Sharkey watched with pleasure as though seeing his younger self rejoicing and riding, the small brown buoyant boy in the hollow of the water, racing left, jamming the board down in a well-timed bottom turn and carving upward as he climbed to the foaming lip again and spun, sweeping the board across the curling wave, just escaping the collapse of the overhang in a cutback that took him into the sliding trough. There he attempted to carve upward, and swiveling, he toppled, holding his head. Lost in the froth and boil of broken water, he appeared again, chased by his board, tumbled in the shore break.

“He’s not bad,” Sharkey said.

His new surf buddy, Skippy Lehua, said, “Wahine.”

Sharkey laughed, walking down the beach and seeing the small breasts in the wet shirt, the pretty mouth, the too-big board shorts.

“Surf bunny,” Skippy said.

But before Sharkey got to her she’d hurried up the beach to her pile of clothes and changed into her dry T-shirt. She was Chinese, small, deeply tanned, her black hair cut short, strands of it burned reddish by the sun.

“You almost wiped out on the reef,” Sharkey said.

“I never wipe out. I seen the reef. I bailed.” She looked him up and down; she hadn’t stopped frowning. “You worry I do a face-plant?”

“I’ve done plenty there,” he said. “How do you think I got this nose?”

“Normal haole nose,” she said.

But his talk was simply to detain her while he studied her. Close up he could see she was older than she’d seemed at a distance, a young woman rather than a girl, with slender arms and legs, her shoulders just a little muscular for someone her size, her face catlike and compact, her short hair still plastered to her scalp like a skullcap. She was small and so slim, no wonder he’d taken her for a boy.

Her sweet face and delicate features were in contrast to her tight muscles, flexing now as she rocked on her heels and grasped the leash of her board with her bare toes, passing it with her foot to her hand.

“Monkey,” he said.

She laughed—lovely teeth. “My father, he calls me that.”

“I want to meet your dad,” he said suddenly, and he was not sure why.

She tilted her head at the unexpected remark and scowled. Lit by the setting sun, one eye was tightly shut against the glare.

“You know me?”

“Not yet,” he said. “But you’re just in time.”

“For what?”

“Pakalolo. Beer. Grinds. Whatever.”

“You don’t want to meet my dad,” she said. “You a bad influence.”

But she sat on the sand with him while he lit a joint and sucked on it and held the smoke in his lungs, gasping a little.

She said, “That fat one cost you, what? Ten bucks?”

“Five,” he grunted, still trying to hold the smoke in.