As for the rest, the island was narrow beaches and coconut palms, some smudges of villages, a perimeter road without vehicles, no large buildings, a place outside time but with a landing strip much wider and longer than he’d expected.

Off the plane, onto the glare of the tarmac, the passengers awaited their luggage—mostly older men, some of them islanders in white shirts and long pants, and a contingent of fishermen in khaki shorts traveling together. The luggage yanked from the plane was piled in the sunshine to be claimed. A woman standing apart, a brown Madonna in a billowy green long-sleeved dress that reached to her ankles, holding a baby, was trying to get the attention of one of the porters, who was intent on retrieving a duffel bag for a fisherman.

Sharkey caught her eye. But a man in an aloha shirt stepped between them. “Can I help you?”

“That box”—she gestured with the baby—“it mine.”

Sharkey watched as the man seized the heavily taped cardboard box.

“It my toaster.”

“And there’s your bread,” the man said with a grim smile—a large carton labeled as forty loaves of white bread from a Honolulu bakery. Fresh-Baked, Home-Sliced. The Taste of the Isles.

Then the man turned to Sharkey and said, “Congratulations.”

Sharkey smiled to cover his confusion.

“I saw you at the Pipe,” the man said. “You killed it. Gerry didn’t do too bad either.”

“Thanks.”

“You guys have youth on your side.”

Saying that, the man sounded rueful. He wore flip-flops, board shorts, his feet dirty, his nose burned, but he had the broad shoulders and slim sinewy legs of a surfer, and though his hair was wild it was thick and sun-scorched, and when he extended his hard-knuckled fingers—showing a pale, peeling, almost amphibious paw—Sharkey knew he was a waterman.

He shook hands, the complex Masonic grip of North Shore surfers, but resented being compared with Gerry Lopez, whom he felt he’d outscored on the day.

“Doc Bowers,” the man said.

“I know why you’re here,” Sharkey said.

The doubting way the man cocked his head and smiled reminded Sharkey of how the older surfers had always regarded him until he’d proved himself at the Pipeline. The old have a special smile they use on the young, and it is the more pitying and patronizing when nothing more is said.

So Sharkey said, “This your first time here?”

“They only started regular flights here a year ago,” the man said, and when Sharkey didn’t ask why, he added, “I’ve been looking at the weather. When there’s a big southerly swell, like now, that wave’s insane.”