Journey (If Where You're Going Isn't Home), Max Zimmer [great novels to read .TXT] 📗

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.”

 

 

 

 

 

Called a raw new voice in American fiction by Rolling Stone, Pushcart Prize winner Max Zimmer was born in Switzerland, brought across the Atlantic at the age of four, and raised in Utah in the crucible of the Mormon faith. When he moved East he wrote a long love story that became the genesis for If Where You're Going Isn't Home. He gravitated toward the city, lived and tended bar in Manhattan, met his wife, and eventually moved to the northwest corner of New Jersey, where he settled in to write If Where You're Going Isn't Home from the beginning. The East is now his home. Utah is a place he writes about.

Learn more at maxzimmer.com.

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Publication Date: 06-20-2013

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