And now and then a Japanese tourist, a girl usually, perhaps not hearing or not understanding—or heedless—was knocked over by the push of a wave and slipped and was dragged away by its outgoing wash, and Sharkey leaped from his tower, carrying a float and a coil of rope. He dashed down the beach and dived for her, encircling her with his arm across her chest so that she lay on her back against his hip, and brought her to shore.

The first time it happened, it set off a series of events that changed him. A Japanese girl in a yellow dress was swept out. He swam for her. He stayed with her and she clung to him, sobbing, Sharkey whispering to calm her while her friends fretted at a distance. And feeling the softness of her flesh, the tremor of her helplessness, Sharkey was aroused. He had not touched a girl since the last time with Nalani, and had longed to. But Nalani had a new baby and all the desirable girls had boyfriends.

Soaked, moaning in fear, her thin dress clinging to her slender body and the outline of the seams of her underwear, her hair tangled and her face crumpled in terror, the rescued girl at Ali‘i Beach looked naked and powerless, and, sobbing on the hot sand, with Sharkey kneeling over her, she seemed sacrificial.

When she recovered and dried her face and sat up, she seemed ashamed of what she’d done—touching him, holding him in the water. She hid her face, and then ran to her friends and was gone.

But that experience, the drama of rescue, grasping the girl’s body and hugging it, gave him the choking sensation, the wordless clumsy groping he came to know as desire, and he wanted more.

“I heard you wen’ done a rescue,” Eddie said later in the week, at their Friday pau hana—beers on the beach. “That’s good. That goes on your record. That’s big points for you.” And peered closely at Sharkey. “You no look happy, brah.”

“She made me horny,” Sharkey said.

Eddie laughed at the unexpected word.

They were sitting cross-legged in a circle, Sharkey, Eddie, and four other lifeguards, at the far end of the beach at Waimea, where they met every Friday at sundown to see the green flash, to drink beer, to smoke pakalolo, to talk story—seldom stories about being a lifeguard, usually about the surf: was it rising, was it dropping, was a new swell expected?