But Uncle Sunshine still had a grip on his shoulder. He said, “Take a look at those boys. I know boys like that. I know they get you pakalolo, and maybe other drugs like speed or batu. But what I want you to do is look at them good, look at their faces, look at their rotten teeth and bad skin and fatness. You buy drugs from people who look like that, you guarantee end up looking just like them.”

Sharkey was still considering the pace of the incoming waves, the slosh and drop and regularity of them. But he had heard.

“So you want to look like that?”

Sharkey reached for his board and leaned on it.

“Not now,” Uncle Sunshine said, and slotted the board into the rack, then walked with Sharkey to the shore and led him into the water, going deeper, steadying him while a wave broke over him, and making him stagger with the force of its collapse, dousing his head.

6

Rehearsals

After that sudden spell in the water, which was less a baptism than a near drowning, Uncle Sunshine dragged Sharkey to the sand and wouldn’t let him go near the water. “You out of shape. You will drown. You will shame youself. You will shame me,” the man said. He was spidery, with slick lizardy skin and squinting eyes, his fingers and toes pickled from constant soaking in seawater. An old man, but he was tougher than Sharkey, a new side of him just revealed—a benign bully, an intimidator to Wilfred and the others.

He saw what the man was made of, the inside of the man, like the inside of Hawaii: no sweetness, but the sinew and survival skills of an islander; and suspicion. He understood sharply the obvious truth, that people have two sides, that the islands just beneath the shaggy green surface were not earth but black rock, that the inner life of Hawaii was molten lava.

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Stay away from those more worse so-called friends . . .”

It was what the Colonel would have said.

“. . . and stay away from the surf.”

This was at the Beach Boys’ surf stand at Waikiki, after dark on a school night. And behind those words he heard the big surf crashing in the distance like something solid moving downhill, a slow and interminable avalanche.