by Linda Hogan
Back in the motel he doesn’t recognize himself but knows he is Thomas when they call to him in his own room. He goes over the walkway to one of their rooms. They are subdued, drinking beer from the cooler, turning on the TV, changing the channel, sitting around in T-shirts, making jokes as if they are uncomfortable with silence, with their memories.
He thinks of the boy he’d thrown out of his way. He had saved his life, the boy whose name was not on the wall, and Thomas was thus decorated and also wounded, but he had taken his medals and ribbons from his father and pushed them into the back of a drawer behind screwdrivers and wrenches. Ruth would never see them. No one ever would have known he had them if it hadn’t been for his father, who showed them to everyone.
Dwight is now in the room putting down a Bud. “The men in my platoon stole food from a truck going to a camp for villagers. We ate cheese!”
Someone laughs. “Yeah, like it was their traditional food.”
They are drinking beer. They don’t see the despair on his face. Just as with the others years ago, they don’t know Thomas any longer. But he knew them and he knows Dwight too well, the liar, the thief.
“She looked just like my sister. How could I kill her?” Dwight says this in wonder. “But I did it. More than once. But you know those gooks. Hey, I hear one came to see you, Thomas.”
He is quiet a moment and so is everyone else.
“Well, it’s not worth thinking about it anymore, is it?” says Dwight. “It was just a dream. That’s what I tell myself. Who decides fate? It’s you or it’s Charlie. That’s all.” But Thomas sees his ghosts all around him. The old man ghost. The infant ghost. The girls. Dwight is heartless. The man without a heart. The liar about the whales.
Dwight sees Thomas looking at him. Nervous, he gets up and he takes off his ring and places it by the TV. “Come on. Let’s go swimming.”
But Thomas doesn’t hear this. He looks at the ring. He remembers Dwight always wore it for special events. He hasn’t worn it until now, this journey. Thomas looks at it carefully. Suddenly he knows. Milton saw it, saw the hand with this ring hit Marco on the head, hold him in water, underwater. Suddenly Thomas knows what happened to his son that day of the hunt. Milton never lies.
Marco is like Thomas. He was the one who said what was wrong. He knew it was not a whale to kill, that the time was not right.
Thomas picks up the ring and puts it in his pocket. He feels love for his son, and quiet grief.
From his room, he hears the others down at the pool.
Vietnam. It was so green there, another world, as if he dreamed it. The humidity and the many shades of green and the rich dank smell of mildew. He opens the box and looks at his medals. Like Dwight’s ring. So proud a medal, a decoration, an identity of some kind. Thomas has a Silver Star for jumping in a bunker to save a wounded man.
Dimitri knocks on his door and Thomas pockets Dwight’s ring as if he is the guilty person. He puts the medals inside the box. Thomas still remembers their grandfathers. Dimitri’s grandfather was a whaler with Witka. Thomas still can see them walking together.
Dimitri comes in and sits in the worn motel chair. “You’re lucky you survived.”
“Yeah, lucky.”
“What did you do over there all that time?”
“Take care of the dead, cover their faces, smell them.”
“What everyone did, huh? But I mean what happened to you all those years they thought you were dead?”
“I don’t know. I grew rice. I fished.”
“You what?”
“Yeah, I worked.”
“Were you like a prisoner or something?”
“I tried not to be a prisoner. I just pretended to be someone else.”
“You must have been good at it.”
“I guess I was. I still am.”
“At least you survived it.”
“No. I didn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“Think about it. My name is up there. Among the dead and the missing.”
“Jesus. You’re right.”
It’s late at night. They’ve had too much to drink. Thomas wants silence. He can hear them down there at the pool until management or someone silences them. They argue a moment and then he hears them come to the door and enter their rooms.
“Hey.” Dwight opens Thomas’s door without knocking and drips pool water on the dirty carpet. Dimitri is already there. “What’s everyone in here so solemn about?”
And Thomas says, “I’m a killer.” He says, “Hit me.” He stands up from the bed.
“Naw. I’m not going to hit you.”
“Hit me.”
Dimitri and Dwight look at each other. “What brought all this on?” asks Dwight, pushing his wet hair back.
“I killed my own men. I looked at their faces, I looked at the children they were going to kill, the women they were going to hurt, and I shot the Americans, those men. They looked so white. It was like it was happening to us Indians. They were going to kill the children. One of them was going to rape a little girl. It was like us, our history, like one more group of murderers.” Crying now. Breaking the rules again. “I shot them. I had to.”
Dwight hits him. “Shut up!”
Thomas stands straight and wishes he’d been hit harder. “Go ahead,” he says. “Hit me again.”
But then Dwight looks at him again. “You’re not worth it.” But then, later, Dwight says, “I might have done it too, Tom.”
“You did.”
“What?”
“You killed your own.”
“What do you mean?”
“It just wasn’t over there.”
Dimitri says, “I did. I killed our officer. I had to or he would’ve killed all of us. He was sending us straight into a trap. He had no idea.”
Thomas thinks of the graves of the old people at home, marked by whalebone, the shrines that belonged to the whalers and the women, the sky that isn’t European. Its constellations are a great whale, a sea lion, a tree of life, and he remembers this; this is who he is; the man who stands beneath those stars, those planets. He’s A’atsika. He comprehends the immensity, the pathos of the tragedy that shaped him and all his actions—and theirs—forever after.
He was one of the breakers, as Ruth called the men after her day sitting out the storm on the water. And she was right. He was still afraid of living. It took courage to live. It took courage to have happiness. What are inner walls made of but memory and forgetting?
“Yeah,” Dwight says, thinking backward in time. “I would have done it.
“Like I said, you did. You killed my son.”
“What? You’re crazier than I thought, man.” He throws an ashtray. It breaks.
Thomas looks him directly in the eye. “You killed Marco. My son. Dwight, Jesus.”
Dwight looks up. “Hey, you know me, Tom. It’s me, Dwight. What’s the matter with you? You’ve been crazy a long time, bud, and everyone knows it.”
“Yeah, well I want to think of how I’d be remembered if I died today.” He’d been thinking that same thing on the day they killed the whale, the day his son died. “I’m not going to be remembered as the one who poured beer on the whale to say fuck off, America.” As the others leave the room he grabs Dwight and pushes him against the wall. “I can prove it. You lied. You killed for money. What could be worse?”
“Shut the fuck up. Let me go.”
“I’m not going to be remembered as an American who killed children and women.” He comprehends the immensity of all his decisions, the long line of American tragedies that had shaped him.
He passes through a door, not the kind that opens and closes.
RUTH WATCHING
Ruth knows that on the day the whales went away, the blood of the whale and that of her son must have been mixed together. Marco and the whale were related once again. He was the boy who went to live with the whales. He left to travel far distances. He learned the bottom of the sea. He began to see wit
h the whale’s eye.
She wraps a shawl around her. She stood years ago in the same shawl watching the ocean, the wind blowing her sleeves and hair, light on water. It was the same shawl she had wrapped around baby Marco, and now she cries. Now ocean and tears become one. It is the same element.
The whales have left them since their hunt. The whales Ruth loved to watch. When she is far out, she still sees them rise and turn, open the water like new stones, new planets, breathing their eyes wiser, older, than her own. She thinks that now all she has in common with Thomas was giving a child to the sea, and where has he gone?
Over where the round rocks are, where the river comes into the sea, and the kelp forests farther out, Ruth watches.
Many of the men are now gone. She thinks perhaps the men have taken a trip together, or perhaps to visit whalers up north, or to piece together another way to hunt the whales, which of course she would fight.
Thomas was the young man who had once followed her prints in the sand to the large dark rocks. They made cairns and left them as messages on the beach. Some of these were elaborate in their balance, more than a message, but something beautiful and full, large-seeming, even as limited as the two young people were in truth and experience. But it was years ago.
Now she comes back inside her mother’s house and the sound of the wind is sometimes like singing.
She sees herself. She is a shadow on the wall at her mother’s house.
Her mother says, “They’ll be back. As for Thomas, did he ever sweep the floor?”
He didn’t. Ruth only shakes her head no.
“Did he eat the food you left him?”
“No.”
“Did he go to the water?”
“Only at night.”
“Did he cry at night?”
“Yes, I think so. I think I heard him a few times. Or it was the wind.”
“Good. That is what matters in these cases.”
Ruth thinks, We are in the town where everything is stolen from the sea. Most of the people have always lived here. A few mobile homes behind and among the houses now take away the old feeling, but where do you put a growing family? And everyone knows each other’s business, who drinks, which man yells at night when frustrated by day. No one even bothers to close their curtains at night unless they are fighting or making love, and they look into each other’s windows and then they can tell which purchase they must next make or how to arrange their furniture.
The sunset is like gold as Ruth watches it. On the windows are beads of light, the ones after a rain. And some nights they have a good strong moon reflected.
The ocean is a landlord here. Everyone pays the sea. Only some pay more. Even the seals have to pay to remain there.
DOA: DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY: ROOMS
Dear Ruth, he’d tried to write, early on in the war, the birds here are noisy and the jungle is a place you would love. But then, even as he wrote it, it was gone. That quickly. From flame to nothing. What could he say to Ruth? And so he is in a room of fire and all night he watches red walls rise up and fall back and he thinks of the creators of his own world, how unlike the Americans they were. The A’atsika creators punished humans who weren’t peaceful. They sent them traveling, like Adam out of paradise, not for having knowledge but for having a lack of peace. They were sent from one world to another for being like the human he had become and he wondered what his next world would be.
In the next room Dwight sits up in bed, disturbed by the sounds next door. He thinks he needs to keep a watch on Thomas. He lights a cigarette. He has heard Thomas showering, then opening and closing drawers. Hell, the first thing a man learns is never to unpack, Dwight thinks as he listens to Thomas’s every move through the paper-thin wall, not knowing that in the next room the walls are red and burning.
Thomas stands up straight and puts on his dress uniform. He carries the medals in his pocket. He opens the door. Outside is rain upon rain. He goes back in and puts the plastic cover over his dress hat before he leaves. He puts on his GI issue raincoat and ties the belt. He looks perfect. His boots are shined but he doesn’t care to cover them, to keep them from being wet. He has already called the cab.
Dwight has heard all this, the door opening, closing. He goes out. “What are you doing? Hey, where are you going all spiffed up like that? Hell, you’re even spit-shined.”
Dwight follows a ways, asking Thomas questions, but Thomas ignores him. It is wet, even if it isn’t cold. Thomas doesn’t say anything. In fact, he doesn’t acknowledge Dwight, not even his presence, let alone the questions.
“We’re just different. It doesn’t mean anything. We’re amigos, you know.”
He gets in the cab. “Department of the Army,” Thomas tells the driver. The man looks at him, then opens a map. Then a phone book. “Sir, there isn’t one. It’s just a historical building. Is that what you want?” He looks Thomas up and down. “You might mean the Pentagon.”
“I saw it on the map.”
Dwight watches. He plans.
“That’s not the department anymore. It’s just the old building. The DOA. Ha, ha! I had one of those in here last night. Dead On Arrival.”
Thomas doesn’t smile. “Or maybe the White House.”
“Which one?” The man is becoming frustrated, losing time, which is money.
“Okay, the Pentagon.”
“Which section?”
“Hell, I don’t know. The Department of War.”
The cabdriver eyes the man in the backseat, dressed in his uniform, wondering why he is lost. “Where are you from?” He sees the other man still standing in the rain as he drives away.
“It’s a place called Dark River. No one ever knows where it is. It’s out West.”
When they pull up and he gets out of the taxi, he gives the cabdriver a large tip.
There are doors and doors and an underground tunnel and somehow Thomas wanders through it all. Security. He thinks of how good he looks today, in his uniform, newly cut short hair, good proud looks. He looks right. He feels the way he did when he first joined, getting his picture taken with the flag. But going into the building at first makes him feel smaller than he felt while he was in the cab, riding without being able to tell the man where he was going. He had planned in his mind what it looked like and not that it was like a prison of deep concrete, then wood, stone, a place of vast scale, not like the rooms he inhabited but one designed to make the army look like it was all clean lines, perfect in scale despite being full with the spirits of the dead. In here is a museum of wars. Files of war. He sees it in his mind like a room one enters underground, then up steps, elevated, but it is still overdone. He should have known there are no buildings here that are not imposing and official.
“Can I help you, Sergeant?” the voice is almost an echo. “You don’t look well.” He can barely see the man behind the desk.
He himself thinks he looks official in his dress uniform, but for a while he is speechless, vulnerable. Of course, he is being watched. There are small cameras. He looks for them as a criminal would, before he enters through security without so much as being questioned, showing his ID. Then he goes into a room where a major sits behind a desk and he tosses his medals on the desk and says, “I want to return these. I want it noted that I am giving them back.”
The major looks up, expecting to recognize anyone in the vicinity, but finds a stranger in their building. “You want to return them? Whose are they?”
“Mine.” He drops them, bends down to pick them up, not at all with the dignity he wanted. He hears Dimitri’s voice in his head. No one gives a damn who killed what, who didn’t. We all did it.
“How did you get in here? This is a secured area.”
He looks suspicious and he knows it. “They saluted me through.” He laughs. “It must have been the uniform.” How far a few silver things, a few bars, a pair of spit-shined shoes can carry a man. Oh, he forgot: “Sir.”
“You have to go through two checkpoints.”
“Yes. I did that.”
“Just a moment, sir. I will direct you to the person in charge of this.” The major backs out of the room, careful of Thomas.
Men appear as if from the air and they push him down and keep him down and he smells the floor wax and sees what could have been his life in so many ways, if he hadn’t joined up and had remained home with Ruth and learned, himself, the old songs and ways they had started to teach him when he was young. Or if he’d gone along with the others and killed the children and women and the old man who was left behind and gone on to another village and done it again and lived or died with his troops, burning things behind him, keeping a souvenir here and there. And he could have gone home with them, found a job or two, drank a beer together with his buddies, watched a ball game, run for tribal council, the state legislature, or some other branch of a government just like this one where he is held down.
When his records come up on their computer, a voice from out of the sky like god’s voice, says, “Hell, why do you want to turn them in?”
“I didn’t earn them.”
“Weren’t you wounded? It says you were wounded.”
They already have his information. He thinks about the scar across his middle, the bleeding leg he’d thought was an artery and tried to hold together, the impact to his neck and arm which he didn’t even know about because of the blood on his leg. It made him sweat now to think of it. He kept it out of his mind, in one of the corners in a bundle he made called shrapnel and suddenly he weighed so much. “Yes sir, I was wounded.”
He is moving closer to words, to truth. “But I wasn’t killed or missing. I killed the wrong people. I stayed.” Tears began in eyes that had forgotten to dry. “I killed Americans. It was supposed to be a raid. It went wrong. And we were in the wrong place. I tried to tell them. I had the map in my hand. And we were supposed to kill the children and I said no.”