What could be more glorious than two friends, an old Dodge lancer and the highway ahead? Nothing. So climb in and hold on!

“Alex says it's me, but it's him. It's got to be him, because this kind of weird griff never happens when I'm alone.”

Thus begins the deceptively simple story of 19-year old Daz, a half-Hispanic Californio to whom Spanish is a foreign language, his hapa-Hawaiian friend Alex, and their drive across country to visit a cousin in New York .

“Grandmas see Alex's easy white-teeth grin and they can't resist saying, ‘What a nice young man! ‘ The real freeze is that these same ladies take one look at me and figure I'm some kind of bargain-rack hoodlum. Me, who's actually the nice one.”

Daz's self-constructed slang and rambunctious story-telling puts readers right in the backseat from their initial struggle to wrest the mysteriously stored Dodge Lancer from Old Man Ching to their jobs with the Odd Squad-the Vietnam vets building homes in the blazing heat of the Central Valley .

The pair's loyalty to the Lancer, as puzzling to Mr. Ching as the older man's bitterness is Daz, comes full circle when their return of the car triggers an unexpected voyage of renewal. Theirs is a journey of odd jobs taken, of temptations to violence seized and rejected, of self-reliance and sacrifice-of an American identity being earned, not bestowed.

 

CHARLES SMITH moved to Hawaii at 15 and entered Lanai High School as one of only three Anglo students. By marriage or birth his immediate family includes Mexican-American, African- American, Asian-American and Anglo bloodlines. After working his way through the University of Hawaii-Manoa as a carpenter, he put his degree in Philosophy to good use by becoming a builder. He has volunteered for the American Friends Service Committee and helped found the people's Party of Hawaii, and co-foulnded the journal VoltAge. A resident of Berkeley , California , he covered a variety of subjects for the media and written both novels and screenplays. His weblog and a sampling of recent work can be found at www.oftwominds.com .