Son of a Gun (23 page)

At the far end of the room, stalls sell everything but guns. The T-shirt section is a pageant of insanity: one has a picture of President Obama next to Hitler and Saddam Hussein, and another features a Browning sniper rifle, which in expert hands can kill a person from a mile away, above the slogan “When in Doubt, Vote from the Rooftops.” A book table displays a manual for building a fallout shelter, a state-by-state guide to gun laws, and a doorstop of a novel that claims to double as a survivalist handbook. Knives are everywhere, pocket knives and boot knives and tactical knives, sais and samurai swords and steak knife sets, streams of glinting steel. Signs advertise everything from glitter paint to hand lotion to jerky made from the meat of a dozen different animals. Half the stalls here hang at least one flag, and a few sell nothing but them: current and historical versions of the American flag in every conceivable size, as well as the usual gun-culture suspects: the Confederate battle flag, the black POW/MIA flag, the yellow
“Don’t Tread on Me” flag, and the flags of various ancestral European nations.

As I observe the crowd, I can’t help but think that based on sheer statistics, there are a half-dozen convicted murderers in this room. A few booths down, a group of young men with prison tats on their muscular arms cradle assault-rifle components. They pay for their purchases with thick wads of cash. In a few days, the
Arizona Daily Star
’s cover story will be about drug cartels buying weapons at gun shows. Still, the majority of the gun-show people prove to be friendly and helpful. It takes a little while to get used to the guns everywhere, all of which seem to be pointing at me, and the crowd is overwhelmingly white and male and Republican, but otherwise the atmosphere reminds me of any other hobbyist gathering, antique shows or chili cook-offs or comic book conventions. A man with a baby on his back and two rifles in his arms walks past me, and as I move out of his way, I see it, lying amid a spread of semiautomatics: a Beretta Model 21 in .25ACP. The gun I came here for.

I pick it up. The entire pistol fits in my palm. It looks like a toy. I expected to feel something, holding it again, but I don’t feel much. It’s just a piece of metal, a light cool weight in my hand.

I first saw the gun that killed my mother on Christmas. One of the videotapes in the camera bag I took from my brother’s house is a home movie of that morning. It begins with Ray behind the camera, filming Josh and me as we mock the scraggly tree Mom bought at Walmart. For the first few minutes, the camera avoids my mother; she’s a voice offscreen. Finally, once we’ve begun to open presents, it pans to her, in a red
Western shirt and jeans, her brown hair cut into bangs, the hairstyle she’d settled on decades before and stuck with. Seeing her reminds me again how poorly I remember who she really was, what she looked like, how she spoke, all the parts of her I’ve already lost.

She sits on the floor; Josh and I are on the couch, but neither of us offers to move. As she opens a package of body spray, Ray speaks from behind the camera, continuing a debate we’d been having about the definition of the word
eve
. He thinks Christmas Eve is a misnomer, that Christmas Eve should mean tonight, the night of Christmas. Earlier, I consulted the dictionary and proved him wrong, but he won’t let it go.

“So what do you call tonight, then?” he asks.

Josh and Mom and I exchange looks. “Christmas Night,” I say, with a little too much satisfaction.

Mom says she doesn’t want to open any more of her presents, that she wants us to open ours. Josh opens the socks I bought him and we argue over whether they’re blue or black. Mom wonders if he’s color-blind. That’s how it always was with her: if we were thirsty, we had diabetes.

She takes the camera, and Ray fills the frame. He’s smiling and eager as he opens his present. It’s his first Christmas with us. I got them matching sweatshirts. He makes a big show of how much he likes his, holds it up to his chest, talks about how warm it must be. This was just when we were starting to get along.

Josh and I are next. We unwrap our biggest presents and discover that Mom has bought us each our first computers. We’re awed by the gesture, because computers were still expensive then, and she didn’t have that kind of money. She was working at the Mexican restaurant at the time, and Ray didn’t have a job at all. Those computers meant a lot of long nights
feeding tourists, a lot of other things she couldn’t buy for herself. In retrospect, it shouldn’t have surprised us: it was another in a long line of sacrifices.

The camera turns to me, a close-up shot. I’m wearing a white T-shirt and baggy jeans, and my hair is long and ridiculous, almost a mullet. A silver crucifix hangs around my neck. My mother gave me that; when she died, I stopped wearing it. I stare at myself on the screen, ten years younger, and wish I could warn him.

This younger version of me asks the camera where Tom is. He was living with us at the time—I hadn’t ratted him out yet for shooting up in the bathroom. The camera turns away, and my mother’s voice drops. “Sleeping. He’ll be out soon.” The time stamp in the bottom corner says it was filmed at one in the afternoon. Tom never appears in the video.

Ray opens another gift, from Connie and Bob. It’s a circular metal sign with two unicorns on it touching horns. He reads the tag and says it symbolizes peace and contentment, that it’s a blessing, like having a cross somewhere. It was hanging in the corral when he killed her. My mother opens the next present, from me, a portable stereo she said she wanted for the horse trailer. I saw it that day we went in the trailer, spattered with blood.

The presents continue, more clothes, wallets, watches, the toothbrushes and dumb gag gifts she put in our stockings. My brother tries on a belt and we argue over whether it’s too small. He was heavy then; he’s slimmed down since. It’s been so long.

The tape ends abruptly right before she opened her last gift. A small package, she held it in one hand and peeled the paper back with the other. The room went quiet for a moment when she realized what it was, as she took the gun from the box and turned it over in her hands, treating it with the peculiar awe we afford instruments of death. She stood and hugged my
brother, mumbling into his shoulder that he shouldn’t have spent so much money on her. She had tears in her eyes. I remember looking at that stupid stereo and wishing I had thought to buy her a gun instead.

We passed the Beretta around as Josh told the story of how he’d bought it. He saw it for sale in the newspaper classifieds, called the number in the ad, and spoke to an old lady who said her son had bought it for her and she didn’t want it. Josh went to her house, gave her cash, and left with the gun. All of which was and is perfectly legal, in Arizona and in most other states.

The Beretta 21 I’m holding is the only one I’ve seen here. The tag says three hundred and nineteen dollars. When the guy behind the table asks if he can help me, I tell him I’ll take it.

He leads me around to the far side of the table, carrying the gun, and hands me a clipboard full of forms. The first is U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Form 4473, the document that records most firearm transactions in America. It asks for the same information as any government form: my full name and address, place and date of birth, height and weight, gender, Social Security number (which is optional), race (which isn’t), and citizenship. Below those boxes is a list of yes or no questions:
Are you the actual buyer of the firearm listed on this form? Are you a fugitive from justice? Have you been convicted in any court of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence?

As I complete the form, he makes small talk with a woman standing nearby, browsing the handguns. “Have you seen our pink guns?” he asks.

“I’m all set, thanks.” She smiles tightly and wanders away.

I hand him the form and he asks for my ID. I show him my California license.

He snatches the gun off the table. “Sorry,” he says. “Can’t
sell to you.” The genial gun seller has disappeared, replaced by a cool cop-like suspicion.

“Why not?”

“Against the law. Sorry.” He turns abruptly and walks away.

I ask around and learn that because I live in another state, I can’t buy a gun from a dealer here. At this gun show, I can buy Nazi daggers, a samurai sword, throwing stars, lavender hand lotion, alligator jerky, and Gun Juice, but I can’t buy a gun.

Late one night just before I moved away from home, half asleep, I heard a sound outside, a car engine roaring, coming closer. Ray met me in the hallway, said he had heard it, too. Together we walked in silence through the dark trailer. On the landing we stood watching. Headlights cast a halo above a hill to the east. The noise of the engine had quieted but we could still hear the faint thrum of its idle.

Ray asked me in a whisper about my rifle. I told him it was under my bed.

“Go get it.”

I hesitated. The car was probably kids, teenagers heading to a party in the boonies, maybe even some of my friends. At worst it might be a coyote driving a load of illegals, but they wouldn’t pose a threat to us. There was no good reason to get the gun.

But I did. By the time I returned with the rifle, the strange vehicle, a white van, had crested the hill and stopped in a flat stretch of road on the far side of the neighbor’s horse corrals. Ray took the rifle from me, grabbed a flashlight from the kitchen drawer, and started walking. I tried to follow, but there wasn’t much of a moon to see by, and I couldn’t keep up in the dark without a light of my own. We came to a gate that
led through the fence onto the neighbor’s property. Ray hurried through. I stayed behind. When I turned back to our trailer, I saw the curtains in my mother’s bedroom window part. I couldn’t see her, but she was watching. I wonder if she had her gun, too, if she stood at the window clutching that little Beretta, if it made her feel safe.

And I wonder what she felt as she watched Ray’s shadow bobbing in the flashlight beam, as he reached the road and raised the rifle to his shoulder, approaching the van and yelling something we couldn’t hear, gesturing violently with the barrel, as the van slowly backed away, and as Ray returned, breathing hard, speaking fast, excited, saying it was a group of illegals and he’d told the driver to turn around or else he’d shoot. Did she think what I said afterward, that what he’d done was reckless and absurd? Who did he think he was, Wyatt Earp? Or did she feel what I secretly had while watching him, that terrible admiration, the wish that I were capable of doing something like that? Was she afraid of Ray then, or was he still her hero?

A few days after the gun show and less than a mile from where it was held, I go to a meeting in a rundown hospital complex. I park in a vast and nearly empty lot and walk through the automatic doors before I have time to reconsider. Past the waiting room and down a bright echoing hall three young nurses sit behind a counter talking. They stop when they see me. One smiles and leans over the counter, asking if she can help.

“Can you tell me where Conference Room B is?”

“No.” She’s cute: bangs, blue scrubs, the whole nurse thing. In other circumstances I’d flirt back.

“I’m here for the Parents of Murdered Children meeting.”

“Oh.” She straightens and points down a hallway. “Turn left, all the way at the end.”

The hallway stretches forever, waxed linoleum and fluorescent lights and posters reminding me of potential dangers. At
the far end a metal door is propped open. I duck into a men’s room, splash water on my face, fight down the urge to leave.

I first heard of Parents of Murdered Children a long time ago, when somebody mentioned it after my mother’s death and said it was for anyone who’d lost a relative to murder, not just parents. I found and read an article about the organization that explained the typical effects of a loved one’s murder: numbness, guilt, rage, insomnia, paranoia, hopelessness, depression, loss of faith, and an obsession with reconstructing the events. But I never actually came to a meeting until now, after weeks stuck in a sweltering guesthouse sifting through my mother’s things, reading descriptions of her murder scene, listening to the voices of my former fathers on my tape recorder. I need to see if I’m really as alone as I feel, or if there are others.

Walking in that door will mean surrendering my scorn for the kind of people who go to meetings and talk to strangers about their problems. And I’ll be violating the code of the American man, to project strength, suffer in silence, all that macho bullshit. But where has that gotten me?

The conference room is warm and slightly musty, and although it’s on the first floor, it feels subterranean, like somebody’s basement. A handful of people sit scattered around folding tables arranged in a rough square. A thickset white guy in his fifties sees me first. He asks what I’m looking for, and I tell him I’m here for the POMC meeting.

He sinks a little in his chair. “Yeah. This is it.”

I take a seat at the far end of his table and look around. A woman about his age sits next to him, probably his wife, and next to her is a younger woman wearing the uniform of a pest control company, who seems to be their daughter. Two white ladies at another table talk loudly about traffic. Across the way,
a teenage girl plays with her cell phone; the flowers tattooed on her forearms twitch as she texts. At the table by the window, a middle-aged woman with a motherly bearing, sensible clothes and makeup and hair, shuffles papers. I run the numbers: nine people, not including me; seven women, two men; five are white, three Latino, one black. Their ages run from twenty to sixty-five or so. Judging solely by appearance, especially clothes and shoes, the one constant here is that everyone is working-class, which makes sense, because so are a disproportionate number of the murder victims in America. The survivors fidget, look tired and bloodless in this bad light, make eye contact and hold it for uncomfortable amounts of time. Their pain is obvious and unguarded; if I saw these people in the supermarket, I’d know they’d lost someone. They’re greenhorns: they haven’t learned to hide it yet.