Son of a Gun (13 page)

We meet at the door of the diner, shake hands, and get a table. It’s been two years since I’ve seen Ric. His dark hair is shorter and gray at the temples, his beard better kept, and he has new glasses that are thick-rimmed and sort of hip for a guy who lives in Parker. Otherwise, he looks the same: short and burly, a heavy brow and melancholy eyes, dark and quick. I wonder how I look to him, whether I’m different.

We order eggs and coffee from the waitress and start to catch up. When he asks how I’m doing, it’s more of a question than it would be if someone else were asking. The last time we spoke, a couple of months ago, I called him at three a.m. and we talked about depression. It wasn’t the first talk like that we’ve had. We both see a darkness at the edges of our lives, an annihilating sadness; the fact that we can both see it is one reason we’re friends.

I say I’m all right and change the subject. His book came out last year, a collection of stories, and I tell him it’s great. He thanks me. The waitress comes with our food and a silence sets in as we begin to eat. Ric shakes more salt onto his omelet, slides his silverware along the table, tugs at the front of his Hawaiian shirt. Something’s on his mind.

“I read something about you online,” he says.

The first result in an Internet search for my name is a brief article from a few months ago, mentioning that I’ve begun writing a book about my mother’s murder.

“You know.”

“Yeah.” He sets his fork down and wipes his mouth with a
napkin. “I was surprised to read that.” He won’t make eye contact.

“I’m sorry I never told you. It’s just—”

“Sure, no, I understand. Don’t apologize.”

“I didn’t tell anybody.” I name a few friends from our Tucson days who also don’t know how my mother died. That seems to reassure him.

It’s not the first time I’ve had this conversation. Most of the friends I’ve made in the last decade are finding out on the Internet that my mother was murdered. I wonder how that feels. It must feel like I didn’t trust them enough to tell them. How do I explain that I didn’t say it because I knew that if I did, they’d never have thought of me the same again? I would have become the guy they knew whose mom got murdered.

Ric changes the subject, says he wants to hear more about Laura. I tell him the story of how we met, that it’s serious, and that we’ve talked about moving in together in the fall. I don’t say the rest of what I’m thinking, that first we’ve got to make it through this summer. When I left San Francisco, Laura said she understood that this trip was something I had to do, but a lot can change in a few months apart.

Ric says there are other things he wanted to ask. He rummages through his pockets. He writes everything down, posts notes to himself on walls. One he hung above his desk when we were roommates has stuck with me:
Remember the belly of the whale
.

Ric throws up his hands; he’s always been sort of theatrical. “I remember what it was,” he says. “Why’d you come back?”

It’s a question I can’t easily answer. Some of the men my mother knew are here. So are the places we lived, and the place where she died. But I don’t know why I came back; I only know I had to. This is the belly of the whale.

Ric and I leave the diner and drive out of town on a dark highway into the res. One side of the road is like a scene from an Arizona postcard, a waxing yellow moon above the shadow of a butte. On the other, a giant billboard flashes the name of an Indian casino. Ric parks and we shotgun a few beers in the parking lot. Inside, we find a blackjack table and blow some cash and drink until neither one of us can convince ourselves to drive. Instead we hitch a ride from a bunch of strangers in a lifted pickup, and on the way to Ric’s trailer we drink beers in the bed of the truck with a tattooed guy in a backward hat who asks us where we’re from. I say Arizona and wonder if it’s a lie. As the tires roar on the highway and the wind whips over our heads, I try to imagine what would happen if the drunk guy driving rolled this truck and we all died. Would anybody find the truth in the wreckage? Would anybody try?

But we make it safely to Ric’s trailer in a park carved into a desert hillside, where I sleep on the couch and feel strangely nostalgic for Tombstone, the places like this where my family lived. And as I fall asleep I think:
Welcome to Arizona
.

In the morning, on my way out of town, I stop to buy water. In the parking lot of Terrible’s, a kid knocks on my car window. He’s white, maybe fifteen, shaggy blond hair and acne, swimming in his clothes. He motions for me to roll down the window and asks for change, says he needs gas.

I check my rearview mirror. There aren’t any cars at the gas pumps. “Gas for what?”

He shrugs and scratches his elbow. “Just gas, man.”

I dig a few quarters out of the console and drop them in his
palm. He looks at them and waits a beat like he’s expecting more, then turns without a word and walks away stiff-legged, pulling up his shorts. I knew a lot of tweaker kids like him growing up in Tombstone. In a few years he’ll be locked up in Florence or withered into a zombie.

The highway outside Parker runs straight and flat through an alkaline wasteland of saltbush and mesquite. Mountains ring the horizon and a gray haze hangs in the sky. It’s a hundred degrees, maybe one-ten—I’ve been gone too long to tell the difference—and the heat makes me realize how much I’ve missed the desert.

At the edge of Quartzsite a cop car pulls out from behind a blank billboard and follows me through town. I slow down and wait for the red-and-blues. I’m hung over, unshaven, wearing designer sunglasses, and driving a red sports car with California plates; I’m every Arizona cop’s wet Taser dream. Empty RV parks pass by, a U-Haul store flying a tattered Stars and Bars. At the turnoff for I-10 the cop drives past, eyeballing me through his aviators. He has a mustache, of course. He reminds me of Ray; cops always do.

Along the highway outside of Phoenix the Joshua trees appear, alone at first and then in bunches. We moved to Arizona when I was six, and I didn’t know the names of most things in the desert, couldn’t tell a greasewood from a mesquite or a king snake from a coral. But I knew Joshua trees. They’re easy to spot, thick greenish limbs covered in thorns that look like golden fur. They were the first desert plant I learned the name of. My mother told me.

The day we first drove into Arizona, she pointed out the window. “Look,” she said, “a Joshua tree.” She glanced at my brother in the passenger seat. “I love Joshua trees because they’re named after you.”

Josh stared raptly at the short trees slipping by in the window.
He craned his head around his seat, looked at me in the back, and said, “There’s no such thing as a Justin tree.”

I told him I hated him. I was in a phase of saying that I hated everything. I hated my brother. I hated Arizona, although I’d never been. That morning, leaving the motel in Texas, when she’d said I couldn’t sit up front, that it was Josh’s turn, I had told my mother that I hated her. “Don’t say that to me,” she said. “That hurts me.” “But I do,” I said. “I hate you.”

I kicked the back of Josh’s seat, said his tree was stupid, and that he couldn’t see the particles. Earlier, in some uncharted stretch of west Texas, I’d interrupted a long, dreamlike silence by asking if they saw the circles floating in the air. Mom asked what I meant and I described them. Floaters, she said. She had them, too.

“There aren’t any particles,” Josh said. “Mom just said that so you’d stop whining.”

“Yes, there are,” she said. She leaned forward and stared up through the windshield. “If you can see them, it means you have special eyes.”

In the backseat I watched her, and when I looked out my window at the sky, I saw them again, circles drifting in the clouds, and I thought that she and I shared the same eyes. “Look,” I said. “I can see them. There they are.”

My brother lives near Fort Huachuca, the army base that gave Tombstone its name. In 1887, when Ed Schieffelin left the fort to prospect the hills in Apache country, the soldiers told him all he’d find out there was his tombstone. Instead he found a mother lode of silver, the news of which would later attract the Earp brothers. Now Fort Huachuca is home to the Army Intelligence Center, which teaches interrogation or torture, depending on whom you believe. My mother first came to Arizona because she was sent there for training, but she never said what she learned there. It was one of her secrets.

Josh lives in a tract home development off the highway. Arizona’s housing bubble burst in the middle of construction, so entire blocks of the neighborhood are nothing but bulldozed dirt. The skeletons of a few half-built houses sit exposed and slowly warping. The finished homes are Pueblo-style, flat-roofed and boxy, painted in earth tones and surrounded
by small gravel yards. The locals call it Baghdad. Most of the houses on my brother’s street are for sale. I can tell which one is his because he takes care of his yard: the gravel is thicker than his neighbors’ and the driveway is swept clean.

I ring the doorbell and hear his schnauzer growling inside. Josh opens the door, holding the dog back with his leg. We don’t shake hands and we’re not huggers; I walk inside and sit on the couch. The Phillies are on TV, playing the Diamondbacks. Josh talks to the dog in a baby voice to calm him down.

“You want the stuff right now?” he asks.

“Sure.”

He leads me through the dark alley of the laundry room and into the garage, where he rummages in boxes and stacks objects in my outstretched arms: a white plastic crate and two padded camera bags.

“Is that it?”

“I think so.” Josh looks around the garage: an unused mountain bike, a dusty set of golf clubs, a column of empty appliance boxes he insists on keeping, and his white luxury sedan. I wonder how he lives here, an hour’s drive from where our mother died, and keeps her things in the garage. I’d be afraid of the past escaping and creeping into the house.

I glance in the crate: a few books, two plastic bags. “What’s in here?”

He shrugs. “I don’t really know.”

We go back inside. I sit on the red leather couch, which makes his otherwise muted living room look like the set of a southwestern porno, and sift through the crate. I open one of the camera bags and remove an old Canon 35 mm. Josh reaches over and picks it up.

“I think this was expensive,” he says, unscrewing the lens. He looks into the viewfinder and presses a button on top. “The batteries still work.”

Inside the other bag is a video camera. I press the power button, imagining some long-hidden clue to my mother’s death that’s about to be revealed, a taped statement of Ray’s explaining everything, but the battery is dead. The pockets of the bag hold unmarked tapes, a spare battery, and a power cord. I fan the tapes in my hand and ask Josh what’s on them. He shrugs again. He’s focusing the Canon on the dog, who cocks his head and stares back. We could connect the video camera to his TV and play the tapes right now, but even though he hasn’t said it, I know Josh doesn’t want any part of this. He has a stable life now, the kind we never knew, a house and a wife and a dog, a career and a retirement plan and life insurance. He’s found a place to put the past, and I’m happy for him, but I don’t understand how he does it. Doesn’t he ever want to walk, to let this life go before something awful comes along and takes it all away? If we were different men, I could ask him.

He watches the Phillies while I rummage through the crate. I find a few books: two volumes from the complete works of Charles Dickens, the
Catechism of the Catholic Church
, and the family Bible, leather bound and worn, its cracked spine patched with packing tape. I open the Bible and papers fall into my lap. A prayer card to Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. A sheet of ruled paper on which my mother wrote passages of Scripture about judgment and forgiveness.
Luke 6:38: “For the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”
Another yellowed sheet with a passage from a book called
The Art of Marriage
scrawled in a smaller and more slanted hand than my mother’s, which I will later learn to recognize as Ray’s. A folded photocopy of a poem called “I’m Not Here,” written in rhyming couplets:
Don’t stand by my grave and weep/for I’m not there, I do not sleep
.