Page 4 of Try Easy

The Best and the Worst Days

Keoni

By the timethe sun set on Waimea Bay, the sand was littered with broken surfboards. Keoni sat with his back to the bonfire, watching the sun slip behind the horizon line. He wished for more daylight. He could have kept surfing for hours.

Nursing his cold beer, Keoni shifted on the sand, trying to find a comfortable position.

Keoni was legendary for his skills at avoiding wipeouts, but even he couldn’t avoid them every time. After a long day of surfing the biggest waves in the world, Keoni was bruised and battered. His right eye was blackened, his forehead was cut, and his mouth was bleeding. His ribs were tender enough to be broken. It hurt to sit or stand, or even breathe, but Keoni couldn’t have been happier.

All that he wanted was a simple life: awesome waves to surf, a cold beer to wash down the taste of sand in his mouth, friends to share a bonfire with, and eventually a close-knit family of his own.

It didn’t seem a lot to ask.

He could have included on the list peace in Southeast Asia, and the end of civil unrest on the mainland, but Keoni thought that was pushing it.

Keoni pressed the can of beer to his forehead, letting the cold metal soothe the split skin.

The best days always held a tinge of sadness. They were the days when Keoni missed Eddie the most.

Nearly two years earlier, on a beautiful sunny day in March, Eddie Alvarez, a twenty-five-year-old, third-generation Portuguese immigrant and best friend to Keoni Makai, had died on the waves.

They had been at Sunset Beach, only a few point breaks up the road from Waimea Bay. Eddie had wanted to go to Patterson’s, but Declan and Keoni wanted to go to the North Shore. Eddie was outnumbered. They’d gone to Sunset Beach.

If they had stayed at Patterson’s would things have been different? Would Eddie still be alive?

Keoni had been raised on Christianity, but he found himself drawn more to the old religion of Hawaii. He believed in the ancient gods who could be both cruel and merciful. He believed in the ultimate power of the earth and the ocean. As a Native Hawaiian, Keoni believed that he had some of that very power in his veins. He believed that he could have saved Eddie.

Keoni had rescued many others from the waves. There was no lifeguard service on the North Shore, and the surfers had to look out for each other. Whether in the lineup or standing on the beach, Keoni always kept an eye out for someone in danger. Dramatic rescues happened so often that Keoni had been featured in the Honolulu Advertiser in an article about the dangers of the ocean.

Keoni’s history of heroic rescues was one of the reasons Eddie’s death caused him so much pain. He’d been on the very same wave as Eddie, and he hadn’t been able to save him. Keoni hadn’t even seen Eddie go under. Keoni had tried for ten minutes to revive Eddie with CPR, but it hadn’t worked. The ocean had already stolen Eddie’s life by the time Keoni had dragged him to shore.

If only Keoni would have gotten to him sooner. If only he’d been paying better attention. If only they had gone to Patterson’s instead of Sunset. If only.

Keoni shook his head, trying to stop his internal dialogue. There were too many “if onlys” for Keoni to count. Eddie was dead, and Keoni could only blame himself.

“You’re crazy. You know dat?” Bones asked.

Keoni looked away from the ocean up at his cousin, whose tall frame blocked the setting sun.

“Yeah,” Keoni admitted. “I know.”

He’d been told that a hundred times. It hadn’t stopped him yet.

Bones dropped down to the sand next to Keoni and handed him a plate of fish. Their mothers were sisters, and descendants of the most celebrated war chief of Hawaii. They were cousins, but also friends. They had grown up on the water together, from their first waves at Queen’s Beach when they couldn’t afford surfboards and had to make their own out of sheets of plywood, to winning surf contests at Makaha.

While Keoni dominated on the big waves, Bones was more suited to bodysurfing and diving. Between the two of them, there was nothing in the water they couldn’t do.

“I got somet’ing I wanna run by you,” Bones said.

Keoni braced himself for Bones’s latest scheme. Bones was an entrepreneur who had a knack for coming up with crazy ideas that were sometimes profitable, and sometimes disastrous. It had been Bones who’d talked Keoni into giving surfing lessons to the wealthy tourists at Waikiki when they’d been teenagers. They’d made a killing. Keoni would have quit his job at the marina if he didn’t hate giving the lessons so much.

“What is it?” Keoni asked reluctantly. He already knew he wasn’t going to like it.

Bones lowered his voice and glanced around to make sure no one could hear him. “You remember that time we found that black coral in Maui?”

“Yeah.”

Keoni took a bite of the fish. The skin was salted and crispy. The white chunks of flesh melted on his tongue, but Keoni hardly tasted it. His stomach was in knots just remembering the dangerous dive in Maui last year. They had found an underwater field of rare coral, but it had been purely on accident. The depth gauge on their boat had been broken, or they would have never been diving that deep.