“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“Are you afraid?”

“No!”

But she always consoled him. And his father took the view that the expression of any fear demanded to be overcome.

“I tell my men,” he said, “‘Get over it.’ I have ARVN guys who are afraid of jumping out of a plane—scared shitless.”

Joe stared, knowing what was coming.

“But they jump. I make them jump.”

“What if they really don’t want to?”

“It’s an order. It has to be obeyed. Or we push them out. And the next time it’s easier.”

“That’s different,” Sharkey’s mother said, coming to his defense, and he hated her for suspecting he was afraid.

“It’s fear,” his father said, his mouth going square, showing his teeth. “Experience makes fear go away. I have men in operations, Special Forces from the forward firebase, who are practically gibbering. ‘I don’t want to go!’ ‘Let’s turn back!’ ‘I’m scared!’”

He reached for Joe’s shoulder, got a grip on his shirt. Joe said nothing. He’d heard this before. It was one of his father’s stories, a way of defining himself. You couldn’t interrupt or he’d howl.

“I grab them like this,” and he tightened his grip. “I tell them, ‘Consider yourself already dead’”—he smiled, those teeth again—“‘and you’ll be fine.’”

But of course his father was away when the incident—the inevitable incident—occurred.

It was the sort of hot Hawaii midafternoon when the sun dominating a cloudless sky seemed to burn him small. He’d gotten off the bus at the end of the street and was walking past the house with the dog when, as he expected, and feared, he heard the loud barking. He knew the bark, he knew the dog, the one that could make it to the edge of the lawn on his tether. As on previous days, Joe crossed the street so as not to enrage the dog further, and he waited for the dog to be jerked back on his tether.

But the dog kept coming, making straight for him. He bounded across the street, his tongue thickened and drawn aside by his speed, and he leaped as he approached, knocking Joe to the ground, and began angrily to chew his face, snapping his jaws.

Later Joe wondered why he hadn’t screamed for help, why he submitted and said nothing. He guessed that there is a reaction of extreme terror that silences you—this, and the recognition perhaps that there is no hope; that you’re done for, so desperate that you’re resigned to your fate, to be torn apart by the dog.