Son of a Gun (19 page)

“Remember the time the car wouldn’t shift?”

“No.”

“The Jetta.”

I remember the car, a boxy beige relic with a circle burned into the dashboard from when Mom made me wait in the car while she ran into a store, even though she knew I hated that, and I heated up the cigarette lighter and pushed it into the plastic. But I don’t remember taking it to Havasu.

“The transmission went out. We lost first gear.” Max’s eyes drift to the ceiling and lose focus. “I couldn’t slow down too much or it would stall. Your mother and I got it push-started, and we drove in circles around the campground”—he draws loops on the table with his finger—“and you guys jumped in while it was moving. We drove to the dealership and blew straight through the entrance and into the garage, and I got out and threw the guy the keys and said, ‘Fix it, I’ll be back tomorrow.’ ” He claps his hands, then spreads them apart: the end. He always did know how to tell a story.

Max chuckles. He likes that memory. I don’t remember it, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Everyone I talk to about my mother has these anecdotes. When they want to remember her, they pull them out and dust them off, and they say: that was us, that’s how it was. His truth isn’t wrong—we were a makeshift family, always on the move, always broken and trying to invent a fix—but it is selective. My memories are
different. They involve the kitchen counter, shouts and bruises and blood, police lights wheeling in my bedroom window, and the time in the living room when he told me he was never leaving, and I asked if we’d have to kill him, and he said yes, and I said OK. My version of the truth is just as selective as his; it leaves out all the good times, and there were some. But I believe mine.

After a couple of years, we sold the Silver Nugget. Max’s sons had gone away to college, and Josh would follow in a year, so we didn’t need all that space anymore, and my mother was sick of the businesses running her ragged. She was restless again. She and Max bought a piece of land out in the farthest reaches of Holiday, just down the road from where we’d lived in the trailer with the pool. It was five acres of unimproved hillside, no buildings and no utilities, on a crooked dirt road named after Fred White, the Tombstone marshal killed by Curly Bill Brocious in one of the events leading up to the O.K. Corral.

The land became Mom and Max’s last project. They put us to work again: Max ran the backhoe, digging trenches for utilities and grading a driveway, yanking sticks and grinding gears and shouting orders. My mother, my brother, and I did the shit work, shoveling dirt and driving fence posts and hauling rocks from the wash to line the driveway. I ate a lot of silent sunburned lunches that summer, sitting on the backhoe blade, wishing I had different parents and lived somewhere else. By the fall we’d achieved my family’s version of the American dream: a brand-new double-wide trailer set atop a hill, with horse corrals and a hay barn and a clear view north across a thousand square miles of government land to Sheep’s Head Mountain.

Max didn’t stick around long enough to unpack. By then
they were fighting constantly, about work and about money and about me. I was becoming a problem, the last kid left and a bad one at that, always in trouble at school, constantly provoking Max to drive a wedge between them. Our family dinners, which until recently had been lavish spreads for six people—years later, when I asked why she stayed with Max for so long, my mother would mention those dinners, how it had felt like we were a real family for once—became tense and meager, frozen lasagna and a head of iceberg drenched in ranch, scraping forks and clinking cups and pregnant pauses, fat yellow moths thumping against the windows. Max’s back had gone out on him while we were working on the property, and he spent days lying in bed with his legs propped up on pillows. He didn’t ride horses, and Mom had sold hers after she met him, but now she bought two more, and started taking long rides through the desert alone, making up for lost time.

After a few months in the new place, I came home from middle school baseball practice to find my prayers answered, Max gone, all signs of his presence erased. Mom sat me down and told me through a veil of pain that he had left. She said he’d tried to hit her again, but I didn’t know what that meant, why he would have had to try after so much practice. I’d finally won, finally gotten rid of him, but sitting in that strange and new-smelling trailer with my mother sobbing quietly, it didn’t feel like much of a victory. She’d just finally gotten sick of the abuse, not so much the pain itself—she’d known worse—but the shame, the struggle, me never shutting up about how much I hated him.

Max took the RV and moved into a trailer park off a freeway exit in Tucson. Mom would visit him a few times a month. Max had taken his dog, Buck, with him when he left, and I missed that dog. I walked Buck along the banks of the bone-dry Santa Cruz, throwing tennis balls into clumps of saltbush
for Buck to fetch and watching the sun set over the hump of Sentinel Peak, listening to the whisk of traffic on the interstate and wondering if they really thought I was too stupid to understand why they’d send me out to walk the dog. I had a moment of terror when she raised the possibility of them getting back together, but soon they went cold turkey.

Our food arrives. I pick at my club sandwich and ask after Max’s health. In response, he rolls up the leg of his Bermuda shorts to reveal a thin scar running vertically through his kneecap.

“Replacement knees,” he says, patting his fake patella. “Just had both of them done.” He says all those years of hockey as a kid in Canada finally caught up with him. He says he’s mostly recovered from the surgeries, but it’s still hard to ride his motorcycle. He has a Harley now. I remember Brian’s words: the motorcycle guy.

“That’s how I heard about your mum,” he says. When he mentions her, he looks down at the table. Steven looks away, toward the bar. I sip my drink and wait out the silence. Max tells me he went to Tombstone on a trip with some motorcycle friends a few years ago. They stopped in the saloon by Madame Mustache and Max mentioned to the waitress that he used to own the place next door. She asked if he knew Debbie. He said she’d been his wife. The waitress said she was sorry.

“I knew right then,” he says. “She told me the story, and I nearly fell over.”

“We wanted to tell you,” I say. “We didn’t know how to get in touch.…” But I trail off, because it’s a lie—we didn’t try to get in touch with him, or any of her other exes. We didn’t even discuss it.

“The last time I talked to her was on the phone,” Max says. “You’d been in an accident.”

Riding in a friend’s SUV during lunch my freshman year of high school, with five other kids sandwiched in the seats, on our way to eat tamales somebody’s mother had made, I felt a rumble through the floor as the tires hit the gravel shoulder of the road. The tires screeched, followed by an awful quiet as the world tilted in the windows, then screams and blackness. Waking up in the backseat seconds later was like being born into a new world of shattered glass and steel and bone, a throb growing in my neck, a classmate in the front seat with his face a wall of blood, screaming for an ambulance, another lying facedown in the road. Candida: an hour earlier we’d been sitting in key-boarding class, slipping folded notes across our desks to make each other laugh. I climbed out the broken window and went to her. A stream of blood escaped her chest and ran downhill, back toward town. She took a breath—later the doctors would tell me it was impossible, that she had died instantly, but I saw it—and then went still. I knelt down next to her and said her name. The asphalt was so hot I worried it would burn her. A car came around the bend and I ran down the road to stop it. I wound up in somebody’s pickup truck, bleeding onto the upholstery, with a Tombstone cop telling me how lucky I was as the paramedics laid a sheet over Candida. Mom was in Mexico, vacationing with the doctor she was seeing. She and Max had been broken up for at least a year by then.

“She called you?”

“She was shaken up real bad. She wanted somebody to talk to.”

But him? It strikes me again how poorly I understood what our way of life was like for her. If I needed something—lunch money, girl advice—I went to her. But when she needed
someone, who did she have? She couldn’t talk to me about her problems, and I wouldn’t have listened if she’d tried. Her parents were three thousand miles away, and with all the drugs he did, her brother might as well have been. Work and kids kept her from making many friends; she didn’t have the time or inclination to go out to the bars on Allen Street, the only social scene in Tombstone, where the locals gossiped and drank. She had too many strikes against her in the eyes of the town: she was an outsider, she was successful, she went through a lot of men, and she wasn’t an alcoholic. She was the worst thing you can be in Tombstone:
too good
. She called Max because she was lonely, and because she’d always trusted him, even after he’d proved that she shouldn’t.

Max says business is good, that he’s making a living even after the bust. He says he’s remarried and happy, but I already know that. A week ago I went down to the county courthouse and ran a records check on Max to see what he’s been up to these last fifteen years. When I saw that he’d married again, I checked for domestic violence arrests and found nothing. Maybe he changed, or maybe she doesn’t call the cops.

Soon our food has been eaten and our plates are cleared, and we’re stumbling through silences and talking about cars. We’ve been here for an hour and we’re boring one another already. The waiter brings the check and I offer to pay, but Max waves me off, as I knew he would; even if he were dead broke, he’d still want to meet in a place like this, and he’d insist on paying. In the ensuing silence we check our watches and press our palms against the table and get up slowly. Outside we linger in the nuclear sunlight of an Arizona summer and shake hands repeatedly and lie about keeping in touch. I’m running out of time, just seconds now, and nothing has been done. I dreamed
for years about this moment, when I’d have grown bigger and stronger than him, and I’d have the power to avenge her. But Max is almost seventy now—he just told me he has grandkids—and what am I supposed to do, punch an old man with plastic knees in a parking lot? She never would have wanted me to become a violent man. And it’s hard to think of it as revenge when he’s not the man who killed her.

The Cochise County Courthouse sits at the top of a winding canyon road in Bisbee, its five-story façade tinted pink in the afternoon light. Bisbee stole the county seat eighty years ago, but Tombstone still has the better courthouse, a sensible brick Victorian with a courtroom and a jail and a gallows yard. Bisbee went Art Deco: polished copper doors, a tympanum of two kneeling miners, and a statue of a shirtless man in the parking lot, dedicated to “those virile men, the copper miners.”

I climb two flights of steps and enter the building’s copper maw into a dim foyer, where I explain to the security guard that I’m here to request public records. He makes me empty my pockets and walk through a metal detector. As I’m reclaiming my keys from the bin, something in the pink-and-turquoise lobby sparks a memory: the last time I was here, I was a defendant, and my mother was with me.

After Max left, I took advantage of my newfound freedom and became a teenage delinquent. It started with small-time shenanigans, shoplifting from the stores uptown and giving tourists bad directions, but soon it escalated into cutting school, stealing Scotch and cigarettes from Danny’s mother, and drinking in the ditch out back of his apartment building.

Danny got a pellet gun for Christmas. It was a terrible gift. All my friends had BB guns, but this was something else entirely, an awesome piece of weaponry for a thirteen-year-old boy to own: semiautomatic, CO
₂
-powered, capable of shooting savage pointed-tip lead pellets at over a thousand feet per second.

We hunted after school. First we shot at birds, then jackrabbits, then any dog that had ever chased us. We killed a few birds and a rabbit or two, but the rush it gave us never lasted long, and we wanted bigger prey. We graduated to hiding in bushes by the road and taking potshots at passing cars. It was only a matter of time until we shot a person, though I assumed it would be each other.