Son of a Gun (5 page)

A fly alighted on a photo album at the edge of the pool. I reached without thinking and picked it up. The caked blood around it crackled and flaked, and a piece of hair clung to the pewter cover until I brushed it away. It was my mother and Ray’s wedding album. Blood had spattered across the bottom edge. I put it back on the shelf. Nearby lay a toppled bottle of holy water, also stained with blood. I put it in my pocket. I still have it in a box somewhere, and I still don’t know why.

I got to work collecting what I wanted to take from that place. Josh was already sifting through the debris in the kitchen. I let my eyes roam around the trailer but had trouble focusing, couldn’t find any one thing. I didn’t want her clothes, her jewelry, her Catholic artifacts—what would I do with them? I didn’t want any of the books because they were probably Ray’s. I took the family Bible, a few trinkets I’d made or given her long ago, and all of the photo albums except the one stained with her blood.

Outside, I put the things in my truck and walked aimlessly downhill toward the gate, toward the road, toward nothing in particular. The only sounds I heard were the scuffing of my sandals in the dust, the pounding of my heart, and the sound of the desert, which I’d almost forgotten in the time I’d been gone: a murmur you can only hear far away from power lines and passing cars, like an unseen mouth breathing words into
your ear. A length of yellow tape hung in a bush, printed with black letters: Sheriff’s Line Do Not Cross. I took it, folded it neatly, and put it in my pocket with the holy water.

Miles down the valley, cars slid south on the highway, a string of distant strangers driving toward Douglas. None of them knew what had happened here. Neither did I. I knew the aftermath, some of the facts, what the police had seen fit to tell us. We’d know more once Ray was found.

I walked back up the hill to the clearing. Josh came out of the trailer. He gestured toward the barn. “Look around in there and take whatever you want,” he said. “We’re not coming back.” We’d agreed to come here just this once, and to sell it as soon as we could.

I met Joe in the clearing and together we wandered the property, from the horse trailer to the barn to the storage shed, and gathered a haul. I took whatever I thought I might want to have, or whatever Joe suggested: a power drill, a set of tiki torches, an ice chest, and a gas-powered chain saw. I had no real use for power tools, and the backyard of our house in Tucson was choked with waist-high weeds, a bad place for flaming torches. I didn’t need a cooler. I’d never used a chain saw in my life. But I took them anyway. In a few weeks we’d sell my mother’s land, forty acres of empty desert, a shed full of ugly furniture and a barn full of moldy hay and a travel trailer where someone had been murdered, as a package deal at a bargain price.

While Joe was loading our new belongings into the truck, I stood in the clearing and took a final look around. It was a habit from my childhood: every time we moved, after Mom got divorced or flipped a house for profit, I’d take one last walk through the empty rooms. I told her I was making sure we didn’t leave anything behind, but really I wanted to commit those places to memory, to remember where different versions
of our family had lived and grown and split apart. I couldn’t go back in the trailer, but as I turned away, I saw something in its aluminum skin. I walked closer. The metal bulged outward around a ragged hole the size of my pinkie finger. I stared at it for a long time before realizing a bullet had made it. A warning shot. Or a miss. Or maybe it had gone right through her.

My brother and grandfather had already begun to walk back to their car. On my way to the truck I saw Joe standing by a fire extinguisher that hung on the side of the barn. Hay stored improperly can combust, and the extinguisher was there just in case. I’d tried to tell Mom that if two tons of hay caught fire, an extinguisher wouldn’t help; she might as well spit on the flames. But she kept it there anyway. Seeing it made me wonder if she’d raised her hands to stop the bullets.

Joe pointed at the fire extinguisher. “Might as well spray this.”

“That’s a good idea,” I said. If the hay caught fire now, let it burn. There was nothing left to save.

He handed me the extinguisher. I pulled the pin and tossed it into the brush. One last time I looked: the blue mountains in the distance, the brown valley spread beneath them, the crumbling buildings of Gleeson up the road, the trailer, the clearing full of footprints, the tinkling wind chime she’d hung from the rafters of the barn. Josh was right; we’d never come back here. I squeezed the handle and sprayed, circling the clearing until the extinguisher was empty. As I turned to leave, the powder had already begun to settle, covering our tracks.

After I moved away to college, my mother and Ray quit their jobs and sold the trailer where she and I had been living when they met. They said they were sick of working and wanted to travel. It wasn’t a surprise; she’d been in that trailer for two years, and that was longer than she liked to spend in one place. In the thirteen years we lived in Tombstone, we called a dozen places home: houses in town, trailers on the outskirts, a couple of apartments, and, of course, the houses and trailers and apartments of her boyfriends and husbands. It got to the point where I stopped hanging posters in my bedrooms and kept my things in boxes, ready to load up and move whenever she decided to sell or break up.

Mom flipped a lot of property. She’d buy places and put them on the market again before we’d finished moving in, priced at ten percent higher than what she’d paid. She owned and ran five different businesses in Tombstone at one point or another. Her best friends were all real estate agents; she’d first
met Bob and Connie when she bought a house from them. But it wasn’t just houses: she refused to settle on any place or anyone. When I was a kid, the constant moving and changing bothered me. I told myself that when I was on my own, I’d find a home and stick, put down roots. But in the decade since I left Tombstone, I’ve had a dozen different addresses.

I hadn’t expected her to stay in the same place after I left. But when she and Ray both quit their jobs, sold the trailer, and hit the road, I asked the obvious questions. How long would they be gone? What would they do for money? Where would they live when they got back? She waved my questions off, said I was too square. They were leaving the normal world behind. They called it the Adventure, a name my brother and I mocked. We got battered postcards and staticky calls from the remote reaches of America. Every few months they’d swing back through Arizona to visit for special occasions, Josh’s graduation or my birthday. Their roaring, stinking diesel truck would show up in our driveway and they’d invade our house, set the dog loose in the backyard, take over our living room. For a weekend they’d complain about their self-imposed privation on the road and rave about how nice it was to have air-conditioning and running water. We’d eat a big dinner at a chain restaurant. Then they’d be off again.

After months of this, Mom convinced Josh and me to come visit them. They were camping for a few weeks along the Mogollon Rim in eastern Arizona, and she called and begged us to drive up until we both relented. We packed warm clothes and loaded my truck and set off on the four-hour trip to someplace called Gabaldon with only Mom’s directions to guide us. On the drive, as we navigated the switchbacked mountain roads, Josh and I talked about how our mother had gone crazy.

“I don’t know how long they think they can keep doing this,” Josh said. We were crossing a bridge at the bottom of a
steep canyon somewhere in the Pinal Mountains, near Globe. Far above us, the sun set over the rimrock. Down where we were, it was already dark.

“Forever,” I said. “That’s what they think. It’s insane.” We’d been at it for an hour, working each other into greater states of righteousness.

“We should talk to them about it,” Josh said.

We tried to follow Mom’s directions but they were typically unclear, relying on vague landmarks instead of road names and numbers—
turn right at the second fork after the tree that got struck by lightning
—and we arrived late to a remote expanse of land just off an Apache reservation, in a part of the state known for high school football, wildfires, alien abductions, and an apocryphal creature called the Monster. The sign for Gabaldon pointed into a stand of pines overlooked by the bare peak of Mount Baldy glowing in the moonlight. We drove in. The first four campsites were eerily deserted in the headlights, scattered with ash and half-burnt firewood. Just as Josh and I had begun to exchange worried looks, we saw the white horse trailer through the trees, and a flicker of firelight beyond.

My mother walked haltingly into the beams of light, shielding her eyes with a sideways hand, sticking to the side of the road, as if she were afraid of something. Maybe they’d gone feral way out here, away from civilization, started to view other humans as a threat. But she knew we were coming, and she had Ray with her: what was she scared of?

I parked my truck next to hers and Josh and I got out, hugged our mother, shook hands with Ray. Chance came padding over to lick my palm. We ate grilled steaks and baked potatoes wrapped in foil. After dinner we sat around the picnic table and played games in the harsh light of an electric lantern. Josh and I were on one side of the table, Ray and Mom on the other. Ray and Josh were drinking wine from a box. Mom and
I had water; she rarely drank and I pretended for her benefit not to be the binge-drinking college freshman I was. It wasn’t late but the black ring of forest around us and the starry sky above made it seem like the middle of the night, and a vast silence gaped beyond the popping of the fire. It was easy to believe that there were no other people in the world but us, and I wondered if that was how my mother and Ray felt on their Adventure, spending so much time in places like these. I didn’t think I could live that way, but I could almost understand why they did.

Mom suggested Scrabble. For an unschooled family—Josh and I were the first to attend college—we were pretty good at Scrabble. Mom didn’t read much except for self-help and spiritual books, but she did crossword puzzles, had a thing for words. She had read to my brother and me in the womb, and she bought us lots of books, so we grew up reading: Josh was into war history, and I liked mysteries, adventures, Westerns.

Ray was not an educated man. He’d gone straight from high school to the Marine Corps. I sometimes saw him reading paperback versions of the classics—years later I would take a copy of Plato’s
The Republic
off my shelf while I was moving, see his name inscribed on the inside cover, and throw it across the room—and I admired his impulse to self-educate, his curiosity about worlds beyond his own. I’d first been drawn to books by a similar desire to discover something beyond the bizarre hermetic world of Tombstone.

But Plato hadn’t helped Ray’s Scrabble game. He stared at the board for minutes at a time, lips moving, fingering his tiles, clearly overmatched. We should have taken pity on him. He could do things none of us could; he was a genius at the steering wheel, could back a horse trailer through a gate blindfolded. He just wasn’t good with words. But Josh and I were long-warring rivals averse to mercy, and my mother had a
nasty streak in competitions of any kind. And even though we all liked Ray, he was the latest in a long line of men, and the three of us treated him the same as we’d treated all the rest: he wasn’t one of us.

We killed him. Somebody dropped a
Z
on a triple letter score. Mom had learned Arabic in the army, and she used one of those bullshit loanwords with a
Q
and no
U
. As the game went on, my brother and I started giving each other looks and smirking, and soon Mom joined in. By the end, the three of us were chuckling and Ray had gone silent. Mom beat Josh on the final turn. I finished third. Ray was a hundred points behind me.

When the game was over, Mom went to check on the horses. Josh walked off holding his cell phone above his head to find a signal. Ray lit his pipe and refilled his cup of wine. I hadn’t been keeping track, but it wasn’t his first refill. He sat across the table and stared at me. When he spoke, I smelled the acrid tobacco on his breath.

“I guess Scrabble’s not my game.”

I shrugged. “I lost, too.” I felt bad for humiliating him. I rehashed all the things I’d told myself when I left her with him and moved away. He wasn’t the enemy. He was a good man, or good enough: a marine, a cop, a protector. He treated her well from what I’d seen. So what if he wasn’t good at Scrabble, if he got drunk once in a while?

“Maybe I should have gone to college,” he said. I was looking toward the corrals, where shadow horses snorted and stomped, spooked by something they sensed in the night, and it took me a moment to realize that Ray was mocking me. I turned to him. His eyes were the color of shit. I’d seen this sour mood before, in other men, across other dinner tables. It was one of the first signs.

I thought of my mother out there in the dark, and wondered
if she was watching us, if she was listening. She and I both knew that once the first battle began, there was no retreat. Apologies and retractions and promises were useless: in the end she’d have to choose between her man and her sons. In the past she’d always chosen us, but this time I wasn’t sure she would.