Tumbleback Road takes place on the dusty plains of Eastern Colorado in the summer of 1980, during the Iran hostage crisis and Ronald Reagan's run-up to the presidency. Its protagonist is Tommy Sandor, a seventeen-year-old man-child who believes the lie that his mother told him when he turned thirteen: that his father was a saxophone player from New York City who knocked her up and left her. Here's a bit of Tommy's interaction with this fantasy father. You'll see that he's just like me: he built his life over the wreckage of what wasn't there.

Tommy pulled the string to turn on the lone bulb—the one he’d rigged up when he first turned seventeen and Dolman taught him how to jack electricity from power lines—then stepped into the little nook he’d made next to the stage where he liked to put his sax together. A place where he could peek out from behind the curtains of whatever imaginary jazz club he was playing, gauging the crowd while he twisted the curved metal neck onto the Selmer’s body and tightened it down, then twisted the mouthpiece onto the corked end of the neck. 

Always put it together standing up, his father reminded him. Your breath has to come out of your lungs straight, so get your mouthpiece right for how you’re standing that night. Every night’s different.

Tommy nodded and reset his strap, then set the wet reed on his mouthpiece. He slid the ligature on and tightened it down hard, then loosened it a bit—another trick his dad taught him. He looked out at the stage once more, at the floor that his feet would stand on, and reminded himself not to care about the crowd. What happened in that circle was between him and his sax, and it would happen whether anybody else heard it or not. He stepped under the light and got his lips around the mouthpiece, and then the scale that had been rumbling through his blood all day rose up to his throat, almost ready to leave his mouth. 

He almost started with the low E_b but didn’t, because the messed-up D key made it the hardest note to hit and he didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot tonight. Tommy wanted to play the notes like he was the notes, so he started off with an animal shriek at high E_b, with nothing but the side of his hand pressed against the keys, that told the world I am here and you cannot stop me and I will say what needs to be said. Then he gave out a soft, tremulous G_b, almost a whisper, before he leapt back to the high E_b for a second and tumbled down an octave right away. He held that middle E_b, putting a growl into his breath that the instrument sent back through his bones before his breath faltered and the broken key revealed itself and the sound broke into a squeak. 

Doesn’t matter if you’re any good, his father said. Everybody teaches himself. 

Tommy spent another minute picking out notes on the scale that he knew the Selmer could play and holding them, whole and pure. Playing them like they could save his life. Then he picked up a bit of melody, gliding and looping between high C and B_b and A_b before drooping down to a soft middle C. He hopped up to that high E_b shriek again, then dropped down half a note to D, and then he got so lost in the scale that he couldn’t keep track of where he was on it. His dad always told him to get lost in scales, let them seep into his hands and breath until they felt not like something he made, but like something that happened to him. Told Tommy to move his body and head around to pull the music closer, as if his head were an antenna luring down signals from outer space. Once he found a signal he had to still himself to keep it coming, and that’s when the real music hit.   

Because scales don’t belong to you, Tommy’s dad whispered. There’s not a single one you can play that hasn’t been played before. You move your head to catch one, then you let it flow through you ‘til it starts to break you down. Because the song wants you. It’s out there and it wants to be born.

But this isn't Tommy's real father. That's our belongings to a man named Richard Thorpe, who'd burned down the TV store that belonged to Tommy's grandfather after the boy's mother––on the day she announced her pregnancy––refused to ever marry him. It takes a while, but Tommy eventually finds the truth at a library in Nebraska. 

Tommy flipped to August 3rd, then saw a mug shot with the face he’d been looking for all his life: hard as a brick, anger drilling out of the eyes. A fuck-you smirk. That blond, buzz-cut hair and bull neck, the same neck he’d admired so many times in his own mirror.

 

“Fuck,” Tommy barked, slamming that face with the side of his fist. The headline said SUSPECT APPREHENDED IN HOLMQUIST FIRE. He went back to staring at his true father's face. Only nineteen years old, but with a dead man hanging over his head already. Scared and defiant. Zits in the same places his son had them now. Tommy stared so hard that he didn’t notice Mrs. Petorak looking over his shoulder until he felt her breath. 

“There’s one more picture,” she told him when he looked up. “August 21st.” Then she went back to her desk, head down like Tommy didn’t exist. He found the page and saw another picture of Thorpe, this time in a trim leather jacket leaning back against a car without a hood. Arms crossed, head tilted back to let loose a big Huh-haaaaaaa! Blonde hair, sideburns that didn’t really show yet. Pointing at him from nearby was a man in jeans and a white V-neck T-shirt with a pack of cigarettes rolled under his sleeve. 

GUILTY PLEA IN HOLMQUIST FIRE, the headline read, and Tommy scanned the rest of the article without registering the words. He only absorbed the ones beneath the picture, and as he read them he felt everything but his eyes spin around.  

Richard Thorpe, who pleaded guilty to arson and involuntary manslaughter in the Holmquist TV and Entertainment Showroom fire of July 17, is shown with his father Eldon at an unnamed race track. The whereabouts of the senior Thorpe are unknown.  

Eldon Thorpe was partly in shadow, his deep-set eyes darkened as he pointed to Richard. He stood a bit taller than his son, though not so thick around. It made Tommy wonder about his grandmother on the Thorpe side—it took a tough woman, probably a hell-raiser herself, to love a man like Eldon and raise a boy like Richard. Men who roamed, who disappeared for months at a time without even needing a reason. Tommy looked at his father leaning against the car, at his grandfather’s pointing finger. You’re next, that finger said, and Richard stood up to win the next race or die trying. Tommy felt his jangling walk, a walk that knew where it was going even if it wasn’t welcome there. He saw his father walking out of the picture, cocking back his head like he was about to get into a ring with somebody. A boxing match before the race, or a knife fight.  

Then Tommy couldn’t take it anymore. The feeling came back to his body and he got sluggish all the way through him, because knowing who he came from gave him a heavier load to carry than not knowing. The truth didn’t set him free from anything except the fake dad that his mom tricked him into loving.  

All my ol' familiar themes are there. All the tropes I've worn out. The criminal father. The low-level bohemianism and spiritualist approach to art. I love Tommy Sandor and I want him to succeed, to get beyond the father-wrestling he's mired in the middle of. I'm pulling for him, though I know from experience that he may be fifty before he gets done with the wrestling match. Before he wins it or quits it. 

In this respect he's the clearest surrogate for me I've ever written. His father-wrestling is my father-wrestling, though our fathers are quite different. Funny, Tommy is seventeen in this novel––pretty much exactly how old I was when I started wrestling with my father. If he and I are paired in this way, do I have to keep writing him until he's fifty?