Apart from my occasional enquiry as to whether my passenger is OK, we hardly speak at all. Then an hour or so in I hear him say, ‘I’m grateful.’

‘Just giving a guy a ride back to the world,’ I answer.

‘Sure,’ he says and then, after a pause, ‘Iggy says you served with him in Nam.’

‘The only word wrong in that sentence is “with”.’

‘He says you were one of the last ones out,’ and he sounds just like the young men who mistook me for something other than a REMF.

‘Only because I was so unimportant that they almost forgot about me. Iggy’s memory isn’t so good any more.’

‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘I appreciate this.’

Then I remember something I have tried all my life to forget.

‘There’s nothing I need to say to you because you will take your own path now, except this one thing. If you have a photograph of anyone you love in your wallet or in your bag, you should think about taking one last look at it and then destroy it.’

‘Why?’

‘Because they will use it to hurt you. Because it makes you vulnerable.’

Silence settles again as we head north, driving past towns and cities whose names speak of the shared configuration of history, of saints and angels, of battles fought and land defended. In time we will hear talk of building higher and stronger walls but still they’ll come. And maybe Donovan is right and the whole world is crossing over. Now I find myself a ferryman. And yes, there are times as I drive that I think what I should do is deposit him in the hands of his pursuers, receive the commendation of the state I had served all my life. At a gas station I have to stop and refill. He slips out and goes inside to use the restroom. I watch him walk across the forecourt, the back of his shirt heavily creased, but a young man seemingly without a care in the world. The automatic doors wheeze open as he approaches before he disappears inside, hidden behind the sun’s glare on the glass. When he returns he hands me a drink and, as I cup the welcome coldness of the can, I’m glad he wasn’t privy to my thoughts in those few minutes when he was out of sight.

Once, outside a small town, we come upon an accident involving a truck and a motorhome, with a police car, its lights flashing, parked up at the side of the road and a police officer ahead waving on the slow-moving line of traffic. We are waiting in line, slowly edging forward then stopping again when traffic heads in the other direction, given right of way. I tell him to stay low. The car in front has a Confederate flag on its fender and one that says ‘Live Free or Die’. Soon there will be other stickers talking of making America great again and they will give their votes to the man they believe able to do it, just as my home town on the prairie will also believe – something that will leave me feeling homeless, a refugee in my own country, separated from the very people who guided me into the world and nurtured me as a child of the nation.