Son of a Gun (11 page)

The priest was late. As we stood around glancing at our watches, I let my anger well and fester. A self-indulgent, blinding fury had become my default response to any official ineptitude, real or imagined. It didn’t matter that I could see from where I stood how much traffic there was on the avenue, or that it didn’t make a difference what time we buried her, or that I didn’t believe the words he was going to recite over her ashes. The tardy priest was another sign of the injustice of the world.

I’d voted against the burial service. She’d already had a funeral mass in Tombstone, and in a few more days she would
have been dead three months; it felt like forever. When I saw something that reminded me of her—a horse on television, a woman with similar hair across a restaurant, a mother on the sidewalk pushing a stroller—she would glimmer in my mind, and I’d will her away. I was building walls in my memory to separate the present from the past, walls to hide her, walls to keep the Beast away. I didn’t want another ceremony or the false comfort it offered. But there we stood, surrounded by stone angels, waiting for a priest.

My grandmother had a bunch of plastic roses in one hand and a cluster of balloons held by their strings in the other. She handed one of each to everyone and told us to take turns walking to the grave, laying a flower on the tarp, and releasing the balloons into the sky. When it was my turn, she held out a flower.

“I don’t want one.”

She lifted her hand higher. “Take it.”

I thought about refusing. My mother wasn’t looking down at us, watching her own burial, and she didn’t hear our goodbyes or feel our fingertips tracing the freshly etched letters of her name. She was gone, forever, and I wasn’t going to waste any more time wallowing in grief. I didn’t want prayers, flowers, tears; I just wanted it to end. But my grandmother looked tired—we all were—so I took the flower and set it down, took a balloon and let it float away into the sky.

The priest finally showed, sprinkled some holy water, said a prayer. I was looking out over the long green lawn of the cemetery, down the slope of the hill to where a mist hung over the faraway graves, when I realized it was over. The priest shook hands with Grandpop. The others walked past the grave a final time and headed for their cars. I went to her grave and looked down at the stone:

I had to read it twice to understand why it looked odd: she was buried with my father’s last name. She’d gone by his name for most of my life, whenever she wasn’t married to somebody else, and sometimes when she was. She always said she wanted the same name as her sons. Grandpop must have made the decision not to use her maiden name. He’d chosen our last name instead of his. Seeing it etched in stone felt vindicating, as if from the moment she’d become our mother, she’d belonged to us. Still, it didn’t seem right that even in death she’d be marked with the name of a man—my father—who abandoned us, a man who wasn’t even at her funeral.

I lingered at her grave, waiting for something that didn’t come: no revelation, no Beast, no sense of closure. When we pulled away in the Caddy, her urn was still sitting on the tarp. The gravediggers leaned against their truck, waiting until we were gone to bury her.

At the edge of the city the fog breaks and reveals that strange San Francisco sunshine, soft and buttery, hardly even warm. It’s Sunday afternoon and I’m driving south, weaving through light traffic on the freeway, listening to NPR, drinking fair-trade coffee from a place called Progressive Grounds. It might be one of those snapshot moments I often have since moving to California—is this my new life?—if I weren’t going to a graveyard. I recently read a biography of Wyatt Earp that said he was buried in Colma, a few miles from where I live now, and thought I’d pay my respects.

When I lived in Tombstone, tourists disappointed at Wyatt’s absence from Boothill Graveyard would sometimes ask where he was buried. I didn’t know. I didn’t give a shit back then; I was sick of hearing the stories. Only long after I moved away did I take an interest. Now I’ve read a shelf of books about Wyatt and Tombstone and the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral,
and I’ve seen the movie
Tombstone
so many times I can quote it by heart. I’m practically an expert on Wyatt Earp.

He’s buried in a Jewish cemetery, in his third wife’s family plot, although he was the grandson of a Methodist preacher and not a religious man himself. I park at the cemetery entrance and wander the rows for half an hour before I see his stone, tall and black in a field of gray, facing West, bearing his full name: Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp. The original marker was small and flat, like the ones around it, but it was stolen in 1957; by then he’d become a legend, so somebody bought him a bigger tombstone. An empty shooter of whiskey, a bullet casing, and a miniature American flag lay atop his grave, a shrine to someone’s idea of him. There’s not much of a view: at the bottom of the hill blank stones wait outside a mason’s shop, and across the street a SuperTarget sprawls along the freeway. I wonder if Wyatt ever thought he’d wind up here.

After the gunfight made him famous, he left Arizona to rove the West, chasing mining booms, gambling, barkeeping, racing horses, bounty-hunting. A decade later he settled in San Francisco, where he had a beautiful wife, a steady job that didn’t get him shot at, important friends. He didn’t talk much about his past in Tombstone, although it caught up with him eventually, as it always would. He later said those first few years in San Francisco were some of the happiest of his life.

I moved here two years ago from Arizona, and I’ve also found a better life: a career, a woman who loves me, smart and successful friends. I take public transportation, eat organic produce, have business cards and a coffee grinder and a roommate from France, hang out at used bookstores and lesbian bars and literary readings. I’ve come a long way from Tombstone, and I should be happy. But this life feels like a lie, because it’s built on one. When I moved here, I denied my mother, lied about her death, kept her pictures in boxes, tried
not to think of her. I thought I was leaving all that behind, starting over. It worked, for a while.

Then one night I found myself talking to a friend, Laura. I’d met her just after moving to California, and wanted her right away: big brown eyes and a Tennessee accent, from a factory town in Appalachia, a poet with a wiseass sense of humor who spoke fluent French. She wasn’t single and her parents were still alive, but nobody’s perfect.

We were standing on a fire escape outside a party, talking about relationships. I mentioned a girl I’d been seeing casually, said she was pretty and smart and fun, but her parents were both doctors and she was a slightly different kind of doctor, and she’d gone to Stanford and she drove a Benz, and I couldn’t get past my grudge against people like that enough to date one. Laura said she was going to break up with her boyfriend.

Voices drifted out from the party. Beyond the railing of the fire escape, the gray rooftops of Bernal Heights rose crookedly up the hill. As the silence stretched, I felt my opportunity passing, but before I could bring myself to say how I felt about her, Laura asked about my mother. I’d told her long before that she’d died in a car accident. It wasn’t the time to come clean, standing out there in the gusting wind.

“My stepdad shot her.”

For a moment, Laura didn’t say anything, just stared searchingly at my face. “That’s awful,” she said, and left it at that. We talked about something else and went inside. Soon afterward we started dating. It wasn’t like I’d feared it would be; she didn’t ask a lot of questions or define me by my past.

Afterward, I wondered why, after lying about my family to everyone I met in California, I had blurted my secret to a woman I liked at a party. It didn’t make sense, but it wasn’t a surprise; lately I’d felt the walls around the past crumbling, sensed something stalking me again. Standing on a dais at my
brother’s wedding, about to give a speech in which I wouldn’t say her name, I caught myself looking for my mother’s face in the crowd. After a day spent flying kites with a friend and her daughter, I stood in her kitchen watching them build a house together out of Popsicle sticks and remembered for a moment how it was to have that bond. On Mother’s Day I lay in my bed, thinking of the gun I keep beneath it, wondering how it felt to die that way. For years now I’ve denied my mother’s murder, always trying to be some different kind of man—normal, stable, calm. I’ve hoarded the rage in my heart, and it manifests in the destructive ways rage does: chronic chest pain, failed relationships, an exaggerated response to threats. I expect the people I care about to die at any moment, and I don’t make plans for the future, because I don’t believe in it; in order to do that, I’d have to understand the past. Running from it has only brought me here, to a graveyard at the end of the West, still watching for the Beast out in the weeds.

My mother is buried beneath another black stone on another hillside, a few thousand miles east. I don’t visit her grave. She fades a little more each day: I can’t picture her face, can’t remember a time when she was alive. I don’t know her story, because I’ve tried to forget, and because there was so much I never knew. She didn’t like to think or talk about the past, a trait I inherited. Nearly a decade now since she died, and all that’s left of her are a few relics and my own suspect memories. I know more about Wyatt Earp than I do about my mother.

She was born Deborah Ann Bennis in North Philly on August 10, 1957, to teenage parents from working-class Catholic stock. When my grandmother got pregnant at seventeen, my grandfather did the honorable thing: he married her and joined the military. They gave it a shot for a few years, living on air
force bases—West Palm Beach, then Belleville, Illinois—but soon they moved back to Philly and divorced. Neither of them can explain why, and when they see each other now, which is rarely, they act like the lovebird teenagers they once were, although both insist they never should have gotten married. My mother lived with her mom, seeing her dad on the weekends. He would take her to a pond near his house to feed the ducks. He says she was so tiny, they were bigger than her.

My grandmother remarried, had my uncle Tom, and got divorced again. My mother lived with her mother and brother for the next decade, in different houses with different men. That period of time was never mentioned in later years; my grandmother still won’t talk about it except in the vaguest terms. Once, at a family reunion, a distant aunt sat next to me, patted my knee, and said my mother had it rough growing up. “There are a lot of things you don’t know,” she said. But she wouldn’t tell me what they were.

At thirteen my mother showed up at my grandfather’s door in the pouring rain, soaked and frowning, holding a suitcase. She’d said she wanted to live with her father one too many times, and finally her mother had dropped her off. Grandpop was working full-time for a union, living with his siblings in a house they’d inherited when their parents died. There was nowhere to put a teenage girl, so he sent her to a Catholic school north of the city, where she lived with the nuns for a year. He says she hated it; she was the only boarder, woke up with the nuns, had breakfast with the nuns, was schooled by the nuns, nuns nuns nuns. She told Grandpop she didn’t know why he was punishing her. He told her one day she’d have kids and she’d understand.

After a year of picking her up every weekend and bringing her home, hearing her complain about boarding school, Grandpop bought a condo and my mother moved in with him.

In public school she twirled a baton, chased boys, got into trouble. Grandpop says he came home once and found some burnout boyfriend sitting on his couch, drinking a beer; the boyfriend offered him one and Grandpop kicked him out. At fifteen my mother was picked up in Washington, D.C., by a cop who saw her walking down the street with her best friend at two in the morning. She’d been hitchhiking to HaightAshbury. That was 1973, Grandpop says, a little late for the free love, but she didn’t know that. She didn’t know much. He let her stew in the holding cell for a night and sent bus fare.