Frank made a big production of acting as if he couldn’t believe his ears. He looked up at the ceiling, spread his arms wide, and shook his head. I don’t know why this particular thought occurred to me at a time like this, but I thought, yeah, he’s an American all right. The Americans, like the Spanish, massacred millions of Indians, but I don’t think it was out of malevolence so much as plain old ignorance. And sometimes ignorance is even harder to deal with than deliberate evil.
