Son of a Gun (27 page)

The report includes a photocopy of Ray’s driver’s license. The picture copied poorly: half his smiling face is dark, the rest
white and ghastly. I remembered wrong: his eyes were blue, not brown. He was five-eight, a hundred and sixty-five pounds, thirty-five at the time of his death.

It also includes a copy of the suicide note. It’s hard to read. His handwriting is sloppy and strangely angled, a few mistakes scribbled over. The note is spattered with black dots of various sizes, blood and brain matter. As near as I can tell, it says:

The first time I read it, I thought: what a crock of shit. He doesn’t admit what he did, doesn’t use any of the words:
murder, wife, mother
. He doesn’t even say her name. Instead, he says he’s sorry. On the second read I noticed the details. The inflated diction:
pessimistic, fatalistic, expedited;
I guess he had been reading. The wire spine of the notebook is on the right; he began the note on the back of a page. What was on the front, the rough draft?

And the signature: Duane R. Hudson. Duane. I never heard him called it. To me he was Ray. But in the last words he ever wrote, he didn’t think enough of that name to spell it out—it’s just an initial, just a crooked R. Did he always go by Ray, or
was he once Duane, in some previous life? Did he become Duane when he became a murderer? When he thought of himself, what name did he use?

Past the ranger station there’s an empty parking lot and a ring of deserted campsites. Halfway down the hill to the boat launch, I stop at the bathrooms, where a scratched Plexiglas display holds a map of Caballo Lake and a bunch of warnings about drowning and snakes. The report says only that Ray was found in a remote area of the park, but this is a minor state park in rural New Mexico: it’s all remote area.

The day is bright and hot, the sky vast and blue and clear save for a rim of clouds on the north horizon. A minute out of the car, sweat rolls down my ribs, and the sun off the water hurts my eyes even through sunglasses. The smells of shit and chemicals waft from the bathrooms. Farther down the hill, a half-dozen empty boat trailers lie nosedown in a line by the launch. From there a faint road turns off into a flat stretch of desert that overlooks the shore, which is marked on the map as primitive campgrounds. I get back in the car, crank the air-conditioning, and head that way.

The road is rutted dirt, bordered by cacti. It crosses shallow washes and winds through stands of brush. Except for a cinder-block bathroom, this part of the park is empty desert, dirt roads that cross and circle back, leading nowhere.

I stop in a clearing and pull the report out of my bag. It contains forty-eight grainy images—copies of copies, tawdry and unreal. The first few photos show the truck from a distance, partially hidden by a mass of black branches and a web of shadows. It’s impossible to tell where it was, which stand of mesquite, which clearing along which of these roads, if it was even in this part of the park. I flip through the pages, looking
for clues. The camera moves closer, the truck emerging, that familiar Ford, the chrome toolbox in the bed, the empty water tank that in the picture is just a plash of washed-out white. A chrome Jesus fish on the tailgate above an Arizona license plate—the old white-on-maroon—in a chrome plate holder that says:
The More Men I Meet … the More I Like My Horse
.

The next picture, the front of the truck, its rectangular grille, the orange running lights on top of the cab, brings back a night one summer just before I left home. A monsoon storm split the sky with lightning and flooded the washes around our trailer. I was in a hurry, just off work, driving home to shower before I went to meet my girlfriend, and I got stuck trying to cross a gully where the water was deeper than it looked. My truck sank to its axle in the sand. The water was above the exhaust pipe and rising. If I didn’t get it out soon, the truck would be swamped, maybe even swept away, wind up battered and waterlogged a quarter mile downstream, like the cars immigrants abandoned in washes. I stood in the pouring rain, drenched, starting to panic, and saw our trailer lights flickering in the distance behind sheets of rain. I ran, hoping somebody was home.

I crashed through the door dripping water and tracking mud, startling my mother, who wouldn’t listen to what I was saying, just kept asking if I was all right. Ray understood; he went and got his keys, and we climbed into the Ford. Those big headlights fell on the front end of my truck rising from the gully like the prow of a foundering ship. Ray didn’t ask why I’d tried to cross it, didn’t scold me or complain about the rain soaking his shirt and dripping from the brim of his hat. He just grabbed a chain out of the toolbox and handed me one end, said to make sure to hook it to the frame, not the bumper, got back in the Ford and pulled me out. Five minutes later we were back home, the trucks in the driveway and us warm and
dry inside, sitting at the dinner table, drinking tea, watching the flat plain of desert outside flood, cracking jokes about my driving. Was that the life of falsehoods and lies he mentioned in his note?

Agent Bishop took the notebook into evidence, along with the license and Ray’s wedding ring. Ray had left the ring atop the note in a gesture he must have thought profound, but it only makes me wonder why he waited three months to take it off. Bishop unlocked and opened the truck’s rear door. The body was male, decomposed, stretched out on the seat, head hanging backward and to the left. A handgun lay on the floorboard near the left hand, a Browning with a round in the chamber and eight in the clip. Bishop noted a strong putrefying odor and maggots in varying stages of development on and around the body. He took samples to help determine a time of death.

The medical investigators arrived, pronounced the man dead, and removed his body from the truck, laying it on a blanket on the ground. They located an entry wound in the left temple and an exit wound in the right. A pair of holes in the truck’s rear seat showed where the bullet had passed through, but Bishop couldn’t locate the slug itself, only the spent casing, which he placed into evidence along with the gun and live ammunition. Bishop photographed the body before the medical investigators took it away.

The first picture of Ray shows only the outline of his boots in the darkened cab of the truck; he died with them on. The next photo shows Ray’s body lying in shadow, the sun slanting through the open door of the truck and onto the top of his bald head. Bishop is a worthy photographer: he withholds what I want to see, keeps me waiting, creates suspense. The
next few photos show the gun, resting on a piece of paper on the ground: a Browning Fabrique Nationale Model 1922 in .32 caliber, an awkward-looking automatic manufactured in Belgium, a slight variant of the gun that killed Archduke Ferdinand. It was developed for the Yugoslav army after World War I and used throughout eastern Europe for most of the twentieth century. Hundreds of thousands of 1922s exist, but the serial number listed in the report indicates, according to various online resources, that Ray’s pistol was manufactured in 1941, under occupation, for the Nazis. I wonder if he knew that.

I turn the page again and there he is, lying on a blanket in the dirt, badly decomposed and yet still somehow recognizable. Ray’s body is shrunken, his head pressed against his left shoulder, hands hanging gnarled near his waist. It looks as if he died in pain, and I hope he did, but his twisted body is probably an effect of weeks spent decomposing in the desert.

The next picture shows his face, but between the decay and the bad copy, I can only make out his right eye socket and cheek, a mess of matted hair and beard, a glimpse of teeth; the rest is hidden by a sinewy darkness. He looks almost penitent, but that’s probably wishful thinking. A face like that can’t convey anything but regret.

Agent Bishop saved his masterpiece for late in the sequence: roll three, photograph six:
close-up of left hand of Duane Hudson
. The others are evidence, but this is art. The shot shows Ray’s left hand, swollen knuckles and cracked skin, nails long and clawlike because the beds around them have dried and receded. Halfway closed, his hand is as it was when he died, letting go of something it once held. The framing tells the story: his hand slightly right of center, his belt buckle to the left, a swarm of maggots gathered on the front of his pants at the bottom
edge. In the upper right corner, past the white edge of the blanket, a triangle of dust. And in the middle, drawing my eye, his trigger finger, still human, still half bent.

I once asked Ray if he’d ever shot anybody. It was soon after I met him, before he moved in. We’d just finished lunch at my mother’s restaurant, the tablecloth between us strewn with tomato chunks and bits of tortilla, and he was about to go back to work. I glanced at the gun holstered on his hip. It didn’t bother me—half the men in Tombstone wore guns, and at least he didn’t have the whole costume, ten-gallon hat and duster, chaps and spurs, shell belts, all that shit. But when a person wears a gun, it works its way into conversations.

“No,” he said. “I’ve come close.”

“In the war?”

He took a drink of tea and wiped his mouth with a napkin. “No, I didn’t see any combat, just hauled stuff around. It wasn’t much of a war.”

He said it had happened when he was a cop in Huachuca City. He got a call for a domestic disturbance out in Whetstone. It wasn’t his jurisdiction, but he went anyway, because the county sheriffs would have taken hours to respond, if they even bothered. In the middle of telling the story, Ray picked up his pipe and began to load it with tobacco from a bag. He said he’d responded to the scene, a trailer at the end of a dirt road, and a man came walking out onto the steps.

Ray leaned toward me.

“He’s got a baseball bat in his hands, and he looks crazy, like he’s on meth.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. Bad news.” He held a disposable lighter to the bowl
of his pipe and flicked it a few times before it lit. Later I would suggest that we get him a torch lighter for Christmas. He continued his story, puffing smoke.

“I tell him to drop the bat. He tells me to get the fuck off his property. I hear a woman yelling inside.” Ray was nailing all the pauses, drawing it out. I could tell he’d told this story before.

“I tell him again. He doesn’t drop it. So I draw my sidearm.” Ray made a gun with his fingers and pointed it at me. I looked at the real one on his hip.

“Can you shoot somebody in that situation?”

“If I thought I was in danger.”

“But would you?”

“I don’t know,” Ray said. “He dropped the bat.”

He went on to tell me that he’d put the man in cuffs, taken him to the station, saved the woman. Mom came by to check on us and listened to the happy ending. When Ray was done, he got up from the table, kissed her goodbye, nodded to me, and went back to protecting and serving. Mom lingered with me at the table, listening to the house mariachi tune his guitar.

Ray’s story stuck with me. I wondered what had happened when the man got out of jail. Maybe he’d gone back and pleaded for forgiveness and cried crocodile tears, promising it would never happen again, like Max used to. Or, if he was a different kind of man, he came home and picked up the bat and finished what he’d started. Either way, I imagined the woman was still there, waiting, because that’s the way it always goes.

Ray’s body went to Albuquerque for identification. A tow truck came and took the Ford away. Bishop left the scene and returned to his office in T or C, where he called the Cochise
County Sheriff’s Office and spoke to Freeney. He asked for my mother’s contact information, so he could tell her that he’d found her husband. Freeney filled him in.

Freeney told Bishop a slightly different story from the one he’d told me. He said Ray never had a warrant out for his arrest because there wasn’t enough evidence—no witnesses, no murder weapon—and he said that Ray had a history of domestic violence with his former wife.

Freeney asked him about the murder weapon, the Beretta, if he’d found it in the truck. Bishop said he’d look again in the morning.

First thing the next day, Bishop talked to Ray’s ex-wife, who helped positively identify the body by describing his tattoos. She said that after he left Arizona, Ray had crossed the Canadian border and may have stopped in Montana. Either Bishop didn’t ask how she knew that, or he didn’t record her answer.

Bishop went to the towing company to search the truck, and collected forty-nine photographs, various documents, three pistol holsters, a box of .32 ammunition, a cell phone, a pink 35 mm camera, and four road atlases, but no gun. He sent the evidence to Freeney. For some unfathomable reason, all of it was destroyed except for the pink camera. Only when I read the report did I realize that Ray had their cell phone the whole time he was on the run. Why didn’t I think to call it? What would he have said? What would I have said?

Two days later, Bishop talked to the medical investigators. They’d received Ray’s fingerprints from the Arizona Department of Public Safety, which had them on file from his time as a police officer. The prints matched. The remains were positively identified as Duane Raymont Hudson.

My mother had left me the truck in her will. She’d written that I should sell it to pay for college, since I wouldn’t be getting her VA checks once she died. After Ray’s body was found, I got the towing company’s phone number and called; I didn’t particularly want the truck, but I wasn’t going to let Ray take that, too. The man who answered was gruff and annoyed. He said I’d have to prove ownership. I said I could. He said, with far too much satisfaction in his tone, that there would be storage fees.