The good news and the bad news are that America’s immigration problem has been curtailed if not exactly solved.

I also can report that Laura, who no longer is Laura, has become a key organizer and is moving regularly. I hear from her at odd times, and she is careful to never even hint at her location. I can tell you she looks good as a blonde, a brunette, a redhead, and with light-brown long or short hair, depending on her appearance at the time. When I think about her, when I wonder where she is and what she’s doing, for some reason I remember the beautiful final scene of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, in which Tom Joad, now a fugitive in America, sets his path: “I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be ever’where—wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there … I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there.”

I’ve always loved the determination, the promise, and the threat of that promise, and hold on to it still.

And Jenny. If this were a movie script the character instruction would be: (Rollie sighs deeply, caught in a flurry of confused emotions). That would be accurate. We speak regularly. I notice when I’m talking to her I find myself scratching my left palm, an old nervous habit I thought I’d left behind long ago. Our conversations are always like a mountain range in twilight; the peaks are impossible to miss, but the valleys are hidden. Maybe that’s intentional. For two people whose careers are dependent on the ability to communicate directly, we have both been utter failures.

Neither of us can ignore the possibility (she says, I say fact) that Homeland Security is physically listening to or taping these conversations. I know I don’t speak without first considering the impact of my words on her life. It’s like America has become a universal party line. (For those who don’t know, a party line was a single telephone line shared by many people that provided no privacy.) Like those nations we once fought, in schools and churches, in the entertainment world and on television, the government is listening for subversive conversation. No one really knows what is being recorded or who might listen to it or, worse, what the penalty might be. Those rumors about a subversive point system that I’d hear apparently proved accurate. It appears the National Computer Center search engines have been programmed to pick out key words or phrases, which are forwarded to the “Computer Bank of America,” a division of the NSA, where someone listens to those conversations and decides if and what actions should be taken. In most cases, each time a person is cited a point or two is added to his or her score. Ten points gets you a pleasant visit from a district officer.