To avoid the long drive from town he rented a room in a house near Rocky Point, surfed at Velzyland on his days off, and sneaked girls into the room for . . . what? To him it was never more than play, and for the girls too; blameless, joyous, brief.

He was with a girl on the late afternoon his mother stopped by the beach. His mother was with a man he’d never seen before.

“Puamana, this is my mother.”

“Glad to meet you,” his mother said. And to the man, “This is my son, Joe.”

“Jamie Kunzler,” the man said. “I was in your father’s outfit in ’Nam, running recon patrols.”

“Jamie wants to talk to you about school,” his mother said.

“I’m done with school,” Sharkey said.

“You’ll be in good shape with a high school diploma.”

“I’m in good shape without one.”

“Can’t enlist without one,” the man said. “But if you get one and join up, the army will look after you. Put you through college on the GI Bill. That’s pretty much a free ride.”

His mother stared, saying Answer that with her severe gaze.

Sharkey said, “The Colonel—my dad—said we were just helping out in Vietnam. Advisers. Recon. But now there’s all kinds of fighting. He didn’t see that. A lot of guys are getting killed, and lots of injured men are at Tripler. I don’t want to go.”

“You don’t want to help your country.”

“Ever ask yourself, ‘Why are we dying there?’” Sharkey said. Then he smiled. “My dad said they got waves.”

The man winced, and what angered Sharkey was that his mother was on the man’s side—a new man, a new date—and not on his.

“Think of your future,” she said. “What will you do?”

Sharkey was holding his board, standing near Puamana. Now he put his arm around her waist and drew her to him, and he faced his mother, who had edged away from Jamie Kunzler, who stood, hands behind his back, at ease.

“This,” Sharkey said.

12

The Year of the Rat

The distant boy appeared climbing onto his outthrust board at the lip of the wave at Pipeline just before sunset—half the western sky glowing dusty pink, the light whittling his body small. He crouched on the board and dropped in and cut left, scissoring the face of the wave.