Mistrustful of friendship, he did not know how to be a friend. And his idea of fatherhood was absolute authority, a giver of orders. But that suited Joe, who obeyed, and he knew that as long as his father commanded him, issuing orders, and Joe carried them out, his father would be appeased and would not ask for more. And the satisfaction for Joe was that because he was an order-taker—“Yes, sir”—his father would never know him, never know his secrets, his worries, his sadness, his weaknesses, his shortcomings; because he was obedient. And his father never asked.

No sooner had his father established a routine in Hawaii for a week or two—“Get a haircut,” regular meals, drinking and smoking in the armchair, an evening dinner at the officers’ mess at Fort DeRussy—then he was gone, always swiftly, always first thing in the morning, always unexpectedly; and another life resumed, Joe’s mother brooding.

So Joe knew that he could not depend on him, and it was just as well his father didn’t know him, because he would have been disappointed; he might have raged.

Joe’s grades faltered. He tried out for the water polo team and, though he was a good swimmer, didn’t make it, because water polo was not just about swimming: it involved thrashing for the ball, and shouting, and a rowdiness he could not muster among strangers. This failure added to his sense of being an outsider—no other boys from Fort Shafter attended Punahou. But there were boys he recognized as misfits like himself—the geeks, the jokers, the surfers.

They had one thing in common, smoking pakalolo. Being stoners was their secret and their bond, and it made them a team of outlaws. With this secret they were loyal to each other. Smoking was their shared activity, and as it was always covert, it amounted to a ritual.

The Punahou teachers were proud of the school; they spoke of it with fondness, remarking on its traditions and its heritage. They emphasized how lucky the students were to be studying there and how they had to live up to the reputation of this great institution. “Be true to the Buff ’n Blue!”

All this emotion was bewildering to Sharkey; Punahou was a name, nothing more, and the way the teachers and older students spoke of it mystified him and made them seem silly and sentimental. He was used to students hating school or satirizing it, not praising it. The boys at Radford, most of them military children, were a rough crowd who regarded the teachers as irrational and overbearing—people to avoid or subvert with pranks. But Punahou teachers were at pains to stress their friendship with the students, and any suggestion that a teacher could be friendly with a student made Sharkey suspicious.

“I tell my men I am not your friend—I am your commanding officer,” his father, the Colonel, said. This made sense to Sharkey.