Bc1

Bringing Gills’ Go Love novel sequence to a fiery close, BC¹ lays down the Harvell grudge of Mountain Meadows and aims, finally, at healing for all involved. Lara Luce Harvell has been charged with carrying her late father’s prized Martin D-28, handmade in Nazareth, Pennsylvania in 1998, the same year she was born, to Mr. Edgar Paris in Dinnehotso, Arizona. Such is repayment to him for saving Joey’s right index finger when it got bit off in an Arkansas fight. The resulting journey, part dynamite, revenge, and the tenderness of love, wanders into the lands of the woolly-headed Washers, a whole tribe of wandering relatives who ＂...inhabited the desert, living in trailer parks from Tuba City to Las Vegas, pumping five dollars’ worth of regular at a time into jalopies that overheated and ran on threadbare tires.＂

Not unlike the rural south where this sequence all started, Rez land on the border of Utah and Arizona is dog-eat-dog. Life offers few legal ways to get by. Whites and Indians eye each other with mistrust, and young people either move to Las Vegas or Tucson or sunny California. Or they get reduced to doing whatever it takes. Yazz Begay and Louie Washer are no exceptions. When they stumble on a stash of newly buried dynamite while spray-painting graffiti in a burial cave, what else is there to do but find a buyer, ring the big bell, and move to Hawaii to drink Mai Tais on Waikiki? But the man’s ever out there sniffing them out, just like he had their mothers and fathers. High school dropouts with the taste of siphoned gas in their mouths, what else was there to do but meanness? Roll on down the highway to hell. Koyanisqatsi, the Diné called it, world out of balance.