Son of a Gun (10 page)

Norman set his beer down on the concrete. “Don’t you ever feel his presence?”

Of course I did. I felt Ray’s presence like I felt my mother’s absence, everywhere and all the time. Every truck that drove past in the street at night, every time I saw a balding head across a crowded room, every time I saw John Smoltz make another save on
SportsCenter
. Ray looked uncannily like
Smoltz, a pitcher for the Atlanta Braves, a team I already loathed for constantly beating my Phillies. I had never put my finger on the resemblance before my mother’s death, but now the sight of Smoltz’s face sent me into a rage.

“He’s still around,” Norman said. “I can tell.”

A few days later, Norman left. When we said goodbye on the front porch, I didn’t know that I’d see him only one more time, at a family reunion a year later, that we’d sit at a picnic table drinking late into the night, telling stories about my mother, how he still thought he heard her voice sometimes, and how I didn’t. Or that he would call me months later asking for help with his rent, saying I was his last chance, and I’d give it to him and never mention it again, and neither would he, but after that things would never be the same between us. Or that years later I’d learn in a phone call from my father that Norman’s poor overworked heart had given out in an apartment somewhere in Texas, that he had been discovered dead and alone, like too many of my family members.

About a week after my mother’s death, I went back to Tombstone for a football game. Marques was home from college for the weekend, and we wanted to watch his little brother quarterback our alma mater in its homecoming game. It was a mistake. At the gate, my old PE teacher gaped at me as if I were a ghost before waving off my entry fee. Customers in line at the concession stand turned to watch me walk past. I kept my eyes ahead as we climbed the bleachers to where the Reischls sat at the very top. I knew I was being watched; the field lights were blinding, as if I were onstage, and my steps rang out on the metal stairs. A low murmur followed in my wake. I sat flanked by Marques’s family for the entire game. At halftime we risked a trip to the cross-country team’s bake sale. En route, an old
neighbor collared me to say that she’d always known there was something wrong with Ray, that she’d never liked or trusted him, and then stood there waiting for me to congratulate her on her hindsight. Voices said my name as I passed, but I kept going. At the bake sale I saw a friendly face, a former teacher and coach. He gave me a brownie and I stood next to him. He asked about Tucson and school. Then he reached over and squeezed my shoulder.

“Tough week,” he said.

“I’ve had better.”

I stayed there in the shadow of a lightpost for most of the second half, watching spectators pass by sneaking looks at me. In my hometown I’d become a perverse kind of celebrity, the victim’s son. For a long time after I’d moved away, I missed Tombstone, and often fantasized about returning. But that night I realized I could never go back.

A month passed. The life insurance didn’t come. We sold Mom’s horses and one section of the property, let the banks foreclose on the rest. I continued a binge of drinking and carousing and banal self-destructive behavior. I stopped writing every night; I had nothing interesting to record, and I’d lost my urge for preservation. Still no sign of Ray.

I woke one morning in late October and remembered that it was Josh’s birthday. It would be our first family occasion without my mother. I lay in bed for a while, trying to fall back to sleep, and then got up and wrote my first journal entry in weeks. In it, I wondered what I should get Josh as a present, when all either of us wanted was Ray. I still imagined he’d be caught alive, and had fantasies of retribution: watching him die in the gas chamber, shooting him myself. I don’t know why I assumed I’d be capable of killing someone. It may have
been the effect of all that Tombstone lore: I thought I’d get my showdown, and in my righteousness I would prevail, like Wyatt Earp. So I kept the rifle ready and waited for Ray to appear.

For my brother’s birthday we went out to dinner at an Italian restaurant with a group of friends, and afterward we went to the French Quarter, the same place we’d gone the night we heard the news. We drank pitchers of beer and did rounds of shots, fed dollars into the jukebox—my brother has an inexplicable fondness for Elton John—and arm-wrestled one another and told jokes and did our best to have a good time. The night ended with Josh climbing up onto the stage and dancing, a tall, sweaty man with his shirt untucked swinging from a pole to “Tiny Dancer.” The rest of us laughed in relief: there he was, the Josh we knew. He was going to be all right.

Somebody took a picture of my brother and me that night. Josh and I sit next to each other at a table, with strings of bar lights glowing behind us, a neon beer logo reflecting in a window, and a souvenir Bourbon Street sign barely visible in the top left corner. We’re both drunk and bathed in camera flash, our faces flush and narrow-eyed and grinning, drinks in our hands. We look like what we were trying to be at that moment, two brothers celebrating. Josh is turning twenty-four and I’m still too young to legally be in that bar. Our mother has been dead a month and we’re smiling. We’ve learned how to pose.

Two months after my mother died, I went on a date. Her name was Eliza. We worked together at the newspaper. After building up the courage for a few flirtatious weeks, I asked her to go to a football game with me. By halftime, Arizona was losing by thirty and she’d confessed that she hated football, so we left
to get dinner. We wound up at a concrete table in a strip-mall parking lot, eating frozen yogurt and talking about our families. She told me what her parents did. I said I didn’t really have a dad and that my mother had passed away. I already hated that phrase, but it was better than the alternatives.

Eliza eyed me over her yogurt cup and said she was sorry. I said thanks.

“How long ago?” Her green eyes were wide, her face curious and concerned.

“A couple of months.”

She twirled her spoon. We didn’t say anything for a while.

“How’d she die?”

“My stepdad shot her.”

The spoon stopped halfway to her mouth. Tears welled in her eyes. I handed her my napkin. It was the first time I’d had to tell anyone I was dating, and I’d handled it all wrong.

Later that night she and I took Chance for a walk. My neighborhood didn’t have streetlights, so as we walked I saw her face only dimly, in the lights of neighbors’ porches. At first we didn’t say much. I thought I’d ruined the entire night by telling her, and told myself that next time I’d wait longer to have the talk. Next time I’d lie: car wreck, cancer.

As we walked in silence, the sounds of the neighborhood sharpened: cars racing down Speedway, sprinklers in the park stuttering, the gravel scattered at the mouths of driveways crackling beneath our shoes. I brought up work and school and plans for the future, trying to change the subject to typical first-date topics, but everything I said sounded sadder than it would have before I told her.

We stopped at a neighborhood park and I let Chance off the leash to run. Eliza and I sat on a swing set and watched the dog dart across the dark field. Chance caught a scent and tracked it to the street, but lost the trail at the curb and raised his nose to
the wind, trying to find it again. He trotted back and forth, sniffing. Whatever he had smelled, he wanted it badly. I wondered if he was searching for his master, just like everybody else was.

Ray once told me the story of how he found Chance. He’d seen a dog walking alone on the shoulder of a highway, picked him up and taken him home. The dog didn’t have any tags, didn’t try to leave, and seemed friendly enough, so Ray decided to keep him. Ray played the hero, like he did in most of his stories: he figured he’d given the dog a second chance at life by saving him from being hit by a car or attacked by coyotes or starving to death in the desert. So that’s what he named him. Ray was a literal man.

When he fled, Ray didn’t take Chance with him, which was partly why I had trouble believing at first that he’d done it. Later, it made sense. Ray was in a hurry, and Chance would have slowed him down. Still, Chance must have tried to jump into the truck, like he always did. He must have whined and barked. How does a man who just murdered his wife treat his dog? Did he kneel down and pet Chance one last time as he said goodbye? One thing’s for sure: Ray didn’t shoot him. He left a witness. I wonder if that’s why we decided to keep Chance, in some vain hope that one day he would speak.

At our house, Chance was not himself. He slept constantly, pawed at our bedroom doors at night because he hated to be alone. He hardly ate. In his sleep his legs would twitch as if he were running in a dream, and from the way he whined, I knew he wasn’t chasing some imaginary rabbit—he was running away. Chance spent his waking hours curled in the doorway, watching the road. But even though I knew he was suffering,
and it must have been hard for him to adjust to the new world he’d found himself in, I was also glad to have him: if Ray arrived, Chance would warn us.

During those months when Ray was missing, while my attention lapsed in a lecture, or while I was waiting for the final pages at work, I’d sometimes find myself daydreaming about what he might be doing at that moment. I’d picture him on a beach in Baja, drinking margaritas and dodging the
federales
, scanning the sand for his next victim. Or I’d imagine that he was holed up in the mountains outside of Tombstone, hunting deer in the rocky canyons of Cochise Stronghold, where the famed Apache chief had evaded capture for years. Or I’d see him parked at the end of our street, staking out our house, the embers in his pipe painting his face red.

But as time passed, I thought of him less and less. I tried to focus on other pursuits. I caught up in my classes, worked late nights at the paper, started going to the gym, cut down on my drinking. The insurance money finally came in and I was suddenly flush with cash I didn’t want but couldn’t afford to turn down, so I paid off my debt and bought the Jeep I’d always wanted and took Eliza out to dinners, movies, concerts, wherever we wanted to go.

I began to make friends with my coworkers at the paper. I’d started as a copy editor, proofing articles for grammar and AP style, but when the sports editor asked me to work for him, I leaped at the chance to write about something beyond my own grief. For the first time I was seeing my name in print, and I wrote less and less in my journal. When I did, the entries rarely mentioned Mom. One from December 8, 2001, narrates a party I’d attended with Eliza the night before, thrown
by coworkers from the newspaper. The first line reads:
This is such a beautiful time in my life
. My mother wasn’t buried yet, and her killer was still missing.

The very next day, December 9, a New Mexico state policeman called Detective Freeney and told him he’d found a man’s decomposing body in a red Ford pickup, next to a suicide note and a driver’s license for Duane Raymont Hudson. Freeney must have called Josh, and Josh must have told me, and I must have been relieved. But I don’t know for sure how I heard, or how I reacted, because I can’t remember anything about the moment I learned that Ray was dead, and I didn’t write a word about it in my journal. I must have thought that I could finally forget.

A week before Christmas, I rode with Grandpop and my brother to the family plot in a cemetery on Cheltenham Avenue, just beyond the city limits of Philadelphia. It was cold and gray and damp outside, good funeral weather, and Grandpop narrated directions as he drove:
Left at Felix Hanlon; remember that, left at Felix Hanlon
. He said it was in case we wanted to go there on our own sometime, but we knew he was telling us so we’d know the way when he was dead. He didn’t need to say it: I was expecting him to die, because since my mother died, I’d expected death to come to anyone at any moment and thought I should prepare.

Grandpop parked his Caddy on the shoulder of the ink-black graveyard lane, behind a white truck with shovels in the back and two men inside the cab who didn’t turn to look when we arrived. We got out of the car and Grandpop opened the trunk and lifted out the urn. The family mausoleum was a few feet from the road, a stone vault with verdigris doors and a
stranger’s name engraved above them, some long-forgotten relative. Flat black gravestones ringed the granite walls, bearing the names of other relatives I never knew. A canvas tarp covered one of the graves near the back of the plot, next to a lawn-mower path.

Grandpop set the urn near the edge of the tarp, backed away, took a camera from his jacket pocket, and motioned at my brother and me to close in on either side. He wanted to take a picture of us with our mother’s ashes. I turned to Josh and saw that his lips were pinched together, bloodless and white. We took our places and Grandpop backed away, trying to fit two tall men into the frame with a small urn lying on the ground. He took the picture. I never saw it.

Others began to arrive. Our grandmother was dressed smartly in all black, her blond hair perfectly coiffed, her elegant high-cheekboned face like chiseled marble. I saw a few strange faces but didn’t introduce myself. It seemed odd to me that my mother had an entire life before the one we had together. These people remembered a different person, the person she had been before I was born, a child and a girl and a young woman I never knew and wouldn’t recognize.