With that thought he looked up, hoping for a whale, but the pod he’d seen earlier, spouting plumes of mist, had swum southwest, out of sight in the direction of Kaena Point. Backlit by the afternoon sun, the point was a dark headland, afloat in the gleaming sea.

Satisfied with food, warmed by coffee, bathed in sunshine, he snoozed again, sweating and seal-like, and when he was rested he got his goggles from the car and swam out beyond the rocks, upraised on sea foam like tabletops, that gave the beach its name. He drifted awhile among schools of darting fish until he saw, just below the surface, a green sea turtle nibbling at the moss that clung to the pitted rocks.

The turtle was not alarmed, though its side eye widened on the flat of its head when Sharkey approached. It set its hooked parrot beak against the rocks, nagging at the weedy growth, and it rose and drifted with the incoming swell. Sharkey saw how its flippers were positioned like wings, which it slowly beat in the luminous water, and doing so it seemed to soar without effort, a slimy green manhole cover tipping itself weightlessly out to sea.

That’s how I fly in my dreams, Sharkey realized, seeing the turtle lift itself away from the spiked shelves of black rock and move its flippers slowly, angling itself, not a manhole cover anymore but big and buoyant, rising like a fat beaky bird with four wings.

The swell had increased; the waves were much higher than they’d been in the morning—one pushed Sharkey so near the rocky reef that he had to fight to avoid being tumbled against it. So he dived into the swell and swam out, but as he did his foot struck the sharp face of the reef, and he knew from the sting of saltwater that he’d slashed his toe.

Positioning himself at the widest opening, he body-surfed through the slot between the rocks on a rolling wave and made it to the beach in one ride. There he sat, clutching his toe, until the blood stopped flowing through his fingers. And he laughed, seeing that the cut was near the wound the goose claw had made.

No one was surfing the toppling white crests at Rubber Duckies now, no one was swimming; the waves were twice the size they’d been earlier in the day—the surf forecast he’d heard in the morning was proving accurate. Fifteen-foot faces here meant higher waves at Waimea, just around the point of land in the next bay.