by Paul Theroux
The lifeguard chair was a throne, upraised, eight feet in the air, under a red canopy. He sat, his legs out straight, in the shadow of the canopy, wearing sunglasses, not emerging except to warn the tourists—Japanese girls in floppy hats and summer dresses—of the surf on big days. Using a megaphone, which gave him an older voice that crackled with authority, he called out, “Keep away from the shore break. You can be knocked down and swept out.”
And now and then a Japanese tourist, a girl usually, perhaps not hearing or not understanding—or heedless—was knocked over by the push of a wave and slipped and was dragged away by its outgoing wash, and Sharkey leaped from his tower, carrying a float and a coil of rope. He dashed down the beach and dived for her, encircling her with his arm across her chest so that she lay on her back against his hip, and brought her to shore.
The first time it happened, it set off a series of events that changed him. A Japanese girl in a yellow dress was swept out. He swam for her. He stayed with her and she clung to him, sobbing, Sharkey whispering to calm her while her friends fretted at a distance. And feeling the softness of her flesh, the tremor of her helplessness, Sharkey was aroused. He had not touched a girl since the last time with Nalani, and had longed to. But Nalani had a new baby and all the desirable girls had boyfriends.
Soaked, moaning in fear, her thin dress clinging to her slender body and the outline of the seams of her underwear, her hair tangled and her face crumpled in terror, the rescued girl at Ali‘i Beach looked naked and powerless, and, sobbing on the hot sand, with Sharkey kneeling over her, she seemed sacrificial.
When she recovered and dried her face and sat up, she seemed ashamed of what she’d done—touching him, holding him in the water. She hid her face, and then ran to her friends and was gone.
But that experience, the drama of rescue, grasping the girl’s body and hugging it, gave him the choking sensation, the wordless clumsy groping he came to know as desire, and he wanted more.
“I heard you wen’ done a rescue,” Eddie said later in the week, at their Friday pau hana—beers on the beach. “That’s good. That goes on your record. That’s big points for you.” And peered closely at Sharkey. “You no look happy, brah.”
“She made me horny,” Sharkey said.
Eddie laughed at the unexpected word.
They were sitting cross-legged in a circle, Sharkey, Eddie, and four other lifeguards, at the far end of the beach at Waimea, where they met every Friday at sundown to see the green flash, to drink beer, to smoke pakalolo, to talk story—seldom stories about being a lifeguard, usually about the surf: was it rising, was it dropping, was a new swell expected?
Sharkey enjoyed the ritual, feeling that he belonged to this little band of watermen. School had not worked, his mother didn’t know him; in town he was reminded of his failures. Here on the North Shore, among his fellow lifeguards, he was among friends. His was a job that came with distinction and authority; the lifeguard commanded the beach, he was obeyed, he sat upraised in the open, and whenever he made a rescue it was a spectacle.
He was the only haole among the lifeguards; as Eddie’s protégé he was respected. Eddie often told the story of how they’d met that evening on the road to Hale‘iwa and how in that meeting they’d felt a bond. Eddie made the meeting sound momentous. He did not remember saying, “Gas, grass, or ass—no one rides for free,” and Sharkey giving him a dollar.
At the perimeter of the circle of boys in yellow lifeguard T-shirts and red shorts, some girls had begun to gather and kneel, more numerous on Fridays because the weekend loomed. Like an extension of the boys’ tribal rite, the girls sat a little distance apart, pretending to be uninterested but often glancing over at the lifeguards. Sharkey resisted staring at them, fearing that he might choose the wrong one. He knew from Roosevelt High School that though the girls kept to themselves, whispering, and allowed themselves to be teased by the boys, each girl had a lover among the boys. It was only after dark that they met and paired off, and it was dangerous to presume and flirt, since every girl was spoken for.
“Hear that?” Eddie said. “Haole boy wen’ rescue one Japanee wahine and he come horny.”
“She had no muscles,” Sharkey said. “She was so soft, her flesh like something I could eat. And she was all wet, her clothes sticking to her.”
“Ha! You see surf bunnies with plenny papaya in little bikinis all day long and you get horny when you see one Japanee wahine in a wet dress.”
Sharkey laughed and tried to deny it, but it was true, just as he said. The dress alone made her sexy: a wet one on a soft little body filled him with desire.
“Thass crazy,” one of the other boys said.
Sharkey said, “I can’t explain it.”
“Is a mystery,” Eddie said.
He had gotten to his knees. He wagged his head to see across the patch of sand, where the girls had gathered beneath the feathery overhang of an ironwood bough.
“Eh—Rhonda,” he said, leaning, then putting his fingers to his lips and whistling.
A small figure emerged from the shadow of the tree, the glow of her white shorts making her visible.
Sensing a moment that might involve him, Sharkey said, “I’m heading into town. Friday traffic,” and jammed his beer bottle into the sand.
“Not yet, haole.”
Now the girl was beside Eddie, and as though in a gesture of respect she dropped to her knees, looking like a child beside him, with a soft smile and a face like a seal pup’s.
“Rhonda—dis haole Joe Sharkey.”
Sharkey awkwardly got to his feet but could not think of anything to say, not even “Hi.” He felt so conspicuous among the other boys.
“Go wid him.”
“Aloha,” Sharkey said, swallowing hard, and walked across the sand to the parking lot where he’d left his car, glad for the darkness that closed over him. He was careful not to look back, but when he got to his car, the girl was behind him. She slipped into the backseat, leaving the door open.
Sharkey got into the driver’s seat and gripped the steering wheel.
“What are you doing back there?” he said.
“Taking my clothes off.” Her first words, a squeaky island voice, singsong, baby talk.
“Why?” he said, and did not recognize his thick throaty voice.
“Come here and find out.”
He was trembling as he sat beside her, taking care to close the door so that it hardly made a sound. As he began to hug her, leaning to kiss her, she took a wad of gum out of her mouth and flicked it through the window.
“What are you doing?”
“I don’t want it,” she said, her breath thick with the sweetness of bubble gum.
“What do you want?”
“I want you in my mouth.”
The spoken words worked on him with more force than if she had caressed him, and she said them again in a hot urgent whisper. Then her little hands were snatching at his shorts and her head was nuzzling his lap, until he lay back and rested his hands on her bobbing head, her warm hair in his fingers.
* * *
Like the first time he’d surfed a barrel, shooting to the end as the wave closed over him, flinging himself into the sunlight, this was explosive, a relief, filling him with joy and promising more—promising happiness.
The Colonel had warned him, his mother had warned him, and now he knew why. Desire was dangerous to them; they knew they’d lose him to it and never learn his secret.
Rhonda sat up and sighed, shrugged her breasts back into her torn T-shirt and at the same time passed a fingertip across a gleaming snail trail on her cheek, drew it to her lips, and licked it. Then she let out what Sharkey heard as a giggle of wickedness and complicity, but it was only a shy girl’s laughter.
“I want more,” he said into her hair.
“Me too.” Her mouth warmed his ear.
“I have to go now, Rhonda.”
“I see you tomorrow, Joe.”
“You know me?”
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“Everybody see Joe Sharkey, but you nevah pay no attention.”
So he was known, he was desired, he had friends, and now, just like that, a lover. He was not a conqueror. He was an initiate—he’d been admitted to a mystery and saw inside the rosy recesses of it, red as the flesh in a mouth. He understood now what was allowed, and knew the wonderful truth: his innocence of girls had been ignorance—what he wanted, they wanted too. That was the solemn secret. No wonder they smiled, no wonder Rhonda wanted more.
Not experience delivering him to maturity—sexual desire made him a child again, a happy boy, free to do as he wished. And now he knew that the girls weren’t afraid. They were like him, his equals. It was play, it was joy, it was the childhood he thought he’d missed, to be lived again.
11
Surf Bunnies
They wagged their okoles and fluttered their fingers and did mocking hula on the beach near the lifeguard stand and called out “Joe” to him. They watched him surf and met him as he came ashore. They brought him bowls of poke and rice or Spam musubi as presents and watched him eat under the palm trees. They challenged him to take smaller waves and sometimes surfed beside him with more grace than he could muster. They were not strong and so they needed to be more agile, they were light on their boards, they were gleaming mermaids in the water, they knew their limits and so stayed out of the monster surf and rode like nymphs on the waves they chose—surf bunnies.
Unexpectedly, they were his friends. He did not have to pretend to love them, yet he desired them. It was a relief to him that he did not need to woo them or contrive a reason for meeting them secretly—and when it happened, which was after work, most days, they were as eager as he was, and more straightforward.
Snatching his hand, one said, “I stay hanawai.”
He pushed her hand aside and hugged her.
“My period.”
“Want to forget about it?”
“Plenny other ways.” And she laughed softly, groping him as he had just groped her and shoving his hand onto her okole.
Most of the time it was hurried, a swift grappling and then a convulsive gasp, and when it was over, giggles. They knotted her pareu, lit a joint, and talked about the surf. No memory of what had just happened—it was mutual relief, a frantic hug.
This was the life he craved. It did not matter whether he excelled at riding the wave—he was relaxed, surfing when he was off-duty or on his free days; he found a rhythm in his climb into the wave, a way of appraising it, jamming his board onto it, and planting himself on it, so that the wave and the board were one. And why so smooth? Because he was happy.
This was play, sex was play, lifeguarding was friendship—a team, and that involved play too. None of it was work. He was paid enough that he never had to ask his mother for money. That he was independent confused her, thwarted her in her hovering, since his accepting money from her had held them together, and now he didn’t need her.
“I can give you more,” she said.
“I don’t need more. I don’t need any.”
Girls had money and sleek bodies, girls had cars, girls had rooms where he could crash, girls had parents who encouraged him. He surfed with Rhonda’s father, Kawika, who said, “You got a job. You got respeck.”
The pink C-shaped scar on Sharkey’s face set him apart, it masked him, it gave the illusion that he was less a haole than the others—someone with a story, a secret, an altered face, the scar a distinction like a badge of honor, as though he’d been injured in battle, more proof that he might be a hero.
From the loneliness of lingering on a swell, waiting for a wave to ride, he became aware that he was being watched, that someone—probably a girl—saw what he was doing and understood the difficulty; and the very fact that he knew someone was watching him—someone onshore to surf to, an appreciative spectator—helped him put forth his best effort. So he rode the wave to the girl on the beach and that night lay in her arms.
It was so simple, this notion that there was someone watching him, someone who desired him—more than one, perhaps many: this attention drove him to perform, the play became serious, and he was reminded of how he wanted to win and had a reason for winning, not for money but to impress a girl, to possess her for a night, or more.
He saw that the other surfers had the same idea, competed against each other to be noticed—less warriors battling for a trophy than a pack of poi dogs nipping each other and lolloping for a favor. Sharkey usually came second or third. He was complimented—so young, smaller than most of them, a haole, but distinguished with a scar.
One day he won at a surf meet at Sunset. He was crowned with a lei, a ring of flowers on his head. The prize was a new surfboard and a ticket to Tahiti, and a girl that night murmured to him, “Watch me, watch me, watch me—what I do to you.”
The neglected aspect of his growing up, what was missing in his childhood, was a girlfriend; and now, with money, he slipped out of his mother’s grasp and eluded her control. He had lovers.
“Them Tahiti wahine better be careful.”
“I’ll come back to you,” he said.
“Maybe I no stay here. Maybe I no wait.”
He was now used to their playful defiance—it made them whole and equal and more desirable.
* * *
Tahiti was his first trip away from Hawaii, on his own, away from his mother—she saw him off, looking sad. He arrived in Papeete, set against old mountainous volcanoes, overgrown and thickened in rainwashed green, steeper than the pali of O‘ahu. But the town itself was much smaller than he’d expected, no tall buildings, a human scale. The plane had circled and come in low across the reefs, Sharkey scanning the breaks for surf spots, his face pressed against the window.
“New board,” said the taxi driver, Hawaiian in his big brown bulk but with a French accent.
“A prize.”
“You win this board?”
“Oui, mon ami.”
“Vous êtes un grand champion.”
“That’s me!”
He was someone else, someone exceptional; no one knew him here. He was happy in the freedom of being able to say anything he wished about himself, and still remembered a little French from Roosevelt. He discovered the first day in Tahiti the transformation of travel, liberated in a far-off place.
This is all mine, he thought. He possessed the island with all his senses. The town smelled of sea-rotten wood and old rope and decaying fish, and the women were lovely in their bright pareus, knotted at their breasts, walking beneath the arcades of the shop houses in a stamping, assertive way, as though to show they weren’t owned by the French. Food smells, the blatting of motorbikes, and a strange and fragrant cigarette smoke—all new. Another odor he could not identify, from great woven baskets and burlap sacks—blackened husks. He saw it was the sourness of broken coconuts. “Copra, m’sieur.”
The taxi driver found him again, calling out, “Champion!”
He strapped Sharkey’s board on pads on the roof of his purple Renault Dauphine and drove him along the coast, Sharkey in the backseat, a pretty woman in the front; he was fascinated by the simple knot of her pareu at the back of her neck, which he mentally untied.
“What country?” she asked.
“Hawaii.”
The word cheered her; she relaxed, as though he’d announced himself as a relative. And then she was narrating, “Maraa . . . Papara,” indicating the surf beyond the reef, and farther on Sharkey saw a wave rising on an outer reef and no one surfing it.
“Stop,” he said, but already the taxi had begun to slow down.
“Teahupo‘o,” the driver said, and got out with the girl, who helped unload the board. Her hair was thick; she had a flower on her ear; her face was sculpted, thin-lipped, a pretty chin. A slender neck; the pareu still neatly in place, with a simple knot.
The guesthouse was near the beach. He paid extra to stay in the thatch-roofed cottage on the grounds, like a dollhouse. He propped his surfboard outside and threw
himself on the bed, taking a deep breath of the fragrance from the open window—fragrant even in the musty room, the bedposts damp and salty with sea air. He felt freedom in the fragrance of every new aroma.
And then a knock. “Yes?”
It was the driver, looking shy, trying to form a sentence.
“Ma soeur—elle veut être ton amie.”
He understood “sister,” he understood “friend.”
That was all he needed to know. He saw the girl from the taxi waiting on the beach the next day, in the late afternoon, as he rode in the last of what he imagined would be the good waves. The surf had been dropping since lunchtime. But he’d been alone on the break, and he had the renewed sense that it was all his, this day was his, the beach was his, and the girl on it, barefoot in the red-and-yellow pareu—different from yesterday’s—fluttering as she walked back and forth, something in her hand. When he came closer he saw it was a rusty machete.
“Now I kill you,” she said, swiping with the blade, looking reckless, her eyes flashing.
“Wait,” he said, quickly putting his board down.
She screeched, laughing, and ran on skinny legs to where the grassy bank had been eaten away by the sea, forming a ledge, undercut by the tide.
“Votre tête,” she said, falling on her knees and selecting a coconut from a pile of green coconuts. Holding it at arm’s length, she slashed at it in oblique strokes, narrowing its end with quick chops to open a hole.
Sharkey had been frightened by the sight of the knife. Now, as she handed him the coconut, he felt only joy. The taste of the cool coconut water brought a sweetness to his soul.
