No one asked Sharkey’s secret on the North Shore, where he was always in the water, on a wave or waiting for one. He had done nothing else of value in his life, had quit school at sixteen, avoided Vietnam by using the trauma and disfigurement of his scar to gain a deferment, had never had a girlfriend for more than a few months nor held a job for long—lifeguarding in Hawaii was not a job but rather a privilege and a mission. Surfing was his obsession, but perhaps like other obsessions an evasion, an escape—in his case an escape from dry land.

Water was his natural element—life-giving, offering him buoyancy, weightlessness, purification. Except when attracted to a woman, in a sudden fever of desire, clutching at her, he was a slow talker, clumsy and torpid on land, like the clomping, gasping, flat-footed amphibian that glides so smoothly when it slips into the water and flashes away just beneath the surface.

He was silent in the water, like those creatures, and a talker onshore. Even the surfers he knew well, who’d heard his stories many times, wanted to listen to him tell the same stories again in his slow confident voice, growly from smoking weed, always the same opening, the same pauses and plotty reminders, the familiar dialogue. “You should write them down,” Bingo had once suggested. “No need,” Sharkey said—they were better recited, like folktales, and would be repeated by anyone who heard them. “They give people something to say”—because his listeners were the stammering, inarticulate grommets with goofy smiles, hearing Sharkey tell of the strangeness of the world beyond the islands, or narrow escapes, and brutes, and heavy water, and especially of women. He was the adventurer, whose tattoos illustrated the risks he’d taken, the marvels he’d seen; the explorer, reporting back; the storyteller, the survivor, who always had the answer to the persistent question, “Got waves there?”

He’d flown back to Tahiti and Fillette. That was a story. He’d found a new break in Indonesia, and a woman named Putri. “It means princess,” he said, and described some of their nights, and the danger of their nighttime lovemaking in the land of puritanical believers and honor killing for adultery. Another story. He’d surfed in Cornwall and Spain. “What kine language they speak in those places?” they asked in Hawaii. “And this Cornwall—it’s like some kine country?” They loved hearing stories of islands that were small and seedy, with foot-high dumpy shore breaks, places that proved that Hawaii was the center of the world.