He looked around for Charlie. There he was, separated from his surfboard, which washed ashore without him. “Surf’s not too easy, is it?” Oscar called.

His friend gave him the finger. “This shit can happen down by Diamond Head, too,” Charlie said. He wasn’t wrong about that, either; he’d lost his front teeth within a couple of miles of Waikiki.

They surfed all day. Oscar wiped out several times himself. He’d known he would, and didn’t worry about it. When the sun sank down toward Kaena Point, they put the boards back into the Chevy and walked into Waimea. A chop-suey house there gave them a cheap, filling supper.

“You don’t want to drive back in the dark, do you?” Charlie Kaapu hinted.

Oscar smiled. “No. I was thinking we’d sleep in the car, put the boards on the roof, and go at it again first thing in the morning.”

Charlie’s face lit up. “Now you’re talking!”

Sleeping in the Chevy was a cramped business, but Oscar had had practice. Charlie hadn’t, or not so much, but he managed. His snores escaped through the glassless rear window.

Those same snores helped wake Oscar around sunup. Yawning, he sat up in the front seat and stretched. He did some more stretching after he got out of the car, to work the kinks from his neck and back. He walked over and pissed at the base of a coconut palm. Only the waning gibbous moon looked down at him from low in the west.

His belly growled. He wished he’d thought to bring along something for breakfast. Nothing in Waimea would be open so early. And this was Sunday morning, too, so it was anybody’s guess if anything would be open at all.

He couldn’t do anything about that. All he could do was put his board in the water. He looked out to the Pacific and muttered under his breath. The waves were no better than they had been the day before. If anything, they were a little flatter. Oscar shrugged. What could you do?