If Where You're Going Isn't Home

Book 1: Journey

Chapter 1

You know before it’s over. This sound that takes the human breath of a voice and gives it the shimmer of steel and makes it light and effortless and fly like a bird made of the clear bright ringing sound of steel with all the sky out through the windshield to itself.

It’s not enough to hear it.

It has to come from you.

The way you can’t breathe just by listening to someone else’s breathing. Pump blood just by feeling someone else’s heart. Get rid of thirst by watching your mother drink down a glass of her lemonade. It makes you want some too. It has to be you drinking it.

Your breath.

Find out what instrument it came from. Manny and Hidalgo. You can’t ask them. They’ll tease you if you let them see how much it matters. They’ll never tell you.

“What’s got you by the tail there, little man?”

“Nothing.” And then, feeling the punishing bite of telling a grownup a lie, you say, “That music. On the radio.”

“Just now? Just some Mexican jazz. You like it?”

“Mexican what?”

“Jazz. You never heard it?”

“It’s from Mexico?”

“It ain’t from no hymnbook, that’s for sure.” “Where’s it from?”

“It’s sheepherder music, little man.”

“No it’s not."

“No? Tell him, Manny. Sheepherder music.”

You, almost twelve, the oldest of five, the first born back in Switzerland, four years before you were put on the Queen Elizabeth and brought across the ocean, then on a plane in New York the rest of the Journey way to Salt Lake City, a big plane called a Constellation, where a stewardess helped your mother scrub your vomit out of the sweater some aunt had knit for you. Born four years before you lived in your grandfa- ther’s open basement in the big house in the Avenues, with your uncles and aunts and cousins, where blankets were hung from the floor joists overhead to make rooms for the families. From there, a tumbling kaleidoscope of the places you found yourself living, moments in your head you could capture and then let go and then catch again like grasshoppers or moths, the upright piano your mother brought from Switzerland in different living rooms, songs from Broadway musicals one of her ways of learning English, the lessons you took at her side from her thin articulate hands the same no matter what else around you kept on changing. The basement apartment where nightcrawlers came up through the drain in the kitchen sink. The house with two front doors, the house divided down the middle, the half where the welder’s family lived and the half where you lived, the room where your fingers nibbled away at night at cracks in the wall your bed was pushed against, where you came home from school one day in the fall to a fire truck, a busted water heater in the yard, the front door open wide, your mother in her striped dress out in front, firemen talking to her. The first Rose Park house on Talisman Drive. The second one, a corner house on another Rose Park street, in whose basement you and a neighbor girl named Louisie pretended you were married. Then La Sal, the ranch down in southern Utah, where they slaughtered a steer each Saturday and passed the meat around and your family always got the kidneys because nobody in America ate kidneys. Four years there, your father the ranch book- keeper, the retired old workhorse named Rex you used to ride bareback out across the sagebrush till the ranch was a tiny oasis of trees in the shimmer of distant heat, the junkyard of abandoned army trucks across the dirt highway whose dashboard instruments you extracted and traded with your buddies, the tank without a turret in the sagebrush, the mountains behind the ranch bald where their forests ended, the long and intricate and sometimes abruptly scalloped line of distant yellow sandstone that was as far as you could see in every other direction, the piano the choiring heart of the little house where sometimes you woke up to watersnakes in the living room.

School the same kaleidoscope. Kindergarten, the teacher a whitehaired woman big as a polar bear, who used to get the class to laugh along with her at the way you fumbled English, who came striding down through the desks when laughing got tiresome to slap the back of your head so hard you saw sparks like lightning in the flash of black. Mrs. Brick. First grade partitioned between three schools you don’t remember except for Webster Elementary. Second grade in Rose Park, where you used to come home for lunch to chocolate and cheese sand- wiches your mother would heat in the oven to just before they melted, where the Diamond brothers caught you coming home on Valentine’s Day and scattered the cards the kids in your class had given you in the slush of the gutter. And then the two-room schoolhouse on the ranch. Third grade in the room from old Miss Jenny. Fourth and fifth and sixth in the other room from Betty Peterson whose husband Chas ran the milkhouse across the big dirt lot from the bunkhouse where all the sheepherders lived. The potbellied stove, the portrait of Adlai Stevenson on the wall, the coal bucket you took out back and loaded whenever your turn came around, the flagpole out in front in the dirt that got turned into a maypole every spring. By fifth grade, and then all through sixth, because of Mrs. Brick, you were winning every spelling bee they could throw at you. And then here, two months ago, in April, to this house in a town named Bountiful, twenty minutes north of Salt Lake City, this brand new house on a paved and guttered circle ringed with other brand new houses. So for junior high you wouldn’t have to ride the school bus all the way from the ranch to Moab and back to the ranch again. So you’d be close enough to a school to ride your bike to seventh grade instead.

They let you out of sixth grade early. Your father told them he had to move in April or else lose the house. So they let you and Karl and Molly out of school with two months left and had Manny and Hidalgo use a cattle truck to move your stuff here from the ranch. Karl and Molly and Roy made the trip north through the length of Utah in the deep back seat of your father’s Buick while Maggie rode in your mother’s lap. You got to ride with the sheepherders, on the bench between them, perched on a bundle of gunny sacks so you could see, smelling hay and sheep feed, keeping your knees away from the trembling black knob of the tall gearshift, watching the buttes and the cliffs and the canyons move slowly past, listening to the radio right there in front of you over the grinding whine of the engine. Moab. Crescent Junction. Green River. Price. Helper. Soldier Summit. Towns you knew from the shopping trip your family made in August every year to Sears in Salt Lake City for clothes for school and Christmas toys. Manny driving, Hidalgo on your other side, the sheepherders talked to each other in Mexican the way your father and mother talked to each other in Swiss. When they talked to you, like your father and mother, Hidalgo and Manny used English.

“Hey, little man, we got your bed back there,” Hidalgo saying. “You sleepy, you can go back and take a nap.”

“I’m not sleepy.”

“We got all your stuff back there. Those magazines with the naked ladies, too.”

“I don’t have any naked lady magazines.”

“Sure, sure. Manny, he’ll tell you he don’t either, when you ask him.” “Honest. I don’t.”

“We lose the brakes right now, little man, what you think happen?” Manny saying something quick and sharp in Mexican to Hidalgo.

But you heard chico there in what he said and knew that it meant little kid and you didn’t like it. Not after being called a little man all morning.

“What?”

“You see that kind of cliff down there? Where the road turns?” Manny shaking a cigarette out of the pack of Chesterfields he had on the dashboard while you looked down the road and saw where it looked like it ended. Not a cliff but this bunch of boulders like a family of huge brown elephants. You knew that the road didn’t end there no matter how much it looked like it did because the Buick would have been there, stopped, and your father would have been standing in the road outside the open driver’s door, wondering what to do, your mother complaining for an answer from the passenger seat.

“Yeah,” you saying. “I see it.”

“Time we got there,” Hidalgo saying, “no brakes, we’d be doing maybe a hundred.”

“Would we crash?”

“Would we ever. And all that stuff in back? All that furniture?”

“Yeah?”

“It all come flying. Right through the cab. Smash! Squish us to pieces like three big ripe pumpkin heads. Turn us into pumpkin juice.”

You understood it too when Manny coughed out a burst of white Chesterfield smoke and said fuck in the middle of something in Mexican and you got scared and looked at Hidalgo and he shut up but sat there grinning. And then turned his head and looked out his side window. And after a while said, “Manny don’t like pumpkin juice.”

And then, after the long and growling climb up Price Canyon, after cresting Soldier Summit, after making it around the turn past the ele- phant family boulders and the road was there again, and the distant back of your father’s Buick, there was the song on the radio, and the sound that was playing the song, a sound you’d never heard before, the human breath of a voice giving flight to a bird made out of the sound of steel.

You sat there spellbound. Your breath. If it was an instrument it was one you’d never heard before. But you wanted it to take your breath too, make it the sound you were hearing, a sound you would follow anywhere. And then it was gone, and Hidalgo was saying sheepherder music, and you were saying no, it’s not, looking at Manny, knowing from this quiet grin around his cigarette that they were fooling you.

“Sure it is,” Hidalgo saying. “Up in the mountains, the moon and the stars all out, the sheep all sleeping, just you and the dog, a little fire going, right, Manny?”

“Keeps away the cougars and coyotes, too,” Manny saying.

“That’s right.” Hidalgo taking a second to lean down toward the dashboard and light his own cigarette. “Makes them peaceful. Takes their minds off their stomachs.”

“You hungry?” Manny saying. “Thirsty?”

“No thanks.”

“Just say so. Don’t want your mom thinking we’re letting you starve.”

The movie your father took when Manny came to get your dog the afternoon before you moved because your mother said you couldn’t bring him north. You drew a picture of him instead to bring along. Rufus sat there, watching you draw, not knowing it was him, not knowing anything until Manny leashed him to the spare tire in the bed of his pickup truck. Manny said he wouldn’t change his name, would call him Rufus too, would make him a happy-go-lucky sheepdog. And then he drove away, Rufus barking, leaping back and forth in the bed, and there you were, in your gold-colored swimming trunks and the piece of tarp you used for a Superman cape, half chasing the small cloud of dust that rose up behind the tailgate, your legs confused and irresolute, the same uncertain jerkiness in your arms, up and then down and then up again, half waving, not knowing how to let him go, not sure how to say good- bye. Rufus. The dog you got when he was a puppy not much bigger than the bowl of your two hands. The coyote you cornered and tackled in the yard. The way you pulled his jaws apart until Rufus fell clear. The day it took for Rufus to come unparalyzed enough to eat and walk again.

Later, in Bountiful, when your father runs it on his noisy home projector during a Family Home Evening, the movie will startle and shame you. It will show you what he sees when he looks at you. You wheeling round, seeing the man behind you in the road with the whirring camera to his face, the recognition in your own face that you’re being filmed, the half-apologetic try at smiling, then wheeling around again to run a few more stumbling steps in the wake of the dust-blurred pickup. In the film you won’t hear Rufus barking. Just see the fierce repeating recoil of his head. Just see you waving while your father records on film what it’s like when you think that a dog would know what it means when you wave at him. The scene will feel endless while your family sits there watching. Jazz. A new word. Sheepherder music. A way to comprehend it. Thistle. Spanish Fork Canyon. Springville. Provo. Orem. Out ahead of you, through the windshield of the cattle truck, through the towns going north all the way to Salt Lake City, there was always the green rear end of your father’s Buick, heads and sometimes faces in the big rear window.

“Hey. Look over there. Your new house.”

Looking where Hidalgo’s pointing. The spires of the Salt Lake Temple above the roofs of the downtown buildings in the yellow afternoon sky.

“That’s the Temple,” you saying, because Hidalgo wasn’t Mormon, because maybe he didn’t know. “God lives there.”

“Looks to me like where Tinkerbell lives.”

“Tinkerbell lives in Disneyland.”

Manny smoking another Chesterfield. Working the gearshift between your knees to get the truck through another red light of the crawling traffic of the city.

“Who’s that gold guy?” Hidalgo saying. “Up on top there? That Jesus?”

“That’s the Angel Moroni,” you saying. And then catching him smiling away from you. “You knew.”

“No I didn’t. Promise.”

“Yeah you did. You just wanted to make me say it.”

Five of you. The places you were born like evidence that you’d lived there while your father looked for footing and learned English himself. Karl almost ten. Born like you in Switzerland. Molly almost eight. Across the Atlantic and then from New York to Utah inside the huge bell she made of your mother’s stomach. Born while you lived in the basement of your grandfather’s house in the Avenues before your father moved you to the basement of the house tucked under the four-lane double curve that swept around Brewery Hill as it brought traffic down into the city. You remember Webster Elementary not from the classroom you sat in, but from the outside, from across the curve around Brewery Hill when you went out walking with your mother with Molly in the baby carriage, sinister and powerful like a factory or prison, its brick walls black like the hull of a burned ship. Roy just five. Born in Rose Park. In La Sal, you saw him standing in the doorways of different rooms, sucking his thumb while your mother stood over you, out of breath, her pretzel-shaped bamboo rugbeater in her hand, welts rising from your back and face and arms like the brands they gave the cattle.

You’ve heard his fingers hunt for notes and realized he’s the one kid who’ll ever take her piano lessons and keep going. Maggie. Two this coming November. Born in the hospital in Moab while you were living in La Sal. There was the Indian they wheeled into the hospital the morning your father took you there. His shiny blue-black hair in the sunrise through the glass doors. His leather moccasins at the other end of the gurney. Vomit ran in a steady river out his mouth onto his pillow. You and Maggie the bookends of the family because your mother was done with having kids. Ten years stand between you.

Here, now, in Bountiful, in a town you reach by driving a few miles north of Salt Lake City, past Slim Olson’s World’s Largest Gas Station, past the stinking yellow haze and always burning torch of the Phillips 66 refinery, past the cattle pens of the Cudahy stockyards, past the monster black machines of the sand and gravel pits carved out of the foothills. A town where your back is to the mountains when you look west toward the Great Salt Lake and Antelope Island and the horizon where the desert starts and goes all the way across Nevada. Bountiful. A town whose name you can’t get used to because it doesn’t feel finished, just the start of a name, just an adjective. Bountiful. Like naming a town Little. Or Yellow or Shiny or Fat. But you’re here, here instead of Switzerland, because of your grandfather. Because he translated the Book of Mor- mon and a lot of Mormon hymns into the German language. Because during the war he used to cross the border into Nazi Germany to visit the German members in their hiding places there. Because a year before you rode the Queen Elizabeth yourself, the Church officially made him their German translator, and moved him from Switzerland to the big house in the Avenues whose basement became a holding pen for the rest of his family. Soon after the last family moved, and the last of the blankets came down, your grandfather had to leave the big house too, because it belonged to the Church, because he was only renting it from them.

He’s short for a famous man. Shorter even than your father but built the same way, stocky and muscular, a small bear on hind legs. In the fenced back yard of the little house where he and your grandmother live, on a dirt-curbed street off the thoroughfare of Seventh East, your grandfather sits in a lawn chair off by himself, not saying much, not drawing attention, but his rimless glasses explode with light when he turns his large bald head toward the small grill where your father, on his knees, rolls hot dogs back and forth across the smoke.

“If Grosspapa’s so famous,” you say, “how come he doesn’t live in a mansion?”

On the way home from your grandfather’s house you ride between your father and your mother. A woman is singing opera, high and fast and frantic like someone’s tickling her, out of the big chrome grill of the radio in front of you. Behind you, deep in the back seat, Molly holds her sleeping little sister as though in her mothering little arms both of them are safe, Karl’s got his head out the window and his mouth open to the wind, and Roy is back there too, somewhere, maybe asleep, maybe watching the tops of the trees and houses pass along the sill of the win- dow above his head. Your father reaches across to pick at something on his arm, then returns his hand to the big black hoop of the steering wheel.

“Is that all it means to you to be famous?” he says. “To have a big mansion?”

You keep your eyes fixed on the speaker grill. The hose fight, the clownish way your father let Molly catch and tag him, the joking around, the horseplay that like a circus bear lured all of you through the afternoon. All of it gone, left behind, put away, like the barbecue grill he scrubbed, the aluminum chairs and card table you folded up, the plates and glasses your mother washed and Molly dried, the mustard and ketchup bottles whose threaded tops your grandmother wiped with a washrag before capping them. He’s alone with his family again. His voice is gruff, heavy with responsibility, restless, like you’ve made him turn around while he’s been headed somewhere else. From deep inside his mouth you can hear the soft and regular clacking of his back teeth, a sound that goes with the worried contemplation of some distant peril in his eyes, the always furrowed flesh of his forehead even when he’s laughing.

“No.”

“Your grandfather is a modest man. Like the commandments teach us to be. Did Jesus have a big mansion?”

Your mother lifts her hand off her thigh and puts it back down again and then turns her head and looks into the wind through her open window. 

“No,” you say.

“Then why should your grandfather have one?”

“He shouldn’t, I guess.”

You wonder if what your father’s telling you is that your grandfather keeps all his money stored in a bank somewhere.

“He’ll have his mansion in Heaven,” your father says, “when he reaches the end of his mortal journey.”

“So, Harold,” your mother says. “He’s only a child.”

In two years, your grandfather will be dead, of something called a stroke, and at his funeral you’ll look across the rim of his casket at the only dead person you’ve ever seen, and your grandmother will tell you not to be afraid to touch him while the knobbed gray fingers of her veined hand skitter with frightening tenderness across his scalp and ear without him knowing it. He’ll look more waxed and buffed to you than dead, like neutral shoe polish was worked into his face and scalp and ears and hands and then brushed until his skin turned satin, like a kid’s, no sign that he’d ever had whiskers, like it must have been when he was twelve years old himself, wondering how old he’d be when he’d finally get to shave. Journey. In the front seat of the cattle truck, the big Buick out ahead of you hauling your family toward Bountiful, toward the town where your own will start now that you’re almost twelve.