Son of a Gun (4 page)

Chance spun around our feet, wagging his tail and whining. I figured I’d start with the dog. I bent down and scratched behind his ears, let him lick my hand. Then I stood and turned to my mother. She was playing with her hair, checking the tips of the long brown strands for split ends; she did that when she was nervous or upset. She was wearing sunglasses, the enormous plastic shades sold in drugstores to senior citizens, the ones I made fun of her for—she worried about her eyes, and about mine, told me to wear sunglasses all the time so I wouldn’t get cataracts—and when she took them off, she was already starting to cry. I’d seen those eyes change in different lights and moods, almost black when she was angry or soft brown like this when she was sad, or when she was in love again, and I’d seen the skin around them wrinkle and spot in the eighteen years I’d known no life other than one with her. She was more than a foot shorter than me, so I had to reach way down to let her hug me, squeezing hard with her muscular
arms. When the doctors had told her after my brother that another child would mean another C-section, she’d had me anyway, then hemorrhaged and had an emergency hysterectomy to save her life. After that she was scarred and barren, on hormone pills, prone to fractures—a shattered wrist, pins in her foot—and as she raised and loved and competed with men for the rest of her life, through motherhood and marriages, careers as a soldier and a small-business owner, she began to seem almost masculine, broad shoulders and a bracing grip, tough as rawhide.

She hugged me, holding on tight. I told her not to cry, that I wasn’t going far, even as I looked over her shoulder toward the horizon. I think I told her that I loved her, but I’m not sure.

She let go, looked down, wiped the tears from her face, and forced a smile. Ray put one arm around her and extended the other to me. We shook hands. His grip was firm and I tried to match it. “Take care of her,” I said, and he nodded, and it was like we were two cowboys selling a horse. Then I got in my truck and headed west, toward Tucson and college and the house where I would be living with my brother when the call came.

We left early in two cars: Josh rode with Grandpop in his rental, and Joe rode with me in my truck, which we would need to haul anything of my mother’s that we wanted to keep. We climbed the hill into Tombstone, passed the city limit sign, and drove straight through town on the highway without speaking, watching the landmarks slide by, the Best Western and Boothill and the Circle K, one of the houses we’d lived in, the marshal’s office and the Mexican restaurant where Mom met Ray. The town felt hostile: I knew everyone would be talking about my mother’s death, gossiping, twisting the truth.

At the far end of town we turned on Gleeson Road and took it until my truck rumbled across a cattle guard and the road turned to dirt. I drove slowly so Grandpop could follow. I was the only one of us who knew the way. I was the only one who’d been there.

About a year after I left home, my mother and Ray bought land in Gleeson, a dozen miles east of Tombstone. They said they wanted to be near Josh and me, but they also wanted to get away from Tombstone; as a former cop and a serial divorcée, they’d both made their share of enemies, and they were sick of the rumors that run rampant in a town that small and dull. Gleeson didn’t make any sense—it was farther from where we lived than Tombstone was, and if they wanted to stay in the area, there were better places to live. They could have moved to Sierra Vista, which had movie theaters and grocery stores and chain restaurants and a new Target. Or, if they really wanted to be hippies, as they sometimes called themselves, they could have moved to Bisbee, an artsy tourist town by the border.

Instead they chose Gleeson, a busted copper camp way out in the desert. Even in its boom years, Gleeson had been an afterthought, smaller and poorer than Tombstone or Bisbee, and a century later it was less than that: a few closed-down mines, a jail in ruins, an abandoned post office, a graveyard full of crooked crosses, and a handful of recluses living in trailers. Nobody famous had ever lived or died or killed anyone in Gleeson, so when the mines shut down it became what Tombstone would have if it weren’t for the Wyatt Earp legend: a real ghost town, one of hundreds rotting in the rural West, remote and dangerous—collapsing mine shafts, arsenic in the water—and mostly forgotten, with no utility service or telephone lines, no cops or fire department. Gleeson hardly even had tourists, who wisely decided not to venture too far from the chicken fingers and stagecoach tours of Tombstone.

I drove slowly down Gleeson Road, checking the rearview
every few minutes to make sure Grandpop’s rental car was still there, following in a plume of dust. Just before Gleeson, I turned off the road onto a dim track and stopped at a metal gate. Tire tracks striped the dust: the crooked tread of the police SUVs, the dual rear wheels of an ambulance. Ray’s trail must have been there, somewhere in the latticework of tracks, but this wasn’t one of the cowboy stories I’d read as a kid: I wasn’t going to hunt him down.

A strip of yellow police tape held the gate shut. I ripped it off and opened the gate, then stood for a moment looking at the land. Ahead, the road dipped and crossed a rocky wash, then climbed a low hill and split to form a loop around the buildings: a small barn with a corral, a shed, and an Airstream travel trailer. Mom and Ray had bought the trailer as a temporary place to live while they researched plans to build a rammed-earth house—another of their crackpot ideas—and it was where they’d lived together, with no running water and no air-conditioning, just a gas generator providing noisy and expensive electricity part of the time. Of all the homes she’d had, all the temporary places with temporary men, the worst was where she died.

Grandpop’s rental car wouldn’t make it down the driveway, so he and Josh got out and walked. I drove through the gate and paused before realizing there was no reason to close it behind us, then followed the trail across the wash and around the back of the trailer, where I parked by the barn. We met in the boot-trampled clearing between the buildings. Nobody spoke for a solid minute as we surveyed the scene. A lawn chair lay tipped over. The rocks of the fire pit had been scattered. The horse trailer sat empty with its tongue propped up on cinder blocks. The tin-roofed barn was still half full of hay. Dust swirled in the corrals, and at the edge of the clearing mesquite
branches stirred in the breeze. It was a beautiful day, warm and clear, the sky cloudless and deep. I remembered that it was the equinox. Fall had come.

I’d only been to my mother’s property once, during the previous spring, near the end of my first year in Tucson. The university had sent me a letter threatening to kick me out if my grades didn’t improve. I was broke and in debt. One night, leaving my girlfriend’s apartment after an argument, I backed my truck into a telephone pole in the parking lot and lost it, wound up curled on my bedroom floor, sobbing.

The next day was Good Friday. I woke up in the afternoon and felt the same, as if a dam had broken and I was drowning. So I did what I always did when I got into trouble: I called my mother. She didn’t answer. Since she’d moved to Gleeson, she rarely answered: her cell phone couldn’t get steady service out there. When I did get through, our conversations were full of static and often ended without warning when she lost the signal. I sat on my bedroom floor staring at the texturing on the ceiling, trying to find a pattern, wondering when she’d call me back, wondering what I would do if I didn’t feel better soon.

My phone rang. It was Mom. She was in Tombstone running errands, so the signal was clear for once. She said she’d been in the feed store and had missed my call. When I told her how I felt, she said to drive down there, that she missed me and wanted me to see the place where they were living. She gave me directions, said she’d meet me at the entrance to the driveway.

I got in my dented truck and drove. When I reached Tombstone it was dusk. I went through town slowly, watching the setting of my childhood pass by; I was a sucker for Tombstone’s
false nostalgia, and missed it even though I remembered how badly I’d wanted to leave less than a year before. But already my hometown had begun to feel strange, and I didn’t know if the town had changed or if I had.

By the time I made it to the cattle guard where Gleeson Road turned to dirt, the sky was fully dark. The scattered lights of Tombstone receded in my rearview until I crested a hill and they disappeared, the land rolling black to every horizon. I knew rural places, but this emptiness was something else: I was alone out here, like a pioneer or a survivor, the first man on a new planet or the last one on Earth. In the half hour it took to drive to Mom’s property I didn’t see another car, only shotgunned signs warning of road hazards. After the mile marker she had mentioned in her directions, I slowed down and watched the side of the road, but still she shocked me when I saw her, a wraith at the edge of my headlights, standing on the shoulder of the road and waving. I stopped and she walked out of the void into my yellow headlight beams. She got inside and hugged me and guided me the rest of the way.

In their claustrophobic trailer we sat in the light of a lantern and the three of us had a long talk. I was there to see her, but there was nowhere for Ray to go, pitch dark outside and cold as it was. I told her I couldn’t make sense of anything, that I was afraid of something I couldn’t name. A panic attack, she said; she’d had them during hard times in her life, before giving birth and after Dad left, during airborne school and her divorces. Ray claimed to have known something similar in boot camp and at the police academy, but I didn’t know if he was telling the truth or if he was just trying to be part of the family. Mom told me the way to deal with times like these was to focus on the present and not to think about what’s still to come. Soon it will pass. It always does. After talking to her, I
felt lightened and relieved, calm for the first time in days. When I left that place out in the desert, it seemed like what they must have wanted it to be, a refuge away from the world.

A few months later, for my birthday, Mom and Ray showed up at our house in Tucson with a new tailgate for my truck to replace the one I’d dented backing into the telephone pole. They’d found it at a wrecker. It was the most redneck present I could have gotten, and normally I would have cringed, but after that night out at the property I understood what it meant: even now that I was grown, she could still make things right.

In the clearing by my mother’s trailer, we formed a circle by instinct, as if preparing to ward off an attack. I met my brother’s eyes and we went to the door. The hinges creaked as a gust of wind blew it open a crack. Josh went first, opening the door and ducking through the entrance. I filled my lungs with fresh air and followed him.

Inside it was dim and warm. The smell wasn’t as bad as I’d expected, musty and rich and a little sour, like the desert after a rain. A miniature kitchen ran along the far wall and sunlight slanted in from a small window above the sink. The cupboards and drawers had been emptied, their contents scattered across the countertops and floor. The cops had left a receipt for the evidence they’d taken: documents, pictures, a computer, a rifle, shell casings.

To my left a narrow hall led to the bathroom. To my right was the bed. I thought I’d get it over with and followed the buzzing of the flies. The mattress was gone, removed by the police. Past the headboard, a shelf stretched beneath the sloping roof of the trailer to form an alcove. The flies had gathered on the shelf. As I walked closer, I saw a milk crate full of papers, a few books, a small stereo I’d bought them for Christmas,
and a large shadow that spread across the wood. The dark patch was larger than it looked from across the room, a rough circle a few feet in diameter. There was nothing else it could have been, but I didn’t believe that it was blood, because there was too much. I touched the surface of the stain and my fingers came back caked with a brownish paste. I rubbed my fingertips together; it turned to powder and stained my skin. Where the pool was darkest, I noticed clumps of brown hair, and fragments of something I didn’t want to identify.