“Get down, you idiot!”

He escaped being shot one time they were ambushed; he sank as far down into the mud as he could, so deep the earth looked flat. He was walked on. He heard their voices above him. He held his breath a long time after they were gone, waiting.

I am earth, he thinks now. That’s why I lived. I became the earth. This became his way of surviving.

As earth he noticed the plants. Even the roots were being destroyed. He thought nothing would grow back on that end of the world. What would his grandfather have thought? Even with war around him, it broke his heart.

He never challenged or fought their own military action like some did. He was a follower of orders at first. He understood, name, rank, serial number.

Now he was a container of history, pain, convictions, beliefs, memory, and courage. All those were in him. Now was a carrier, of weapons. M16’s (twenty-three pounds), grenades, grenade launchers. Above were the C-130 transport planes. Out there were the once-green mountains.

He remembers Murphy. He can still see his eyes.

There was one boy who lived through their last ordeal together, the saved all-American towheaded blond boy. Thomas has pushed him away. He’d been pushed to safety and he fell to the ground, but he watched, wide-eyed. Afterward Thomas never forgot him. He disappeared. Maybe he ran. Maybe he told their story. Most likely he died; there were fires even at the river and daytime was like night because of the smoke. Thomas was the lone survivor.

He thinks of his daughter, Lin.

The lone survivor sees his daughter running toward him when they find him. He remembers. For him, it all became one thing, the many pasts, the present, all one memory; a kite in the sky attached to a string, his daughter Lin running, he and Ruth once running together with a kite across a field near the river, an eagle with its wings spread, a fish in its talons. There were the sheer curtains blowing in a breeze, blowing inward as in the summer at their little newlywed house, their green fruit box house by the river. Everything falling, wind in a plastic bag floating down. Fishing weights in water. Bombs. Ruth with skinny legs holding up her skirt filled with fresh-picked apples and then letting them drop, watching them fall on the very bed where he now lay, at Witka’s where they hoped they’d live together one day, the house willed to them.

Remembering, in Spanish, means to pass something through the heart again, and now all the years are going through his heart again as he tries to turn away from the ocean. But he hears it and he knows it is out there. Some sleepless nights he goes out. But this night in his sleep he says, “Oh, look at all those beautiful life rafts.”

THE RAIN PRIEST

In Dark River where the A’atsika live, no one seems to remember or notice when the clouds first abandoned the sky or when the coastal rains ended, but what the old man predicted after the killing of the whale is coming true. Without observation the ocean tides slowed and then the winds of the world decided not to blow, even the gentle ocean breezes that move the curtains of summer windows, breezes that blow the long hair of women and ring bells that were once on ships. This is not noticed at first.