His brother and his best friend called the other men and they went to prepare the wooden canoes. They brought the harpoon, the floats, drinking water, for they might be gone four days or more. When they hunted, the women would be quiet the whole time the men were out. Everyone had to be pure in heart and mind. By then the whale would be coming gladly toward the village.

“Oh brother, sister whale,” he sang. “Grandmother whale, Grandfather whale. If you come here to land we have beautiful leaves and trees. We have warm places. We have babies to feed and we’ll let your eyes gaze upon them. We will let your soul become a child again. We will pray it back into a body. It will enter our bodies. You will be part human. We’ll be part whale. Within our bodies, you will dance in warm rooms, create light, make love. We will be strong in thought for you. We will welcome you. We will treat you well. Then one day I will join you.” His wife sang with him.

When Witka truly died, his wife, best girlfriend, and daughter held on to his body longer than they should. They couldn’t be sure he was dead just because he wasn’t breathing.

Those were the grandparents of Thomas Witka Just. They were the grandparents and mother, on one side, of Thomas, the man who had been missing in war, the man who now lived in Witka’s gray hut on the craggy rocks. Thomas, the man who’d won the Purple Hearts and nearly the last Medal of Honor and other shining tokens of actions that should have made him feel esteemed.

When Thomas was a boy, he, like his grandfather, always watched the water. As if keeping with the old traditions they’d all heard about, he and his friends, Dimitri III, Dwight, jealous of the abilities of Thomas, and the others would see how long they could hold their breath underwater. “It isn’t funny,” Thomas’s mother said when she thought, more than once, that he had drowned and she pulled him up to air by the back of his shirt. The last time, the shirt, an old Arrow, ripped off and Thomas nearly drowned, laughing.

Custer died in an Arrow shirt. That was their joke.

Later, as his grandfather had gone under the ocean, his grandmother under the land, Thomas had taken to the sky, a most unnatural thing for a human. On his way to war, the first plane crashed and he was the sole survivor. Before he could even protest or tell the story of what he’d seen, they put him on another plane. After that, he believed he was saved for a reason.

But now he hopes he has an appointment with death and all he wants to do is wait for it. He has turned his back on the sea.

It’s a secret to the rest of the world where Thomas lives, as he wants it to be. If it were known, people would come searching. They would find him. He is a war hero missing for over five years after the war was declared over, until he was found by the army, then, after a stop in Hawaii, he was lost again in San Francisco, named for Saint Francis. Now he is missing from himself.