Still, Thomas searched the scene. His warrior intuition told him something wasn’t quite right. His jungle law, something that told him when there was danger, when an enemy was near, or death in his proximity.

The storm came in and many of the young men left as soon as the whale was dragged to land. Thomas thought Marco was among them, and he was angry they had gone indoors to watch a football game. A ball game, no less, leaving the whale on the beach, a large mass of blood and fat and skin needing to be cut away from the enormous bones, the spilling innards shining and the flies coming from nowhere, even in the night and autumn wind. This was what Ruth had protested.

“Hey!” someone called out. “We need some help over here.”

And then Ruth came again to ask about Marco. She asked, standing there in the whipping wind.

Thomas didn’t know. He was thinking the blood was too familiar. The sound of helicopters, as well. It all made him nervous.

“Where’s Marco?” she repeated, a frenzy in her, her eyes, yet she sounded quiet in spite of the certain knowledge that something was not right.

“He went in already,” Thomas said, almost brutal. “Like the rest of them.” He was angry, but he thought his son was probably angrier. Worse, his son had seen him. Really seen him. And he had been brutal to the whale and he wondered what it was in him, in other humans, and he was wishing he could change time, go back hours, even years, and change events. He wished he would have stood by Marco and said, No, it is a friendly whale.

Never kill a timid whale. He had been told this by the old people.

Ruth’s eyes scanned every face in all the fast motion. Searching. “Thomas, you don’t know him. You don’t, but he wouldn’t have gone in. He wouldn’t do that.” She started to tell him, He’s lived over with the white house people, but instead she entered the house of her own fears, the son she searched for, feeling, knowing she would not find him, she would never see him again, his dark soft eyes, and her face already began to line with another grief.

As for Thomas, he himself wanted to leave as soon as the whale was dragged from the water and the men cut it, laughing, talking about its sex organs, calling it names, all the love for the animal missing, and he thought, Jesus. They are like the men at war. What his grandfather would have thought if he had seen it! Thomas was ashamed of them. Now he hated his own men. His love for them had led him to crimes, including this one. He never wanted to talk to any of them after this, some of them drinking in the boat that day, smoking marijuana, one had put beer in the blowhole of the whale with irreverence and stupidity and Thomas had made him stop. “You fucking idiot!” he yelled through the noise.