IV

OSCAR VAN DER KIRK AND CHARLIE KAAPU SAT IN A WAIKIKI SALOON DRINKING what the bartender alleged to be Primo beer. Hawaii’s native suds had never been a brew to make anybody forget fancy German beer-or, for that matter, even Schlitz. This stuff tasted more like bathwater after the University of Hawaii football team got clean in it.

Charlie had a different opinion. “So,” he asked the man behind the bar, “how sick was the horse when he pissed in your bottles?”

“Funny,” the barkeep said. “Funny like a crutch. You try getting fucking barley these days. For beer brewed from rice, this ain’t half bad.”

“Beer brewed from rice is sake, isn’t it?” Oscar said.

“Sort of. I have some of that, in case any Japanese officers wander in,” the bartender said. By the way he said Japanese officers, he meant Japs. But he wouldn’t say that, not around people he didn’t completely trust. Oscar knew he and Charlie weren’t informers, but the barkeep didn’t. Fiddling with his black bow tie, he went on, “There are some real hops in this, though. It’s doing its best to be beer, honest.”

“That’s not very good,” Charlie said, and then, incongruously, “Give me another one, will you?”

“Me, too,” Oscar said as he emptied his glass. “Primo’s closer to real beer than what they call gin or okolehao is to the real McCoy these days.”

“You got that right, brother.” Charlie Kaapu made a horrible face.

“Yeah, well, you don’t want to know some of the shit that goes into them.” The bartender set up two more beers. “Four bits,” he said. Oscar slid a half-dollar across the bar. The bartender scooped it up.

Oscar raised his glass. “Mud in your eye,” he said to Charlie.

“Same to you,” the half-Hawaiian surf rider replied. They both drank. They both sighed. This Primo wasn’t good, even if it wasn’t so bad as it might have been. Charlie sighed again. “We ought to do something different,” he said.

“Like what?” Oscar asked. “Just getting along is hard enough.”

“That’s the point,” Charlie said. “That’s why we ought to do something different.”

Back when Oscar was at Stanford, his philosophy prof would have called that a non sequitur.

Somehow, he didn’t think Charlie would appreciate philosophy. “What have you got in mind?” he asked.

“We ought to go back to the north shore,” Charlie said. “We haven’t been up there in a hell of a long time.”

Oscar stared at him. “Are you out of your goddamn mind?” he exclaimed. “The last time we did go up there, we damn near got killed.” Just thinking about it brought back gut-wrenching, bladder-squeezing raw terror.

“Yeah, I know.” His hapa-Hawaiian buddy looked vaguely embarrassed. Maybe he was remembering fear, too. But he went on, “That’s another reason to go back. It’s like when you fall off a horse-you get back on again, right?”

“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.