People of the Whale

by Linda Hogan

  In the morning, she wakes and in their place the light is beautiful and almost green. The smells of America are gone. She is peaceful and she bows in front of the ancestors on the altar. Over the thick rich coffee she loves, she leans back on the wall behind the bed and talks to him. “It’s so good to be home. I didn’t like America. There is a shadow there.”

  “There are shadows here, too.”

  “Yes. But we know what they are. The shadows of rubber trees. Our loved ones. Our stolen ancestors. Our living.”

  “When is he coming here?”

  “I don’t know. It is just something I know he will do. He is very handsome,” she tells her husband. “But not as handsome as you.” She kisses him lightly. He grabs hold of her.

  They laugh. He kisses her lips. “I had forgotten how much I could love. I missed you.” She feels her body, cell by cell, wanting to step into, walk into, that of her husband, that close. They lie down. They become the same. Her nipples love the feel of his skin, her stomach against his, his body moving into hers until they are one person.

  PART THREE

  THE WALL: THE NAMES

  There are many kinds of walls, like the wall Thomas built in front of the water. There are walls of history, and the secrets of history. There are ones no one can breach or climb, the invisible boundaries of humans. Some walls seem righteous instead of ruthless. They don’t claim property or hold something in or out. They keep things separate, but now, in the District of Columbia, it comes together for Thomas Witka Just.

  Here in this Washington is a wall of revelations. A strange word, Thomas thinks, like the end of the world in the Bible. But at The Wall, it is the ground he sees first, as if it is not possible to look up. So he sees a box of donuts; some boy’s favorite food. On the ground, a baseball sits before this portion of the wall. On it is written, For Dad. A batch of carnations sits, still in its wrapper, leaned up against the heat of it all. There is a letter to a soldier, even a gold button with a rhinestone on the ground as if to signify a blouse this man’s hands once unbuttoned?

  Mementos. Poems are engraved on plaques. Someone took such care to write them, to preserve them. There are now nearly sixty thousand names and the reflection of light on one whole side of it. In the place of America it shines. The whole crying light of it.

  Three single roses. People walking already feel the heat of black stone as if it holds the fire of yesterday and not today. Thomas feels it in his body, remembering the heat of another country.

  The world of this shining black stone is shaped at an angle, a chevron, really, like the stripes on a military sleeve, an army shirt.

  The black heat from the wall is powerful as he stands near it, then begins to walk.

  One old man traces the names of many men. He couldn’t have known them. It is his existence. He is there for who knows how long. He has grief for the whole war, maybe for other wars. A woman visits the name of her man and presses her lips there. The Wall is a world, a time, a place. A young man in uniform walks about to see who needs help, the man in the wheelchair or a person searching for the name of one of the many gone.

  Someone is reading the names in the background, but Thomas hears nothing. The names are anonymous, even his own. The grass has been replaced in patches as if someone has taken away part of the earth as a memory. Something, he thinks, is always covering up, hiding what is taken away. That’s part of the purpose of earth and walls.

  Somehow he walks right toward the day of the plane crash. He stands up straight at attention before the names of the many killed in that crash, the one thing he survived. His name is not there, where it should have been. He didn’t know the others in that plane, but they were a noisy group; part of their noise was excitement, part of it fear. It was long ago, lifetimes. It feels like a century. He remembers the man who sat beside him, one eyebrow higher than the other, as if he knew something he wouldn’t tell. Until now he barely remembered this man took his hand as the shaking plane dropped, the overheads opening and everything falling, cameras flying, jackets falling, drinks rising to spill. The lucky bastards, Thomas thinks, all of them. They never even reached the war. The date; so long ago now. Some of those years he wished he’d been among those killed in the plane. And what did they do but put him on another one right away. He had swallowed his fear, just a boy still, and gone along with it when he should have walked away and said, The hell with it, what kind of people are you?

  He moves slowly down the way, seeing the tall building reflected in the black stone. He sees an old president behind him, before him, but he carries his own reflections as he reads the names that withstand the elements long after the flesh and bones of the men and women are gone.

  Then he looks up and down and all along the shining black wall and it is nothing but names. He follows to where they are constant, one name crowded together with another, and there is no break and everyone was killed at nearly the same time, just before the end of it all.

  It is the dark wall of this country. It is a black hole, some name enters and is gone from the universe. Some people cry here, some talk. Thomas would never find words for what he is feeling. Anger, fear, guilt. But he’d had to live with what he did and return home. For a passing moment he thought about his world, his real world. Stone. In the A’atsika stories there is an account where the stones speak and tell a lost boy the direction home. So it is with this one. It says name after name of the boys and men of America, a generation broken, some now still lost, some who found their way home covered with a flag. He thinks of the song, “Can’t Find My Way Home.” For him, this stone is a direction home, speaking to him.

  The morning light on it is reflection on water. The first name of one who died, and is remembered, is found by Dwight. Then he hears Dwight. “John Doe. That really was his name.” He laughs.

  Thomas thinks there must be a mixture of happiness and grief in finding a name. It asserts that at least the man had once existed, and there is also the sorrow for knowing what it meant, but in truth none of the men there on this day knows how to feel, what to feel. To see the wall is to witness numbers of the unmeasured sacrifice, countless more than ever should have been, and Thomas has a strange feeling in him, a mixture of dread and sorrow, love and hate. He watches a man touch a name as if it is a human being and cry and walk away. Everyone touches The Wall. Touching it you feel you touch a human being. A name is more than just a name. Thomas hadn’t counted on that.

  After all this time of solitude he begins to understand something. “I knew it,” he says, feeling he is alone.

  “What?” asks Dimitri.

  Thomas turns toward the voice. “I knew what it would be like, I guess.”

  A woman holds a flower next to the name of her son and her husband photographs it.

  He knew it would be memory: It was the monsoon season. There were walls of rain. He was pushed out of the helicopter to certain death. “I’m sorry, man,” said the sergeant pushing him out. He spread his arms and tried to stay in the door. He thought he was a coward. He opened his arms to hold on for dear life. Trying not to cry, terrified. The man pushing him would have cried, too, but he had no more tears, and he would always hate himself even though he had to follow orders. He was trapped in his work, a part of the killing. If he quit, he would be thrown, maybe without a parachute. He thought each man he pushed fell to his death. He never heard what happened to them. The smell of chemicals was in the air. And on the way down Thomas remembered thinking, This is it. This is it. He wished he could at least hold Ruth one more time. He felt the reality of her body, the physical warmth of it, the length of her next to him all the while he knew it was the end.

  She would at least be his last thought. Looking around he saw the fire ahead of him, the fire of what they taught in some churches. Fire and brimstone.

  It was as if he knew already what he would find on the ground, fire, smoke, bullets, mines, grenades. He was afraid. On the ground, using a flashlight allowed you to see, but it allowed you to b
e seen. He wanted to die first and get it over with. To just be gone. The smells are still in him, he thinks now. The smell of war, of human flesh, chemicals, smoke, fear.

  The others who survived that push, that first touch of feet, bend of knees, roll on dangerous earth, would stay together in the firmament of jungle law, in the darkness of the water, the earth. In all that destruction they’d say such things as, “You’re a sorry excuse for a man,” and laugh, blowing out smoke.

  Then he remembers the bodies carried out and away, some in bags, some just thrown on top of each other until they could be carelessly gathered and their blasted remains sent away. Then, another bomb. They may have been good sons and brothers, good to their wives at home, but a disease traveled through them in war. It was a fire of fear, excitement, hatred. There was no trust of anything, anyone. Everything alive was destroyed, as if all life but your own was dangerous and yours was the only one that existed and it wanted only to live.

  “There is a reason everybody cries when they are first born,” he says out loud.

  The others all look at him.

  They returned to camp sometimes. They were given real coffee and even heard a radio, but half the time even they didn’t know exactly where they were. Thomas always kept a map. Thomas was crazy about maps. He studied them, watched directions. He even wore a compass around his neck. That was how he knew they were going to the wrong location, that world he would remain inside for how many years he didn’t know until later. Once there, he lost track of time. As he does now, touching the map of names, touching it as if to be certain it is real, they were real, as if to touch them.

  And so he reaches the place at the Wall. So. His name listed as one of the dead. Then a cross with a circle at the edge of it, which means he was resurrected. He wants to laugh. It is so crazy, but he wants to fall on his knees.

  Dimitri, quick, finds the names and dates and, like everyone there, he touches them. There, there they are. Thomas’s men. Murphy. Voight.

  The sun reflects in it, the clouds, his own face, his own name.

  Dimitri stands beside him. “Geez, you’re not only a hero. You’re a dead one!”

  “Don’t I know it.” Smith, Anderson, and two others. They had been good boys at home. Wholesome. Once.

  He wishes he could have touched their skin, held their sweaty bodies. He wishes he could have stopped it. He wishes. And in the mirror light his own face is reflected across theirs. He obliterates them with his life. He sits—no, he falls—on the ground. For the first time it doesn’t matter if his tears are seen. A man comes by and touches him and says, “Hello, brother.” He’s Indian, too. It is too much for him, Thomas, the untouched man, the smell of the earth and hot stone, to think of their faces, the redheaded Murphy who at first was so innocent. It is too much for him to be touched, and he begins to cry.

  One name is missing. So he survived, that boy, the one Thomas pushed out of the way. They, the only ones in that smoky place where they’d been dropped—no, thrown—from the copter, him arguing about them being at the wrong place. It wasn’t part of the country. That day, he was not afraid so much as angry. Thomas is relieved the boy survived. The new boy shouldn’t have been there. None of them should have. Thomas reads his own name. Thomas Just. His face reflected on it makes him wonder, when did he grow to look so haggard? He realizes he doesn’t even know the date. He didn’t over there, either. He lost track of time. But not his map. Some people tried to keep diaries, but those on special operations would eventually give up everything constant. They were called at any time, any place, any year, it seemed, because time was irrelevant when you were there. But it’s engraved on the wall.

  It began when Thomas was upset about the defoliation of the rice at harvest time. “What are you doing?” He saw the poor peasants broken, starved, running away from the orange cloud, bending over, weeping, and he said to the men, his men, “What are you doing? Are you trying to starve everyone? They are just poor people trying to live.”

  “Hey, we’re just following orders.”

  “Who gave you that order?”

  No answer.

  Or maybe it began at the hamlet where he protested about a girl and then he saw an M16 turn slowly toward him, point at him, and he knew they would kill him. “You even look like one of them,” Murph said. There was laughter. He knew they were no longer together, not a unit. He, with his black hair, dark skin. He was a man who couldn’t lose his whole history of knowing that life was precious, sacred, irretrievable. That’s what he’d been taught at home. It was in his blood. From his grandmother and mother all the way back in time. It was his blood. But he became silent even though the girl screamed because he knew at night when they breathed in tobacco or something stronger, that the M16 was more honest than anything else around him.

  After that, something in him changed and he became the land, the life that was precious, the man like his grandfather who could feel the presence of a whale. He felt the presence of the land, the jungle, the bamboo, the rain, the pathways, partly to save himself from his own men as much as to save himself from the enemy. He became the man who could tell where the enemy was, could feel them, even if he still believed there was someone to be trusted, at least an infant four months old. He remembers Murphy killing the babies. “Hey,” he had yelled. And Murph yelled back, “Those aren’t babies. They’re bombs!”

  The bruised sky suddenly lit.

  Or maybe it began with the planting of mines in the paths of villagers who merely wanted to survive. The rain already beginning. Him, scared, having to shoot at a sound only to go look and find it was a water buffalo and not a group of men making the sound, and he felt bad about killing it. The other men wrote on it with knives, words he hoped no one would read, all the while he felt terrible about killing it and tried not to cry.

  And then there was a little old woman huddling behind a wall with her grandbabies. They were hungry. In a war, unlike now, a wall can be no place to hide behind.

  He disappears inside this black stone wall, remembering how he feared some of his own men.

  “What are you?” one of them asked him after he started to leave his things behind. The heavy things that made some of the men lose balance and fall. He was going to survive. It began this easily in the suddenly unholy world. That way he could slip into the grasses easily, the bamboo. He could hear the sound of someone moving in the jungle. He became the jungle. He knew by feel where things were and weren’t. He knew if it was a trail they were on or if it was a trap because the Cong, as they called them, could make a weapon out of a tin can or anything. Soon he walked in front of them, not a point man; they were not that organized any longer.

  He’d seen it coming and asked for a transfer because these men were not right. The organization had left them long ago. Then, he refused to kill a woman.

  “Hey, she’s probably got a grenade in her snatch!”

  “Probably,” he said, walking on, letting the woman flee from them, his own vulnerable body in the way to protect her. She was small and he could tell by her movement, her face, that she had lost everything. It was as if he had become awake in a new way, able to see into the heart of things, the place, the people. Those who vanish into the trees silently. But he could never be too sure and it was not untrue that a child could be a bomb, the Cong had seen to that, had created fear in the American boys. But him, he got into the minds of everyone in order to live and to save his own comrades.

  At The Wall a man takes off his glasses and weeps, his face turning red. It is a place where a person’s allowed to be overwhelmed by the names of the dead and the overwhelming language of the heart. The men come together as if they know one another, but mortality is what a person really knows here.

  Thomas’s fists are clenched. He looks at this wall as if it is a living thing, not only names carved in stone, but the silencing of a jungle, the sudden flare of deafening bombs, every sense attacked. Ordinary people. American men and women whose mothers sang lullabies to them w
hen they were children, who had been boys with bicycles, handsome young men, ordinary women who wanted children, boys who once stole apples, whose mothers and fathers read them stories, as Ruth had surely done with Marco, the boy named out of his mother’s desire that he would do what she never did, travel and see the strange and beautiful world. He thinks sadly of Ruth and his treatment of her. He carries her in his thoughts, the vision of how she stands straight and has cared for his own daughter better than he has. He wonders if there are times when she falls to earth and weeps, if she looks for Marco when she is out at sea. He thinks, out of all the warriors he has known, she is the true hero.

  The names prove history. They prove lies.

  “Where were you then?” Thomas asks.

  “What about you?”

  It was the end of the war.

  He thinks of all the men with stripes and bars and shining medals. He thinks of seeing the fire of a village burning. Shapes in silhouette in smoke and fog. He thinks, for some reason, of a human nerve, the way it branches off, the way you see it in your dilated eye, a tributary that makes all the difference between pain and no pain, memory and no memory, vision or none.

  On this night the fireflies come out in a familiar, humid jungle smell. DC is built on a swamp, a jungle where you can watch the plants grow. Oh, they are beautiful, the insects lighting up between the leaves of trees, a reminder of the light still remaining in the world.

  A wall is to keep things out. A wall is to keep things in. Here are the names of all the gods who have left the world. It is a map, right, wrong, changed, earth opened to geographies of other kinds.

  Humans have carved on stone throughout all their brief existence. Here, instead of these names, should be handprints, spirals, buffalo, horses, or whales like the stones in sacred places.