“Shark,” he yelled again, this time pointing with his whole giant hand as though it were a ventral fin, the thumb tucked in, palm downturned and level with the ground.
“Where?”
“There. Past the surge zone. Coming back in. That’s a big one now. Huge one.”
Cal turned and stared.
“Never seen one like that,” and Harold was still hoarse and bellowing. Burbling on. Coming up sweaty and grabbing him by the shoulders, roughing him in his excitement so that Cal, who was lithe and tall, nearly fell down.
“See it,” said Cal, straightening himself. “That does look large.”
The dorsal indeed stretched surprisingly high off the surface, was wide at the base, and swiveled slightly, aggressively, in a way that Cal had never seen.
“Big sucker,” whispered Harold, clearly fascinated. Now they could make out a shape beneath the water, again, surprisingly large, of a scale Cal had only seen in a young whale, in humpback calves he’d dived with off the northern coast of the island near Hawi.
“Jesus Christ,” blurted Harold excitedly. And at last the shark was close enough to the shore that they could see, squinting out across the lava breaks, that the dorsal was mottled, even banded at its base with jagged swaths of shadow crossing the blade. “Christ, that’s a tiger.”
Cal twisted free of Harold and ran to the side of the house. He grabbed the light hawser of the kayak and started hauling, running with it as best he could down the beach to the break and finally dipping the bow into the first crust of the waves.
“Get in here, Harold,” he hollered, expecting Harold to begin shuffling backward as he invariably did when challenged, to start shifting his bulky shoulders in retreat, tracing a line with his heels up the beach toward the lanai.
But Harold stood transfixed and Cal, turning quickly, could see the outline of the shark clearly now, the sun cutting across it from the west, the big snub nose small in comparison with the bulk behind it and the scythe of its tail tall and proud and immense, sweeping far behind the head as if a sailfish were trailing the body and propelling it at a distance.
“Get in here, Harold,” Cal yelled again, and Harold, to Cal’s amazement, began to sidestep, still staring at the shark, which had turned to the south and seemed to be moving back along the surge line in their direction. Harold, for whatever reason, perhaps because the shark had taken him from his dreams and just at that moment he remained poised between worlds, or perhaps because he’d suddenly awakened to his bravery and found himself at last to be redoubtable, a crowing beast, or, most likely, because he was utterly beside himself—Cal didn’t care what it was—now shuffled not backward toward the lanai but sideways. Then, as Cal steadied the kayak in the channel between lava floes, Harold stumbled in, nearly upsetting it. He even grabbed the paddle from the floor, as though it were a sword, still straining his eyes out toward the sea.
Cal had never seen a tiger shark in the wild and supposed, to the extent he supposed at all, that Harold, who seemed fascinated with anything large, found the prospect of witnessing the animal up close too tempting to resist. It was certainly true that tigers rarely, almost never, approached such shallow coral embankments during the daylight hours. Occasionally there were sightings by open-water swimmers along the shoreline south toward Kona and the odd attack on surfers, particularly when swells amped up and runoff from rains clouded coastal waters. But it remained an anomaly, something wild and mysterious, and Cal, for his part, did not hesitate to run for the kayak at the prospect of peering down at such power.
There was one other thing. Cal, who had dived with many sharks, had never been in the water with a tiger. They had a kind of mythical presence. When they did approach the shore, it was usually at dusk and they had been known to surf, literally to surf, to use their wide bulks to navigate wave troughs and fish along the break line when the sun had exited but still cast its gloaming rays. In other places, not Hawaii, Cal had sat on the beach and watched this happen. What had struck him then was not the danger of wading into the shallows but the need of such animals, the urgency that size brought to bear. There were stories of tigers slit open to reveal plow blades and tree branches and parts of cars.
Now he climbed in behind Harold to the seat at the stern and pushed off with his own paddle. They moved, incredibly, out toward the shark, as though they were one, as though the two of them had often, just before sunset, set off together in precisely this way, toward things you couldn’t exactly envision from land but that, having lived them together in a kind of complicity and synchrony, they’d known for years and thrust into their knowledge of each other.
“That’s it,” purred Cal from behind, watching Harold work his paddle carefully, avoiding the outcroppings of jagged, coffee-colored lava. Then, “Now, good work,” as they came to the surge zone, elongated and rough with breaks arriving in three irregular rows across the floe banks. Here, to his amazement, Cal watched Harold dig in, bending his broad back toward the water and hauling powerfully with his arms, the big bulk of him at work, the head lifted up as though seeking something, then the shoulders dipping back down to pull.
They were in a rhythm. It was maddening, thought Cal, to the extent that he was of a mind to think anything. Indeed, just at that moment he scarcely inhabited such a mind. He had almost no thinking in him at all except for a yearning for deep water, for the place he’d never brought Harold before where even from a kayak you could see depths, detect things displaced beneath other things, find animals passing beneath you and then, when you dove, gliding even above you, over you, between you and the air.
The shark was gone, so far as Cal could tell. Harold had stopped working his paddle and was sitting upright. The sun was blinding in the west and streaking through the surface of the sea into what was now a gorgeous blue, fine and clear at depth, marking out the place just ahead where the drop-off lay and beyond which other things, God knows what things, were alive and real, shooting into light you could scarcely see.
Out there, Cal knew, they would be beyond the tumult of the break line and the turbid, brown water of the shallows, past even the green of the lava holes and, because it was already July, outside the coral bloom that began along the structures at the surface and persisted until the reef gave off, where the substrate of the ocean floor bent down into the gloom.
Cal had dived out there on many occasions, equalizing three times and passing down toward the curve in the coral floor where it arched to a sandy bottom below sixty feet in places and descended across outcroppings from there. From those outcroppings he would turn, his lungs pulled tight while the sun at that depth fell through curved shafts into a set of slung hammocks against the sand. Then he’d sail upward, thrusting with his ankles locked together. Finally, as he rose above fifty feet, the air would begin to boom inside him.
But that had not happened for a while. It had been some time since he’d been down there like that. Perhaps years. In fact, Cal could not recall when he’d last felt alive in a way he’d once taken for granted, testing his body, feeling it wrapped around his mind like cords of energy he could alternately tense and release, tap into. Harold too seemed tired, had been tired, Cal suspected, for perhaps fifteen years. He had been terribly affectionate when they’d first met. Too affectionate, if anything. Making it difficult to sleep. Indeed Harold had been a wonderful lover, a great brute, a hurly-burly. And even now there were spurts of love, periods of grand warmth. But those too, if one thought it over, drew roots from an epoch of earthiness and treachery and reconfirmed belonging that had long passed. So at times it seemed to Cal as if they haunted separate spheres, as if for years he’d been walking slowly into the sea and the tide line was the breaking point where Harold left off and he began.
There was this, though—the impossibility of anything else was what you reached, what you earned. To Cal it seemed hardly conceivable that either of them at this late stage could ever renew or reset. Or be jolted. That too, he’d decided, was a kind of love, deep
and trenching. And like the tide, it made grooves in you.
Now Cal could see Harold stiffen, the looseness in his limbs suddenly disappearing. Harold still held onto his paddle but it was in one hand rather than across his thighs and the blade dragged into the water, slicing the surface insignificantly. He was shifted awkwardly in his seat, craning his neck.
“Gone,” said Harold bemusedly, and Cal turned the kayak so they could see behind them, in the direction of the shore.
“I suppose so,” he agreed, not wishing to disturb the fact that they had alit here silently as though atop a wide sky, that they’d settled in the water as if on spreading boughs that were invisible and belonged to nothing.
“Christ,” blurted Harold suddenly, but Cal was not sure why.
Now they both stared outward and to the west, squinting, and were motionless. The wind was already coming down, eddying elsewhere, stirring beyond the bay somewhere in the offing before it would stiffen again just as they lay back to sleep in the small bed beside tall, screened windows that faced the sea.
Cal dipped his paddle and shoved them forward, farther from shore, watching Harold, who was still swiveling, scanning the surface, and looking downward into water at last clear and deep.
When the shark came, it was from behind and beneath them, rising and sweeping under the kayak from the back. Its bulk was perhaps a yard under their feet at its closest, the dorsal fin alone filling much of that space. It was just to the starboard, coming below their right hands and passing massively, for a long time, the snout abrupt, then the black, intelligent eye, gills vulnerable and white on their ruffling insides, and the skin mottled by huge, broken swatches of dun. The upper lobe of the tail was what moved, long and smooth like a sail.
Cal could not see the look on Harold’s face. He had not thought of Harold in the moment it took for the shark to pass. He himself was elated, as though a soft electric current had swept through him, had coursed through his insides, and he wanted to touch Harold, to make sure he too had felt this thing, this immensity.
“Fifteen, maybe sixteen feet,” he shouted to Harold. But Harold was already falling. Having twisted around in his seat, his hands to his right along the thin rim of the kayak shell that lacked the deep gunwale of a dinghy, Harold had jerked himself forward to see the broad swath of the tail glide beneath him. Now, for an instant, he was curved sideways, grappling to regain his balance, hips hulked dangerously out away from his shoulders and left hand shooting to grab his seat. It was too late. Harold’s bulk took him right, nearly overturning the kayak. Harold himself plunged into the sea, his shoulder in first then his jowls and head then the heavy rest of him, all of it disappearing for a moment before the pale back of the neck showed and he was bobbing at the surface, hallooing and monstrous, pouncing for the kayak as though there were something below him to leap from, tossing out his arms and letting them flop into the hollow below his seat before he was sinking back down again, returning to the ocean with his great throat sputtering and eyes in the waves.
Cal could see a moment of horror in Harold’s face that held all moments. This, after all, was why you swam in the sea—the thought flashed in Cal’s mind—so there was an element of readiness about you. As Harold had no experience of sharks, his legs, Cal imagined, would feel like bloodied meat, seeping even before their butchery, and Harold must sense them now hung languidly down for slaughter.
“Harold—reach out and take your paddle,” yelled Cal. Unlike other pairs who’d invented bedroom names or other flip endearments, he and Harold through a kind of tacit formality and his own inveterate shyness had never taken such license. Now Cal leaned forward but could not quite reach Harold’s paddle bumping on the surface of the blue ocean away from them.
“Swim out and grab your paddle, Harold.” But it was like talking to a fool. Harold was clamoring madly, stabbing for a hold of his seat in the kayak with both hands and pulling the rim violently to the starboard.
Cal leaned left to balance him and began to crawl toward the bow in an attempt to gain a purchase on Harold’s broad shoulders and heave him back aboard. But before he’d gone far he realized he would not have the strength to lift a man as big as Harold, and Harold, he knew, would soon spend himself in his panic and turn listless and dead-weighted. For now, the kayak wobbled dangerously as Harold flailed and vainly sought a handhold, an oarlock, at last a gunwale that was not there.
“Stop splashing,” shouted Cal. “It will attract the shark.”
And Harold ceased, already exhausted, his eyes bright and strange, contaminated with fright in a way that Cal had not witnessed in anyone, that did not fit with what he’d known. Initially he’d thought to drag Harold beside the boat, to paddle him into the safety of the reef structures. But now he changed course.
“I’m going to flip it,” he hollered. And Cal grabbed hold of the right rim of the kayak and shifted his weight to the left, letting himself splash down into the ocean on the far side of Harold and pulling the kayak with him until it was inverted. He guessed that the shark would be near, that there had been too much commotion for it not to circle and return, so he dove down several feet beneath the tide wash and gazed out, scanning into the water, his vision mask-less and bleary, before he lifted his head to surface.
“Now we’ll get on together,” Cal said more quietly, “at the same time,” trying to reach Harold with his eyes, Harold whom he could not see, as the broad yellow plastic of the kayak, built for tourists and novices, rounded out above the level of his vision. He weighted the back end and, to his surprise, there was Harold on the far side at the front, coughing and pulling himself up onto the inverted bow until the two of them were lying awkwardly in a line, facing the western horizon and the deep sea, their legs straddling the plastic and splayed out, chests full on the kayak bottom, and the whole enterprise sunk a foot, or a foot and a half, below the rocking surface of the waves.
Cal saw that Harold had a paddle wedged beneath his armpit. Cal had lost his own paddle, not thinking to grab it before he’d turned the kayak, and he cursed himself now for this omission. But Harold must have found it. Somehow, it must have floated to him. In any case, Harold had a grip on the paddle now, had shifted it into his right hand, and, to Cal looking across Harold’s back toward the crown of his head, his partner seemed suddenly armed, as though he were preparing for something, girding for battle.
“If it comes to it, go for the butt of the snout and the eyes,” Cal whispered. “If you can manage it, jab at the face, strike him above the mouth.”
But Harold looked to be concentrating on the water just in front of him, fixated on something that Cal, from his vantage, couldn’t quite make out.
“Stay close to the boat whatever happens,” Cal went on. “We make a larger shape together.”
Perhaps thirty seconds or another minute slipped by like this, with them lying on their chests, grasping the overturned kayak as though they were riding a wobbling missile through the air, their bodies largely submerged, the water covering their backs, and their heads moving on a swivel, eyes on both men scanning, feet and even knees hung more deeply in the sea on one side of the kayak or the other, then pulled up hastily, then dropped down again for balance.
“Stay quiet with your legs if he comes. Lift them out and shift them away from him.”
But Harold gave no indication, had given no indication, that he could hear Cal speaking from behind him in the stillness. He remained fixated on the water in front of the kayak, as though spinner dolphins were circling in the brilliant blue beneath them. Cal remembered that spinners and tigers were famously ill disposed to one another, that they were enemies. He thought perhaps in the winter they would laugh about all of this, the two of them holding one another on the beach like they had done regularly in those first years after his inheritance, basking in their good fortune. Harold, who was always more voluble in company, whom Cal would watch shyly and admire, would tell the neighbors the outrageous story of their humping a kayak and Cal woul
d search out pieces of olivine in the sand and pile them on Harold’s stomach while it rumbled and shook as he came to the part about dolphins. Perhaps, he thought, there were spinners beneath them now.
As the shark rose, its dorsal slit the surface evenly, sixty feet in front of them, without the conspicuous swivel that would suggest aggression. He was moving on them directly, however, in a line. Cal could see the large scythe of the tail working well behind the dorsal and breaking the surface at intervals on either side of the body. The sun was in their eyes as the shark came in and what they could glimpse was limited by the glare. Though Cal could not make out the head just yet, he knew where it was in the water.
“Coming,” he whispered to Harold. “Stay steady.”
The shark left its course and built a slow circle, perhaps fifteen feet in its radius, and now Cal, as the shark made its first pass to his port side, could clearly see the eye, which was round and jet black and seemed to stare at him directly. It was a magnificent eye, old and patient. Then it was behind him and though the shark finished its circle and completed one more, Cal did not see the eye again but was caught instead by the ravaged field of the skin, by opalescent scars ripped above the mouth and tattering the left ventral fin, by the breadth of the fish in its middle where it was wide as his Toyota, and by the tiger swatches, faded and worn and making the sides pass on and on, shapeless, great decorated walls that narrowed only after a long time to the tail.
When Cal watched the shark veer after its two circles and start to swing its tail wide, he barked, “No,” but by then it was already in on Harold with its body arched upward and the head lifted nearly out of the water and Harold was falling backward and off to the left, the whole bow of the kayak momentarily jerked down from great weight and Cal himself raised up, grasping for the plastic as he came off into the sea then clumsily stroking for the stern and hauling himself back on before finally, reinstalled and safe, searching wildly for Harold, who had disappeared.
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