The Colonel moved to the lip of the bluff, in the attitude of reviewing his troops, his khakis glowing yellow in the afternoon sun, his posture, the angle of his head, his visor yanked down, giving him an interrogating look of severity. Because he was wearing sunglasses, his expression was unreadable—he was motionless, enigmatic, peering out to sea, watched by his son, who was rising and falling on the succession of swells. The Colonel was his posture, standing upright, awaiting an order. That was how all soldiers seemed to Sharkey—like men listening for a command, waiting to be told what to do. But studied by Sharkey on his board from the height of the swell, the Colonel looked small and solitary, isolated on the bluff, in a way Sharkey had never seen him before, not like a soldier but like any other man, fragile, decaying in the failing light.

Sharkey tipped his board to catch an oncoming wave, paddled hard to stay on it, then grabbed the rails and got to his feet and rode it, angling himself so that he remained visible to his father until, as the barrel narrowed, he slipped into the foam and swam near to where his father was standing.

“That took guts,” the Colonel said in the car. And when they got home he heard him tell his mother, “He’s a brick.”

Sharkey had never before heard his father praise him with such force; he loved him for it, and despaired of the stink of tobacco smoke and his yellow-stained fingers.

“You’re drown-proof,” the Colonel said the morning he left. “You’re going to be all right.”

A few days later Uncle Sunshine said, “I see you fadda. I checking up on you. I see him and I think, ‘Bugga no need Sunny.’ Just the way you fadda standing I think, he a soldier for sure. And he proud of you. What he doing up there in Vietnam?”

“I asked him. He said, ‘I can’t tell you.’”

“That more worse. It mean really important,” Uncle Sunshine said. “More dangerous, the operation.”

“Helicopters.”

“Gnarly,” Uncle Sunshine said. “I wish I woulda met him, to talk story.”

Uncle Sunshine was more attentive to Sharkey after that, kinder, more concerned, as though taking the Colonel’s place. Sharkey detected something fatherly in Uncle Sunshine’s tone, a note of firmness that was also a note of protection and encouragement, a gruff sort of love. And some days Uncle Sunshine left the Beach Boys and the surfboard stand at Waikiki to paddle across the breaks to Magic Island and watch Sharkey on the waves.

“Loosen up,” Uncle Sunshine said. “The wave not your friend but da kine, companion like. It let you do what you want to do. Don’t fight the wave, don’t try to beat ’um—ride the bugga.”