“Let’s see,” the old man said, tapping a yellow fingernail on the menu. Then he grunted. “It say here that rabbit and rat not compatible.”

“Yo, heinous!” Sharkey said, and laughed, and wondered if anyone would notice he was stoned. “What a shame.”

Winston said, “Maybe a blessing.”

Slightly dazed from smoking the joint, Sharkey remembered a fragment of what he had planned to say to the old man. He turned to Winston and spread his arms for drama and said, “You have nothing to fear from me, man.”

The pakalolo had deafened him, and he could not tell whether Winston, or anyone, had heard. No one reacted, though he’d meant it as a thunderous statement.

May was seated next to her brother, and Sharkey saw that they were holding hands.

“Or you, Bunny,” Sharkey said, and felt the need for more smoke. “I’m going outside. Don’t wait for me.”

13

Naming a Wave

A notion that made Sharkey laugh was to name a place, any place on earth—Paraguay, Albania, Baluchistan—and the Hawaiian surfer, innocent on his tiny islands far from the world, looked hopeful and asked, “Got waves there?” But Sharkey could be innocent too, and that was how he heard there was a wave at Christmas Island. He was certain that it hadn’t been ridden, at least not by anyone on the tour, because the wave had no name.

The mention had been casual, not the explosive blurt of a surfer with news of a big swell but offhand, from a fisherman he met, who’d flown down from Honolulu, the only route to Christmas Island, seeking bonefish in the flats of the lagoon.

“At the harbor mouth of the atoll, pretty awesome—rocked my boat.”

“So you could surf it into the lagoon?”

“I guess.”

Sharkey was reassured by this vagueness: a surfer would have known for sure. Sharkey wanted to know. The island now seemed virginal for its unnamed wave, a blue plow blade sliding in from the sea.

It was the spring of his biggest achievement so far, as the youngest winner of the Pipeline Masters. He used his prize money to buy a ticket. He zipped his board into its padded bag, triumphant in his second trip away from Hawaii, to surf the wave and maybe to name it. And at the end of the three-hour flight he pressed his face to the window as the plane banked for its descent. The island was shaped like a bulky magnifying glass, with a thick crusted coral handle, the lagoon serving as the lens, glacial milky blue, a smooth vitreous pool of magic in contrast to the dark ocean around it, frothy and windblown. In the distance, at the break in the reef, a rolling wave lifted, white-maned, and—he was still squinting—no one on it.