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Joseph pressed his face against the window, looking up, up, to where the pale yellow moon watched over the Buick that carried Joseph and his father past everything Joseph had ever known and farther East than Joseph had ever been in his entire almost-decade of living. The moon had been a fat fingernail when they had left home; now it was on its way to a golf ball, a melon, a wheel of cheese from Joseph's father's deli.
"When will we go back to Tucson?" Joseph asked, his breath playing patterns on the window.
His father didn't answer for a long moment.
"When we've seen what we need to see," he said finally, and Joseph nodded and pretended he understood, and he fell asleep with his face against the glass and awoke when they pulled into a service station, his cheek numb.
He curled around himself, wishing vaguely that he was warmer, but his father was bad at packing suitcases and hadn't brought anything with long sleeves for either of them, and the nights were sticky and damp, and Joseph shivered as his father talked to the attendant behind the counter and bought cigarettes for himself and milk for Joseph.
Joseph drank the milk, though it made him colder, and a city began to blink at them out of the darkness, and Joseph thought it didn't look as nice as Tucson but it was probably an okay city because somewhere inside it, his father had promised him, there was a holy place.
"Is it Memphis?" he asked, his voice thick with milk and weariness, and his father looked over at him and lit a cigarette and smiled as they began to cross the bridge that would take them there.
"Yep. That's Memphis," he said, and he rolled down a window and the night air poured into the car and whisked away the smell of Joseph's father's cigarette, and Joseph finished his milk and they let the city consume them.
Joseph knew who had once lived in Memphis. The same man who had lived in Tupelo, where they had stopped that morning, the man who had died the night Joseph was born, the man whose home, Joseph's father had told him, was a temple. And that was where they were going. They would see it in the morning, and Joseph's father would play his guitar in a park in the evening as the sun got weary over Memphis, and they would eat chicken for dinner and sleep in a strange hotel bed with sheets that were too cool and too slick against Joseph's shoulders.
He hoped that then they could turn back west towards the sunset and go home, which was a dry place with its own haunting music, not the damp night mosquito bite blues like Joseph's father played, but music that seemed to Joseph that it should never have reached his ears though every day it dusted in through shingles and under doorways with its pervading beat and unfathomable melodies.
But when they stepped out of the temple, Joseph's father lifted his face to the sun and they found the Buick and drove south.
If the temple was a holy place, then New Orleans was its opposite, a place that stank of sewer sin and made Joseph ignore his glass of milk because he didn't know what drinking it might do to him. The mystery was different here. The city was not remembering someone ten years gone, but waiting for someone to be reborn. Someone who frightened Joseph, just a little bit, a fear that sat right at the back of his neck and prodded him and made him shrink in upon himself.
Joseph stood with his hand clasped in his father's across the street from a grocery store, bigger than the one Joseph's father worked in back at home. Then the same across from a bar, and then a café, and then a dance hall. Joseph had learned not to ask questions when his father's eyes clouded over like that.
They had chicken for dinner, and cornbread and rice and beans, and Joseph's father let him stay up late, ignoring the fact of their motel and ignoring the stares from the fat white women who wore too much lipstick and probably thought that Joseph didn't belong here after the sun had gone down, his feet tucked up under him on his chair and his milk still untouched in front of him. He had asked for a Coke in one of the tall glass bottles that dripped perspiration, but it was always milk, and at least the women couldn't hate Joseph's father for that.
But Joseph's father stared the women down until they turned away, and he turned back to Joseph and told him about his mother, things Joseph had never known about her, before she was the woman who gave him weary smiles and brushed his hair from his forehead and then left Joseph and his father and the phantom of her scent behind. Told Joseph of how they had danced and how pretty she had been before worry and wanderlust had ruined her. Joseph nodded, and he remembered.
Remembered his mother, and remembered his father's second wife, too, Linda-but-you'll-call-me-mommy-soon-enough, with her flat hands and her smell of detergent and her impatience with Joseph when he didn't want to do his homework. Remembered when she was gone, too, just like his mother, and it was just Joseph and his father again, alone in the house with too many bedrooms, bedrooms which Joseph always wished were filled with brothers and sisters for him but which ultimately held only ghosts.
There was a little stage where men in suits joked with each other and took instruments from cases, and then music started up and it wasn't music like Joseph had ever heard, not his father's blues, not the sounds of the man from Tupelo and from Memphis, not the Arizona mission music that had been his lullaby, but something wild, something accompanied by heart thumpings and laughter and shouts, and Joseph's father drummed his fingers on the table and Joseph danced in his seat until his father grinned at him and whisked him onto the dance floor. Joseph was too big to be held, but his father did it anyway, Joseph's legs dangling as they moved to the beat their ancestors had created, the beat that made Joseph's heart move, that was in his blood, that went why-why-why in platelets and plasma, that came from the roots of rhythm back in Africa somewhere, and they danced, they danced, they danced.