Son of a Gun (2 page)

On the TV, the president talked about a long campaign to come, unlike anything we’d ever seen. He said to live our lives and hug our children. He said to be calm and resolute in the face of a continuing threat.

“You think he’d come here?” I asked. Ray knew where we lived. He’d been to the house a few times, with our mother, staying on the pullout couch in the living room.

“The detective mentioned that. He said he doubted it, but to keep an eye out.”

I wondered what good that would do but didn’t ask. Josh said we’d know more on Monday, after we met with the cops.

“What do we do until then?”

I could tell Josh was wondering the same thing: what the hell were we going to
do
? “Wait, I guess.”

Behind me the pool table rumbled as the players began another game. I looked down at my plate, realized that my food was gone, and scanned the old newspaper articles from New Orleans pasted beneath the glass tabletop. My mother was dead. I leaned back against the vinyl seat and finished my beer, watching the president try to soothe a wounded nation. He said that life would return to normal, that grief recedes with time and grace, but that we would always remember, that we’d carry memories of a face and a voice gone forever.

Late that night, I said a prayer for the first time in months. When I was a kid, Mom had always made me say prayers before bed, and it became a habit, something I felt guilty about if I didn’t do. I’d stopped praying regularly after I left home, but that night I prayed for my mother’s soul, because I knew she’d want me to, and I figured it couldn’t hurt.

I didn’t pray for my own safety; I knew better than to rely on God for that. Instead, I got up off my knees, pulled a long gray case out of my closet, laid it on the bed, and flipped the catches. Inside, on a bed of dimpled foam, lay a rifle, a gift from my father on my thirteenth birthday, an old Lee-Enfield
bolt-action. I lifted it out of the case, loaded it, chambered a round, and rested it against the wall by my bed. Then I tried to sleep, but every time a car passed, I sat up to peek out the window, expecting to see Ray in our front yard.

After a few sleepless hours I got up and went to my desk. I turned on my computer, opened a Word document, and stared at the blank screen. I kept a journal, in which I wrote to the future self I imagined, chronicling important moments in my life, because I thought he might want to remember, and because it made me feel less alone. I would write about how much I missed Tombstone, how dislocated I felt after moving from a town of fifteen hundred people to a city thirty times that size, how I felt like an impostor at school, was failing half my classes, would never graduate. I wrote about girls. I wrote about money, how little I had, my mounting debt, my fear that I wouldn’t be able to cover tuition and rent. And I wrote about Mom, how she’d gone crazy after I moved out, how she and Ray had sold our trailer outside of Tombstone and gone touring the country with their horses, camping in national parks, how one day I’d get a card in the mail postmarked from Utah, and the next she’d send an email from Nebraska—all of them signed
xoxo, Mom and Ray
—and how she’d leave rambling messages on our answering machine at five o’clock in the morning, saying how much she loved and missed us.

I thought I should write something about that day, so the future me never forgot how it had felt to be twenty and motherless, my life possibly in danger, numb from shock and hating my own inability to feel. But I didn’t know what to say. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to do the feeling justice, that I’d choose the wrong words. I was in my first literature class at the time, an American lit survey, and I’d just written a paper on Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle.” So I did what any English major would: I quoted someone else.

My mother is dead. The Beast has sprung
.

It worked. I sat down to write at the end of every day for the next few weeks, and each time the words came easily. Sometimes I return to those entries, when I’m afraid I’ve begun to forget. But I can’t read them for long without wanting to write back to my old self, to warn him of what’s to come, to tell him that the Beast will always be with us.

I woke up the first day after learning of her death and turned off my alarm, then went back to sleep until the room got too bright. When I woke again, I looked out the window at the yard full of weeds. I stood, stretched, brushed my teeth. Walking down the hall into the living room, wondering what I’d do with the day ahead—it was Friday, so I had a softball game that night, and afterward somebody would be having a party—I glanced through the screen door at the front porch and remembered.

My grandfather arrived from Philly that afternoon, pale and harried, lighting new cigarettes with the still-burning stubs of the last. We went straight from the airport to a Denny’s by the highway and sat drinking iced tea and watching cars pass by outside, planes taking off and landing, families piling out of minivans in the parking lot, other people going places. The world hadn’t stopped, despite how it seemed to us.

When our food came, we picked at it and discussed our plans. My dad had decided to come and would be flying in the next day. On Monday we had meetings scheduled with the detectives and the funeral director and my mother’s bank and lawyer, a gauntlet none of us wanted to think or talk about. My mother’s closest friend, Connie, was taking care of the horses and Chance, Ray’s dog, who’d been left behind. She said that my mother’s property was still cordoned off, that
the cops were there in a helicopter, looking for Ray or for his body. We’d go to Tombstone in the morning. For now, there was nothing we could do but try to get some rest.

Grandpop went to his hotel. Josh and I went home and sat on the couch watching pirated cable for the rest of the afternoon. As the room began to dim, I checked the time and remembered that I had a softball game in half an hour. I went to my room and changed. When I walked out carrying my bat bag, Josh asked where I was going.

“We’ve got a doubleheader.”

“Seriously?”

I put on my hat and grabbed my keys off the coffee table. “There’s nothing better to do.”

“OK,” he said, shrugging.

I realized it would be the first time we’d spent apart since we heard the news, and an unfamiliar feeling came over me: I was worried about him. “What are you going to do?”

“I might go to the Bay Horse.”

The Bay Horse was a bar two blocks away where our roommate worked. I was glad to know Josh wouldn’t be alone while I was gone, and the thought of joining them later at the Bay Horse gave me comfort. We spent a few nights a week in that smoky dive, playing darts and feeding the jukebox, writing graffiti in the bathroom, drinking ourselves into stupors.

I walked through the door and across the porch and out into the yard, where I stopped and looked back. The blinds were open, revealing my brother’s face in the blue glow of the television. The house loomed gray below a purple sky; the stucco had cracked along the edge of the roof and one of the address numbers had been missing since I moved in. It was the only home I had left.

The dugout went quiet when I walked in. My teammates continued lacing their cleats, hanging bats in the racks, filling their mouths with sunflower seeds, but nobody spoke to me, and hardly a head turned in my direction. They were trying to act normal. They failed, but I appreciated the effort.

It was a coed league of born-again Christians. Our team’s coach was a pastor. Most of the players, the men especially, took the games too seriously, heckling opponents and yelling at umpires, and nobody was any good. But I’d played ball my whole life and I missed being part of a team, so when my friend Brent had asked if I wanted to join, I’d jumped at the chance to play.

I spotted Brent at the far end of the metal bench and sat next to him. We’d known each other for a few years, had played together on our high school baseball team. I could tell that he had heard.

“You made it,” he said.

I nodded. “Had to get away for a while.”

“Sure.” He worked a sunflower seed between his teeth, thinking of something to say, but just then the umps called us in for the pregame prayer. Before each game we stood in a circle around home plate and held hands while our coach, the pastor, said prayers that were clearly made up as he went. I was raised Catholic, communed and confirmed and all that, so it sounded like amateur hour to me, but I always went along, joined hands and bowed my head and pretended to listen.

That night’s prayer was oppressive. I stood staring down at the dusty home plate, with my hat beneath my arm and a stranger’s sweaty palm pressed against mine, listening to an error-prone second baseman preach about our great and just and loving God. At the end he said something about those of us suffering hard times and I wondered if he knew.

When it was over, I grabbed my glove. I played left and
liked ranging the outfield. The bats would ping and I’d be off, tracking down a deep fly ball at the fence, snaring a liner to the gap, trying to throw out runners at home. For a moment I’d forget that it was a coed church league, that the person I’d just robbed of a double was somebody’s aunt. I’d forget the score, the number of outs. I’d forget about school and work, forget my name, forget who I was. The world shrank down to a field of grass, and all I had to do was catch the ball.

I played well that night. I made a basket catch on a liner over my head, slid to pluck a Texas leaguer just before it hit the grass. I don’t remember what I did at the plate, only sprinting across the outfield, catching everything. A lull would come, a few groundouts in a row, a string of walks, and I’d feel something stalking me just outside the white ring of the field lights, something creeping in. But then the yellow ball would rocket across the night sky and I’d be off, gauging its depth, fixing on a point ahead and running, running as fast as I could.

My mother loved to tell the story of how Ray had saved her. She met her fifth and final husband by calling the police. I wasn’t there, but I heard her tell the story over and over, and it grew more dramatic every time. She was managing a Mexican restaurant in Tombstone, Arizona, the small and legendary town where I grew up, when one day a tourist, a big and angry man, started harassing her about his bill. He said his tab was wrong. She said it was right. He called her a name. She told him to pay his bill and leave. He grabbed her arm. She pulled away, ran to the back room, and called the cops. The marshal’s office was across the street, next to the O.K. Corral, and Ray showed up in a few minutes. He wrestled the man to the ground, cuffed him, dragged him outside to his police cruiser, and threw him in back. Then he came inside and asked my mother her name.

“My hero,” Mom would say, only half joking. “It was love at first sight.” She’d look over at him all dewy eyed, and he’d
blush and give a sheepish grin. The story never made much sense to me. A customer grabs her, and none of the employees intervene, not even Adonis, the hulking Greek waiter? How did the man get close enough to grab her in the first place if she was behind the bar? If the customer was so big and so mad, how did Ray, at five nine and a buck fifty, bring him down so easy? And why would Mom—a single mother of two boys, a former army paratrooper, the toughest woman I’ve ever known—have been afraid enough to call the cops? The mother I knew would have grabbed the order spike off the counter and stabbed that son of a bitch. She didn’t take any shit from men unless she was in love with them.

But that was the story they stuck with.

I didn’t meet Ray until a few weeks later. He’d started hanging around the restaurant, eating lunch with other cops. They’d all sit around a table stroking their mustaches and eating free chips and salsa. I’d never had any run-ins with Ray before, but I hated Tombstone cops, thought they were a bunch of power-tripping dicks. When they weren’t busy harassing my friends and me for imaginary moving violations, trying to catch us driving drunk or riding dirty, the deputies would hang out in the parking lot of the Circle K, chatting up high school girls. Now they took their lunches at the restaurant, with my mother stopping every five minutes to refill their iced teas.