I’m sick, he told himself. I’m going surfing. I’ll feel better in the water, I’ll get well.

The surf at Waimea was head-high and clean, but even so he decided on the simpler predictable break at Pua‘ena Point in Hale‘iwa. He felt better driving down Kam Highway and promised himself a good day. When he parked he vowed not to look at the scrape on the fender, but a man on an old bike near the wall at the parking lot called out to him.

“Nice ride. Too bad it mess up. You hit one tchree?”

Sharkey shrugged, unstrapping his board, telling himself he didn’t care; but his annoyance was like heat suffusing his body and pressing against his eyes. The man had one leg slung over the bike, and the very sight of the rusted bike, the man clinging to junk, made Sharkey furious.

But he said, “I like it the way it is.”

“Da fender kapakahi. It look humbug.”

Tucking the board under his arm, making for the beach, Sharkey heard the man call out behind him.

“I know one guy do body work. He stay mauka side of ‘Ehukai, near Ted’s Bakery. Can fix, brah.”

The man was still muttering as Sharkey knelt to fasten the leash to his ankle, and then he dropped onto his board and paddled out. So as not to betray his weakness to the man he had marched to the shore and now paddled, asserting himself. But he had not gone far when the effort of it slowed him. The water was chilly, like cold metal against his skin, and the twist in the small of his back that Olive called a spasm kept him thrusting hard with his arms.

Easing up, he lost his momentum and was pushed sideways and slowed by the slap of a low blunt wave like a speed bump. He tried to right himself, lost his grip, and the board crushed with a chewing sound against a coral head. He felt through his fingers on the board the scrape of his fins and hoped they hadn’t snapped. Another set of waves lifted him and helped him straighten, but the force of it took all his attention, so that he couldn’t tell whether the fins were damaged.

He headed for the empty wave of the break, glad that he had it all to himself, because he knew he would be struggling. The sets kept coming, and he rode them, straddling his board, waiting for a likely one, misjudging several before he caught the crest of a good one and was swept up, paddling, and then canted on the face of it, and he stood to surf it. But just as he mounted the board, positioning his feet to angle it, the thing slipped from beneath him, and he could tell as he toppled that two fins were gone and the third broken.