Son of a Gun (12 page)

At seventeen, as soon as she could, my mother joined the army, the best way out of Northeast Philly for a working-class kid. She met my father in the service. The way he tells it, he’d just returned from a year in Korea, patrolling the DMZ in a tank, when in the mess hall at Fort Knox he saw this girl, real pretty, walking out the door by herself. He turned to the guy next to him and said he was going to go talk to her.

He once gave me a picture of them on their wedding day, standing at the altar. On the back is a handwritten date: February 5, 1977. My father wore a white tux with bell-bottoms and a bright red shirt with ruffles, a white bow tie, and white boots. My mother’s white dress had sleeves of flowered lace and she wore a wide-brimmed hat that looks plastic. They were nineteen. I knew that as a fact, but never understood what it meant until I saw the picture, their faces smooth and scared. I was about that age when she died.

Eight months later my brother was born. My parents got discharged and moved to Philadelphia, next door to my great-grandparents, across the street from Olney High. My father once told me the address, and the last time I was in Philly, I went by it, a run-down row house in a rough part of town. I was probably conceived on the night the Phillies won the 1980 World Series. She read to me in the womb.

One night while she was pregnant with me, a man broke into our house and robbed it, stole the family silver. My father says he heard a noise in the night, saw a shadow, and sprang out of bed to protect my mother and my brother. He yelled and the man in the dark retreated into the alley. My father tried to chase him, but he was already gone. My mother told her version of the story once, long ago, and I don’t remember the details—a knife, a greater sense of danger—but my father wasn’t the hero.

I was born, a C-section, my mother’s second; she hemorrhaged, had an emergency hysterectomy, and her dream of a third son died on the operating table. We moved to the suburbs. My parents’ relationship, already strained, began to crack; my grandmother says my father was a feckless drunk, unemployed, getting high. One day my mother found my four-year-old brother walking shirtless down the middle of the street, my father passed out on the couch. She reenlisted. We moved to North Carolina. It was a last-ditch shot at saving our family; she thought we needed a change of scenery.

It didn’t work. A few months later my mother came home to an empty house, my father and the car gone. She called my grandmother, who drove down from Philadelphia to help out. “I helped her buy that car,” my grandmother says. “And that dumb son of a bitch stole it. Left her with the motorcycle. Two kids and a fucking motorcycle.”

My grandmother once showed me a picture she took of me the day my father left. I’m about two, small and pale, all head and curls, wearing what looks like a girl’s shirt and sitting in the open trunk of Grandma’s Coupe de Ville, staring at the camera, scared and confused. She asked if I remember the elephant in the trunk. I don’t. She said her car had a hydraulic trunk that made a sound like an elephant when it opened and closed. I was beside myself about my father leaving, and she
told me if I didn’t stop crying, she’d lock me inside with the elephant. I asked if it worked. “You’re not crying in the picture, are you?”

Grandma stuck around for a while, even after my mother remarried. My first stepfather, Jay, worked at a Chevy dealership and happened to be the son of a former Phillies outfielder. By all accounts he was a decent man, nice enough, didn’t beat her, held a job and worked hard. I think he treated my brother and me well but I can’t really say—all I remember about him is that he once gave me a sip of his beer and laughed when I made a face, and that he took me to his dealership to meet Bone-crusher Smith, a local heavyweight who was about to fight Mike Tyson. My first memories are from those years in North Carolina, but that’s how they all are, fractured and brief, glimmers of a past life that belonged to somebody else. My mother’s face beneath her red beret, stern and proud. Sitting in the backseat of her Camaro with the T-tops off, watching her hair swirl in the wind.

Jay had a son named Josh who was exactly my age. We played on the same T-ball team and took turns getting beaten up by my real brother, who because he was husky hated being called Big Josh. Little Josh was my first and favorite stepsibling, and for the only time in my life I bought the new-brother spiel my mother and stepfather gave me; when they broke up, I would never see him again, and after that I’d know better.

Mom was gone a lot, soldiering, learning Arabic to get promoted faster. Grandma babysat, helped around the house. My brothers and I were latchkey kids, went to school and walked home together and played Atari while we waited for our parents to arrive. Army planes flew over our playground and we
feared the Russians. We might have been a normal American family.

My first clear memory is from that time. I was in my room, listening to a record on my toy turntable, when Mom’s Camaro rumbled into the driveway. I went into the hall and watched her shadow appear in the curtained window of the door, heard her keys jingle in the lock. Mostly I remember the excitement: Mom was home.

She came in carrying grocery bags, swung them onto the counter, rubbed her hands and sighed. She looked out the window into the backyard while I snuck up behind her, pretending not to see me, just like she pretended not to have heard my jokes so I could tell them again. I threw my arms around her and she jumped in faked surprise, ran her hand through my hair, and said, “How’s my baby boy?”

She decided to go to airborne school. She was pushing thirty, raising boys, about to get divorced again. I guess she needed a challenge. She asked Grandma to babysit and went to Georgia, came back a few weeks later, gaunt and haggard, a pair of gleaming wings pinned to her chest.

I once watched her jump out of a plane. Grandma drove us onto post and we sat on bleachers looking out at an empty field. A drone swelled in the distance, like a swarm of bees, and a huge green Hercules came into view, flying low. A door opened and specks began to fall out, their parachutes popping open above them as they settled into a swaying fall. I tried to say a prayer for my mother, because I knew she’d want me to—she stopped and prayed whenever she heard an ambulance, for whatever stranger was hurt—but there were dozens of chutes in the sky and I didn’t know which was hers. I concentrated
on the distant specks and listened for a message. She said we had a special bond, that one of us would know if the other was in trouble, that we could communicate even when we were far away. I closed my eyes and tried to hear her.

A few months later she missed her drop zone on a botched night jump and landed in a tree, shattered her wrist, hung tangled and in agony for hours before they found her. I hadn’t known that she was in pain, didn’t get a signal; after that I stopped believing in our secret messages. Later she told me she thought of my brother and me that night, hanging in the tree, trying to distract herself from the pain. She wondered what we were doing at that moment, what we would do without her. She decided not to reenlist.

She and Jay broke up. Nobody remembers whose fault it was. We moved into a gray house at the end of a cul-de-sac. It was quiet, safe, suburban, with a big lawn and a garage, a fireplace and a computer; it’s the house I think of when I wonder how our lives might have been if we’d never moved to Tombstone. I learned to ride a bike on the sidewalks of our street, my mother running behind to catch me if I fell.

A middle-aged woman who looked like an older version of my mother lived alone in a brown house next door. A high fence separated our backyards. Josh and I would accidentally throw baseballs and Frisbees into her yard and fight over who had to go get them. I usually lost.

A concrete path split her front yard into two squares of leaf-strewn grass and led to her front door, tucked deep in a dark alcove. I dreaded that walk, felt an eerie danger lurking in that quiet house. Or maybe I didn’t; maybe I remember staring at the gold door knocker with a sense of dread only because of what happened later.

When I knocked on her door, our neighbor would answer and smile and let me in, and she’d walk with me through the living room to the backyard, where she’d stand watching as I retrieved the lost ball. She’d offer me something to drink and ask about my mother. She had children, daughters, but I don’t remember them.

Right before we moved to Arizona, Josh and I came home from school one day and saw strange cars ringing the cul-de-sac, police cruisers and news vans. When Mom got home, she told us that our neighbor had been hurt, and we prayed for her.

I wouldn’t learn the whole story for twenty years, until I searched the local newspaper’s archives.
*

A month earlier, our neighbor had called the police on her husband after he’d punched her and beaten her head against a wall. One of her daughters told the police that she’d heard her father say to her mother, “I am going to kill you.” Our neighbor took her kids out of school and moved into a shelter for domestic violence victims.

She pleaded with the magistrate to prevent her husband from posting bond. She said she feared for her safety. A social worker suggested having him involuntarily committed. The magistrate said it would be a waste of time. The social worker would later tell the newspaper that she saw a look of terror on our neighbor’s face.

She filed for divorce and got a restraining order. When her husband called several times a day, parked in our cul-de-sac to watch her, and followed her to a store parking lot, where he begged her to take him back, she reported him. He was served papers to appear in court on charges of contempt.

She did everything she could. She did everything right.

On a Thursday morning, our neighbor went to the grocery store with her three-year-old granddaughter. She might not have seen her husband’s car behind her, or she might have seen it and decided not to let him control her life anymore. She parked and went inside. He followed her.

A Pepsi vendor making a delivery heard them arguing. Another vendor heard shouting by the soft drinks and turned the corner of the aisle just in time to see the husband draw a pistol—a .25 caliber automatic, the same kind of gun that would later kill my mother. He grabbed his wife and held her as he shot her once in the hand, once in the arm, and finally once in the head. Our neighbor fell. A bullet ricocheted to the front of the store. Customers screamed and ran. Her granddaughter, who watched it all happen, began to cry. The husband held the gun to his head, pulled the trigger, and fell next to his wife. The pistol landed between them. The Pepsi man called the police. A customer led the little girl outside.

The husband died three days later. Our neighbor went into a coma. We moved to Arizona. I once asked my mother what happened to our neighbor, and she said she didn’t know, but she often thought of her and wondered, and she often prayed for her. The newspaper says she remained in a coma for eighteen months, then died. Her name was Carolyn.

In the article, a man from the neighborhood says he thought they were friendly people. The article says other neighbors declined to be interviewed, but that’s not completely true.

That night my brother and I sat on the floor in the living room, watching on TV as a man with a microphone stood live outside Food Lion. We called out to Mom and told her it was on. She came into the living room just in time to see herself appear on the screen, standing in our front yard that afternoon, with her name in a banner across the bottom, above the
word
neighbor
. On-screen, her hair blew in the wind, and standing in the living room hours later, she lifted her hand to fix it.

The reporter held the microphone toward her and she squinted at the neighbor’s house, that dark front door, and said they’d seemed so nice, like such normal people.
You just never expect a thing like that to happen
. She’d never been on TV before, and she asked us if that was how she really looked, if that was her real voice. She didn’t recognize herself.

The town named after Wyatt Earp is way out in the California desert on the Arizona line. I pass through Earp just after sundown, the sky still rosy in the rearview mirror, having spent the last ten hours driving through the dogshit parts of California: Bakersfield, Boron, Barstow, Needles. The lights of RV parks waver on the waters of the Colorado as I coast across the bridge. A sign of a striped sunset welcomes me to Arizona.

I stop at a gas station called Terrible’s with a saguaro by its sign and call my friend Ric. It’s just past nine on a Tuesday night and he’s leaving work. Ric teaches writing at a satellite campus of a junior college here in Parker. He tells me to meet him at a diner down the road in fifteen minutes.

Ric and I were roommates once. We’d both just finished graduate school and were living in Tucson, stringing together part-time jobs. We drove shitty cars that broke down and made us push them along the sweltering streets, ate a lot of eggs,
drank cheap beer by the case until we got belligerent and challenged each other to fights. At night we’d sit in the laundry room of our rented house, where we kept our desks, and write short stories. The only mail we got was rejection letters. We joked about how if we ever became famous, we’d look back on that time as our bohemian era.