“And it was your father. He tried to rape me. Dwight and some of the guys walked by and they could have stopped it. I cried out for help. They were drunk. They didn’t do anything. I was already pregnant. I said, Help me, and they didn’t do a thing. I fought your father off. I attacked him with all I could muster.”

“Jesus.” Thomas is quiet, thinking of his father, but he is also a man possessed by his own offenses. He thinks of Dwight lying again. Then he remembers. He takes Dwight’s ring out of his pocket. “Here. It’s his ring. Just as Milton described it.” It makes a hollow sound when he drops it on the table. “We can go to the police.”

She looks at him long and hard. She wishes he would leave. He didn’t even care about what his father had done. But then she turns to the ring. “Which police? The tribal police? The town? The FBI? Our word supported only by a retarded boy and everyone out there hating us for killing the whale? This whole part of America hates us. Even our children are attacked in school. Who is going to care about a dead A’atsika who was whaling? Me with only a mother’s feeling and you with something you didn’t even see?”

“Yes, but Dwight knows I know.”

Thomas still fails to see that sometimes there isn’t justice, that the world still is not one made up of black and white, right and wrong. How could he have survived a war, she wonders, without knowing that zone of gray, of being in between, of sitting on the border between lies and half-truths, between the goodness of some and the evil of others?

“Nothing is ever finished,” he says.

“What does that mean?” She’s almost sarcastic. “Some things are finished. Gone. Done.”

“I don’t know what it means. It is some kind of riddle of being human, being a man.”

She sits down. “Okay. Do it. Get Milton to testify. Between the two of us we have a history of Dwight’s betrayals, including the death of whales, the stealing of tribal funds, his lies.” She knows it is futile, but at least Dwight would have to sweat it out.

“It’s even in the fact that Marco said no that day.”

She is silent, taking it in, taking him in. Sometimes she wakes up thinking Marco is alive. She talks to him out loud in the floating darkness. She tells him, “Good morning,” or “Oh, look at the whales pass by.” But now she looks at Thomas in wonder. “He said no? You mean about killing the whale?”

In the long silence that follows, Thomas thinks about how, with surprise, he could have been the first to fire a shot and he blamed it on history, his history, and he hated himself for it, but that day it was like war all over again, the copter above, the men in the boat yelling, the Coast Guard boat, the excitement akin to fear. He remembers the men, them firing, too, the barrage, the sound, the whale coming to them in its pain from somewhere it didn’t know, to them instead of away in its last fight, larger than they could have thought even though it was just a small one, moving the boat, and then it turned in its bleeding agony and the canoe was tossed like a stick and the Coast Guard rushed in with all the noise and yelling. The confusion, everyone with a different focus. Some trying to get the whale up from its descent down to the bottom of the ocean with lungs full of water, some trying to find the men who were lost in the water. Yet for most, the focus was on the whale, even with water all around them, the men trying to get out of water, afraid of the whale, of the great waves created by it and the Coast Guard boat, the spray of blood on them all.