He was already in his shorts, and the day was so warm he didn’t bother putting on a T-shirt. His board was strapped to the roof rack from yesterday. He drove down the hill to Three Tables Beach, and parked, and waxed his board. He studied the sets rising outside the break they called Rubber Duckies, the way they lifted and rolled in, staying whole and smooth-faced until they smashed against the wall of lava rock at the shore and cascaded down its fissures.

That rock wall, with its spikes of eroded and pitted boulders, was the reason most surfers avoided this spot. There was no beach, no sand, nowhere to crawl ashore. In places it had the look of a shattered Gothic steeple, carved to sharpness among broken gargoyles and stone ornaments. Surfing on the Côte Basque, Sharkey had seen such gray steeples in Brittany, and there the beaches were rocky too, looking tumbled with old cathedral stone. Linger a fraction too long here at Rubber Duckies, or wipe out at the end of a ride, and you were dashed against the spikes of bulking lava. He had seen surfers lacerated on the stones, their arms and faces torn and bloody from a badly timed run and a face-plant. He always surfed alone, and the danger, the knowledge that mainly kooks surfed here, assured him of solitude.

But he saw two surfers seated on their boards on a swell. He paddled out, duck-diving beneath incoming white waves, tucking the nose of his board down, and joined them in the lineup. He greeted them as he sat, legs dangling in the water, rising on the incoming swell like a man on a horse.

“How’s it?”

They nodded and he took them to be newcomers, mainlanders, or perhaps foreigners.

“Were you out yesterday?” he asked. “It was okay. But it’s coming up.”

One said, “First time,” with an accent, probably Brazilian.

They had no idea who he was, and he smiled, enjoying the novelty of their not knowing him, of his bobbing on the wave with them as a stranger.

And so instead of taking the next good wave he hung back and swayed on the swell, letting it lift him, so that he could watch the other two paddle into the wave and surf it. One of them missed it; the second tipped himself into the face and caught a ride, surfing it almost to the rocks. And when the man lost his balance at the end and a wave behind him slapped his back, he snatched at his board and saved himself by swimming hard away from the pitted lava rock, blackened from the seawater streaming across its serrations.