Page 89 of Bulletproof

I had been so scared for so long to try again. Having failed once, I didn’t want to repeat it—the soul-crushing pain of having to give up on my dream. But after three years away from it—working for other people, being a pinball, moving at the pace of others, being at their whim about what I should do and how I should think—I was done. And some people had to endure it; some people didn’t have the choices I did to try and work for themselves not once, but twice, and I was so thankful that wasn’t me. I was lucky to have resources in my brother and friends, who were there, I knew, waiting for me to grow another spine.

So, as soon as I got back to shore—if … because, really, it was starting to get a little dark … I was going to finally figure things out.

First off, I had to somehow, someway, take what I hoped for and what I thought Dylan wanted and put that together without running out on Fallon Strauss. Whether the man knew it or not, I was counting him in as being with me, in on my big-picture dreams because he had been my safety net, and I wasn’t about to leave him alone. I just had to connect all the dots. I was good at figuring out puzzles, and I just needed time to see all the options.

I was thinking, weighing things in my head, and then my right leg cramped. And I was pretty sure I saw a fin. At the same time, I remembered that when I had changed the billing on my room to my credit card from Aaron’s, they had told me that the B&B was close to Shark’s Cove and Waimea Bay. I had no idea where I was currently, but tiger sharks and mako sharks were not out of the question. Great white … probably not, but that did not preclude some prehistoric horror rising from the deep. I started to hear the theme music from Jaws in my head.

Eaten by sharks … Sam would never forgive me.

When I saw the boat, I waved. The man who pulled me from the water was big and tall, and his hair fell to the middle of his back in a long, thick braid. His salt-and-pepper beard and mustache were neatly trimmed, and his eyes, under a Pittsburgh Steelers baseball cap, were squinted.

“Eh! You know get sharks in da water.”

I liked the Pidgin I had been hearing since I got to the islands. It was a warm dialect that I would never ever in my life attempt to duplicate, like I sometimes tried with others. How many times had I made Dylan live through Irish Accent Day or Italian Accent Day with horrible results? But the sound made me feel kind of at home.

“You heard?”

“Sharks?” I asked tentatively.

He nodded.

“No, sir, I didn’t know there were sharks out here,” I said, my teeth chattering.

He grabbed a beach towel and then another, dropping one on my head and draping the other around my back.

“Thank you.”

He grunted the way all the men in my life did when faced with my specific brand of stupidity. They all made a noise, agreeing that I was a dumbass.

“Strong, you know, da current. Can pull you under and drown you.”

I nodded.

“You like eat?”

There was more nodding from me because, really, getting fed was the number one way to get to know people. The second-best one was to play their sports, but I wasn’t really up for that, and from the look of the hat, I was betting that his sport was football, and that one I already knew about. Every Saturday and Sunday in the fall, the TV was on at my house with some game that Sam had to watch. College football on the first day of the weekend, and the pros played on the Sabbath. I didn’t need to play football to understand the inner workings of my Good Samaritan. What I needed to do was eat whatever he offered and ask for more.

It turned out that he was meeting people on the beach to barbeque and camp—which, apparently, you had to have a permit for—and sit around and eat and drink and hang out. He was bringing the fish.

His name was Tetsuo Nakamura, and when I told him that he did not look Japanese in the least, he smiled at me. The man was easily six-three, muscular and broad-shouldered, and I guessed late fifties, early sixties. It turned out he was seventy-two, which I told him was amazing. His mother was half haole—which to him meant white but was supposed to just mean visitor—and half Hawaiian. His father had been Japanese.

“You look pure Hawaiian to me,” I told him.

“No more pure Hawaiians,” he told me. “And just ’cause you from Hawai’i no make you Hawaiian.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I like you; you get plenty respect. Come.”

It was loud and noisy, and the barbeque smelled so good that I was salivating. Nothing made you more tired and hungry than swimming. Kids came out of the water like ravenous beasts, and I was no exception.

“Tetsuo, who your friend?”

And he explained how stupid I was, where I had been swimming and how far out. One of the women—Ku’uipo, shortened to just Ipo—pointed to where the cold-water beach shower was, about fifty yards away, and told me that I needed to get the saltwater off me and she had clothes that would fit.

I tried to explain where I was staying, but she shut me down, like women do, and pointed.

I went.