Son of a Gun (9 page)

There was no burial afterward. We had decided to put her in the family plot in Philadelphia, and Grandpop was taking the ashes back with him to be buried later. After the mass, Bob and Connie invited us over to their house. As we pulled into their driveway, I eyed our old trailer next door, the spot by the carport where I’d said goodbye to her. I didn’t recognize the cars parked there now. Somebody else lived there, strangers sleeping in our old rooms and eating in the kitchen where we’d shared the terrible pot roasts my mother cooked. It didn’t seem right that it had been wiped clean like that, that we had been forgotten. I thought a place should have a memory.

Inside Bob and Connie’s house I took a plate and filled it with food I wouldn’t eat and sat on the couch. Everyone was talking about the murder, the troubles with the will and life insurance. Connie and Bob had known my mother better than anyone in the last years of her life. Connie was my mother’s realtor and best friend, a gentle woman but one who got things done. Bob was a cowboy, a real one, not a poser like Ray: he’d worked on ranches as a young man, been a command sergeant major in the army, served in three different wars. He and my
mother had the kind of warm platonic relationship she sometimes had with men like him—strong, kind, respectful men, men with nothing to prove—while she was running off and marrying their opposites. Bob had found her body.

Somebody mentioned Mom’s horses. Connie pointed out the sliding glass door of their living room toward the corrals, where a small herd of horses stood swishing their tails, but instead I stared out into their backyard, where my mother had married Ray.

Among the things we’d taken from the trailer where she died was their homemade wedding guestbook: a few sheets of computer paper folded in half and bound by two crooked staples. The cover has their names, the date and place—
Debbie & Ray, May 13, 2001, Tombstone, AZ
—and a picture of the bride and groom sitting in front of a blooming rosebush in Bob and Connie’s yard. The photo was taken with an early digital camera and printed on cheap paper, and the lighting is odd: sunlight bathes the rosebush and yard in the background, but Mom and Ray sit in shadow in the foreground. The picture looks almost fake, grainy and washed-out, the edges of their bodies strangely sharp against the brightness beyond. Ray wears a straw cowboy hat and his beard hides his unsmiling mouth; he never smiled for pictures, was always playing the tough guy. His eyes are slitted and inscrutable.

My mother wears earrings, thick gold hoops. That seems out of character; she rarely wore earrings. I wonder if she wore them because she was getting married, or if I remember wrong, if I never knew her as well as I thought, if she was a slate on which I wrote my own assumptions, as so many people are. The tiny line of gold below her neck is the crucifix she always wore; that I do remember. I can’t tell what her T-shirt
says: the first two words are visible, above a silhouette of horses and cowboys:
I’m a
. I’m a what? The smile on her face seems strained, but it’s hard to say for sure.

The guestbook has ten pages. Seven are blank. The other three contain a half-dozen scrawled signatures I don’t recognize, the laboriously printed names of my young cousins, and brief notes from Tom, my brother, and me. Tom wrote crookedly in letters of varying sizes:
Good Luck Always
. Josh added:
Congratulations & Best Wishes!!! Love Always
. I wrote:
Mom, it’s wonderful to see you so happy. You deserve it
.

I don’t remember much of the ceremony. I’d been to weddings involving both of my parents before, and they run together in my memory. I got dressed up, which, for a backyard wedding in Tombstone, the fifth wedding for the bride and the second for the groom, meant I wore a shirt with a collar. Josh wore a suit and tie even though he knew nobody else would, which was typical of him: Mom liked to tell stories of him as a boy, putting on a blazer to play in the street. My mother wore an off-white dress, and I think Ray wore a brown sport coat and jeans, although I have to rely on my memory, because the photos from that day were in the bloodstained album I left by the bed where she died. Leighanne was the lone bridesmaid. Josh and I were groomsmen.

As we stood waiting for the bride to walk up the aisle, I heard hoofbeats and turned to see a white pony trotting through a gate in the fence, pulling a small cart that carried my mother, with a young towheaded boy driving. The cart pulled up to the minister and stopped. I had never seen the pony or the boy before, although later I would learn that the boy was Connie’s grandson. Josh and I did our best not to laugh as Mom stepped out of the cart and the pony trotted away.

She and Ray held hands throughout the brief service. Leighanne says my mother watched Ray the entire time, and
that she shed a single tear and let it roll down her face without wiping it away. I don’t remember any of that, but I do remember something the guestbook doesn’t mention: they got married on Mother’s Day. I’m sure Mom planned it that way. She must have thought having all of us there together on her special day would symbolize the new family she’d been seeking for two decades and through a handful of marriages. But even then it struck me as a strange day to get married. Now every Mother’s Day I think of Ray’s face on the guestbook, my inscription inside welcoming him into our family, and my words to my mother on her wedding day:
You deserve it
.

Before we left, Connie turned on the TV. She’d heard there would be something about my mother on the news. A Tucson station’s intro played, shots of saguaros and the city skyline. We waited through a few stories about local events and the aftermath of September 11th, and then the name of my hometown appeared in the box in a cartoonish Western font. “And in Tombstone today,” the anchorwoman said, “an Old West murder mystery.” The camera panned down Allen Street, showing groups of pasty tourists and the sign for the O.K. Corral, as the anchorwoman discussed a murder that had happened fifteen miles from there. Her voice was high and hollow as she advised anyone with information to call the Cochise County sheriff. Connie turned off the television and we sat in silence.

“An Old West murder mystery?” I said.

We didn’t discuss it again, but the next morning I looked up the network’s newsroom number and called. Some poor intern answered. I yelled myself hoarse, throttling the handset, my voice quaking and tears welling in my eyes as I asked a stranger if he had any idea how it felt to have his mother’s death on the
evening news, described as an Old West murder mystery. When he found his voice, he apologized and promised to pass my complaint along to the producers. I never heard from them.

As we were leaving Bob and Connie’s, they asked what we wanted to do with Chance. They offered to keep him, but even though he was Ray’s dog, he’d become a part of the family. He was a good dog, obedient and protective, not a barker, never mean. And even if he would always remind me of his owner, that wasn’t Chance’s fault. I said I’d keep him.

I stopped at the Reischls’ house on my way back to Tucson. Their oldest son, Marques, was my closest friend in Tombstone, and his family had always treated me like one of their own. Nobody was there—Marques was away at college, his brother was in school, and their parents had gone to work after the funeral. I went in through the side door, took my shoes off, and crossed the cool marble tiles to the guest bedroom, where I changed out of my funeral clothes and gathered the things I’d left there the night before. I went into the kitchen and thought about making myself something to eat—Julie cooked dinner every night, so their fridge was always full of leftovers—but I didn’t have an appetite. Maybe I’d sit on the couch for a while and watch TV and wait for the Reischls to return. They’d told me their house was mine, but they didn’t really need to tell me that, because their house had felt like home for a long time. In high school, when I left their place after staying for a few nights straight, afraid without reason that I might wear out my welcome, I’d turn into the dirt driveway that wound past Bob and Connie’s house to our trailer and stop the truck and stare at the dim light shining in my mother’s bedroom window, knowing she was probably waiting up, that she must have felt forgotten when she came back from work to that dark and empty trailer every night, and still I’d want to turn around and
go back to the Reischls’ and make up an excuse to stay another night.

I saw an envelope on the dinner table with my name on the front in Julie’s handwriting. Inside was a sympathy card. She wrote that I was now part of their family, that they loved me like a son, and that she was there if I needed her. She told me to be strong. And she enclosed a check so that I wouldn’t get behind on my bills. I hadn’t told her that I couldn’t pay the rent that was due in a few days now that my mother’s VA checks had stopped coming—I hadn’t told anyone, because I was ashamed—but somehow she had known.

I was sick of sympathy, the obligatory feel of the other cards and calls I’d received. But that small note in Julie’s neat writing, reading it alone in their kitchen and feeling at home, it opened me right up. The last thing I remember from the day of my mother’s funeral mass is sobbing in the house where I’d always wanted to live.

My dad flew home the morning after the funeral, and Grandpop left later that day with my mother’s ashes in hand. We’d agreed to bury her in the family plot in Philadelphia sometime in December; until then, the urn would sit on Grandpop’s dinner table. The sympathy cards stopped coming in the mail and our phone stopped ringing. Josh and I went back to work, and I tried to salvage what credits I could for the semester. We didn’t hear from the police. The life insurance hadn’t come in, so we were still broke. Our lives were eerily the same as they’d been before, except that our mother was dead, and the only suspect in her murder was still at large.

After everyone else had gone home, my uncle Norman knocked on our door one day, carrying a sixer of Michelob in a plastic bag. He’d flown to Tucson after my mother’s funeral mass. He said he wanted to be there to provide emotional support for my brother and me. The timing of his visit didn’t
make a lot of sense to us, but we weren’t exactly surprised. Nothing Norman did surprised us anymore.

Technically, Norman wasn’t even our uncle. He was a second cousin on my father’s side. But he got along so well with Mom that we’d always known him as Uncle Norman. He was a character: portly and exuberantly gay, frenetic and profane, with enormous Coke-bottle glasses and a thick New England accent. He smoked two packs of Kools a day, and once, when my mother had hooked him up to our home heart monitor, his pulse had registered at ninety beats a minute. His open homosexuality had made him an outcast from my father’s family, and might have explained why he bonded with my mother, who had a soft spot for outcasts. When Norman came to visit, they’d stay up talking through the night.

I’d always liked Norman; when I was a kid, we’d go for long rides on his motorcycle and talk about my loser dad. Norman even moved from New Hampshire to Tombstone at one point—Mom convinced him, as she had with Uncle Tom—but it didn’t take long for him to see that it wasn’t a good place to be an outspoken gay man, and after a few months he moved to San Francisco.

I hadn’t seen him much since then, so I appreciated the fact that he showed up, even if he was too late. I gestured toward the plastic chair next to me and took the beer he offered, although it was the early afternoon and I was still hurting from the night before. He sat, pulled a pack of Kools out of his pocket, lit one, and said he wanted to talk to me. I told him I didn’t want to talk anymore. She’d been dead for days. There was nothing left to say.

Norman took a drag, blew a stream of smoke, and surveyed the wasted lawn. He said he’d spent the last couple of days driving his rental car through rural Cochise County, looking for Ray, which seemed odd considering that as far as I knew,
they had never met. Norman had talked to every cop and bystander who’d humor him, asking if they’d seen a man matching Ray’s description driving a red Ford pickup. It seemed ludicrous and maybe dangerous for a man like Norman to travel the remote reaches of Arizona interviewing strangers, but it made me wonder if that wasn’t what I ought to be doing instead of lying awake at night with a rifle by my bed, waiting for Ray to come to me.

Norman said one old man had seen a red Ford headed south toward Mexico. I told him there were shitloads of red Ford trucks in rural Arizona. He leaned forward until his tank top tented out from his chest and set his elbows on his knees.

“I went out there,” he said.

“Out where?” He didn’t reply. “You went to the property?”

“I didn’t go inside.” He drank from his beer. “But he was there.”

“What?” Norman was staring off into the distance, and I wanted to wring his neck. Who was where? Dead or alive? And did he need to be so theatrical about it? “What do you mean he was
there
?”

“I felt his presence.”

“Jesus Christ.” I slumped against the chair. I’d had so many talks with so many people, my family and the mourners and funeral directors and cops and lawyers, asking the same questions and getting nowhere. The last thing I needed was a psychic.