“Your steps down there look like a real workout.”

“Yeah. I guess they are.”

At the door, before they walk away, Mr. Murphy stands and salutes.

Thomas doesn’t want to, but finally he salutes back, awkwardly.

He doesn’t say how Murph wanted to torture everyone and pee on them. He thinks how he was turned inside out and the only feeling their redheaded boy had was adrenaline, hate, fear, and insane laughter.

He stands and watches them leave.

Thomas sits in the darkest corner of his place on the small bed and he bends over, his face clenched like his fists. He has learned not to feel and now he is forgetting that skill of unfeeling needed by the best of warriors and doctors and priests, those who bear sad news and carry the weight of death.

Milton, the one they call the idiot, says he saw someone hold Marco down in the water, onto the back of the whale, as it rolled in agony. Milton is not smart enough to lie. Over and over again, Milton has said this, but he was the one whose parents drank more than the rest so he had been born with strange eyes and hands with palms and no lines, and he limped, and no one put stock in what he said. But Ruth does and now Thomas ponders this, that someone injured his son. His son.

That night when he falls asleep he is nineteen. He is nineteen, and they are sure to die. They are dug in and there is firing around them. Fire falls from the sky. He says to Murphy, “Wouldn’t you just love a Big Mac right now?”

“It’s the planes trying to block the North,” someone says.

“Our own planes?”

They laugh as if hamburgers and fries had never really existed. They laugh even if they may be surrounded by people with guns, people smarter than them. They can’t stop laughing. Even when the fire comes, he is stifling himself laughing. He puts his head down and smells the molds of the earth.

“Fighting for world peace,” Murphy used to say. “Yeah, and so here we are with bulletproof jackets.” A lie.

“Yeah, and not even a flak jacket. I lost it somewhere, and it’s damn cold at night. They could at least give us a jacket when we have ’em shot and burned off our backs. So this being down here on the ground is the infantry airborne!”

“Yeah,” someone says. “Bulletproof jackets. Like those shirts, what do you call them, Tommy? You know, you Indians wore them? They were bulletproof.”

Thomas’s jaw tightens. “How would I know? I never heard of it.” But he had heard of the ghost dance. His grandmother had been a ghost dancer before the massacres, but she said they’d known, they all had, that they weren’t invulnerable humans. “That was just some bullshit the white men made up,” she said. He and his cousins laughed to hear an old lady talk like that. Their grandmother in her navy blue dress and church hat and the ghost dance dress she kept. It had raven feathers off the arms like wings, and a single eagle feather in the center.