I see a friendly face, my sweetheart, Monica. She catches my eye with a big smile and then falls to the linoleum floor in the crowd of students. It’s instantaneous. One moment she’s smiling with big eyes and the next she’s on the floor.

Students crowd around her. I know what has happened.

“It’s her heart,” I call to the school staff. “Call an ambulance.”
They think I’m hysterical.

“Call an ambulance,” I demand. “She has a heart defect.”

Her mother had told me about it.

One of the secretaries goes into the hallway.

“Call an ambulance,” I shout again.

I move towards the door and the Vice Principal orders me to stay in the office. I protest. He tells me I’m the most self-centered kid he’s ever seen. A minute, maybe three, pass. Monica is on the floor, surrounded by students and adults. Someone calls the ambulance and soon they arrive. They put Monica on a stretcher. Her skin is pale, her eyes closed. All decorum in the office falls away and I leave with no comment.

“Where did they take her?” I ask a friend.

There’s only one hospital in Lawrence, Kansas. I leave the school building and ride my white Gitane bike down the big hill and north to the hospital. I throw it to the ground and go into the front entrance.

“I’m here to find out about Monica McNish,” I say.

They can’t tell me anything, so they say. I’m a minor. I’m not family. They don’t know.

I believe she is dead.

An hour or so later, someone — I remember it was an adult, I don’t remember who. Perhaps her parents. Perhaps a teacher. Tells me that yes, she passed.

Later, her mother invites me to the house to give her the details of what I saw. She is looking hard for a reason that I know she never will find. She takes me into Monica’s room and asks if there is anything I’d like to have. I leave with a James Taylor album — we had seen him perform together not long before.

I’ve had many other people die in my life. I’ve even watched several other people die. Yet Monica is the person I miss the most. Perhaps it’s because we didn’t have time to truly know each other. We were just 13, with explosions of emotions, protests, music and chaos happening all around us — though her quiet home with her mother and father was, for me, a peaceful refuge.

I feel her sneaking up on me at the end of every October, and by the 29th, I usually realize what is happening — Oh, it’s Monica’s anniversary. I’m still very close to two of our mutual friends, Jolynn and Omi, though I rarely see them. Today I read something Omi posted about Monica. And I got a few texts from Jolynn. These words made me feel warm.

And from Monica, I received a visit, as sometimes happens. She’s on my shoulder now, vaporous and warm.

When I reimagine 1971, I follow a thread from my digital present that takes me back 55 years to an analog past. Very different places. But the energy I feel at my desk right now in a garden in Manhattan is the same energy I felt when I was with her back then. A warm, swirling ball of particles, as real as any ball. At the moment, that warmth keeps me present and connected to Monica in both places at once. And I like it.

Earlier this week I drove from New York to St. Paul, Minnesota with my youngest child, Beckett, aka Aspen, and Beckett’s dog, Gambel. On Wednesday I said goodbye to Gambel, in St. Paul, where Beckett lives, and flew back to New York. For the last 23 years, except for one break, I’ve been taking care of other people’s dogs. Suddenly, there is no dog waiting in my home to be walked.

There was Ruby, a white mongrel my wife adopted from a little cave in rural Ecuador, and brought home to New York with every intention of walking it several times a day. But then she got pregnant, three times, and dog walks fell to me. When we divorced, she asked me to take care of Ruby.

A few years later, Rynn rescued a large, gorgeous bluetick coonhound named Elvis. The dog barked so much that the city gave her tickets. She solved that problem by adopting a black and tan coonhound, and the two of them howled even louder together.

Six months later, Rynn died, and her dogs moved in with me full time along the our three children, Bolivia, Violet and Beckett. The dogs were completely untrained. Coonhounds are meant to ride in the back of trucks and chase raccoons up trees under the light of the moon, howling the whole time. They were not designed for New York City. I sent them to some Orthodox Christian monks upstate for training. They came back well behaved and able to run off leash in parks, which was a wonderful sight.

A few years later, Beckett adopted Gambel, hoping the dog would help him through some rough adolescent times. Gambel excelled. He is the most sensitive, easy dog I have ever been around. When Elvis and Alice died in old age, Gambel became the prince of the famiy.

And now he’s gone to St. Paul, and I feel alone for the first time since 2003. This is a new paradigm, and my heart is stuck in the old one.

Of course, being me, I told everyone that sending Gambel off to the north country would be easy, that I was looking forward to being alone and not having to take Gambel into consideration every time I went out, or took a trip.

However, coming home tonight I realize that Gambel was always waiting for me to come home, always watching to see if I was going to leave, and that grounded me. I am floating tonight, and I wish for my feet to be back on the earth.

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Hardly anyone lives in this landscape, and only a few dirt roads go in and out. The road I took ended broke abruptly on the south bank of the Missouri River, where a small sign hanging from a rusted mailbox read “Call for Service.” In the box I found a walkie talkie, and called across the river for a ride. Soon a very large man fired up the ferry and came across to pick me up.

I proceeded into the wilderness on yet another 100 mile plus trip on gravel roads without services. It was exciting and slightly intimidating, because there wasn’t anyone out here to help me if I got into trouble.

About an hour into the drive, with sagebrush covered land rolling off in all directions, I saw a spooky house set on a hill way back from the road. It was black against the brown soil, probably abandoned, and reminded me of the Edward Hopper painting called “Lighthouse Hill.” I felt nervous about going up there, but how could I not?

I searched up and down for a driveway that would lead to this spectral house. Just then, I spotted an early 1980s Ford pickup truck coming towards me, the first vehicle I’d seen all day. I nodded as they passed – two older, very dark skinned Native American men. They appeared somber and didn’t acknowledge me. I immediately became self-conscious and fearful. Was it their dark skin? Their Indianness? Their maleness? Their gun rack? Or was I just wound up from too much travel and too many conspiracy theories coming my way.

I skipped the abandoned farmhouse and headed back up the main dirt road. Within a mile I’d unintentionally caught up to the men in the pickup, so I throttled back a bit. My thoughts went wild. Now they think I’m following them, that I’m up to no good. They’re gonna pull over and ambush me. At some point they turned off into the hills. I knew I was losing it. None of my reactions made sense.

I drove into the dark part of my soul, desolate just like the landscape. So much about me was dark. So many things had happened that I could have prevented.

My emotional makeup sometimes made me cold, distant, unable to connect with people, especially those with the strongest desires for me.

I had trouble accepting love, even from my kids.

I was twisted, hard for others to understand.

I was fat.

I moved slowly.

I never earned the money a man like me should earn.

I sank, the bad emotions consuming me to the point I looked to the edge of the road where it dropped off into a canyon and thought, Maybe I should drive right off. I’d thought this only once previously in my life, just before I quit drinking when I was 26. A few days after my birthday that year I was driving drunk, with a six pack beside me, through some highway tunnels in Pennsylvania, just killing time and stewing in my personal, drunken hell after work all day writing books on an assembly line of typewriters at a book factory. Along with a loft full of other writers I wrote books about how to be healthy that sold millions of copies for the publisher. Between paragraphs I would step out on the back porch and smoke unfiltered Camel cigarettes. My eyes saw even sunny days through a dark haze. As I approached a tunnel that evening I almost pulled to the right to smash into the entrance wall.

However, there were no tunnels here, just the long, beautiful gravel road, and I was not that young man from so long ago. I pulled the truck over near a pond and set up my little one-burner stove on the tailgate. I put finely ground coffee in a Moka pot and brewed a double espresso while watching ducks swim among the reeds. The madness passed -- it had been about 20 minutes.

I was exhausted from the road, but thankful for the equanimity, even in the face of negativity, that came with growing older.

At day’s end I arrived in the rolling grasslands of the Nez Perce Bear Claw Battlefield. The low sun lent the tall grasses long shadows beneath a pale blue sky.

There were no humans near and falling into the history of this place was easy – and startling. It was a cold early October in 1877 when about 800 Nez Perce warriors and civilians held up in this gulch and low hills to rest after fleeing the US Cavalry for several months. They were trying to reach Canada, only 42 miles away, where they’d be safe from persecution. Then U.S. soldiers found them and set up to attack the encampment. The two sides had already clashed several times in previous weeks, and here the situation only worsened. The Nez Perce women and children hid in the vegetation and rocks along the creek, while the men had a standoff with the army. The leaders talked a few times, trying to figure a way to settle without warfare, but that ended in an attack that killed three top Nez Perce leaders, and dozens of others, including Army soldiers. Women and children hiding in the marshland were slaughtered. Wounded soldiers were left to bleed on the hillside overnight. About 56 people died, from both sides, and hundreds were injured. Another massacre.

The site, with its bubbling creek and golden grasses, had a sense of grace and majesty. At several points on the trail the park service had set up markers explaining what happened at that spot. At each marker, Native Americans and others had set down offerings that were meaningful to the modern Indians: sunglasses, coins, jewelry glinting in the golden sun. On a tree the Indians had tied bandanas and other cloths to help guide spirits. These memorials were powerful, and intriguing -- I couldn’t fathom the exact symbolism of the objects or the bandanas. Dead soldiers, dead horses, dead mothers, dead children, dead warriors, dead leaders. A US soldier wrote after the massacre that he never would have been able to imagine the horrors he saw take place. The theory had been that the Indians weren’t human, but he found that they were. He regretted everything. There was a line from the Nez Perce to George Floyd that we all could trace if we chose. This would always be sacred ground.

I felt a sudden coolness and descended a slough to a marshy creek where the water bubbled against the heat. A hawk flew in gentle circles above me, dropping every now and then with a cry. What is that about? I wondered. Maybe we’re connected, I thought. Maybe I am a hawk. I returned its cry with my own imitation. A few moments later the hawk dive bombed me, and I realized I was near its nesting site. This hawk didn’t want to connect with me. It wanted me to get the hell away from its chicks. I needed to swear off magical thinking, finally and for good.

At the top of the trail an indented grassy swirl marked the collapsing mass grave of the dead US soldiers. In comments on Yelp, some people said that when they visited, they didn’t feel any sympathy for the soldiers, who they saw as genocidal. Others countered that the Nez Perce were savages, who would have been unharmed if they’d just complied. I thought about all the hunting that my government had done this year. And all the hunting the protestors had done, right and left. All the ways we still couldn’t leave each other alone. The Nez Perce were chased, dehumanized, killed. So much wrong had been done, so much murder in the name of war. So much harm that lasts to this day. I felt deep regret at points along that trail. But I could see why the Europeans would have wanted this land. And when you want something, it is easy to justify taking it. And if you can justify it, then what is wrong?

That’s our ethos now, and I guess it was our ethos back then, as well.

Happy to share that I’ll be speaking at AI Literacy Salon: Why Machines Can’t Be Smart (Signal and Sign)! Make sure to stop by on May 13, 120 Walker St, 3rd Floor,Chinatown, NYC

I don’t write with AI, although I have. A year ago I used Chat GPT to write a psychological thriller for women (which Chat told me was the best selling category on Amazon digital), using the pen name, Vesper Riven. I trained an AI agent on my fiction writing, including several unpublished literary novels, and then told it to write like me, if were a a writer of best-selling psychological thrillers for women.

It did an ok job of writing the novel, with my guidance. But it did a great job of making me suspicious of pure AI writing (prompt based), because AI has an amazing ability to write sentences that at first blush seem to be brilliant, but on second blush, with careful reading, don’t make sense. I believe this is because the machines are not created with built-in souls, as we humans are.

These days I spend a fair amount of time “training” machines how to write better. They’ve learned a lot! But the writing continues to be missing a spark. An ineffable human quality that can make connections far beyond patterns. I don’t know that I’d go so far as Nitzan Hermon, the big thinker who organized the AI Literary Salon, who says that “machines can’t be smart.” But they sure can be dumb.

Look forward to seeing you May 13, 7 PM, 120 Walker St, 3rd Floor, Chinatown, NYC.

Below is the cover of my psychological thriller for women. Chat told me that the elements on the cover image were going to boost the sales of this book (I haven’t checked in months, but I think it has been read a dozen times). It was a lot of fun, and I will never do it again.

The southeastern edge of California meets the western edge of Arizona in a desert that’s filled with water. Generally, I’m captivated by any flowing water. I always want to swim. I had to restrain myself here. I came across this canal in a verdant desert after leaving Calexico, California, a small border town marked by a collection of suburban homes with views of the border wall, and Mexicali beyond. All sand, everywhere. From the edge of Calexico, the canal seemed like a mirage in the distance. But then I got close and smelled it, pungent and layered, like moss on bark. This water began as Rocky Mountain snowmelt before flowing into the Colorado River, then through the Hoover Dam and, finally, into the Gila Gravity Main Canal system, in Yuma, Arizona, a few miles from where this photo was taken. I followed it into a nearby date farm (above), hoping I would encounter a date shake. Alas, the shake shack was closed.

These canals are unfenced, not at all fancy, purely utilitarian, and quite beautiful because of it. The constant movement of nearby trains is a plus. These are all tributes to American engineering, and it would be nice to see modern projects of all types that were made with these principals of simplicity and longevity. That doesn’t mean I believe this water should be funneled into the desert to irrigate lettuce, cotton, alfalfa and grasses. And that is where it is going. It’s kind of like watering your desert home garden with bottled imported spring water.

Then, during the few weeks when Arizona had the highest rate of Covid in the world, I found myself tooling around the state, talking to people and marveling at the fact that hardly anyone wore a mask. I ended up at the border, as I usually do when wandering, parked in a two story motel type place on the edge of nothing. The pool was closed due to the virus, so I passed through the crowd of geriatric cigarette smokers at the lobby entrance, and made my way to a big cemetery in town.

The cemetery felt ancient, connected to the old west and to Mexico. To Calexico and Mexicali, the two towns that straddle the border an hour down the road. I walked in the dirt among driftwood crosses, altars made of tin ornaments, concrete memorials and hand painted signs, artificial flowers and ribbons everywhere. All the dead had Mexican names. Rosario, Quiñones, Guadalupe.

And then, through a portal in a hedge, I saw an expanse of green, so bright in the desert sun. I passed through, and suddenly I was in a verdant, treeless cemetery with few baubles and no hand-painted signs. More like granite, letters carved in stone. All the names were Anglo. Heather. McNulty. Jonathan.

Oh, I realized. The story of America.

The following excerpt from my yet-to-be published nonfiction book, An American Family, tells the story of how I met these two characters, who are among my favorite people of all time.

Frankie and Sachie Are Lovers

Poking around AirBnB I found a traditional Navajo hogan for rent in the mountains outside of Chinle, Arizona. The hosts’ profile suggested they were a Navajo man and a Japanese woman. Using the tex in the app I introduced myself and asked if they’d be up to talking about their lives and the crisis they’d been living through. The virus had hit the Navajo Nation particularly hard.

“We might do that. I will talk to Frankie,” the woman, named Sachie, replied.

It’s said that all journalists are, at heart, deceivers, and manipulators.

I agree with this thought. A big part of my job is behaving in ways, different for each person, that encourage someone to trust me enough to share their story. I’ve been doing this as a journalist for 40 years. Finding pathways to invading people’s privacy is now part of my being.

The next morning my phone pinged as I power walked through the early Chinle light, a short text from Sachie.

“Frankie will be at your hotel at 10 this morning.”

It was just 7 am, so I had plenty of time to prepare.

“I’m in room 9.”

“He is a cultivated man and will not come into your room, but he will talk to you outside,” she said.

I had planned to interview him at the table in my room, in front of the window looking onto the parking lot where a white family gathered in their folding chairs. It hadn’t occurred to me that this might be improper.

Back at the hotel I said, “How’s it going?” to the white family.

“Cool,” the father said.

Who were they? I’d stereotyped them as being closed-minded right-wing types who saw me as a pointy headed city dweller with no cajones. But they could just as easily be rural Bernie Bros. Or American Romani. I had no idea. I’m sure I thought about them much more than they thought about me. I sat at my table and waited for Frankie.

Around 11:00, a copper colored late 80s Oldsmobile with opera windows slowly approached, like something out of a Tarantino film. As the car rolled past, the driver, masked and wearing a big hat over a blue bandana, stared intently at the unmasked parking lot partiers from Wyoming.

Someone had dipped a hand in white paint and made a handprint near the car’s opera window. An indigenous symbol of healing. This had to be Frankie.

He stopped his car, and took in the scene. Three white dudes and a lady sipping beers in a parking space and a couple of tow-headed kids running circles after a playful crow. And Frankie. He was older than I expected, with deep lines around his highly observant eyes. Fifteen seconds later, without so much as a tip of his hat he did a U-turn and drove slowly away.

What the fuck? Did the lot lice just lose me this interview?

I texted Sachie: “Does your husband drive a copper-colored car?”

“Yes, that’s his antique car,” she replied.

“I’m not sure what scared him off, but please tell him to stop by again.”

“Maybe he’ll fill up his tank and come back – wait a while,” she replied.

I gathered a cookie and a coffee from the hotel lobby. This was all I’d eaten since the night before when I’d had a cookie, chips and coffee. I checked on the Internet and found that Denny’s was the only place in town serving meals these days, thanks to the virus. I’d have to wait till after Frankie left for the pleasure of ordering a patty melt on my phone.

An hour later the copper-colored car returned and parked near my room. The Wyoming crew was down to just the grandparents, quiet and smoking in their lawn chairs. I stepped out to greet Frankie before he could run away. He looked up, annoyed, and I realized I wasn’t wearing my mask. I pulled it from my pocket. He got out of his car wearing blue jeans, leather shoes and a buttoned shirt. He had a fabric mask layered over a surgical mask, a floppy straw hat and deerskin gloves. He wouldn’t look at me, only to the side.

“What is it you want?” he said, staring down at his car.

“I want to hear your perspective on the virus, and on the state of the world in general,” I said.

My words were so stiff. What I really wanted to know was this: why do all the Navajo look so wary when I approach? Do they see that I carry the DNA of every generation that has tried to destroy them? Why am I making this all about me?

He looked doubtful about the prospects for our conversation, and I didn’t blame him. It was already 90 degrees and the sun beat down. Occasionally a car pulled in and out of the parking lot, and the loud wind carried grit.

“I don’t know,” he said, “The world is a big place.”

Each word tumbled around in his mouth, each consonant a new sentence. I. Don’t. Know. The world. Is. A. Big place.

“I lived in Japan for 7 years,” he said, “I speak Japanese. My wife Sachie is Japanese. Did you know that Japanese and Navajo have similar sounds? They are related. Japanese people and Navajo people also use similar gestures. I believe it is in the DNA. This is what I was thinking about last night. The DNA was spread between the people.”

“That makes sense,” I said. But did it?

We stood, distanced.

“I don’t know anything,” he said, out of the blue.

“Really?”

“You tell me – have you heard me say anything important?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not really looking for important. I’m looking for you.”

He was silent for a long moment.

“Ok, I’ve given you my fifteen minutes of thoughts,” he said. “Can I go now?”

We’d actually spoken for three minutes or less. I said I was hoping we could talk some more, that his wife said he had a lot to say.

He brushed that off and took our conversation in a new direction.

“I am getting good at shooting my bow and arrow,” he said.

“Oh yeah? That’s a hard thing to do.”

“After 25 years I’m finally hitting my target. I made my own bow.”

“Really?”

“Look at it,” he said pointing to the back window of his car. A hand-carved bow rested on the shelf below the window. Oak.

“It is exactly like the ones Geronimo made,” he said. The same curve. The same purpose. I studied a photo as I made this one.”

He stood back from me, nervous about the virus. He was the most socially distanced person I’d met on this trip. At times it was hard to make out his words through his masks, in one of which he’d put a double layer of coffee filters, for extra protection.

“Did you know that Custer was dead before they crossed the river?” he said referring to the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

“No, I did not.”

“That whole thing happened without him – he was dead.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

“I was there,” he said.

“You were there?”

“Yes.”

“You were there in a past life? Or you were there in a memory?”

“I do not know,” he said, “It was inspired by Sitting Bull.”

A pause. I didn’t know how to respond. Was Frankie a nut? A genius? Manipulative?

“Well, now you’ve had your 20 minutes with Frankie, I can be on my way,” he said.

It had been 5 minutes, at the most.

I asked how he felt about the virus.

“I do not like to talk about it, because so many have died. It is not to be talked about.”

I said I understood. I respected that. We were silent.

“But I can tell you something,” he said. “I feel a pull to the ocean. I might move to the beach.”

This surprised me, and I asked where.

“To the islands of Washington,” he said. “I have my own ways. I am Indian.”

“I can see that.”

He chuckled. We were silent.

“Well, now you’ve had your 30 minutes with Frankie Spencer. May I leave now?”

It had only been about 7 minutes.

“Of course,” I said.

“You know where to find me.”

I didn’t, so I gave him my number on a piece of paper.

“I don’t use the phone,” he said. “Maybe my wife.”

He got into his copper-colored Olds and pulled away.

Aspen called, rare to hear her voice rather than read it on text.

“It’s good to have Violet here,” she said.

Violet was living at home now, riding out the pandemic and working as a studio assistant to a photographer whose art she admired.

“I’m doing well, but it's good to have someone around,” Aspen said.

She told me the protests were ongoing, though she wasn’t joining as many of them. Her ideas about them – how effective they were, whether she even had a right to join a Black Lives Matter protest, what kind of future any of us had in this world anyway – were complex.

I described Chinle and told her I was finding the local people hard to strike up a conversation with, unlike in other places I’d been.

“Well, look at yourself,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said.

I examined my hand. Long, strong fingers, wrinkly knuckles, liver spots and red blotches and veins just below the pink and pale skin. An old White guy.

“I wouldn’t want to talk to you if I were a Navajo in Chinle right now, trying to avoid the virus.”

“Yeah, the virus levels here are pretty scary,” I said. “But I can’t infect anyone – I don’t think.”

“Just be yourself,” she said.

Aspen knew all about finding herself. I admired her for that.

“Do that and people will want to talk. You’re very likable,” she said.

I loved receiving advice, for a change, rather than giving it.

That night Sachie texted:

“Frankie liked talking to you.”

This was a surprise, as Frankie had seemed eager to get the hell away from me.

“He says to come to our home tomorrow,” she wrote, “Drive to Tsaile, to the T and turn right. You’ll see a big tree on the left. Keep going. When you pass two boulders on the right, you’ll see three big trees on the left, look for Frankie and he’ll take you to where we live.”

Approaching the T, I saw the chrome nose of his Olds poking forward from a gas station parking spot and pulled over. He motioned me to follow and roared out of the gas station. So, he was a rule changer, I decided, reliable and unreliable at the same time, agreeing to meet me but then changing the meeting spot without warning. I followed him down the two-lane at 75 miles per hour and then onto a dirt road up the mountains to 7,200 feet. His rutted driveway led down to a trailer, a pickup truck with no hood, a few very furry dogs and an eight-sided hogan made of logs notched and fitted and sealed with chink. There was red dirt everywhere.

“You will not see the inside of our hogan,” Frankie said. “The hogan is a special place.”

A large dirt lawn was dotted with a fire pit, an old wood stove, a sweat lodge made from willow branches, tipi poles without a tipi and several old tires suspended on stakes. Frankie said the tires kept people from being hurt by the upright stakes, but he never explained why the stakes were there in the first place

.

Sachie came over. She was diminutive, middle-aged, and spoke with a Tokyo accent.

We sat outside on folding camp chairs around the rusted wood stove which vented about five feet towards the vast blue sky. Was this plein air stove meant to heat the whole mountainside?

“I’m fixing it up,” he explained.

Sachie leaned forward with her hands clasped. She said she first met Frankie as a tourist at an Arizona dance hall in 1989 and they’d danced together ever since.

“I came here because I was interested in Indians, what it is that makes an Indian tick,” she said, “It’s a spirit from a long time ago that went into hiding and now comes up.”

“Everyone wants to know what that spirit is,” said Frankie, “Especially now.”

I nodded.

“You too,” he said.

He was right. I, for sure, was a tourist among the Indians, with my thoughts that grew out of myths and cliches passed down from my 17th century ancestors who’d invaded Naumkeag lands, to the 19^th century ancestors who farmed Kanza land in the territory they called Kansas, to the present moment, a small, unkempt homestead where I tried not to be the guy who inquired as to the secrets of the magical Indians. Keep your ears open, I told myself. Frankie has something to say.

A few years after meeting, Frankie and Sachie left Arizona for Tokyo. Frankie practiced silversmithing in a traditional Japanese atelier, and they lived there together for seven years.

“When I heard Japanese people talk, the sounds to me were like someone speaking Navajo backwards,” Frankie told me, “I felt a connection to Japanese culture.”

I pictured Frankie walking tall along Tokyo sidewalks. I lived in Japan for a while when I was 24 and had been struck by how passionate some Japanese people were about meeting foreigners. Frankie said he did feel bit like a celebrity in Tokyo at times. Eventually, they returned to Arizona. Frankie fixed up the hogan on land that his great grandmother had homesteaded long ago, wrangling a title out of the government. They worked at this and that, translating documents, Airbnb, whatever would make a living. Frankie, in particular, is not a fancy person. Work shirt, jeans, boots, bandana, and a hat. At home, they often spoke Japanese, because Sachie still felt uncomfortable with her command of English and Diné.

Frankie held the bow he had made, along with three arrows he’d bought at Walmart before modifying the shafts with chopsticks to which he attached new, more lethal tips.

“Walmart?” I asked.

“Yes, Walmart has good feathers,” he said, lilting up the end of his sentence to indicate that I had a few things to learn about the world.

“Chopsticks?”

“You do what you do,” he said.

He wasn’t an expert bowman, by any means. He could hunt rabbits with the fancy compound bow he had in the house, but he’d never much used the type of bows Geronimo used. He was teaching himself.

“I need to use my third eye or my long-ago DNA, and maybe I can strike the target. I can access the skill from my ancestral past. It’s been asleep for 7 generations right now. We’ve been living on this damn reservation for a long time and it's about time we use the bow.”

I was beginning to decide that Frankie wasn’t wacko. Rather, he was someone who thought and spoke completely in metaphors, similes and, sometimes, fantasies. Not crazy, for sure, but I had to keep my brain loose to follow what he was saying, basically: we humans are in a very bad spot and we Indians have it worse than most. If all of us don’t learn from the ancient systems soon, we’re screwed.

“You, Stephen, need to write that down,” he said.

To survive the pandemic, he and Sachie had isolated themselves on this mountainside. I was their first visitor in months. They hid, they hibernated, they stoked the fire when the temperatures dropped. They wore masks and imagined how they might survive in the future. For Frankie, the virus had reinforced the value of learning the old ways.

When he was a child, the government sent him away to an Indian boarding school.

“All of us – every one of us children,” he said, “We are used to what the government does to us. We lost a lot of our culture in those schools.”

He was working to get it back.

Frankie wore a lime green plastic glove on one hand for protection, the other hand was bare. He waved his green hand slowly in front of his face to indicate the virus. He believed the virus was airborne, and it was awfully windy in his yard. The virus could land on his gate. It could land on the door. It could land on the tip of your nose.

“If I dip my arrow in horse manure and shoot it, that’s germ warfare,” he said, “I think the Navajo nation was picked out for this virus because we are black – meaning we are red. They also picked certain types of White people to infect.”

“The government did?” I asked.

“I have no idea.”

“What?”

Back in March, when it all began to get really bad, he heard a sonic boom in the sky above his hogan. Then another. It was a missile, he said, they were test-firing something. Then he saw a B1 bomber that he thought looked bigger than a 747, fly over. He’d never heard the boom or seen the plane before. Coincidence? Who knew? Maybe not. Could be. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

At times Frankie seemed to be speaking in Zen Koans. But this was just the way his mind worked, like the old video game Pong, but slightly on the fritz. I had been pretty good at Pong, years before.

Sachie pointed out a 7-foot-tall pile of gray ash behind their hogan that Frankie called Mt. Fuji. Ash from all the times they’d cleaned out their wood stove over the last ten years, it was a clock showing the passage of the seasons.

“Our neighbors laugh at it,” said Frankie, “But you don’t need a clock unless you believe in the future.”

“So, you have hope for the future?”

“Yes, I have hope.”

Then, much to my surprise, he invited me inside the hogan. He said he wasn’t quite sure why he wanted me in there, but maybe he trusted me. The three of us stepped into the cathedral ceilinged space, a rustic octagonal interior with dark wood kitchen cabinets and a table, a desk with a computer, and a room off to the side where the couple slept.

“For us, the hogan is a sacred place,” he said.

I felt honored.

Out of the blue, he asked me to explain why the new version of Microsoft Word required a yearly subscription.

“Oh, I see,” I said. “You just invited me over for tech support.”

He laughed.

“I think you were sent here to spread the word to the larger world,” he said.

“Word?” I asked.

Sachie spoke up:

“He asked me this morning ‘why am I telling this guy to come to our house,’” and I said, ‘because you feel you should.’”

“It just dawned on me that’s why you are the first person we have invited here since the whole thing began. You are a voice for my thoughts,” said Frankie.

It turned out that when he pulled up to the hotel the previous day the Wyoming people had spooked him. Bad energy. No masks. Lots of beer. So, he drove up above Canyon de Chelly to scope out a cave where he thought we might be able to talk in peace. But the cave didn’t seem right, so he returned and spoke to me, warily, as the Wyoming family watched.

“I knew I wanted to talk to you,” he said. “But I couldn’t with them around.”

“What is the word you want to share?” I asked.

“That hope that I mentioned. Hope. That’s it.”

His father had fought in the Korean War. But not as a Navajo, Frankie said. He’d fought with everyone to survive together as American people. Frankie thought that same sense of unity would reappear in this country. Some day. That people would work together. The country would be better. “I have hope as long as the grass is green,” he said, standing in his denuded yard.

Sachie, as usual, nodded politely.

The afternoon had gone into evening and soon the sun would set. It was time for me to go, to beat the Navajo Nation covid curfew back to my hotel. As I gathered my backpack to head out, Frankie told me to wait a minute. He opened a drawer on the other side of the room and came back with a small gray crystal, about an inch and a half long.

“My mother gave that to me,” he said, folding it into my hand. “It will help protect you until we see you again.”

I held it tightly, with hope.

Driving down the mountain I stopped to look at a small herd of horses jumping about at the edge of a spring – a roan, a white pony, a dark stallion. The meadow was green, the heat of the day lifting. I tucked the crystal into a small drawstring bag and eased it into a spot on my dash. At the highway I turned left, heading south into the virus.

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In the morning I headed down dirt roads through a desolate canyon towards the Mexican border. It was 114 degrees at the border, bright, dusty and bleak, and I didn’t encounter anyone besides a store clerk who sold me cold Topo Chico mineral water and some spicy peanuts. Driving along the border wall, I was grateful for my four-wheel drive truck, which could take me almost anywhere. Compared to the Best Western motels I often stayed in, or even to my single-person tent with its broken rain flap, I felt at ease, always, in my truck. It was my home, for now. I tried to keep it orderly, with only enough fetishes – a feather hanging from the rearview, a pinecone on the dash – to protect me from evil. But not so many that I became the leader of my own cult.

At one point, I passed two white and green Border Patrol trucks parked on the side of the road. About a mile further down I pulled over to sign in to my weekly group therapy appointment, that had gone online because of the virus. My phone opened to five other people in their various rooms, me in my truck. I turned my camera so they’d see a bit of the barren landscape as we discussed our fears, fantasies and families for an hour and a half. I did this once a week, no matter where I was. Now, I was about 30 miles from the nearest paved road staring at my phone screen when a Border Patrol officer rapped on my window. Fuck! I dropped my phone and fumbled for my mask.

I rolled my window down.

“Where are you headed?” he asked, his deep voice muffled by his own mask.

“El Paso,” I said.

“Where you coming from?”

“Marfa, then the border and now here. I just stopped for a Zoom meeting.”

“A what?

“Work call.”

“Are you an American?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He leaned in my back window and scanned the bags and cooler on the back seat.

“Ok, you’re free to go – or finish your call or whatever.”

Wow, I thought. He didn’t even ask for my ID.

I watched his truck in the rearview mirror as he pulled out. Then I saw my own face – sunburned, white hair, blue eyes, the wizened features of an old white guy. That’s privilege, I thought, pulling back on the highway.

“Gotta sign off,” I said to to the group, as I made my way along the border to El Paso.

I had not been in El Paso since I was 19 years old, but the downtown area didn’t seem to have changed. My room in the Gardner Hotel, built in 1922, right after the last pandemic,  reminded me of my great grandmother’s house in Jewel City, Kansas: cast iron bed, ancient empty picture frames on the wall, no TV and no AC. My bed was draped with a brown quilt over brown patterned sheets. The window trim and baseboard also were brown. A noisy 1950s swamp cooler labored in the hallway to push slightly chilled air through the transom left open above my door. The fresh air would help keep the virus at bay. I loved the place.

The hotel’s literature suggested that the dark El Pasoan writer Cormac McCarthy loved it too -- he’d checked in a few times to write his novels. And John Dillinger used one of these rooms as a hide-out from the law. That first day I absentmindedly left my room without a mask and ran into a hotel housekeeper who backed away in fear. On the streets of El Paso, everyone was masked.