Though his schoolwork was good and the Punahou teachers were patient, he was ignored or snubbed by the other students and had yet to make a friend. But he said nothing about that to his mother, who concluded from his good marks on exams that all was well. Nor did she know that he surfed at Magic Island most afternoons, even when he claimed he was swimming at the pool or engaged in school projects. Surfing was another secret, because he loved it, and because he was still learning and did not think he was a good enough surfer to tell anyone.

Each time his father came home he was reminded of the man, how he looked, how he talked, how he’d have to get used to him again. His brutal haircuts, buzzed close to his head, showed his bumpy skull and the white slashes where his scalp had been somehow gouged. And his first words to Joe were usually “You need a haircut.”

“I told him, but he wouldn’t listen,” Joe’s mother said in a sorrowful voice.

“And let’s see those hands.”

His father snatched at his fingers, twisting each one to get a look at the fingernails, usually bitten, to his father’s rage—a grunt of disgust as he flung them down.

Joe knew when he was standing next to him that his father was average height and slim, but he carried himself with authority, his steely order-giving voice demanding attention. When he was home he seemed to fill the house, as though his aura, which was both light and shadow, enlarged him. He never laughed. He said little about Vietnam except “There’s no war,” and to the next obvious question, “It’s a pacifying operation, Joe. I’m commanding a unit of advisers,” and he paused, and ended the discussion in a tone of muffled secrecy: “Special Forces.”

The other reminder—making the man bigger—each time he came home was his father’s odor, a tangle of aromas that clung to him, this thickness of odors another enlargement. He smoked, he drank—the burned, stale smell of Lucky Strikes, the smack like a sharpness of sour sugar that was whiskey on his breath. Not a human smell at all, it made him seem oddly edible. And it produced a gagging moment of suffocation when Joe was hugged.

Of the house in Manoa, his father said, “This is how the rest of the population lives.” He cocked his head as though looking at a crowd. “Civilians.” Of Punahou, he said, “Private school. Never thought we’d be able to afford it on my salary.”

“It’s got a pool,” Joe said. “Better than Radford’s.”

“Good school. You’ll have a great shot at making the academy.”