on the first good wave, and because he was last in the lineup, away from the others, he was at an advantage. He danced around the trim line, pierced the lip, and, charging, found his feet, cut right and rode through the barrel, at one point high on the foam ball, and when he emerged at the far end of it, kicking out as he’d seen Eddie do, he heard a cheer—and the raised voices lifted him. He turned to see the crowd on the beach, a wall of bodies, eager faces watching him.
“You done good,” Eddie said, generous as always, meeting him at the shore.
“You done better.”
“I know dis wave. I stay lifeguard here, brah.”
More heats, more noise. Sharkey surfed three more times but did not feel he’d improved on his first ride—the thrill of it, the howl from the beach that was like a welcome to him as he’d shot out of the barrel.
He sat with Eddie and the hui, the pack of water dogs, while the results were tallied. The winner’s name was announced with the points he’d gotten—a boy he didn’t know; and then Eddie, the second prize, and Kanoa, who was in the hui. He was not surprised that he hadn’t won, nor did he feel that he’d lost. The boys in his heat came over to congratulate Eddie: they were not really dogs—they said “Aloha” to Sharkey. What struck him, sitting there on a beach—the winners garlanded with leis—was that he was among brothers.
Then he remembered his mother. He looked at where she’d been standing with Ronald, but they were not there, nor anywhere on the beach.
The house was empty when he got home. But he was elated, pleased with his rides—he’d done the best he could, and knew he could do better with practice, if he devoted every day to it. It was a competition but it was also a ritual, a game, a rite of passage, a celebration of brotherhood.
His mother was late and, being late, seemed to be making a point, asserting herself—slightly tipsy, severe in her silence. She peeled off her gloves and unpinned her hat.
Sharkey lay stretched out on the sofa, heavy from the fatigue of the day. Standing over him, rocking slightly, his mother smacked her lips.
“I sincerely hope you’ve done your homework.”
She was not tipsy, she was sozzled, and he felt sorry and embarrassed for her as he always did when he saw that she was being unreasonable, and was glad there was no witness to her foolishness.
“I didn’t go to school today. You know where I was.”
She sat down in her usual armchair and kicked off her high-heeled shoes and stared at him, nodding, as though bringing him into focus.
“We went all the way out there,” she began, “Ronald and I.” She was still nodding, like someone dropping off to sleep, and did not speak again for a while. Time passed slowly when you were drunk; even Sharkey knew that. “For nothing.”
He snorted, refusing to acknowledge what she said with a reply.
“You lost.” With a little giggle of satisfaction, as though she had won, she fixed her gaze on him. And he saw with pity and disgust that her upper lip was chafed, some of it due to smeared lipstick but mostly it was rubbed and reddened. And he was reminded that Ronald had a mustache.
After that, nothing that she said with this mouth, with this face, mattered to him. She was someone he didn’t want to know. And, predictably, when he said nothing, she became remorseful, another stage in her drunkenness, and began to cry.
He left her whimpering in her chair and went to bed and surfed in his sleep. In the morning, leaving the house before his mother awoke, he strapped his board to his roof rack and drove to the North Shore, vowing that he would drop out of school. It wasn’t complicated—it was legal, he was within his rights to quit. He was over sixteen, half his class had quit, all the bullies were gone, one was in jail, Nalani was pregnant, another girl was married. His classmates had grown up fast, but seldom followed through on any plan. They abandoned whatever ambition they had and stayed home, and their families enclosed them, protecting them, sheltering them, helping them raise their kids.
Not Sharkey. His mother said, “Your father would be devastated.”
Sharkey thought, If only he could see you.
“What will you do now?”
“I don’t know.”
He did not know what he would do—true. But he knew what he wanted and felt it thumping inside him, more strongly now because he was facing his mother. You lost. Another spur, another goad, a challenge.
She had shown him her hand. She would never have a claim to his victories. I don’t know if it will happen, he thought, but I know what I want. I want to surf, I want to win.
10
A Rescue
Later, when he was much older, dominating the tour, he’d see a barefoot boy of sixteen or so, deeply tanned, the glow of sunshine on him, golden salt-crusted shoulders, thin legs, wild blond hair like crushed feathers, his underlip thrust out in defiance, in a torn T-shirt and faded shorts, a big board under his arm, and he’d feel a pang for this fallen angel. He wanted to say to the boy, “Don’t listen to your mother—keep doing what you’re doing,” but the boy wouldn’t listen and didn’t care and would of course do whatever he wanted to do. He also wanted to say to someone—anyone—“I see myself in that boy.”
But there was no one to tell, no one who would understand. He was alone with the thought. The boy, that gangly twitching amphibian, half civilized, a fanatic, jumpy with ambition, didn’t know what was going to happen to him; his whole life ahead of him, he only knew that he had a passion to be on a wave. He was alone too, and happier that way, with fantasies of glory in his head.
Whenever his mother was nearby Sharkey would chant in his mind, With you I’m more alone than when I’m on my own. A single mother, he saw, was like a bossy older sister, and she distrusted him, she hovered, and inflicted the worst sort of intrusion: she said no, and then she was gone, out of the house, on a date. His wish to be alone she took to be inspired by his streak of cruelty.
The Colonel had believed in him, and that belief had made Sharkey confident. The Colonel had also had a sense of proportion—some things mattered, others not so much. He had seen men die in battle; next to that, what else was worth lamenting? Being under attack in a firebase mattered more than cutting your thumb on a tuna-fish can or even crashing your car. Losing meant more than winning, but putting forth your whole effort mattered most. Were you shit scared? “Consider yourself already dead” and take the leap, no retreat.
To his mother, everything mattered equally. “A strange thing happened today,” Sharkey had once said to her, preparing to tell her how a pretty Chinese girl in his class, seeing him alone in the school playground, had come up to him holding two cans of soda. She was small, slender, kitten-faced, chinless, and she crouched obliquely with a little bow. “This one for you.” It was a day when, reverting to their bullying, Wilfred and his friends had been brutal to him. “Fucken haole!” And the girl, Mee Ling, was an angel.
His mother said, “Wait”—staring, she wasn’t listening, she rummaged for a pair of tweezers and plucked a hair from between his brows. “You can’t go around like that.” When that was done, she said, “What were you going to tell me?”
“Nothing.”
For those who believed that everything mattered
, nothing mattered. They lived in a smothering clutter of concern and were never happy.
“Look at the time. I have to put on my face.” She dressed for men, for other people.
When she was gone, he was glad; his confidence returned, he was himself again.
Uncle Sunshine’s motto was There’s always another wave. Sharkey’s mother sometimes alluded to the loss, because it was the only time she’d seen him surf. She did not know that he’d begun to win—not contests, but the daily rough-and-tumble in the waves at Sunset and Waimea. In the tribal rites of surfing, the young surfers were merciless in their quest to be warriors. Other surfers knew better than anyone who the up-and-coming surfers were—Sharkey could see that he was gaining respect, because they matched themselves against him. It was better that his mother didn’t know, better that he was detached from her, detached from school.
He dated the onset of his adulthood from this period. His mother was preoccupied with her boyfriend. Sharkey dropped the pretense that he went to school every day; his many absences meant that there was no going back, no way of catching up with schoolwork, as in the dream he often had of being naked and unprepared and late for class. He quit entirely, saying so in a short scribbled note of farewell, ridding himself of the uncertainty and the sense of failure, leaving behind the skirmishes in the playground and the exasperation of teachers, though he wondered what would become of Mee Ling, who had risked the taunts of the class by offering him a can of soda.
He said to his mother, “I’m quitting school,” and when she howled he left the house and went surfing. His decision to quit gave him a great day on the water. His mother was calmer when he got home, exhausted by her hysteria.
“What will you do?”
“Maybe be a lifeguard.”
Eddie Aikau had vouched for him—Eddie had quit his part-time job at the cannery and was now a full-time lifeguard at Sunset. Sharkey passed the test and earned a Red Cross certificate, and was assigned to Ali‘i Beach in Hale‘iwa. His mother was bewildered that he had gotten a job so quickly, that he had responsibility and a uniform and a salary—amazed that he knew people who helped him. Becoming a lifeguard on the North Shore was another rite of passage for lucky surfers—more like being a member of an exclusive club or a secret society than a city job, and with greater status. But it was not his ultimate aim, only a strategy to stay near the water.
