Chapters (54)
Doc sighed, and as he did Sharkey saw the island anew, as if for the first time. He had been thinking only of the wave and the best way to approach it. Nothing else had mattered to him. But now he was seeing the island with Doc’s eyes, another place entirely, and he wished he had not known.
He had always surfed alone. History and customs and holidays didn’t interest him, except when they impeded his surfing. He was proud of surfing every Christmas Day—the surf was always up in December. “Surf is my religion.”
He did not want to know what Doc knew. He told himself that Doc was trying to impress him. Doc was a dropout, and like most dropouts he retained his old instincts and habits. He was not a competitive single-minded surfer. Doc’s problem was that he knew too much.
But the next day, Doc with a newly bandaged foot helped him carry his board down the slipway, and he watched like a proud parent as Sharkey paddled out to the wave and sat rocking on the back of the swell, now and then riding it, exploding through the barrel.
And for Sharkey the wave was pure and ageless and eternal; no matter how badly the island had been abused, the wave remained the same, unspoiled, the same shape it had been centuries before, when it had rocked the sailing ship of Captain James Cook. Sharkey surfed for the remainder of his week on Christmas Island, claiming the wave as his own, rejoicing in it. Now and then he saw Doc onshore, a tiny figure in an aloha shirt sitting on the pier.
He saw that he’d been wrong—wrong about Doc. Wrong about the island, wrong in his judgments and his sarcasm, wrong about himself. But in this small, flat, crusted, and contaminated atoll, humming with flies, the itch of dog fur rising from its rotting coconuts, its littered beaches and reeking villages—the glowering man with the big oily fingers—in all this the wave was a muscle of water that lifted him and carried him forward, a thing deserving of a name. The wave at least was pure. He hadn’t been wrong about that.
One of those nights, stinking of diesel and chattering with the racket of the bar’s generator, under the glare of fluorescent tubes, Sharkey fist-bumped Doc and said, “Call it Jimmy’s.”