“I guess.” Oscar was vague about horses. His father’s construction business had been completely motorized by the time he was born. Dad went on about a competitor who’d thought trucks were only a passing fad, and stuck with horse-drawn wagons. He’d gone broke in short order.
“Sure you do.” If Charlie Kaapu had any doubts, he hid them very well. “Besides, the surf down here is rotten. I want something I can get my teeth into.”
“Get your face into, you mean, if you mess up,” Oscar said. Charlie gave him the finger. They both laughed. Oscar took another sip of more-or-less Primo. “Besides, we’re not just surf-riders, you know. We’re fishermen, too.”
Charlie grimaced. “Waste time,” he muttered, a handy phrase that could apply to anything you didn’t like. He too took a pull at his miserable excuse for a beer. “Nobody shooting at us up there nowadays.”
“You hope,” Oscar said. “God only knows what the Japanese are doing up there these days, though.” He didn’t say Japs in front of the barkeep, either.
“Hey, come on. Don’t you want to get away from all this for a while? Or are you married to that gal of yours?” Charlie laced his voice with scorn.
It struck home, too; Oscar’s ears heated. “You know I’m not,” he said. He and Susie were getting along pretty well, which was nice, but it wasn’t married. He jabbed a forefinger in Charlie’s direction. “If we go up to the north shore, how are we gonna get there? Even if we could find gas, my Chevy’s got a dead battery and four flats. Hell, it probably doesn’t even have flats any more, the way the . . . Japanese”—almost slipped there—“are stripping the rubber off cars these days.”
Charlie clucked reproachfully. “And here I thought you were such a big, smart haole.”
“What do you mean?”
“You were the guy who thought up sailboards,” Charlie said. “We can go on them, catch fish”—he evidently didn’t mind when he was doing it for himself—“sleep on the beach, have a hell of a time. No huhu.”
He made it sound so easy—probably a lot easier than it really would be. And he tempted Oscar, and Oscar knew damn well he was tempted. He gave back the strongest argument against the trip he could think of: “What do you want to bet the surf will stink?”
“Bet it won’t,” Charlie retorted. “It’s October by now, man. You can get some good sets up there.”
He wasn’t wrong. The waves hadn’t been that high last December, which had disappointed Oscar and Charlie but no doubt relieved the Japanese invaders. Oscar wouldn’t have wanted to try to get a landing craft over thirty-foot breakers, and no doubt the Japs hadn’t wanted to, either. Storms could start up in the Gulf of Alaska this early, and waves from those storms had a straight shot over the Pacific, all the way down to Waimea Bay.
Charlie Kaapu gave him a slightly sloshed grin. “Come on, Oscar. Don’t be a grouch. We pull this off, we talk about it forever. You want to be a fisherman all the goddamn time? Go ride a sampan if you do.”
Maybe Oscar would have said no if he hadn’t had some beer himself. But he had, and he didn’t like coming back to Waikiki every day any better than Charlie did. “I’ll do it!” he said. “Let’s leave tomorrow.”
“Now you’re talking! Now you’re cooking with gas!” Charlie’s grin got wider and more gleeful. “Can’t change our minds if we go right away.”
Oscar wasn’t so sure. He would have to tell Susie. When he did, she was liable to change his mind for him. Charlie didn’t begin to get that. Oscar didn’t think Charlie had ever stayed with a girl more than a couple of weeks. Charlie no more understood settling down than a butterfly understood staying with one flower all the time. That wasn’t in a butterfly’s makeup, and it wasn’t in Charlie Kaapu’s, either.
How much of it was in Susie’s nature? There was an interesting question. Oscar told her that evening, over steaks she’d cut from a tuna he’d caught and tomatoes he’d acquired for another, smaller, fish.
He stumbled and stammered more than he wanted to. She looked at him for a while, just looked at him with those eyes that always reminded him of a Siamese cat’s. The mind behind the eyes was often as self-centered as a cat’s, too. But all she said—all she said at first, anyway—was, “Have fun.”
He let out an elated sigh of relief. “Thanks, babe,” he breathed.
“Have fun,” Susie repeated. “And if I’m still here when you get back, we’ll pick it up again. And if I’m not—well, this was fun, too. Mostly, anyhow.” And if that wasn’t praising with faint damn, Oscar had never run into anything that so perfectly fit the bill.
He wondered if he ought to tell her to stay. She’d laugh at him. She was no damn good at doing what anybody told her to. He also wondered if he should can the whole thing with Charlie. The trouble with that was, he didn’t want to. And if he did can it, Susie would get the idea she could run roughshod over him. Whatever else that would be, it wouldn’t be fun.
“I hope you’re still around,” he said after that calculation, all of which took maybe a second and a half. He wondered if he ought to add anything, and decided not to. It said what needed saying.
Susie cocked her head to one side. “I kind of hope I am, too,” she said. “But you never can tell.”
She didn’t yell, I look out for Number One first, last, and always, but she might as well have. It wasn’t anything Oscar didn’t know. Drop Susie anywhere and she’d land on her feet. That was one more way she was like a cat.
She did the dishes as well as she could with cold water and without soap. Neither she nor Oscar had come down with anything noxious, so it was good enough. He dried. He’d become domesticated enough for that. As she handed him the last plate, she asked, “You want one for the road?”
“Sure,” he said eagerly, and she laughed—she’d known he would. They always got on well in bed. This time seemed special even for them. Only afterwards, while he wished for a cigarette, did Oscar figure out why. This was, or might have been, the last time.
Susie leaned over in the narrow bed and kissed him. “Trying to make me want to stick around, are you?” she said, so he didn’t have to worry about Was it good for you, too? tonight. Not that he was going to worry about much right then anyhow. He rolled over and fell asleep.
When he got up the next morning, she was already out the door, heading for her secretarial job in Honolulu. No good-bye kiss, then, and no early morning quickie, either. But a note—Good luck! XOXOXO—made him hope she’d still be here when he came back from the north shore.
Breakfast was cold rice with a little sugar sprinkled on it. It wasn’t corn flakes—and it sure as hell wasn’t bacon and eggs—but it would have to do. He’d just finished when Charlie Kaapu banged on his door.
“Ready?” the hapa-Hawaiian demanded.
“Yeah!” Oscar said. They grinned at each other, then hurried down to Waikiki Beach.
As usual since the occupation, surf fishermen were already casting their bait upon the waters. They moved aside to give Charlie and Oscar room enough to get their sailboards into the Pacific. For a wonder, they also stopped casting till the two boards were out of range.
“How many times have you just missed getting hooked by the ear when you went out?” Oscar asked.
“Missed? This big haole reeled me in once. Bastard was all set to gut me for a marlin till he saw my beak wasn’t big enough,” Charlie Kaapu said.
Oscar snorted. “Waste time, fool!” They both laughed.
Once they got out past the breakers, they set their sails. Oscar was used to sailing out a lot farther than that, to get to a stretch of the Pacific that hadn’t been fished to death. Instead of running with the wind today, he swung the sail at a forty-five degree angle to the wind and skimmed along parallel to the southern coast of Oahu. Charlie’s sailboard glided beside his.
“You want to talk about waste time, talk about fishing,” Charlie said.
“Since when don’t you like to eat?” Oscar said.
“Eating is fine. Fis
hing is work. Would be worse if I didn’t get to surf-ride there and back again.” That qualifier was as far as Charlie would go. Oscar knew the native Hawaiians had fished with nets and spears. If that hadn’t taken the patience of Job, he didn’t know what would. But Charlie, like too many Hawaiians and hapa-Hawaiians these days, was willing to work only on what he enjoyed, and was convinced haoles would run rings around him everywhere else.
They sailed past Diamond Head. These days, an enormous Rising Sun floated from the dead volcano. So much for the Kingdom of Hawaii, Oscar thought. He didn’t say anything about that. Charlie Kaapu had no use at all for King Stanley Laanui, though he thought the redheaded Queen Cynthia was a knockout. From the pictures Oscar had seen of her, he did, too.
The empty road struck Oscar like a blow. There was still traffic in Honolulu, even if it was foot traffic instead of automobiles. Here, there was just—nobody. No tourists heading up to see the Mormon temple near Laie. No Japanese dentist off to visit his mom and dad at the little general store they ran. No nothing, not hardly.
Charlie saw the same thing. “Whole island seems dead,” he said, and spat into the Pacific.
“Yeah.” Oscar nodded. The otherworldly pace at which things happened when you were under sail only added to the impression. The landscape changed only very slowly. The emptiness didn’t seem to change at all. And then it did: Oscar and Charlie passed a long column of Japanese troops marching east. They passed them slowly, too, for the Japs marched almost as fast as they sailed. A couple of Japs pointed out to sea as the sailboards went by. Oscar said, “I’m almost even glad to see those guys, you know what I mean?”
“I know what you mean,” Charlie said. “I ain’t glad to see them any which way. We’re lucky the bastards aren’t shooting at us.”
Oscar’s head whipped back toward the coast. If he saw Japs dropping to one knee or even raising their rifles, he was going to jump in the water. They’d been known to kill people for the fun of it. But the soldiers in the funny-colored khaki uniforms just kept trudging along. After another moment, Oscar figured out what made the Japanese uniforms seem funny: they were of a shade different from the U.S. Army khaki he was used to. That was all.
Slowly—but not slowly enough after Charlie’s comment—the soldiers fell astern of the sailboards. “We don’t want to go ashore where they can catch up with us,” Charlie said, and Oscar nodded once more.
When they rounded Makapu Point, Oscar saw that the lighthouse there had been bombed. That pained him. The light had been welcoming and warning ships for a long time. To see it ruined . . . was another sign of how things had changed.
Oahu itself changed on the windward coast. Oscar and Charlie got spatters of rain almost at once, and then more than spatters. It rained all the time here. The air felt thick and hot and wet, the way it did back East on the mainland. The sea began heaving erratically, like a restless beast.
Everything he could see on the shore was lush and green. The Koolau Range rose steeply from the sea. The volcanic rocks would have been jagged, but jungle softened their outlines; they might almost have been covered in emerald velvet. Remembering a paleontology class, he pointed to the mountains and said, “They look like giant teeth from an Iguanodon.”
Charlie Kaapu looked not at the Koolau Range but at him. “What the hell you talkin’ ’bout?” he asked. Oscar decided the world could live without his similes.
He quickly rediscovered why they called this the Windward Coast: the wind kept trying to blow him and Charlie ashore. Long stretches of the coastline were rocky, not sandy. He had to keep fighting to claw his way out to sea.
Kaneohe Peninsula was the last obstacle he and Charlie got by before putting in for the evening. They barely got by it, too. If they had to put in there, they could have, at least as far as the beach went. But what had been a Marine base was manned these days by Japanese soldiers. Oscar had no desire to get to know them better.
Wrecked American flying boats still lay along the beach like so many unburied bodies. None of them had engines on their wings. Various other bits were missing from this machine or that one. As the Japs had all over Hawaii, they’d taken whatever they could use.
Light was fading when Charlie pointed to a small stretch of sand beyond Kaneohe. Oscar nodded. They both guided their sailboards up onto the beach. “Whew!” Oscar said, sprawling on the sand. “I’m whipped.”
“Hard work,” Charlie agreed; the phrase, translated literally from the Japanese, had become part of the local language. “Don’t have much in the way of fish, either.”
Before, he’d grumbled about the indignities of fishing. Oscar saw no point in reminding him of that. He just said, “We won’t starve.” He checked his match safe. “Matches are still dry. We can make a fire and cook what we’ve got.”
They gathered driftwood for fuel. The rain had stopped, which made things easier. Charlie Kaapu walked along the edge of the beach. Every so often, he would bend down. He came back with some clams. “Here,” he said. “We do these, too.”
The clams weren’t very big—only a bite or so apiece—but anything was better than nothing. After that, Oscar and Charlie lay down on the sand. That would have been comfortable enough if it hadn’t rained several times. Whenever it did, it woke Oscar up. He thought about taking shelter, but there was no shelter to take. The night seemed endless.
“Some fun,” Charlie Kaapu said as they put their sailboards back into the water.
Oscar couldn’t help rising to that. “Whose idea was this?” he inquired sweetly. Charlie sent him a dirty look.
They spent all day beating their way northwest along the beautiful but often forbidding coast. But they didn’t worry about food for long: Charlie caught a big ahi less than an hour after they raised their sails. “How hungry are you?” he asked Oscar.
“What do you mean?”
“Want some raw, the way the Japs eat it?”
“Sure. Why not? I’ve done that a few times.” Carefully, because the water was still rough, Oscar guided his sailboard alongside Charlie’s. The hapa-Hawaiian passed him a good-sized chunk of pink flesh. He haggled bite-sized pieces off with a knife. They weren’t neat and elegant, the way they would have been in a fancy Japanese restaurant. He didn’t care. The flesh was firm and rich and hardly fishy at all. “Might almost be beef,” he remarked.
“It’s okay, but it ain’t that good,” Charlie said. The Hawaiian side of his family would never have seen a cow till whites brought them to the islands some time in the nineteenth century. Charlie no doubt didn’t worry about that one bit. He just knew what he liked. Locally born Japanese often preferred hamburgers and steaks to raw fish, too. Nowadays, a lot of them were probably pretending to a love of sushi and sashimi they didn’t really have.
Because the surfers had to tack so much, they made slow progress. They needed two and a half days to round Kahuku Point near Opana, Oahu’s northernmost projection. Oscar whooped when they finally did. “All downhill from here!” he said. And so it was, as far as the wind went. But getting back to the shore to sleep that night was an adventure all by itself. Big waves pounded the beaches. Oscar and Charlie took down their masts and sails before surf-riding in. Oscar would have liked to go in with the sail up, but if something went wrong it would have cost him his rigging in surf like that. He would have been stuck with no way to get back to Waikiki but lugging his surfboard down the Kamehameha Highway—a distinctly unappetizing prospect.
Charlie Kaapu did the same thing, so Oscar didn’t feel too bad. Charlie was more reckless than he was.
They ate fish and clams on the beach. Charlie—reckless again—pried some sea urchins off the nearby rocks, too. He cracked them with a stone to get at the orange flesh inside. “Japs eat this stuff,” he said.
Oscar never had, but he was hungry enough not to be fussy. The meat proved better than he expected. It wasn’t like anything he’d tasted before; the iodine tang reminded him of the sea. “What we ought to do is see if we can get so
me of those plovers”—he pointed to the shorebirds walking along the beach—“and cook them.”
“I wish they were doves instead,” Charlie said. “Doves are too dumb for anybody to miss ’em.”
The plovers weren’t. They flew off before Oscar and Charlie could get close enough to throw rocks at them. “Oh, well,” Oscar said. “Worth a try.”
He and Charlie got to Waimea Bay the next day. Again, they took down their rigging before going ashore the first time. Oscar looked back over his shoulder as he rode toward the beach. No Jap invasion fleet this time. No Americans with machine guns in the jungle back of the beach, either.
Once up on the golden sand, they left their masts and sails there. As they went back into the Pacific, they solemnly shook hands. “Made it,” Charlie said. Oscar nodded.
And then they paddled out again. The waves weren’t the three-story-building monsters they were when the north shore was at its finest. They were one-and-a-half- or two-story monsters—suitable for all ordinary purposes and quite a few extraordinary ones. Skimming along at the curl of the wave, or under the curl in a roaring tube of green and white, was as much fun as you could have out of bed, and not so far removed in its growing excitement and intensity from the fun you had in bed.
“This is why we’re here,” Charlie said after one amazing run. Oscar didn’t know whether he meant this was why they’d come to the north shore or why they’d been born. Either way, he wasn’t inclined to quarrel.
Part of the excitement was knowing what happened when things went wrong. Oscar was catfooted on his surfboard—but even cats slip once in a while. Then they try to pretend they haven’t done it. Oscar didn’t have that chance. He went one way, the surf board went another, and the wave rolled over him. He had time for one startled yip before he had to fight to keep from drowning.
It was like getting stuck in God’s cement mixer. For a few seconds, he literally didn’t know which end was up. He got slammed into the seabottom, hard enough to scrape hide off his flank. It could have been his face; he’d done that before, too. The roaring and churning dinned in his ears—dinned all through him. He struggled toward the surface. The ocean didn’t want to let him up.
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