It’s true, but the officer hasn’t been bought off like Dwight thinks, and he’s not his friend. They went to high school together. JC remembers him. And he’s been waiting for information on the whales killed, thinking a drunken tongue will sooner or later tell the truth and he’ll find Dwight behind the wall of lies.

Dwight had brought the white woman back with him. She was so proud to be with the man who sings old songs and tells her traditional stories, even those not intended to be told and some he even made up, and he is a warrior and a paddler and such a good, proud Indian man. Her friends think she is fortunate and privy to tribal secrets. She watches Dwight at the door. “What’s going on?” she says. They all ignore her.

Suddenly self-conscious, she goes into the other room and puts on the new robe she bought to cover her gown, a silky pink thing Dwight secretly told his friends about, laughing about her wiles. She stands at the door, watching his hair fall across his face as he looks down and they handcuff him, in front, not like on TV with his hands behind him, and they tell him not only his rights but also his wrongs and he says, “There are witnesses. I have my witnesses,” meaning from the boat the day Thomas was shot, but he doesn’t say a word, nor will he ever, about how he thought he saw the great octopus lift a tentacle and rise up and look right at him with a black, intelligent eye and become red with fury at the humans who were said to be similar to itself except for the bones that limit them so much they can’t slide away and into safe, small places, and only two arms, oh, poor pitiful creatures. Dwight will never tell how the whale lifted their canoe from beneath or that he was jealous that Thomas had been the one that could hear the low rumbling of the whale that day and he’d said, “Wait. Listen.” Or that Thomas had been the one who could paddle and sing and truly had been a hero and a man. Always, really, when they thought of it, as if he’d been born to it, even as a child.

“I do. I have witnesses.”

“Yeah, your witnesses are the ones who told us,” the policeman says.

Dwight hadn’t counted on that, but now he is already figuring out what he might say. He wouldn’t tell the truth if it was his name.

“What’s going on?” the blond woman asks again, fear in her voice. “Dwight?” She hollers after him as they leave.

While Dwight is taken away and concocting stories, the woman who has been left behind, and worse, ignored, thinks and says out loud, “Geez, my mother was right. I’ve gone wrong with another freakin’ man.” She closes the door after watching them load Dwight into the car. She steps over the rifle, and, crying, takes out her new underwear and the clothes that no longer fit her pregnant body. She gathers things from the room, the slinky top, and she tries to figure out how to get home. She’ll hitchhike, but she doesn’t trust her own judgment, so she sits and cries until Milton hears her and goes to tell Ruth and send her over to see if the woman is being hurt by Dwight.