The family’s constant moves from base to base meant they never had pets bigger than goldfish. Joe scarcely saw a dog except the ones leaping at him from behind a fence, but he was keenly affected by a bark. The choking growl was like an expression of hunger for human flesh; of anger too, being denied it. His sense was less that a dog was going to bite him but rather, given the insistent bark, the dog working its jaws, that the creature was going to seize him with its teeth and chew him and eat him. The mere sound of a dog made him hold himself so still as to be rigid, and he knew he had no protection other than his skinny hands.

He always looked terrified, because the owners, or the people nearby, said, “He won’t hurt you,” and when Joe looked tearful and unconvinced, goggling at the thing, the owner would say, often with a hint of satisfaction, “See? He knows you’re afraid. He can smell your fear.”

He hated them. They sensed his hatred. He had come to love ocean waves and learned to duck under them and bob up behind them. The thump and crush of water, the fetch of wind on it, was like the rhythm of life. Even when he was tumbled in the shore break and his father had to yank him to safety, he held his breath and laughed when it was over. He had no fear of water. He did not mind being alone in the dark—he talked to himself. He climbed to the highest limbs of the trees in his yard and swayed there in the sunshine. He knew how to start a fire. But dogs . . .

They shortened their muscly necks to their shoulders and barked at him from behind fences, leaped at him, making the chain links clatter from the force of their yellow claws and dirty paw pads. They dashed to the limit of their tethers, half throttled by their collars as they reared, standing on their hind legs and threatening him with insistent yelps. Even the ones on leashes that he passed on the sidewalks of the base trotted toward him and sniffed him wickedly, the damp prune-black nose prodding him. Was it his smell of fear, his stiffened fingers, his leaning-away posture? Or that he was new here, a haole boy?

The owners smiled, as though the barks proved their dog’s superior instincts, and they seemed to rejoice in the suggestions of the pet’s wildness, the sense that the dog was powerful and fearless—a protector, courageous in its vigilance, perhaps displaying a feral anger and ferocity that its owner was too timid to show, the barking dog like the manifestation of a hidden self, another secret of grown-ups. Sharkey sensed there was an angry dog inside every teasing dog owner.

Seeing the tears in his eyes, the terror on his face, his mother tried to shield him.