The language and form of this searing book are as powerful as the life experience that inspired them. In a series of essays that cohere into a spiritual autobiography, the author writes prose that's deceptively simple yet rich in metaphor. An wild horse living in the parking lot of a Navajo school becomes a symbol for living creatures' intrinsic wildness, tamed only at a terrible cost. "We are all runaway horses" is one constant refrain, as is the reminder "you are your history." The author's history is painful: born in 1950 the son of an alcoholic Native American woman and a white cowboy father who "would sell my mom to other migrant men for five dollars," Nasdijj grew up a "mongrel" and an outcast, contending with his violent father's demons while his mother beguiled them with Indian stories. Living on a reservation, never fully accepted because of his white skin, he adopted a baby boy with fetal alcohol syndrome who died at age 6. The book's most beautiful passages meditate on Tommy Nothing Fancy's short life and express his father's love. Nasdijj has been homeless, he has taught Indian children on a reservation, he has retraced with a historian friend the dreadful forced march to Bosque Redondo, where the Navajo and their culture were nearly exterminated. These and many other ordeals are related in the agonizingly lucid words of someone who has turned to writing as a lifeline. This remarkable memoir has its share of bitterness and anger, but Nasdijj transcends both in his acceptance of the world that made him and in the knowledge that "the reservation runs like blood through a river of my dreams." --Wendy Smith


From Publishers Weekly
The yearning to write, muses this irrepressible Native American author, "was the epitome of perversity, because reading and writing were such tortures for me." Born in 1950 on the Navajo Reservation to migrant workersDa Navajo mother and a white, cowboy fatherDNasdijj has always suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome, which has made his 20 years as a journalist for Southwest smalltown newspapers, like everything else in his peripatetic, sometimes harrowing life, a terrible struggle. But for Nasdijj, writing was necessary to survival, a means of remembering and vindicating his personal and ancestral history. The symbols he molds out of the bleakness of the desert or his own emotional terrain, as well as the variations of the book's title, trail through 20 fragmented chapters like a plangent refrain. These elements cohere into a unique voice, whether Nasdijj is recounting his adventures on the periphery of white America, musing over the continued impoverishment of the Navajo, or lamenting the loss of his adopted son, Tommy Nothing Fancy, who died when he was six years old from fetal alcohol syndrome. Balancing a propensity to overanalyze his life in deliriously lyric passages with a gift for understatement that can yield more lucid revelations, Nasdijj reveals a great sensitivity to epiphanies wherever they may be found: in the wild stallions of the mesa, in the beautiful face of a troubled teen he mentors, in the bittersweet vandalism of a jingoistic statue of a Spanish conquistador. Agent, Heather Schroder, ICM. (Oct.) Forecast: Nasdijj first attracted attention when the title piece ran in Esquire in June 1999; he was subsequently named a finalist for a National Magazine Award. Already selected by several newspapers for fall preview roundups and early reviews, this haunting memoir is likely to garner widespread review coverage and, consequently, a solid audience that will be further enlarged by a six-city author tour. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
"I write what I see." A simple statement from a complex man. What makes this memoir so very powerful is that both the writing and the seeing are done with such clarity and compassion. Born on the Navajo reservation in 1950 to migrant workers (a Navajo storytelling mother and a white cowboy father), Nasdijj has spent his life on the move. His stories are personal ones but imbued with history and the struggle and survival of people who the dominant white society define as marginal. With strength, purposefulness, maturity, and most of all compassion, Nasdijj writes about the life and death of his son, Tommy Nothing Fancy, their fishing trips, his travails as a committed but unpublished writer, life on the reservation, homelessness, ethnic cleansing in America, love, survival, hope. Illuminating both the comic and the tragic, his writing is a striking blend of "tell it like it is" truths that hit right between the eyes and sensuous, expressive, poetic passages that urgently bid the reader to reread, linger, share, and appreciate. The stories and their implications are heartbreaking; but more importantly, they are heart expanding. Grace Fill
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
"Contains the flat-out best nonfiction writing of this year."


Book Description
A searing book as powerful as the life experience that inspired it, THE BLOOD RUNS LIKE A RIVER THROUGH MY DREAMS transports readers to the majestic landscapes and hard Native American lives of the desert Southwest. Born to a storytelling Native mother and a roughneck, song-singing father, Nasdijj has always lived at the jagged-edged margins of society, yet hardship and isolation have only brought him greater clarity -- a gift for language and a voice of searching honesty. "In a prose style that could almost be chanted" (New York Magazine), Nasdijj writes of his adopted son, Tommy Nothing Fancy, and of his own chaotic childhood; of his struggles between two cultures and his pursuit of the writing life -- as a lifeline. A powerful, unforgettable memoir, THE BLOOD RUNS LIKE A RIVER THROUGH MY DREAMS will "wash over readers and often take them by surprise" (Fort Worth Star-Telegram).


About the Author
Nasdijj is told he was born in a Navajo hogan in 1950. His mother was a Navajo, his fahter a cowboy. He now lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I Hate Mary PotatoThe back of my battered pickup truck is a mess. It is not unlike my life. My tools are always shifting around back there. Making clunking noises when the truck moves. I bought a camper shell so I could camp out in the back of my truck. Now groceries don"t blow away on my way home from the grocery store. I bought a new hydraulic jack. There"s my fishing stuff back there. Poles. A net. There"s an old pair of cowboy boots I don"t wear because I wore them out. Some things are harder to throw away than other things. Those cowboy boots walked through a lot of memories. There"s a hundred-pound bag of dog food I was supposed to drop off at the Wolf Ranch in Ramah for the wolves but I keep forgetting about it. There"s a cement block I use as a weight to get me through snow. There are my tire chains I never use, as putting on tire chains in the Big Mud (the Navajo term for the terrain in this part of New Mexico) is about as much fun as wrestling with an ornery pig. And there"s a basketball that rolls around back there every time I turn a corner. Mary Potato bought the basketball. "Boys play basketball," she said. The basketball was a birthday gift for Tommy. Tommy Nothing Fancy was my Navajo son. Tommy Nothing Fancy is dead. He was a little brown guy with lungs. When Tommy was an infant, he"d cry louder than a coyote wails against the moon. I can still hold both his cowboy boots with one hand. Jet-black hair. Almost blue. Eyes the soft color of the Navajo mountains. Tommy was beautiful. In his own way, the boy was perfect, even if perfection is relative. My Indian wife and I took Tom into our hearts and into our home when he was brand spanking new. The particulars are irrelevant. Infants are like freight trains. We did not know Tommy had fetal alcohol syndrome. I do not know if it would have mattered had we known about the FAS ahead of time. How can anyone be ahead of time for anything? We were not ready for FAS but there it was. You deal with it or you don"t. Seizures mainly. And an otherness about the eyes. They would cross when he was mad, which was regular. But the kid had spunk. Tom loved to fish and he loved to play basketball, although he never learned to dribble very well. He would use both his hands. And Tommy loved riding around Navajoland in Old Big Wanda, my Ford F150 with the camper shell. Even as an infant, Tommy would be hypnotized by the velocity of the truck along the reservation roads and the red rock horizons of the Navajo. I call that truck a reservation truck because it has pits and bashes yet it runs well. It has survived Big Mud, Big Winter, and the big old loads of piñon wood. Whenever I clean Old Big Wanda I always find new pockets of reservation mud caked to her. That pickup is of the earth. She"s the kind of truck migrant workers drive, sometimes live in. A mongrel migrant vehicle, and it is owned by a mongrel migrant. My parents were migrant workers, and my cowboy daddy had trucks just like Old Big Wanda. We worked the ranches of the West and crops anywhere. My cowboy dad was white. My mother"s people were with the Navajo. Mary Potato was a Navajo, too. She looked like a Navajo. I never did ask to see her papers. Why would I? It was none of my business. Mary Potato could say she was anything. She could have been a Kickapoo for all I knew. I did not care one way or the other what tribe she was from. If she wanted to claim she was a Navajo, then let her. Most folks in Gallup are all Navajo or part Navajo or they live among the Navajo because the Navajo are the majority and not the minority in this place. I did my best to ignore Mary Potato. My policy was to ignore drunks who wanted money. Usually they"d go away, but ignoring Mary Potato did not always work. "You"re white," she said to me one day in the city park. That and fifty cents gets you on the bus. "My folks were migrant workers, and we worked ranches all around here," I tried to explain. I loathe explaining it. White folks particularly always have to know the exact spot you are from. I"m from everywhere. For the life of me I cannot see why it matters. Most migrants are Hispanic. But not this time. Mary Potato claimed she knew what it was like to work in fields. This did not surprise me in the least, as I had known many, many Indians who had lived something of the migrant life. I knew Chippewa who picked cherries. I knew Muckleshoot Indians who picked apples. I knew Ute Indians who baled hay during baling season. I knew Red Lake Band Chippewa who worked sugar beets. I knew Alabama-Coushatta who picked Texas cotton. I knew Cherokee who worked tobacco. I knew Fort Sill Apaches who worked melons. I knew Seminoles who picked tomatoes. The Navajo work with sheep. Sometimes horses. Sometimes cows. But the fields I knew Mary Potato worked were mainly plowed in bars and saloons in Gallup, New Mexico, watering holes of gin and sin. I did not care where she was from. It was irrelevant. She knew a hardness. She knew loss. Mary Potato gave Tommy the basketball. She knew he would love it.The Navajo boys love basketball. Reservation basketball. There was an old rusted basketball hoop attached precariously with screws to a telephone pole not far from where I lived on the Navajo Nation, and Navajo boys would come here to play basketball on the blacktop where the asphalt met the dirt road and the reservation mud. Big snow deterred them but ice on the asphalt did not deter them. It was pretty basic basketball. No frills. No coaches. No net. Someone had stolen the net years ago. The lone, rusted rim was in perpetual danger of falling off the telephone pole every time a basketball made deadly contact. But Navajo boys would come here and play informal pickup games. The little boys particularly liked coming, though they could never commandeer what passed for a basketball court for very long, as the older boys would show up, start their games, and elbow the little guys like Tommy out of the way. But Tommy had something not all of the little Navajo boys had. Tommy had a new basketball. He wasn"t much bigger than the ball itself, and the older boys — older being maybe twelve — would tolerate his presence if Tom showed up with his ball. The game begins. In time, the suave patience of the bigger boys with the little pretzels would grow thin, strained, and eventually it would wear out: Tommy would sit there sniffling on the sidelines, content (or forced) to watch the Navajo boys with their long flowing hair show off their adolescent stuff. Pose and strut. Pumped up. Free throws. Take the shot. Little boys wanting to be big boys and big boys wanting to be men. Fetal alcohol syndrome or no fetal alcohol syndrome, the boys always want to be men. I knew better than to interfere. Any father wants his son to learn how to defend himself some.When Tommy was diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome my wife wept for a week. There was little help to be had for it. So I did exactly what I think all parents should not do: I spoiled him rotten. I wasn"t rich, but I could give him certain things. I could try to teach the boy to dribble, and I could teach the boy to fish. More than anything, I was determined to do this for Tommy. I would not allow fetal alcohol syndrome or whatever to ruin that for me, or for him, and I did teach him to fish, and gently. Fishing is a gentle business when you"re out on a lake or in a Rocky Mountain stream. Fishing is a gentle business anywhere on the Navajo Nation. Ramah Lake. Blue Water Lake. If Tommy had been confined to a wheelchair (which he was not), I would have pushed that chair into any number of rivers. The San Juan River, where there was a private spot of sand where we could fish and swim, was Tommy"s favorite place. We went there often. I was damn well determined that Tom would not have the kind of grinding migrant life I"d had. No matter how many years I might or might not have with him. Ask anyone who has lost a kid. All we ever have is now. He would not be knocked around relentlessly like I had been knocked around all my life. I would do it differently. Tommy was the one thing I did that was good and didn"t fail. The rest of it is ephemeral. The fetal alcohol syndrome was a reality. I gave him happiness and joy and fishing tackle and trucks and dogs. I would do it again."I didn"t mean to have him," Mary Potato said. Tom and I were playing in a park in town. Swings. Sandbox. Teeter-totter. Monkey bars. At first, I had thought she was just another town drunk. People were always coming up and talking to us and engaging us in conversation if they could. People needed booze and change. I had neither. I had seen Mary Potato around like you see people around, but I had never directly engaged her, as I am apt to avoid such people. In fact, I avoid people whenever I can, which is never enough. "I had a boy who would be his age but they took him from me," Mary Potato said. Why I attract the losers from everywhere in the universe I do not know. Like a magnet. She"s watching Tommy with a glaze that is mainly sadness. I know that look. It"s about what you do not have. Mary Potato claimed she was Tommy"s natural mom. I was doubtful. I was angry. I was angry this strange woman approached us. I was angry she was making some kind of claim to what was mine. "I don"t want him back," she said. Good. She wasn"t getting him back. Over my dead body. "I just wanted you to know about me." She paused. "That I"m there."I was angry she had to be a drunk. I was angry she had done this to this kid — and if not this kid, some other kid with FAS. Some other kid who had seizures and who would never read goddamn English. Some other kid whose teachers would say try harder! and who climbed the walls. Some other kid who never slept. Some other kid in some other family. I was angry she would even attempt to speak with me. (It took me years to realize how carefully she actually did it, making sure Tommy was far enough away so as to be kept out of it, and I thank her for that.) I was angry her life was like a wound. I was angry she had had her children taken away. I was angry she was a hooker. I was angry all the medicine men in the world could not cure her life to balance. I did not want to know that she was there. That I"m there, she said. It was too much to ask of me. But there she was, her body hunched over the picnic table. She could have been my Tommy"s mom. It was possible even if I didn"t think it was probable. She could have been my mom. She was like my mom. My mother was a hopeless drunk. I would use the word "alcoholic," but it"s too polite. It"s a white people word. Alcoholic. In the migrant life, what we knew was falling-down Jezus drunk and puked again. There"s nothing polite about cleaning up your mother in her vomit and dragging her unconscious carcass back to the migrant housing trailer you lived in. Daddy, too. The story is ordinary. Mama usually just passed out wherever she happened to be. I"d find her in the back of pickups all the time. With men. For all of Mary Potato"s failures, they did not match the failures of my mom. And I loved my mom. Even if I was (and am) angry with her. Mary Potato was a whore who had been kicked off the reservation and lived in a shack made of toothpicks and tarpaper and magazines out by the railroad tracks. Mama had it worse. My dad would sell my mom to other migrant men for five bucks. The life Mary Potato lived was a walk in the park and a ride on the teeter-totter compared to the life my mother lived. Mary Potato could have been my mom. In another life. I could have been Mary Potato. Easily. How can another human being measure what she has given up? How do you divorce loss from rage? If I let the rage out, it will destroy everything. Wolves! I do not let it out, do not tell this story lightly. I cannot speak of it aloud. Or only to people who are close to me, and even then I try hard to leave out the darker pieces of it. "I didn"t mean to have him, but these things happen," Mary Potato said. I"m minding my own business at the picnic table. Tommy is off on his squeaky swing. Me in my brooding silence. As is my way. I had known Mary Potato in other incarnations. On other reservations. She did not want him back. "I just wanted you to know," she repeated, "that I"m there." That I"m there. A recognition of obscurity and existence.Somewhere around the late 1940s, my mom and my dad met in a bar in Gallup. I think they died somewhere in one, too. Bit by bit. In fragments. In tequila shots. In some vast midnight whiskey mist my parents seemed to simply slip away. They did not have far to go. We existed at the edges: the edges of the migrant camps, the edges of the Rio Grande, the edges of the horse-poor ranches we lived on, the edges of the reservation. The Navajo Nation. The Taos Pueblo. The Acoma Indian Reservation. The Jicarilla Apache Reservation. The Ramah Navajo. The Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation. The Ute Indian Reservation. Anywhere there were ranches and cows to work, or sheep to shear, or crops to pick or harvest. Texas cotton. Colorado wheat. New Mexico roundups. Castrating calves and stompin" feet.I have seen my share of the insides of those Gallup bars. Even as a kid, my dad, the cowboy, brought me to enough of them. Those strong Indian men laughing and putting me up on the pool table where I could spin around like entertainment. Pulling my dad out of those Gallup bars in the 1950s, always fights among the men, the women quite content to step over my daddy"s stinking piece of breathing meat. Me getting that man back to his cowboy truck. I could have used those strong pool-table arms then. Gallup or El Paso, it was all the same to me, as it would be the same to any kid. I never put my son through that wringer.The first memory I have is of a time my mother and I were under a tree. I do not know where. I think the desert. I am sitting naked in a big white ceramic pan, and the pan is filled with cold water. I am having a ball. Just splashing water underneath a tree. There is a line of clothes hung out and drying in the desert heat. The air is very dry. My mother"s hands dipping into the coolness of the water. She leaves. She does not come back.I"m still angry about the life Mary Potato is forced to live. I say "forced to live" because I know her options are so limited as to be almost nonexistent. Truckers could turn off I-40, make a quick trek down old Route 66 — U-Haul Central, the Wild West Shangri-La Road Motel parking lot, Palm Tree Trinket Shop and Indian Curios, Uranium Mine Museum, Pizza Hut, feed store, Tortilla Emporium, drive-up liquor store, Powwow Park — and pull their rigs into the lot. Strangers popping Mary in the motel dark. Mary got slammed around. Black eyes, broken bones. She was brittle. Mary Potato"s children had been taken from her. Other people raise them now. I live with fetal alcohol syndrome, too. I saw my mother go through whole bottles of vodka while she was pregnant, and she was a heavy drinker when she had me. I saw her lose babies. At least they were lucky enough not to be born alive. It is very unusual that someone with this disease would become a writer. But I am stubborn and perverse. I am also more than a little angry, which is probably why I was so damn determined I would do good by Tom. Tommy was my sweet revenge. That he could experience joy and all the good things that make life worth living was my salvation. Now he is gone. Writing is my new revenge. That I can put any of it down in the limited confines of the English language is a salvation of sorts. I would rather have my Tom than this writing about him, which is just about all I have now. Sweating blood over words is anything but simple, and English is a foreign language I do not readily understand. I became a writer to piss on all the many white teachers and white editors out there (everywhere) who insisted it could not be done. Not by the stupid mongrel likes of me. Tom was like me and had little respect for authority. You had to earn it. I did. These expert people in the vast universe of writing were not too different from the people who always told me Tommy Nothing Fancy was hopeless. Fetal alcohol syndrome is a mean buzzard. Tommy was many things, but hopeless was not one of them. I understood his battles with the things he saw, like words on the printed page. Reading is a real struggle. It"s extremely hard work. Things appear upside down. Writing is worse. My new babies are the stories I tell as I have lived them, touched them, been touched by them, lived through them, and survived them. They are my feeble attempt to bring the dead to life. I will paint a picture of my Tommy here.In order to succeed as a writer, you have to grow some pretty thick, scarred skin, and you have to get used to lots and lots of failure. FAS actually prepares you pretty well. Failure is the landscape and the barriers. I am not glad to have FAS. I am not glad Tom had it. FAS killed him. It is hard for me to be compassionate toward whatever human being or set of circumstances gave him this horrible thing. Try as I might, I cannot bring him back. Sometimes kids with FAS have very serious seizures. The medications Tommy took stopped working. It happened gradually. The seizures got worse. No one knows why. I still have the rivers and the horses and the mountains and the mesas and the red rocks soft with sand. And a basketball I keep in the back of my pickup truck. That basketball rolls around back there with my other junk like the past that will give me no peace. Someday I am going to find some deserving six-year-old to give it to.Even if Mary Potato was Tom"s natural mom, she wasn"t there. Mary Potato wasn"t there when my Tom was sick. She wasn"t there when he was having seizures. She wasn"t there to make bunny patches for his knees. She wasn"t there when all you"re left with is the phone in the middle of the night. I was there in the middle of the night. I was there through the seizures. I was there in hospitals in White People Town with medical specialists who knew nothing. I was there when they said he would never learn anything. I was there when I proved them wrong. We did not see Mary Potato often. But I knew now she was out there. In the dark with the wolves. Like a shadow. She called. I was not amused. I do not know how she managed to get my number. It was his birthday — she claimed — and she was coming over with a basketball she had purchased as a birthday gift. I hung up the phone. She knew where we lived. It was not his birthday. She arrived in an ancient Buick filled with men. I would not let her in. But I would take the basketball if she agreed to leave. I took the basketball. The muffler dangling from the Buick like a broken limb dragging, limping, scraping blue-hot dragon"s breath all along the asphalt as they left my place for the dragon bars in Gallup. Back to the good life, or in any case the life they knew.My dog and I drive to Mary Potato"s sad place. Navajo hogans can be poor, but none of them are as poor as the bare-bones tarpaper shacks folks live in at the edges of White People Town. I did not let Mary come to Tommy"s funeral. Now, the least I owed her was a ride. When you live on the reservation, you give rides to people who do not have transportation. That"s just the way it is. That"s all it was. A ride. Mary Potato keeps a big black mongrel dog clipped to a chain on a cottonwood tree in the front yard. She is almost ready. I sit on the couch and wait. The house smells of swamp tea and old underwear and boiled roots and dark rooms. Faded Jesus yellow on the wall. Gin. Years and years of cigarettes. Mary Potato walks slowly, with the knowledge she will never heal. How many knife blades have plunged into her solitary heart only to find their way into her belly where all her reversals and her hollow aching live. She does not dance on the wind with mad wings but is blown into her dreams of savage incapacity. There is no refuge in her house, which shakes like toothpicks with the passing of the train. What seems to live here is contempt. She is tough because she has to be. Finally, she is ready. She wanted to look nice. She is dignified.I have a hard time keeping the truck on the road. The closer I get to where Tommy is buried, the closer I come to knowing I know nothing. Everything I have ever known has been taken from me. My only grip is on the steering wheel. Everything at the periphery of my vision is compressed, and all I can see is what"s directly in front of Old Big Wanda. I know Mary Potato has been talking. About her life. Who can estimate what she has given up? I am no judge of anything. I am no moral judge of Mary Potato. I am only a man giving a woman a ride to a cemetery. Go, go, and the wind just sings. He needs me. He is cold. I cannot be here long. I fall apart. This woman who says she gave birth to my son smokes a cigarette and walks around looking at the other graves. She takes a plastic rose from her purse and sticks it into the almost frozen ground. We do not say much. Certainly nothing meaningful. The Navajo abhor speaking of the dead.We drive back to Mary Potato"s place in White People Town. Junkyards. Rusted vehicles piled high as a mountain. It is getting late. I do not go inside. We talk a little in the truck. She is soft and sad. It is difficult to hate her or keep my anger burning like it was some nuclear vehemence. I will never have to see her again. She still thinks Tommy was her son, and I still doubt it. It doesn"t matter what I think. What matters is we both have lost fragments of ourselves to wolves of adversity. Life. I leave her and start to drive home. The weather shifts and it begins to snow. The New Mexico sky deepens, casting purple shadows along the roadside ditch. The night comes down. The close dark. Something out there howling. Rocky Mountain snow sharp as ice picks. The old Navajo songs in my grandmother"s mouth. The snow coming down harder than a bar fight. Old Big Wanda slips on a crusty patch of ice. We slide slow motion down into an arroyo. The dog and I are stuck and will need someone to pull us out of here. No one comes along. We will be here until morning. Navajo folks in their trucks will arrive eventually. Someone will have a chain. Someone will help pull the fool out of the snow. Only thing to do is crawl into the back of the vehicle, into the sleeping bag with the dog, and stay as warm as possible. Avoid frostbite if I can. A numbness. It is impossible to sleep. I turn over on my side and come face to face with the basketball. He always dribbled it with two hands. Never one. I put the basketball underneath my shirt so I might see what it looks and feels like to be pregnant. It is not the same. The basketball is light and empty. Tommy Nothing Fancy was never empty. His quarrels with the world were never light. They were grave battles, and he met them head on with the hardiness of who he was. In the old days, the Navajo disposed of their dead in the branches of trees, where the spirit lingers. Tom"s burial is still crushing me, and time does not make it better. The basketball still rolls around in my pickup. I cannot rid myself of it, or of Mary Potato. And the wind sings go, go. The ghostly laughing voices of the Navajo.The back of my battered pickup truck is a mess. It is not unlike my life. My tools are always shifting around back there. Making clunking noises when the truck moves. I bought a camper shell so I could camp out in the back of my truck. Now groceries don"t blow away on my way home from the grocery store. I bought a new hydraulic jack. There"s my fishing stuff back there. Poles. A net. There"s an old pair of cowboy boots I don"t wear because I wore them out. Some things are harder to throw away than other things. Those cowboy boots walked through a lot of memories. There"s a hundred-pound bag of dog food I was supposed to drop off at the Wolf Ranch in Ramah for the wolves but I keep forgetting about it. There"s a cement block I use as a weight to get me through snow. There are my tire chains I never use, as putting on tire chains in the Big Mud (the Navajo term for the terrain in this part of New Mexico) is about as much fun as wrestling with an ornery pig. And there"s a basketball that rolls around back there every time I turn a corner. Mary Potato bought the basketball. "Boys play basketball," she said. The basketball was a birthday gift for Tommy. Tommy Nothing Fancy was my Navajo son. Tommy Nothing Fancy is dead. He was a little brown guy with lungs. When Tommy was an infant, he"d cry louder than a coyote wails against the moon. I can still hold both his cowboy boots with one hand. Jet-black hair. Almost blue. Eyes the soft color of the Navajo mountains. Tommy was beautiful. In his own way, the boy was perfect, even if perfection is relative. My Indian wife and I took Tom into our hearts and into our home when he was brand spanking new. The particulars are irrelevant. Infants are like freight trains. We did not know Tommy had fetal alcohol syndrome. I do not know if it would have mattered had we known about the FAS ahead of time. How can anyone be ahead of time for anything? We were not ready for FAS but there it was. You deal with it or you don"t. Seizures mainly. And an otherness about the eyes. They would cross when he was mad, which was regular. But the kid had spunk. Tom loved to fish and he loved to play basketball, although he never learned to dribble very well. He would use both his hands. And Tommy loved riding around Navajoland in Old Big Wanda, my Ford F150 with the camper shell. Even as an infant, Tommy would be hypnotized by the velocity of the truck along the reservation roads and the red rock horizons of the Navajo. I call that truck a reservation truck because it has pits and bashes yet it runs well. It has survived Big Mud, Big Winter, and the big old loads of piñon wood. Whenever I clean Old Big Wanda I always find new pockets of reservation mud caked to her. That pickup is of the earth. She"s the kind of truck migrant workers drive, sometimes live in. A mongrel migrant vehicle, and it is owned by a mongrel migrant. My parents were migrant workers, and my cowboy daddy had trucks just like Old Big Wanda. We worked the ranches of the West and crops anywhere. My cowboy dad was white. My mother"s people were with the Navajo. Mary Potato was a Navajo, too. She looked like a Navajo. I never did ask to see her papers. Why would I? It was none of my business. Mary Potato could say she was anything. She could have been a Kickapoo for all I knew. I did not care one way or the other what tribe she was from. If she wanted to claim she was a Navajo, then let her. Most folks in Gallup are all Navajo or part Navajo or they live among the Navajo because the Navajo are the majority and not the minority in this place. I did my best to ignore Mary Potato. My policy was to ignore drunks who wanted money. Usually they"d go away, but ignoring Mary Potato did not always work. "You"re white," she said to me one day in the city park. That and fifty cents gets you on the bus. "My folks were migrant workers, and we worked ranches all around here," I tried to explain. I loathe explaining it. White folks particularly always have to know the exact spot you are from. I"m from everywhere. For the life of me I cannot see why it matters. Most migrants are Hispanic. But not this time. Mary Potato claimed she knew what it was like to work in fields. This did not surprise me in the least, as I had known many, many Indians who had lived something of the migrant life. I knew Chippewa who picked cherries. I knew Muckleshoot Indians who picked apples. I knew Ute Indians who baled hay during baling season. I knew Red Lake Band Chippewa who worked sugar beets. I knew Alabama-Coushatta who picked Texas cotton. I knew Cherokee who worked tobacco. I knew Fort Sill Apaches who worked melons. I knew Seminoles who picked tomatoes. The Navajo work with sheep. Sometimes horses. Sometimes cows. But the fields I knew Mary Potato worked were mainly plowed in bars and saloons in Gallup, New Mexico, watering holes of gin and sin. I did not care where she was from. It was irrelevant. She knew a hardness. She knew loss. Mary Potato gave Tommy the basketball. She knew he would love it.The Navajo boys love basketball. Reservation basketball. There was an old rusted basketball hoop attached precariously with screws to a telephone pole not far from where I lived on the Navajo Nation, and Navajo boys would come here to play basketball on the blacktop where the asphalt met the dirt road and the reservation mud. Big snow deterred them but ice on the asphalt did not deter them. It was pretty basic basketball. No frills. No coaches. No net. Someone had stolen the net years ago. The lone, rusted rim was in perpetual danger of falling off the telephone pole every time a basketball made deadly contact. But Navajo boys would come here and play informal pickup games. The little boys particularly liked coming, though they could never commandeer what passed for a basketball court for very long, as the older boys would show up, start their games, and elbow the little guys like Tommy out of the way. But Tommy had something not all of the little Navajo boys had. Tommy had a new basketball. He wasn"t much bigger than the ball itself, and the older boys — older being maybe twelve — would tolerate his presence if Tom showed up with his ball. The game begins. In time, the suave patience of the bigger boys with the little pretzels would grow thin, strained, and eventually it would wear out: Tommy would sit there sniffling on the sidelines, content (or forced) to watch the Navajo boys with their long flowing hair show off their adolescent stuff. Pose and strut. Pumped up. Free throws. Take the shot. Little boys wanting to be big boys and big boys wanting to be men. Fetal alcohol syndrome or no fetal alcohol syndrome, the boys always want to be men. I knew better than to interfere. Any father wants his son to learn how to defend himself some.When Tommy was diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome my wife wept for a week. There was little help to be had for it. So I did exactly what I think all parents should not do: I spoiled him rotten. I wasn"t rich, but I could give him certain things. I could try to teach the boy to dribble, and I could teach the boy to fish. More than anything, I was determined to do this for Tommy. I would not allow fetal alcohol syndrome or whatever to ruin that for me, or for him, and I did teach him to fish, and gently. Fishing is a gentle business when you"re out on a lake or in a Rocky Mountain stream. Fishing is a gentle business anywhere on the Navajo Nation. Ramah Lake. Blue Water Lake. If Tommy had been confined to a wheelchair (which he was not), I would have pushed that chair into any number of rivers. The San Juan River, where there was a private spot of sand where we could fish and swim, was Tommy"s favorite place. We went there often. I was damn well determined that Tom would not have the kind of grinding migrant life I"d had. No matter how many years I might or might not have with him. Ask anyone who has lost a kid. All we ever have is now. He would not be knocked around relentlessly like I had been knocked around all my life. I would do it differently. Tommy was the one thing I did that was good and didn"t fail. The rest of it is ephemeral. The fetal alcohol syndrome was a reality. I gave him happiness and joy and fishing tackle and trucks and dogs. I would do it again."I didn"t mean to have him," Mary Potato said. Tom and I were playing in a park in town. Swings. Sandbox. Teeter-totter. Monkey bars. At first, I had thought she was just another town drunk. People were always coming up and talking to us and engaging us in conversation if they could. People needed booze and change. I had neither. I had seen Mary Potato around like you see people around, but I had never directly engaged her, as I am apt to avoid such people. In fact, I avoid people whenever I can, which is never enough. "I had a boy who would be his age but they took him from me," Mary Potato said. Why I attract the losers from everywhere in the universe I do not know. Like a magnet. She"s watching Tommy with a glaze that is mainly sadness. I know that look. It"s about what you do not have. Mary Potato claimed she was Tommy"s natural mom. I was doubtful. I was angry. I was angry this strange woman approached us. I was angry she was making some kind of claim to what was mine. "I don"t want him back," she said. Good. She wasn"t getting him back. Over my dead body. "I just wanted you to know about me." She paused. "That I"m there."I was angry she had to be a drunk. I was angry she had done this to this kid — and if not this kid, some other kid with FAS. Some other kid who had seizures and who would never read goddamn English. Some other kid whose teachers would say try harder! and who climbed the walls. Some other kid who never slept. Some other kid in some other family. I was angry she would even attempt to speak with me. (It took me years to realize how carefully she actually did it, making sure Tommy was far enough away so as to be kept out of it, and I thank her for that.) I was angry her life was like a wound. I was angry she had had her children taken away. I was angry she was a hooker. I was angry all the medicine men in the world could not cure her life to balance. I did not want to know that she was there. That I"m there, she said. It was too much to ask of me. But there she was, her body hunched over the picnic table. She could have been my Tommy"s mom. It was possible even if I didn"t think it was probable. She could have been my mom. She was like my mom. My mother was a hopeless drunk. I would use the word "alcoholic," but it"s too polite. It"s a white people word. Alcoholic. In the migrant life, what we knew was falling-down Jezus drunk and puked again. There"s nothing polite about cleaning up your mother in her vomit and dragging her unconscious carcass back to the migrant housing trailer you lived in. Daddy, too. The story is ordinary. Mama usually just passed out wherever she happened to be. I"d find her in the back of pickups all the time. With men. For all of Mary Potato"s failures, they did not match the failures of my mom. And I loved my mom. Even if I was (and am) angry with her. Mary Potato was a whore who had been kicked off the reservation and lived in a shack made of toothpicks and tarpaper and magazines out by the railroad tracks. Mama had it worse. My dad would sell my mom to other migrant men for five bucks. The life Mary Potato lived was a walk in the park and a ride on the teeter-totter compared to the life my mother lived. Mary Potato could have been my mom. In another life. I could have been Mary Potato. Easily. How can another human being measure what she has given up? How do you divorce loss from rage? If I let the rage out, it will destroy everything. Wolves! I do not let it out, do not tell this story lightly. I cannot speak of it aloud. Or only to people who are close to me, and even then I try hard to leave out the darker pieces of it. "I didn"t mean to have him, but these things happen," Mary Potato said. I"m minding my own business at the picnic table. Tommy is off on his squeaky swing. Me in my brooding silence. As is my way. I had known Mary Potato in other incarnations. On other reservations. She did not want him back. "I just wanted you to know," she repeated, "that I"m there." That I"m there. A recognition of obscurity and existence.Somewhere around the late 1940s, my mom and my dad met in a bar in Gallup. I think they died somewhere in one, too. Bit by bit. In fragments. In tequila shots. In some vast midnight whiskey mist my parents seemed to simply slip away. They did not have far to go. We existed at the edges: the edges of the migrant camps, the edges of the Rio Grande, the edges of the horse-poor ranches we lived on, the edges of the reservation. The Navajo Nation. The Taos Pueblo. The Acoma Indian Reservation. The Jicarilla Apache Reservation. The Ramah Navajo. The Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation. The Ute Indian Reservation. Anywhere there were ranches and cows to work, or sheep to shear, or crops to pick or harvest. Texas cotton. Colorado wheat. New Mexico roundups. Castrating calves and stompin" feet.I have seen my share of the insides of those Gallup bars. Even as a kid, my dad, the cowboy, brought me to enough of them. Those strong Indian men laughing and putting me up on the pool table where I could spin around like entertainment. Pulling my dad out of those Gallup bars in the 1950s, always fights among the men, the women quite content to step over my daddy"s stinking piece of breathing meat. Me getting that man back to his cowboy truck. I could have used those strong pool-table arms then. Gallup or El Paso, it was all the same to me, as it would be the same to any kid. I never put my son through that wringer.The first memory I have is of a time my mother and I were under a tree. I do not know where. I think the desert. I am sitting naked in a big white ceramic pan, and the pan is filled with cold water. I am having a ball. Just splashing water underneath a tree. There is a line of clothes hung out and drying in the desert heat. The air is very dry. My mother"s hands dipping into the coolness of the water. She leaves. She does not come back.I"m still angry about the life Mary Potato is forced to live. I say "forced to live" because I know her options are so limited as to be almost nonexistent. Truckers could turn off I-40, make a quick trek down old Route 66 — U-Haul Central, the Wild West Shangri-La Road Motel parking lot, Palm Tree Trinket Shop and Indian Curios, Uranium Mine Museum, Pizza Hut, feed store, Tortilla Emporium, drive-up liquor store, Powwow Park — and pull their rigs into the lot. Strangers popping Mary in the motel dark. Mary got slammed around. Black eyes, broken bones. She was brittle. Mary Potato"s children had been taken from her. Other people raise them now. I live with fetal alcohol syndrome, too. I saw my mother go through whole bottles of vodka while she was pregnant, and she was a heavy drinker when she had me. I saw her lose babies. At least they were lucky enough not to be born alive. It is very unusual that someone with this disease would become a writer. But I am stubborn and perverse. I am also more than a little angry, which is probably why I was so damn determined I would do good by Tom. Tommy was my sweet revenge. That he could experience joy and all the good things that make life worth living was my salvation. Now he is gone. Writing is my new revenge. That I can put any of it down in the limited confines of the English language is a salvation of sorts. I would rather have my Tom than this writing about him, which is just about all I have now. Sweating blood over words is anything but simple, and English is a foreign language I do not readily understand. I became a writer to piss on all the many white teachers and white editors out there (everywhere) who insisted it could not be done. Not by the stupid mongrel likes of me. Tom was like me and had little respect for authority. You had to earn it. I did. These expert people in the vast universe of writing were not too different from the people who always told me Tommy Nothing Fancy was hopeless. Fetal alcohol syndrome is a mean buzzard. Tommy was many things, but hopeless was not one of them. I understood his battles with the things he saw, like words on the printed page. Reading is a real struggle. It"s extremely hard work. Things appear upside down. Writing is worse. My new babies are the stories I tell as I have lived them, touched them, been touched by them, lived through them, and survived them. They are my feeble attempt to bring the dead to life. I will paint a picture of my Tommy here.In order to succeed as a writer, you have to grow some pretty thick, scarred skin, and you have to get used to lots and lots of failure. FAS actually prepares you pretty well. Failure is the landscape and the barriers. I am not glad to have FAS. I am not glad Tom had it. FAS killed him. It is hard for me to be compassionate toward whatever human being or set of circumstances gave him this horrible thing. Try as I might, I cannot bring him back. Sometimes kids with FAS have very serious seizures. The medications Tommy took stopped working. It happened gradually. The seizures got worse. No one knows why. I still have the rivers and the horses and the mountains and the mesas and the red rocks soft with sand. And a basketball I keep in the back of my pickup truck. That basketball rolls around back there with my other junk like the past that will give me no peace. Someday I am going to find some deserving six-year-old to give it to.Even if Mary Potato was Tom"s natural mom, she wasn"t there. Mary Potato wasn"t there when my Tom was sick. She wasn"t there when he was having seizures. She wasn"t there to make bunny patches for his knees. She wasn"t there when all you"re left with is the phone in the middle of the night. I was there in the middle of the night. I was there through the seizures. I was there in hospitals in White People Town with medical specialists who knew nothing. I was there when they said he would never learn anything. I was there when I proved them wrong. We did not see Mary Potato often. But I knew now she was out there. In the dark with the wolves. Like a shadow. She called. I was not amused. I do not know how she managed to get my number. It was his birthday — she claimed — and she was coming over with a basketball she had purchased as a birthday gift. I hung up the phone. She knew where we lived. It was not his birthday. She arrived in an ancient Buick filled with men. I would not let her in. But I would take the basketball if she agreed to leave. I took the basketball. The muffler dangling from the Buick like a broken limb dragging, limping, scraping blue-hot dragon"s breath all along the asphalt as they left my place for the dragon bars in Gallup. Back to the good life, or in any case the life they knew.My dog and I drive to Mary Potato"s sad place. Navajo hogans can be poor, but none of them are as poor as the bare-bones tarpaper shacks folks live in at the edges of White People Town. I did not let Mary come to Tommy"s funeral. Now, the least I owed her was a ride. When you live on the reservation, you give rides to people who do not have transportation. That"s just the way it is. That"s all it was. A ride. Mary Potato keeps a big black mongrel dog clipped to a chain on a cottonwood tree in the front yard. She is almost ready. I sit on the couch and wait. The house smells of swamp tea and old underwear and boiled roots and dark rooms. Faded Jesus yellow on the wall. Gin. Years and years of cigarettes. Mary Potato walks slowly, with the knowledge she will never heal. How many knife blades have plunged into her solitary heart only to find their way into her belly where all her reversals and her hollow aching live. She does not dance on the wind with mad wings but is blown into her dreams of savage incapacity. There is no refuge in her house, which shakes like toothpicks with the passing of the train. What seems to live here is contempt. She is tough because she has to be. Finally, she is ready. She wanted to look nice. She is dignified.I have a hard time keeping the truck on the road. The closer I get to where Tommy is buried, the closer I come to knowing I know nothing. Everything I have ever known has been taken from me. My only grip is on the steering wheel. Everything at the periphery of my vision is compressed, and all I can see is what"s directly in front of Old Big Wanda. I know Mary Potato has been talking. About her life. Who can estimate what she has given up? I am no judge of anything. I am no moral judge of Mary Potato. I am only a man giving a woman a ride to a cemetery. Go, go, and the wind just sings. He needs me. He is cold. I cannot be here long. I fall apart. This woman who says she gave birth to my son smokes a cigarette and walks around looking at the other graves. She takes a plastic rose from her purse and sticks it into the almost frozen ground. We do not say much. Certainly nothing meaningful. The Navajo abhor speaking of the dead.We drive back to Mary Potato"s place in White People Town. Junkyards. Rusted vehicles piled high as a mountain. It is getting late. I do not go inside. We talk a little in the truck. She is soft and sad. It is difficult to hate her or keep my anger burning like it was some nuclear vehemence. I will never have to see her again. She still thinks Tommy was her son, and I still doubt it. It doesn"t matter what I think. What matters is we both have lost fragments of ourselves to wolves of adversity. Life. I leave her and start to drive home. The weather shifts and it begins to snow. The New Mexico sky deepens, casting purple shadows along the roadside ditch. The night comes down. The close dark. Something out there howling. Rocky Mountain snow sharp as ice picks. The old Navajo songs in my grandmother"s mouth. The snow coming down harder than a bar fight. Old Big Wanda slips on a crusty patch of ice. We slide slow motion down into an arroyo. The dog and I are stuck and will need someone to pull us out of here. No one comes along. We will be here until morning. Navajo folks in their trucks will arrive eventually. Someone will have a chain. Someone will help pull the fool out of the snow. Only thing to do is crawl into the back of the vehicle, into the sleeping bag with the dog, and stay as warm as possible. Avoid frostbite if I can. A numbness. It is impossible to sleep. I turn over on my side and come face to face with the basketball. He always dribbled it with two hands. Never one. I put the basketball underneath my shirt so I might see what it looks and feels like to be pregnant. It is not the same. The basketball is light and empty. Tommy Nothing Fancy was never empty. His quarrels with the world were never light. They were grave battles, and he met them head on with the hardiness of who he was. In the old days, the Navajo disposed of their dead in the branches of trees, where the spirit lingers. Tom"s burial is still crushing me, and time does not make it better. The basketball still rolls around in my pickup. I cannot rid myself of it, or of Mary Potato. And the wind sings go, go. The ghostly laughing voices of the Navajo.Copyright © 2000 by Nasdijj. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

FROM OUR EDITORS

Bookseller Reviews

The son of a Navaho woman and roughneck cowboy, Nasdijj grew up among Native American migrant laborers, far from the call of world literature. His writings crafted over twenty years, have only recently appeared in print: In June of 1999, Esquire ran the signature piece of this memoir. "I decided that I had to use the emotions that have been inside me," the author explained. Touching and lyrical (Nasdijj's name is Athabaskan for "to become gain." Apt.)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Nasdijj tells of his adopted son, Tommy Nothing Fancy, of the young boy's struggle with fetal alcohol syndrome, and of their last fishing trip together. The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams is the memoir of a man who has survived a hard life with grace, who has taken the past experience of pain and transformed it into a determination to care for the most vulnerable among us, and who has found an almost unspeakable beauty where others would find only sadness.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

The yearning to write, muses this irrepressible Native American author, "was the epitome of perversity, because reading and writing were such tortures for me." Born in 1950 on the Navajo Reservation to migrant workers--a Navajo mother and a white, cowboy father--Nasdijj has always suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome, which has made his 20 years as a journalist for Southwest smalltown newspapers, like everything else in his peripatetic, sometimes harrowing life, a terrible struggle. But for Nasdijj, writing was necessary to survival, a means of remembering and vindicating his personal and ancestral history. The symbols he molds out of the bleakness of the desert or his own emotional terrain, as well as the variations of the book's title, trail through 20 fragmented chapters like a plangent refrain. These elements cohere into a unique voice, whether Nasdijj is recounting his adventures on the periphery of white America, musing over the continued impoverishment of the Navajo, or lamenting the loss of his adopted son, Tommy Nothing Fancy, who died when he was six years old from fetal alcohol syndrome. Balancing a propensity to overanalyze his life in deliriously lyric passages with a gift for understatement that can yield more lucid revelations, Nasdijj reveals a great sensitivity to epiphanies wherever they may be found: in the wild stallions of the mesa, in the beautiful face of a troubled teen he mentors, in the bittersweet vandalism of a jingoistic statue of a Spanish conquistador. Agent, Heather Schroder, ICM. (Oct.) Forecast: Nasdijj first attracted attention when the title piece ran in Esquire in June 1999; he was subsequently named a finalist for a National Magazine Award. Already selected by several newspapers for fall preview roundups and early reviews, this haunting memoir is likely to garner widespread review coverage and, consequently, a solid audience that will be further enlarged by a six-city author tour. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

KLIATT

The authentic voice of a Native American comes through in stories of loss, intuitive caring, and search for identity. The reader perceives Nasdijj's sense of dislocation as he is drawn both to the reservation and to "White People Town," and as he seeks in writing and teaching and relationships to find truth among the mixed messages of the white and Indian cultures. "I am a mongrel myself. That mix of the morbid, the mystical, and the misbehaved." The stories are filled with original imagery, alliteration, touches of humor, the fanciful, irreverence, and sometimes inchoate anger. Sample stories: "My Son Comes Back to Me" and "The Blood Runs Like a River." Here Nasdijj longs for his son, a victim of fetal alcohol syndrome (as is the author to a lesser degree), who died at age six, while they were fishing. In "Runaway Horses," a wild stallion that hangs around the school is killed by coyotes. "Emergency Landing" tells of Nasdijj's Indian mother's storytelling and compulsive cleanliness that hold the migrant-worker family together as they travel. "Chahash'oh" describes a week's outing with his son in the wilderness that becomes terrifying when a male grizzly kills a female grizzly and her two cubs just outside their cabin. In "Reservation Rocks" and "Onate's Foot," Nasdijj, his dog, and an historian friend retrace a 400-year-old march designed by the Spanish to kill a nation. In "Tenderloin," Nasdijj goes to San Francisco in search of two 17-year-old Sioux boys who live by prostitution and have become heroin addicts. "Half and Half" relates how in the swirl of cream in a McDonald's coffee, he sees his mix of race and culture. In "On Being Homeless," a woman with two children attaches herselfto Nasdijj one summer when he lives and writes in a state park. In "Invisibility" Nasdijj helps a friend who has AIDS. In "Michif's Tape," Nasdijj accepts the job of socializing a deeply alienated boy and discovers that the boy has unusual storytelling talent. Nasdijj's sentences and stories are short. He says, "I know nothing about the technical stuff of writing...What I know about writing goes beyond where to put your commas. What I know about writing has to do with where you put your heart." Nasdijj, whose punctuation is fine and who once had a novel about Indians returned torn into small pieces by an editor, does indeed touch the heart. He may be one of America's great writers today. Category: Biography & Personal Narrative. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2000, Houghton Mifflin, Mariner, 215p., Ages 16 to adult. Reviewer: Edna M. Boardman; Minot, ND

Library Journal

Nasdijj's collection of vignettes about living on society's rough edges originated as an article for Esquire magazine in June 1999 and was subsequently named a National Magazine Award finalist. Much of his first book is set on Southwest Indian reservations, where he grew up as the son of a Native American mother and a white cowboy. Although many subjects are covered, one recurrent and powerful thread is the short life of the author's adopted son, Tommy Nothing Fancy. Born with fetal alcohol syndrome, Tommy died at the age of six after repeated health problems. Nasdijj shares the joys of their relationship--their love of nature and, especially, of fishing together. Powerful in the emotions it evokes and poetic in its descriptions, this book is recommended for public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/00.]--Kay L. Brodie, of Chesapeake Coll., Wye Mills, MD Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Esquire

...unfailingly honest and very nearly perfect...an authentic, important book. Read this book. Nasdijj is indeed the toughest Indian in the world.

Logan Hill - New York Magazine