Son of a Gun (18 page)

They decided to branch out. With the profits from Madame Mustache, they bought a cavernous two-story building at the other end of Allen Street that had a run-down gift shop on the first floor and an apartment on the second, with a long weed-choked alley in back where Max could park his boat and RV.

We went to work again, just like we had with Brian, a different family building a different business. We renovated the apartment upstairs and turned the downstairs into two storefronts. One was a gift shop; the other was a paradise to my sixth-grade sensibilities, an old-time ice cream parlor replete with twelve flavors of ice cream and an antique soda counter we’d bought from a bankrupt restaurant in Bisbee and hauled over in Max’s pickup truck. The twins and Max did most of the heavy work; Josh and Mom and I did a lot of cleaning and painting. I wrote swear words on the closet ceilings for future residents to discover. We kept the building’s longtime name: the Silver Nugget. Next we renovated Madame Mustache, brought in a fudge-making machine and converted the back of the store into an old-time photo studio. The sign painter, the same guy who’d played the barber in
Tombstone
, misspelled it as an “Old Thyme Photo Studio.” When I pointed out the error, Mom told me to stop being such a snot.

By the time we finished, we had a retail presence on Allen Street that rivaled anybody in town, and the same businessmen who’d once thought of my mother and Brian as an annoyance now hated her and Max. She didn’t care. Neither did I. Walking down the boardwalk between our businesses, it felt like we owned the town.

Our domestic life was less triumphant. Max and Mom spent every minute together, at work and at home—it was beginning to seem like a pattern with her—and it didn’t take long for the cracks to show. Josh and I drove Max nuts by bitching and moaning about the work we had to do, and Mom was
often forced to intervene. Soon I began to hear them through my bedroom walls, shouting at each other.

I began to truly hate Max during the World Series. The Phillies had won the pennant after eons of futility, and earned the right to play Toronto, the defending champions. Josh and I were ecstatic; even though we hadn’t lived in Philly for years, we still loved the Phils, knew all the players, even the reserves. I wore Lenny Dykstra’s number four in Little League, and once named a dog Dutch, after Darren Daulton, the Phillies catcher.

Max was Canadian. When Joe Carter hit the series-winning homer for Toronto in game six, he started whooping and carrying on in the living room. Josh and I went to our rooms and slammed the doors behind us as the fireworks boomed on the TV.

Around that time my dad called Mom and said he was moving to Arizona. It was the latest in a series of short-lived symbolic gestures he had made toward being a better father. A couple of years after he and my mother divorced, when we were living in North Carolina, he’d decided to sue for custody of my brother and me, probably as a way of avoiding the child support he rarely paid. He lost, of course, and we didn’t hear from him for a few years after that. But when we moved to Tombstone he tried to patch things up, called every couple of months, even flew me out to New Hampshire one summer to visit. Once I was there, he tried to convince me to stay, and forced me to call my mother and ask if I could. She told me to put him on the phone. I heard her screaming at him and watched my father flinch and fidget until they hung up. I flew home the next day. Nobody ever mentioned it again.

One night when my mother came to tuck me in, she sat on
the edge of my water bed and said she had something to tell me. I put down the book I was reading, one of the Westerns she’d bought me at Walmart.

“I talked to your father today,” she said. She wouldn’t look at me. “He might be coming out here.”

“When?”

“He doesn’t know. He needs to save some money.”

“Give him some.”

She squeezed my arm, too hard. “He asked me to. I said no.”

I badgered her about it for a while. Finally she said, “You have a savings account. Why don’t you loan him the money?”

She must have thought that would shut me up, but it didn’t. “How much does he want?”

“Three hundred.”

“How much do I have?”

“About three-fifty.”

I’d been saving for a dirt bike for the last year. I banked my Christmas and birthday checks, my allowance, the money she gave me for doing odd jobs at the gift shops. But she wasn’t ever going to let me have a dirt bike, because she knew I’d only hurt myself, and I guess she wanted to teach me something about my father, a lesson I’d have to learn sometime.

“Will he pay it back?”

She traced a scratch in the bed rail with her finger. “I don’t know.”

I thought about it for a little while.

“Do you think I should?”

“No.”

Max’s steps thumped in the hallway. I knew my mother still loved my father—she cried every year on their anniversary—and I thought that if he moved to Arizona, Max might disappear. I told her to send him a check.

We said goodnight. She left the light on so I could read, but told me not to stay up too late. Walking away, down the hall, she must have known how it would go. My father wouldn’t pay me back, and he wouldn’t move to Arizona, and they certainly wouldn’t get back together. We’d stop hearing from him again, and she’d take the blame, and for years I’d bring up the dirt bike every time she asked me to do a chore.

But at least I’d learn not to depend on my father.

I don’t remember the first time Max hit my mother, only the way it felt to know that it had happened, the silence and the dread, like being on a spaceship and watching the Earth explode. I don’t remember how many times it happened; in my memory they’ve combined into one long beating. He slapped her, threw her into walls, and once, when she stuck her finger in his face, he bit it to the bone. He liked to do it in the kitchen, or maybe those were just the times I saw. At first she’d call the cops, and he’d get hauled off to jail, but she never pressed charges and she always took him back, and after a while she ended the charade of calling.

I started scheming ways to kill him: rat poison in his whiskey, cutting the brake lines of his truck. It was my version of counting sheep. In one fantasy, I imagined sneaking through the door, creeping to the gun case, grabbing one of the shotguns, and walking to his side of the bed. I’d make sure to wake him up before I pulled the trigger, so he would know that it was me.

My brother and I told our mother every night how much we hated Max, and he’d already abused her more than once, but she married him anyway. They came home from a trip to Vegas and stood in the kitchen digging our souvenir gifts out of plastic bags, and as she handed mine to me, I saw the ring on
her finger and burst out crying. She followed me into my room and swore it was a spontaneous decision, as if that made it any better. She tried to lay a guilt trip on me by saying that Max’s sons had congratulated them. I told her I was leaving and rode my bike to my best friend Danny’s house.

Danny didn’t have a dad—none of my friends did—but he didn’t have a stepdad either, just an old alcoholic mom who doted on me because she knew I had troubles at home, a phrase that would become a refrain, in detention and in the principal’s office and eventually in a courtroom. Danny’s mom would sit me down on the plastic-wrapped sofa in her dim and smoky living room and tell me about the fifth dimension, where our souls go when we die, and where there is no pain, and I would pretend to listen and smell the booze on her breath with curious relish, and after she went to bed Danny and I would fill a plastic cup with her cheap Scotch and slug it down. I stayed at Danny’s for a few days without calling and then came home, and Mom made a big fuss over me for about an hour, and then everything was the same again.

Later, Max hit my brother in the head with a tennis racket. I wasn’t there for that, but Max denied only the details: he said he hit him with the strings, not the metal frame, and that it was just a whack. The knot on Josh’s head said something else. Mom made a big show of dialing 911, and later my brother and I went out to the balcony and watched a Tombstone deputy load Max into the back of a squad car. Mom lingered on the boardwalk below us, thanking the cop. As the car pulled away, Mom stepped down into the street, arms crossed, tears glistening on her face in the streetlight, and watched until it turned the corner.

“I bet you she takes him back,” I said.

“No way,” Josh said. “Not this time.”

Sure enough, Max showed up the next day, croaking and
rubbing his throat, saying he’d spent the night in the Bisbee jail getting beaten up by Mexicans and that they wouldn’t give him water the whole time. Mom had vast reserves of pity, and he tapped them like a baron; it would take years for him to bleed her dry. We had a family meeting where they fed us some story about Max having a chemical imbalance and a medication that would change him.

I figured I was next. I started hiding under my water bed, in a dark and narrow crawl space that fit me like a coffin and had a door I could close behind me. Whenever I was home with Max and Mom wasn’t there, I’d take a bag of candy, a flashlight, and one of the books my mother bought me, and I’d hide in the crawl space for hours, forgetting where and who I was as I read about exotic worlds and adventure, hoping Max wouldn’t find me and hassle me to do chores.

One day I was down there reading
Robinson Crusoe
when I heard a knock inches from my head. I turned off the flashlight and slid down deeper into the dark. Another knock. I held my breath. Finally the door opened and I saw Max’s big veiny hand, gesturing.

“Come on out.”

I pulled myself through the opening, noticing with a pang that my shoulders were getting too big to clear its edges. Max said he had something for me to do outside. I followed him for a few steps, but I didn’t want to go sand the wood on the boat, or wash the RV, or unload whatever was in the back of his truck. I was sick of the Cinderella shit. I wanted to lie in the dark and eat Starburst.

“I’m busy,” I said.

Max wheeled around and glared at me. “What did you say?”

“I said I’m busy. Leave me alone.”

His face flushed and he took a step toward me. I thought: this is it. He’d never laid a hand on me, and I wanted to get it
over with. His eyebrows twitched and his fists opened and closed. He was thinking about it. Instead he grabbed a Nintendo controller off of my dresser and threw it at me, missing badly, then stormed out of my room. I stood there for a while, fighting down the same feeling I’d come to recognize, a mixture of nausea and excitement at the prospect of violence—hollow stomach, pounding heart. I didn’t do the chore.

It was the first time he let me think that I had won. After that I pushed him further, tried harder to turn Mom against him. Later I’d look back on that moment as the turning point in the war, the day I finally fought back.

Max and I arrange to meet at a bar and grill in an upscale strip mall near the university. I walk in the back entrance and circle a bank of high tables by the bar, casing the booths in the dining area, looking for him. He spots me first: when I see him, he’s already leaning forward, pointing a finger at me and smiling. Steven, one of the twins, sits with him in a corner booth big enough for an entire family. I pass an exit on the way to his table and imagine walking through it.

Instead I slide into the booth, say hello, shake their hands. There’s an awkward pause as we pick up menus and a too-attentive waiter appears to take our drink order. The restaurant is new, another stylish and overpriced joint with misters on the patio and frigid air-conditioning, painted in earth tones and lit in soft gold hues, built for snowbirds who want to pretend they’re in Scottsdale. I’ve driven by a dozen times but never been inside. I scan the menu and wonder who’s paying.

Max asks how I’ve been.

“Good. You?”

“Good.” He nods. We both look at Steven.

“I’m good.”

“Everyone’s good,” Max says. “Business is good. Life is good.” For a moment I wonder if he’s gone positive on me, become a born-again Christian or joined a network marketing business. Maybe he’s just happy.

“It’s good to see you,” I say. It’s not, but this is already going better than I thought it would all those times I imagined seeing him again. We’re not squaring off at twenty paces in a dusty street.

It’s been fifteen years since I last saw him, and he looks a little older, his hair a little whiter, his face looser in the jowls, but otherwise he’s the same guy, the same black mustache and quick, toothless smile, handsome and bronzed, like a Boca gigolo. Steven is a younger version of his father, about thirty-five now, tall and thick-chested, with curly black hair and a deep reddish tan, but he’s quieter than Max, quick-eyed and polite and not much of a talker. Three large men with heavy brows and giant heads; the waiter probably thinks we’re a family. I resemble Max more than I do my real father, or any of my other stepdads, and I guess it fits: I lived with him for longer than the others. He’s the closest thing to a father that I ever had.

We talk about old times. He asks if I remember the trip to Lake Havasu.

The summer before his twins left for college, we loaded the RV and hitched the boat and took a long family trip through Arizona, to Lake Mead and Lake Havasu, finally to Vegas. On a boat trip we got caught miles from harbor in a monsoon that swallowed the horizon in purple bands of rain and dumped torrents on our bare heads, whipped the lake into whitecaps, nearly sank us. The boat broke and I helped Max try to fix it, fetching tools without complaining, for once, and Josh grabbed my arm, gave me a pained look, and hissed, “What are you,
friends
now?” Later, the brakes on the RV failed going
down a steep hill and we barreled through a busy intersection with Max laying on the horn and shouting from the driver’s seat to grab hold of something, but somehow guiding us through. We stayed at a trailer park in downtown Vegas, miles off the Strip, and I woke up on the floor of the RV to find it shaking because they were having sex in the bed above the front seats, so I got up and stole money from his wallet to use in the slot machines. Sure, Max, I remember.