A fisherman stood on the beach, whipping a line from his long pole, casting it in successive slashes until with a scissoring sound it looped and plopped in the trough beyond the surf zone, where the water glittered like fish scales. Nearer the shore, small children pretended they were drowning, screeching for help, startling the plovers strutting at the edge, where the slop of the small waves seemed to speak to Sharkey in cautioning stammers.

Seeing the swirl of the bits of broken coral, Sharkey backed away. Rolled in the agitated shore break, the coral was smoothed and made small, knuckles chalk-white from the beating of sun and sea, sluiced together in a great mass, and not like coral at all but a gathering of sea-whitened bones separated from a lost body, a skeleton somewhere, and smashed and smoothed in the greenish stir of a tide pool, among sea blooms and the gray fur of algae on the slabs of lava rock.

It was a broken skeleton rattling in the black sea wrack of the shore break. Sharkey stepped away from it. The push of small waves beat a froth of bubbly spittle in a ridge that straggled along the dark sand near the chips and splinters of bone-white coral. Sharkey was startled by the accusatory sound of the bones in the water, lisping at him. The sea had always spoken to him, but never so severely, nagging with the monotony of malice.

“No,” he said distinctly, shielding himself with his hand. “Never.”

But the single syllables of the slop and the sight of bleached bones and clicking knuckles were inescapable. He stepped back from what he took to be the complaint of a broken man he vaguely knew, his corpse washed ashore, all his bones scattered.

“Joe, you’ve got to hear this,” Olive said as he approached the little camp from the beach.

“Going home,” he said in a haunted voice, and walked past her to the car.

9

A Dog Off His Leash

In the morning, exhausted by the shocks in his dreams—always over the falls into heavy water, under the wave, and suffocating just before he woke—his body was like clay. But he was grateful for sunlight. After he got up and sat in his rocker on the lanai, soothed by green tea Olive had brewed (“Cuppa,” she said, and kissed him), he became alert to the sounds of the morning, the roosters’ crowing, the twisted chirp of the myna birds, and the geese fussing, a chorus of competing squawks beneath the house. The fragrant breeze rattled the bamboos, in the blaze of sunshine the dew winked on drooping grass blades. But he thought, Why am I so sad?

“I promised we’d go back,” Olive said.

Sharkey shut his eyes as though to expel a memory. He said, “Fonoti, from long ago. Crazy Samoan.”

“He told me what happened to you at school—the gang. He said he was sorry.”