Son of a Gun (7 page)

“Stop being so melodramatic.” He looked away.

He was right. I should have stayed calm, but I’d been losing patience. My brother and I had fought constantly as kids, and only when he left for college did we finally reach a détente. When I followed him to Tucson and moved into his house—he offered reluctantly, at Mom’s insistence—we got along better, hung out together and treated each other as equals, and save for the occasional drunken arm-wrestling match or heated
Jeopardy!
argument, became friends. But now, when we needed each other most, I was regressing. I’d been picking fights with Josh, couldn’t even talk to my dad, and could hardly stand to look at the abject sadness on my grandfather’s face. My mother had held us all together. Now she was gone.

“I’ll tell you what,” Grandpop said. He took off his glasses, and as he wiped the lenses, he stared right through me. The skin under his eyes was dark and his face seemed made of paper. “There is no hell.” He pointed at the floor. “Hell is here.”

We pulled into the parking lot of the Cochise County Sheriff’s Investigations Unit in the early afternoon. We’d already met with the lawyer, who’d told us that the life insurance wouldn’t pay until the murder case was solved. We’d gone to the bank, where we withdrew what was left in her accounts. Later, we had an appointment at the funeral home.

The Investigations Unit was housed in a huge county services compound that had just been built on the east edge of Sierra Vista, in a patch of bulldozed desert bordered by trailer parks. The asphalt was black and spongy beneath our feet, the painted lines between parking spaces blindingly white. We took a concrete path that wound through xeriscape to a metal door with a window made of bulletproof glass, where we rang a buzzer and were let in by a receptionist. She was stern until we said who we were, and then she smiled sympathetically and asked us to have a seat, said it would only be a minute. I wondered
if her kindness was part of a standard survivor treatment, something she learned in training.

A tall, lean white guy in a black suit walked into the room and introduced himself as Detective Freeney. He looked the part: he had a mustache and an air of gravitas, although he wasn’t wearing a gun. He invited us into his office, which had a window facing north and not enough chairs. He went to get another. We all sat, and he began to ask carefully worded questions.

He asked if my mother had any enemies and we said yes, business rivals and ex-boyfriends, but not the sort that would want to kill her. He asked about my mother’s past relationships. He wanted a complete history, with names and addresses. That took awhile. We tried to remember all of her exes, and argued over who came after whom, but we couldn’t help him with addresses; we didn’t know or care where those men went after they left.

He asked about her relationship with Ray. Everybody turned to me, because I knew him best; Josh had never lived with Ray, and Dad and Grandpop had both met him once. I told the story of how they met, and said how happy they had seemed together, that I’d thought he was an all right guy. I was pretty sure everyone else in the room had thought the same—if they disliked him, nobody had said anything when Mom was alive—but memories have a way of changing relative to context. We were beginning to remember clues that showed Ray was controlling, or that he had a temper. He was already becoming the villain.

Freeney asked if we knew of any marital disagreements between them and we said no, nothing specific. Grandpop said he’d noticed a strange tone in Mom’s voice the last time they spoke on the phone. Mom and I spent most of our last conversation talking about terrorists, and the only odd sound I heard
was static. But I didn’t argue, because I knew that constructing a cause and effect would help make sense of the event we couldn’t even bring ourselves to name.
What happened. That day. The thing
. Sometimes simply it. If we could convince ourselves that we might have seen it coming, might have prevented it from happening if only we’d been more aware, then we could still believe in an orderly and rational world. We wouldn’t have to confront the likely truth: that a man we liked and trusted had shot my mother dead, and there was nothing we could have done.

As Freeney updated us on the status of the investigation, he mentioned an autopsy, and I realized that I didn’t know how many times she’d been shot. I asked him.

There was a pause while he shuffled the papers on the desk in front of him. “Seven times.”

We sighed and shook our heads in unison. Freeney asked his last question: he said they’d found a barrel full of empty liquor bottles at the scene. He wanted to know if Mom and Ray drank. I told him that our mother hardly drank at all. He asked if Ray was a drinker and I said not really, nothing heavy. As I said it, I thought of that Scrabble game and wondered if it was true.

What did I really know about their day-to-day life out there, remote and isolated, cut off from the telephone and the mail, with no TV and no Internet, just a radio full of Spanish? The quiet, the heat, the days that passed without seeing or speaking to another person. Living like that could have driven them to drink; I didn’t believe it, but who could say? There weren’t any witnesses to tell us what had happened. Until they found Ray, all we had were evidence and guesses.

Freeney said he didn’t have any more questions. He thanked us for coming and said he was sorry for our loss, then shook
our hands and gave us business cards. Before we left, he asked if we had any questions for him.

“What if Ray comes to our house?” Josh asked.

Freeney put his elbows on the desk and folded his hands in front of him. “I don’t think it’s likely.” He paused. “But keep an eye out.”

At the funeral home we chose an urn, picked out prayer cards, signed a series of papers, and answered the funeral director’s question about whether her legal last name—Ray’s last name—should appear in her obituary with a resounding no. During a brief silence, Grandpop thumbed a mint Life Saver from the pack he keeps in his shirt pocket and asked where she was.

The funeral director said she was in refrigeration. He didn’t bat an eye when he said it; that guy was all business, and I liked him. He hadn’t patronized or pitied us, and he called my mother by her name, not “the remains” or “the deceased” or any of that bullshit. He was an unassuming man, short and thickly built with light brown hair and glasses, unremarkably dressed. His job was not to be remembered, and he did it well.

Grandpop bit into his Life Saver. The lenses of his bifocals reflected the fluorescent lights above. “I want to see her.”

Josh bowed his head. Dad just sat there.

“That’s not a good idea,” I said.

“I can bring the remains into the chapel,” the director said evenly, “and you can have some time. But you should know that she was not embalmed, due to the autopsy.”

I wondered where the chapel was. The funeral home was huge and labyrinthine; I’d almost gotten lost on the way to the bathroom. The director lived there with his family. His wife and kids were upstairs the whole time we were in his office,
and we could hear their footfalls as they passed up and down the hall.

The director blinked and continued. “I have to warn you: there will be odor.”

Somebody said Jesus. Somebody said fuck. Somebody repeated the word:
odor
. We convinced Grandpop not to do it. We finished the paperwork and Grandpop cut a check and Josh and I promised to pay him back, although we never would, and he knew it. Outside, in the cruel sunlight of the parking lot, Grandpop and Dad lit cigarettes. Past the mortuary sign and beyond the highway the Huachucas rose green to a cloudless sky, the mountain slopes a lush oasis where at that moment people were hiking and watching hummingbirds and smuggling drugs. As the others debated where we should get dinner, I stared at the funeral home’s front door. I could still go back inside and ask to see her. It was the last chance I’d ever have; in a few hours she would be put in a cardboard container and burned. I wondered if I owed it to her, what she would have done in my situation.

And I wanted to know if I could take it. In a room inside that building the Beast was waiting; I wanted to face it to prove what kind of man I was. But I stood there thinking for too long, and we got in the car and left.

It was dark when Josh and I got home. We crossed our barren yard in silence and I held the screen door open, standing in the same spot where a few days ago he had told me she was dead, while my brother unlocked and opened the door.

Inside, our house was changed. The rug in the entryway had been shaken out. The floor tiles shone. The beer bottles and takeout containers had been cleared from the coffee table, and its surface was visible for the first time since I’d lived
there. In the kitchen a week’s worth of dishes sat drying in the rack, the counters bare and spotless. On the gleaming dinner table we found a note: two of our friends, Pete and Nolana, had cleaned our house while we were gone.

Such a simple thing, a small kindness; it almost brought me to tears. I turned on all the lights and stood in the middle of the house and thought of the Hemingway story I’d just read for my American lit class, the well-lighted café where waiters watch an old man drink alone late at night. The young waiter says the old man should kill himself. The older waiter tries to explain how it feels to be lonely, but nobody listens.

Josh called to thank Pete and Nolana and they came over. Joe came home from work and we sat in the living room. I walked into the kitchen to get another beer and when I came out, Josh made a crack about how I wasn’t old enough to be drinking all the beer.

I knew Josh was only giving me a hard time, trying to act normally. But a senseless and indiscriminate rage had been rising inside me like a warm tide: rage at the professionals for their paperwork and their grim efficiency in helping us erase my mother; rage at the police for their failure to find the killer; rage at my family for our bumbling helplessness; rage at Ray for what he’d done; rage at my mother for her delusions—that harebrained life she tried to live, that ridiculous will—and most of all for dying. And rage at myself, for my own incompetence, for failing to prevent or remedy any of this, for being another angry, useless man.

I took it out on my brother, made a scene. I said things he already knew: that we were alone now, that she would have wanted us to be better to each other. My voice caught and I realized I was crying. Joe got up and came over to me, tried to calm me down, said Josh was just joking and everyone had had a hard day, to let it go. Everyone else turned their heads,
avoided my eyes. Pity. So this was it: the sum effect of our mother’s murder was that I should be embarrassed? Not sad, not overwhelmed by grief and fury—I was supposed to be embarrassed?

I went out to the porch, letting the door slam behind me, and sat on a plastic chair. The porch light cast a yellow ring halfway across the yard, but the street beyond was murky. I already regretted yelling at my brother. We were going through the same ordeal, but we couldn’t talk to each other about it. In times of crisis, we’d always turned to my mother; whenever I needed help with schoolwork or had a job interview or broke up with a girlfriend, I’d go to her, and she’d talk me through it. The last few days what I’d wanted most was to be able to talk to her about her own death, to tell her the loss and emptiness I felt. She would have said what she always said, no matter how bad things got—she’d said it to me in hospitals, in courtrooms, in bedrooms down the hall from shouting men—even when I could tell she didn’t mean it:
We’ll be OK. We still have each other
. But she wasn’t there to say it anymore, and it wasn’t true. Now that she was gone, it felt as if a void had opened in the middle of my family, and we remaining men were standing on its edges, trying to shout across.

As I sat alone on the porch, I thought again of Hemingway—
nada y pues nada y pues nada
—and peered out into the dark street at every car that passed, gauging the shape of the headlights and the sound of the engine, expecting the bright rectangles and diesel roar of my mother’s truck, for Ray to drive up our street and pull into our yard and run me over, crash into the living room, to kill us all and finish it.