“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.