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 some 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.
His lungs hadn’t quite reached the bursting point when he managed to grab a breath, but they weren’t far away, either. Then another mountain of water fell on him. No half-drowned pup was ever more draggled than he was when he staggered up onto blessedly dry land.
Charlie Kaapu was trotting down the beach to capture his truant surfboard. “Some wipeout, buddy,” Charlie called. “You crashed and burned.”
“Tell me about it,” Oscar said feelingly. He looked down at himself. “Man, I’m chewed up.”
“Wanna quit?” Charlie asked.
Oscar shook his head. “You nuts? This is part of what we came for, too. Thanks for snagging my board.”