The boy garlanded with leis seemed to imagine that he gave off a glow—of youth, of virility, of success and sunshine—and heads were turned toward him, his mass of blond curls and blue eyes. He was as yet too young to be tattooed. But for him no one else in the room mattered. He was new to attention but already so used to it that he expected it, believing he deserved it, and would have been puzzled if anyone else in the room had been praised.

Sharkey was fascinated. Something about that callow kid, he thought to himself—he couldn’t take his eyes off him. What was it? A tug of recognition, someone he vaguely knew, a way of standing—his posture, a resemblance to . . . who? Sharkey watched, nagged by not knowing why he was watching, but perhaps in the way a man stares at a much younger and beautiful woman who he knows is indifferent to him, who he will never see again—a glimpse of the unattainable, a black pearl the size of an acorn in a velvet box in a jeweler’s window.

He had gone away smiling, thinking, That boy has no idea of the disappointments that lie ahead of him. He believes that he can ride any wave he wants, entice any woman with a nod, find any surf break in the world. And why, Sharkey thought, am I so rueful? He knew him. I was that boy.

Those two incidents a few weeks apart. And there were the dogs. Sharkey was sitting in his house drinking a cup of coffee he’d just brewed and heard a thumping, heavy paws beating on wood, two dogs loping past the window on the wood planks of the lanai, their heads lifted just above the sill as they bounded past.

He had hurried out to chase them away but they were off the lanai by then, side by side, a pale one and a dark one, short-haired, no collars. What was stranger than their sudden appearance was that they had not barked. If they hadn’t been so heavy he would not have heard them, so there was something ghostly about their suddenness, bursting into view, then vanishing. They’d run with their mouths gaping, their thick tongues twisted out of their jaws, in pursuit of—what?

They had bounded up the hill, out of sight, when Sharkey remembered his geese, and he ran barefoot up the grassy slope, snatching a rake he’d seen leaning against a rail. As he ran, a flock of birds came his way—the two ducks, three geese, the peacock, even some startled chickens, all apparently flushed by the dogs. But when he got to the top of the hill the dogs had gone; he could not tell whether they’d fled left or right, off his property.