Son of a Gun (26 page)

As we’re leaving, I spot a plaque tucked away in a corner of the lot, where it’s easy to miss. It’s a memorial to the McLaury brothers, Frank and Tom, who fell within sight of each other on Fremont Street, both gutshot and dying. The plaque was donated by their descendants. “One owes respect to the living,” it says. “But to the dead, one owes nothing but the truth.”

Against my better judgment, I take Laura to Madame Mustache, the gift shop my mother owned. We wander through the displays, shot glasses and coffee mugs and Christmas ornaments, refrigerator magnets and T-shirts and toy guns, all sitting on shelves my mother built by hand. The old-time photo booth in back is open. I suggest that we get our picture taken. I’m joking, but Laura agrees. What the hell.

A reedy, balding man with a thin mustache emerges from the back room and fits us with costumes. I choose Morgan Earp, and Laura is a dance-hall girl, although all the costumes look pretty much the same, gunfighters and whores. The photographer’s fingers are delicate and pale, dirty-nailed and reeking of smoke, and they tremble as he buttons my vest. He looks a lot like Fredo from the Godfather movies, and acts the part, talks a lot and seems nervous, as if he’s waiting for some disaster. He hands me a nickel-plated replica revolver and tells me how to pose.

When we’re done, he rings us up and I realize that I don’t have enough cash to pay for the pictures. Laura doesn’t have any either, so I hand him my credit card. After he swipes it, he pinches its edge and peers at the name.

“Are you related to the St. Germains here?”

“She was my mother.”

He looks at me as if he’s seeing me for the first time. His eyes are bloodshot and sad. “And Cool Breeze?”

“His name’s Tom. He was my uncle.”

He reaches across the counter to shake my hand. His is cold and bony.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“Thanks.”

The receipt is printing. Laura feigns interest in a rack of
feathered boas. The man tells me his name and says he used to work with my mother at one of her jobs. He says how good of a boss she was, how well she treated her employees. I don’t know about that; she made me work at this store when I was in middle school, paid me minimum wage, scheduled me for weekend mornings. The photo man continues. “And then she met”—his fingers bend into quotes, and his lips curl into a sneer—“that
cop
.”

“Yep.” I sign the receipt.

“At first they seemed so happy. But then … well, he just lost it. It was sad.” This conversation is always the same: here comes the moral. “I guess you just never know.”

I grab the photos. “You take care.”

Five minutes later I’m speeding past the city limit sign.

We stop for dinner in Benson at a diner with a spinning display of pies and little jukeboxes on the tables. As we sit down, I remember that my mother always ordered the roast beef dinner here, and I wish we’d kept driving. We’re the only customers. When the silence gets to be too much, Laura says she’s sorry about what happened earlier.

“We didn’t have to go to Tombstone,” she says.

“Now you say that.”

“I didn’t know.…” When she’s upset, when she’s guilty, when she thinks she’s hurt someone, Laura’s voice goes low and hoarse, and it usually strikes a chord inside me. But not today.

“What did you expect?”

The waitress delivers our food and flees. We eat in silence and drive home. Opening the guesthouse door unleashes a blast of heat, and right away I want to escape, go find a bar with air-conditioning and sit alone among other people. Laura’s
probably thinking the same thing. We’ve been living like this for a week, sharing a hot and confined space with only each other for company, and already we’re restless and trapped, irritable, picking fights and having doubts.

My mother and Ray lived like this for two years.

We spend Laura’s last night in town making up and making plans. She’ll go back to San Francisco and find us an apartment, and in a few weeks, when this is over, I’ll join her. I imagine our first place together: bare floors, empty cabinets, a clean slate.

But later, as she sleeps beside me, I lie awake, watching the ceiling fan whirl, listening for suspicious sounds in the night, reaching down to touch the handle of the machete I found in the guesthouse closet so I know it’s still where I put it, under the bed, in arm’s reach. We can talk about the future all we want, other lives in other places, maybe marriage, maybe kids. But I can’t imagine the future when I’m surrounded by the past: police reports, videos and pictures, a box of my mother’s things. The desert. The Beast. The plaque for the victims at the O.K. Corral:
to the dead, one owes nothing but the truth
.

On my twenty-eighth birthday, a package from the Cochise County sheriff comes in the mail, a padded envelope that weighs a few pounds. I cut it open and dump the contents onto the coffee table: a stack of paper and a plastic bag with an orange “biohazard” sticker.

The bag contains two smaller bags. A paper sack, stapled shut and also labeled “biohazard,” holds only a pink camera with no film inside. The police might have taken the film as evidence, or it might have been empty when they found it. Either way, it does me no good.

The other bag is made of thick plastic and is also labeled “biohazard.” My mother’s name is misspelled in black marker across the top, next to a case number and a red
X
in a red circle, the significance of which isn’t clear. It contains jewelry the medical examiner took off of her body: a bracelet, a necklace, and a few rings. The bracelet is gold, engraved with a floral pattern and the word
Kepi
, her first name in Hawaiian. She had
it made in Maui when we were there on vacation. Her airborne ring is the only one I recognize, also gold, with wings around an open parachute and a diamond set above the canopy. I never saw her take it off. Two of the others, a matching set, must be the engagement and wedding rings Ray gave her. The necklace is braided and gold, and holds a silver cross still flecked with her dried blood.

I gave her a ring once. When I was a kid, my friends and I would fish between the cracks of the boardwalk along Allen Street, digging out coins with chewing gum stuck to the end of straws. One day I found a gold band with the word
love
on its face and a small diamond in the middle of the
o
. I gave it to her. I wonder where it is now, if she lost it, if I left it behind in the trailer.

The stack of paper is an inch thick, held together by a binder clip. It’s everything I asked for, all the sections that were missing from my copy of the police report on my mother’s death, as well as a copy of another police report, about the discovery of another body.

Caballo Lake sits in southwestern New Mexico, surrounded by national forest and the missile range where the atomic bomb debuted, a few miles downriver from Truth or Consequences. The state park facilities—campgrounds, a boat launch, cactus gardens, and a ranger station—are sandwiched into a strip of desert between the lake and I-25, overlooking the western shore. I arrive on a Sunday afternoon. I had never known exactly where Ray’s body was found until I read the report, and now I want to see the place where he died.

The park is nearly empty, just a handful of weekenders packing up and towing their boats back to Albuquerque and El Paso. The lake recedes ahead, jade green and calm, and the Caballo
Mountains rise abruptly from the far shore. Out on the water a few boats trail ribbons of froth, stragglers getting in one more lap around the lake, dragging skiers or wakeboarders or, if they’re anything like my family was, some sunburned kid in an inner tube. We used to take our leaky old ski boat to lakes like this one all over the Southwest—Patagonia, Powell, Mead, Havasu, Alamo—and on Sunday afternoons with the sun getting low and a long drive home ahead, I’d beg my mother to stay out just a little longer, and she would.

At the ranger station, I buy a day pass and decide not to ask where the body was found in 2001. The girl who sells me the pass is too young to have worked here that long, and even if she has, she might not know which body I mean. In the late nineties there was a rash of floaters in a reservoir a few miles north of here called Elephant Butte. Then a woman was spotted running down a nearby street wearing only a dog collar and a chain. Police followed her directions to a trailer park and found a torture chamber. The man who owned the place, David Parker Ray, called it his “toy box.” Investigators said he might have killed dozens of people. He pled guilty to some of the charges, said that he was sorry. He was sentenced to more than two hundred years in prison, but died of a heart attack less than a year later.

When I did an Internet search for David Parker Ray, wanting to see what he looked like, I found a picture of a New Mexico state policeman walking his accomplice out of a courtroom. I recognized the policeman’s name in the photo’s caption. A few months after it was taken, the same policeman, Agent Bishop, came to Caballo Lake to investigate a death.

After the gunfight, after Wyatt’s brothers were shot in revenge, and after the famed Vendetta ride in which he killed the three
men he thought responsible, warrants were issued for his arrest and President Arthur threatened to impose martial law on Cochise County. Wyatt fled to New Mexico. He stopped briefly in Silver City, then Albuquerque, then moved on to Colorado. He thought he would be pardoned for his crimes, and planned to go back to Tombstone eventually; he wasn’t, and he didn’t. He wound up, like many former Tombstoners, in San Francisco.

A few months after Wyatt left, one of his old enemies, a mysterious figure named Johnny Ringo, turned up dead at the base of a tree in eastern Arizona with a revolver in his hand and a hole in his head. It was ruled a suicide, and it probably was. But that didn’t stop writers from claiming decades later that Wyatt had snuck back across the border and murdered one last man.

After he killed my mother, when everyone was looking for him, Ray left Arizona, but nobody knows where he went. Freeney followed the few leads he had. He called Ray’s ex-wife, who put him in touch with relatives. Ray’s mother and stepfather lived in Florida and said they hadn’t talked to him in some time. His grandparents in Montana said it had been about a year. They couldn’t believe he’d done something like that.

His family claimed not to have seen him. He never had many friends as far as anyone could tell. He didn’t have much money, and he would have known his bank accounts and phone calls were being monitored. But he’d been traveling the country on and off for the last two years, living hand to mouth, finding remote places to camp. He’d been in the Marine Corps. He wasn’t very smart, but he was resourceful. He lasted almost three months.

On December 9, 2001, Agent Bishop of the New Mexico State Police got a call from his sergeant around noon: a ranger
in Caballo was reporting a body. He must have thought of David Parker Ray, his victims that were never found. But this wasn’t a floater, and it wasn’t a woman. The ranger had found a dead man in a truck.

Bishop responded to the scene. En route, dispatch told him they’d done a plate check. The vehicle was registered to Deborah St. Germain and Duane Raymont Hudson, of Tombstone. He arrived at the scene to find a red Ford pickup parked by a stand of mesquite and four other agents already there, standing in a clearing with the ranger. As Bishop approached and circled the truck, he noted the make and model and plate, the empty water tank in back, mud on the tires, the tinted windows open a couple of inches, the sunscreen blocking his view through the windshield, and the cell phone antenna jutting above the rear window, its cable disconnected. A toolbox in the truck bed was unlocked and held nothing of interest. In the dirt around the truck he saw no tire tracks that seemed related, no footprints other than those made by the rangers. He smelled a strong odor coming from inside the truck.

The left rear door was locked. Bishop peered through the window and saw a body on its back, partially covered by a sheet. He couldn’t tell the gender and he couldn’t see the face, only the arms: the right lay alongside the body, and the left hung down to the floorboard. On the center console between the front seats he saw an open spiral notebook with writing on the page, but couldn’t read the message. A driver’s license and a wedding band sat on top of the note. The keys were on the seat.