Hawaiian dots, many of them like pinpricks, a constellation of them on his fingers, and balancing that pattern the Southern Cross on his right foot, below an anklet of dolphins. Tattoos hammered into his skin, rat-tatted with blunt inky spikes in Tahiti and Samoa and poked into him with a chattering needle in Santa Cruz and Recife and Cape Town; Devanagari script from India, a lozenge that looked Egyptian, single words, like the name on the meat of his thumb—an old girlfriend? Olive had finally asked him, but no. “My mother,” and he seemed lovable saying that.

“Your mum,” she said. She cocked her head at him and kissed him. “Your muvva.”

Perhaps, she thought, the whole of his life was inked across his body, that she’d know him better by studying his skin. He was hearty, and twenty-four years older, but the lover she’d longed for, passionate but secure and successful enough not to intrude in her privacy. She wanted to be loved, but not possessed. Sharkey was too self-absorbed and fanatical about surfing to be possessive.

He stirred; he seemed to know, hyperalert in his nakedness, that he was being observed—and perhaps felt her warm breath on him. Then he turned over and saw that she was wide awake, hovering; he kissed her, embraced her, her small warm breasts fitting his hands.

Sharkey loved to sleep, because his sleep, like the saturation of a drug, was so much like drifting in the ocean, toppling and bobbing like flotsam, and he was, as they said in Hawaii, a waterman, the Shark.

In his house in the woods, on a bluff above the sea, he lay buoyant in sleep, levitated in noiseless night and darkness. There he hovered, tremulous with the ripple in his sinuses of small snores—hours of that, until in the aqueous shallows of slumber the day got into his dreams. Someone must have mentioned surfing while stoned or asked him if the story was true, or repeated it to him—of his eating mushrooms and paddling into the surf at Waimea in the dark, and the rest of it, swimming on his board out to sea for safety and ending up thrashing ashore beyond Pipeline, the old tale haunting him in his dreams.

He was so expert a big-wave surfer that stories like that—his own fictions, the wilder exaggerations of others that were attributed to him—added to his fame and made him a legend. His admirers were the most inventive, eager to improve upon their hero.