“It’s true.” The heavy woman behind her desk at the tribal office didn’t bother to get up from her chair. “Your benefits are gone. But you’ll have to take it up with the council, not me.”

“Nothing any of you do surprises me anymore.” This place, she thinks, I need to leave it, but it’s all she’s ever known and she almost falls as she leaves. Ruth will have to make a scene. She’ll do it, too, thinks Aurora.

Murph’s parents drove a Toyota Corolla and they had something of a look of hope in their eyes. They knew Thomas had survived. They’d had news some years ago from the Pentagon that this man who had been missing in action was found, but they had no address for him. Nor could they get his address through Social Security. They went over their boy’s letters, finally, and found out Thomas was from a reservation on the coast. They just thought they’d go there and try their luck at finding him.

The parents, the Murphys, are an elderly couple, the woman quite frail, with short hair and narrow shoulders, overly thin in her dark green slacks and flowered blouse, her back curved with time. She loves Thomas Just only because he’d known her son, so her eyes are warm when she knocks on the door and tells Thomas who they are.

“Come in.” Thomas holds the door open. He has little to say. His hair has grown. He pushes it out of his eyes.

“Well, we’ve lucked out finding you. We’re so glad to see you.” She looks at him a moment. “It’s like seeing a part of our son.”

“Sit down.” Thomas clears the papers and a shirt from the cushioned chair and pulls up a kitchen chair, brushing off the crumbs. He moves them close together, near his own chair.

The father still holds his hat in his hand, against his body, then sits down and places it on his lap. The mother looks out sadly at the distant sun descending behind the top of the wall.

The man was himself a veteran of an earlier war and with a slight southern accent he tells Thomas how he had been with the men who had liberated the Jews from one of the camps. He would never forget seeing those living skeletons, seeing them like that. He still talks about it. Thomas can tell he’d once had a straight, taut body, that old man, and he was proud of his life in the war. He had saved people. It was only time and the loss of his son that had made him stoop and age. His was a life lived that had worn him out, but at least he hadn’t been diminished by his own deeds.

With Thomas, his own actions had reduced him, his memories ever inescapable. And now Murphy’s parents. What could be worse, he thinks. A small smile on the mother’s face. Of course Thomas remembers their son. He sees him at night when he should be sleeping, the water buffalo Murphy carved his name on. It was the beginning of the war for him, Thomas, newly arrived, chilled in spite of the heat. Murphy was the beginning, whooping, shooting at everything, everyone.