Son of a Gun (3 page)

I had recently graduated from Tombstone High School and was living with Mom in a trailer outside of town. Josh had left for college a few years earlier, and she hadn’t been dating anyone for a while before Ray, so I was used to being the man of the house. I worked as a line cook at a tourist steakhouse and was failing a couple of classes at the junior college in Sierra Vista. After work I’d drive my pickup truck out to the desert
and drink cheap beer by the case with my friends from high school while we hatched elaborate plans for escape. Broke, single, getting fat, drunk, seventeen: I was white trash. I’d stop by my mother’s restaurant to get free tacos. Now Ray was always there. Mom had mentioned him, but I didn’t take it seriously until I saw the way his eyes followed her, the nervous gestures she made with her hands when she talked to him, the big smile every time he walked in the door. I’d seen it happen enough; I’d had three stepdads by then, and dealt with another dozen of her boyfriends at one time or another. I knew what was coming. But that didn’t mean I had to like it.

Soon Ray started coming to the restaurant alone. She’d linger at his table, ignoring other customers, claiming she was on break. Mom didn’t introduce us, and I wasn’t about to make the effort. They’d talk in low voices, laughing too much, and I’d sit at another table, scarfing pollo asado, wondering how long this one would last.

At home I made cracks about Mom’s bodyguard and asked if the restaurant had started serving doughnuts. She’d blush and change the subject. After a few weeks, she ambushed me one afternoon on the restaurant’s patio, said she wanted me to meet someone, and walked me over to his table, where he sat reclining in the plastic chair with one arm resting on top of his holster, the other hand hooked in his belt. He was about ten years younger than my mother, in his early thirties. Judging by the cowboy hat on his knee and the shiny badge and the bushy mustache, I could tell he was trying to look like his famous predecessor, Wyatt Earp, whose face was plastered all over every gift shop in town. It wasn’t working. Wyatt was tall and imposing, with a full head of hair and piercing eyes; Ray was runty and balding and had a bland, boyish face. We shook hands and I sat down. Mom did most of the talking. “Ray used to be a cop in Huachuca City,” she said, like that was an
accomplishment. When I didn’t respond, she said, “Justin has friends there.”

I did have friends there, potheads and delinquents who drag-raced and built homemade firearms. He’d probably arrested some of them.

“I like Tombstone better,” Ray said.

“Me, too, I guess.”

There was an awkward silence, then he put his hand on her knee. I said I had to go, kissed my mother on the cheek, told Ray I’d see him around. He said it was nice to meet me, but he was looking at her when he said it.

A few days later I came home from work and found him sitting at our dinner table. Mom asked if I was hungry. I wasn’t hungry enough to sit there and watch them feed each other ice cream, so I went to my room. Later I heard their footsteps down the hall, the bass of his voice, her bedroom door closing.

My mother always had shitty taste in men. My father, who likes to point out that he was born in the same hospital as the lead singer of Grand Funk Railroad, is every bit the American man, the second son of an autoworker who joined the army at seventeen and got married and had two kids and got discharged and got divorced and didn’t pay his child support. Now he’s remarried, has two stepkids and two real kids he doesn’t see enough, wishes things were different but doesn’t do much about it, owns a ranch house at the edge of a midsized city with a truck and an old Corvette and a fishing boat in the garage, a lot of guns in a case in the basement, and spends most of his time working a blue-collar job, watching television, and drinking the nights away. He’s my father by name and blood, but not by role: he left when I was two.

The next man my mother married was a car salesman in
North Carolina. Their marriage lasted only a couple of years, and I hardly remember him. After that she dated another army man, the jumpmaster of her airborne unit, and we all moved out to Arizona and they got engaged, but it fell apart when she met her third husband, a rich tourist visiting Tombstone whom she married for six months.

Then there was her fourth husband, Max, the only one I would really call a stepdad, because I hated him with all my heart, and he wished I didn’t exist. Max was a burly red-faced Canadian, an alpha-male blowhard, full of threats and bluster and lies. He was the first man I ever saw abuse her, and then bring her back again and again by crying and pleading and claiming a chemical imbalance in his brain, until I thought she’d never leave him. When she finally did, I hoped she had wised up.

Before she met Ray, it seemed like Mom’s taste in men was improving. She stopped getting married for a few years between Max and Ray, and she dated a pediatrician for a while, a pompous loudmouth, but he was rich and he didn’t beat her. Then she dated another army man, an officer, who taught me how to drive a stick shift, because my mother didn’t have the patience—every time she tried, we wound up stalled at a stop sign, screaming at each other. The officer would take me out on long drives in his Kia, which was so new it still had that smell, and as I ground the gears and spun the tires, he’d talk about my mother, how she didn’t love him like he loved her, and I would listen, and feel bad, and sometimes give advice. But I never told him the one thing I had begun to fear was true: that if he wanted her to love him, he would have to hurt her. I came home from school one day and he was gone, the only trace of him a note left on my dresser that said:
Thank you for being my friend, Justin. Take care of Debbie
. Later she let it slip that he’d been married the whole time.

After that she dated Dave, the father of a friend of mine. Dave’s son was also named Justin, and we were classmates in school. We moved into Dave’s six-bedroom house on a hill outside of town, with an indoor pool and a hot tub and a TV that was five feet across, and it was awkward for a while, but soon I began to like Dave. Every day at breakfast, we’d exchange good mornings and he’d crack a couple of jokes, and then I wouldn’t see him again until the next day. He never asked me about her exes, didn’t try to threaten me or buy me off. For the first time in my life, I wanted her to get married. I was a senior in high school, almost on my own, and I hoped she’d find some stability before I left. They had their disagreements, shouting matches that spilled from their bedroom through the house and into the garage, where he’d kick a dent in her car and she’d peel off down the driveway, clipping the gatepost with her bumper, yelling out the window that I should pack my bags. But he always apologized, and he never hit her. Their relationship ended like hers always did, offstage, the decision already made by the time she told me we were moving out.

There were a few others somewhere along the way, men who hung around for weeks or months and then disappeared, men I never bothered to acknowledge, men whose names I don’t remember. So when she introduced me to this drawling, dull-eyed cop with eagles tattooed on his forearms, I figured she’d get sick of him soon enough. The first time Ray stayed the night, I didn’t speak to her for days. When she brought him home again anyway, I started to worry.

One morning there was a knock at my bedroom door. I opened it and saw Ray. “Got a minute?” he asked. By the way he looked me in the eye, I knew he’d been rehearsing. I glanced
around my room for an excuse but couldn’t find one, so I followed him out into the living room. He sat at one end of the long black sectional, a yard sale find of Mom’s, which ran along the wall beneath a framed motivational poster of a horse rearing in front of a red sunset. A black rug with pink and teal triangles covered the carpet under a glass coffee table. I hated that room: by then the books and magazines I bought with my restaurant paychecks had suggested to me a world beyond mine, and I was starting to understand what white trash meant, that it meant us.

He sat at one end of the couch. I sat at the other and waited for him to begin. I’d been hoping we could skip this—her last few boyfriends hadn’t bothered having one of these talks, and it worked better that way. Did he know how many man-to-mans I’d had, how many promises I’d heard? Would he start with how much he loved her? How he was different from the others? At least I was too old for the new-dad bit.

“I know you’re mad,” Ray said.

“You’re right.”

“I’d be mad, too.”

I waited to see where he was heading. At least he wasn’t playing the tough guy, not like some others had, with the line about how they were going to be there whether I liked it or not, so I’d better get used to it.

“I know how you feel. I’ve been in your shoes,” he said. He told me about his family, that his parents had broken up when he was a kid, and when his mother brought a new man around, Ray had hated him at first. But that man had sat him down, just like this, and he’d said he wasn’t going to hurt his mother, that she was safe with him. Ray decided to give him a chance, and sure enough, he realized he could learn a lot from the man who became his stepdad. Now he thought of him almost
as a father. Ray finished the story and sat there looking satisfied, as if our chat were going just how he’d expected.

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. You guys just met.”

“That’s true,” he said. “But I like her, and she likes me.”

“I’ve heard this before.”

He said he knew there’d been other men, but he didn’t care. He was no angel. And he liked the fact that Mom cared so much about her sons, that we were so close. “I’m not going to take her away from you,” he said. We didn’t have to be friends, but he hoped I’d give him a chance. And if I ever needed to talk, about the kind of things you can’t mention to your mom, girls or drugs or trouble—things I’d always talked to my mother about—I could talk to him.

My instinct was to make a wiseass crack, walk away, and wait for her to leave him. But this was something new. He was treating me like a man, and that reminded me that I almost was: in a few months, I’d be eighteen, and even though I had no real plans, we both knew I’d be gone soon enough. He didn’t have to bother with me. I’d been waiting him out; he could have done the same, and he would have won.

And I thought my mother needed someone. She’d had a hard time when my brother left for college, worried constantly, called too much. When I left, it would be even worse, because she’d be all alone, a fortysomething woman four times divorced managing a Mexican restaurant in Tombstone, living in a trailer. She’d seen worse and come through it; when she was twenty-five, my father left her with two young boys, no money, and a motorcycle, and she still managed to raise us, feed us, give us love. But I was trying to think like a man. I thought she needed someone to take care of her now, and as he sat there on the couch with his hands folded in his lap, looking me in the eye, I thought maybe Ray would do.

I started talking to Ray when he came around our place, and sitting with him at the restaurant. We talked about the things he knew: motorcycles, guns, the military. I learned a little bit about him. He’d been a marine, and had driven a truck in Desert Storm, but after the war he decided not to reenlist, became a cop instead. He started in Huachuca City and stayed for a few years, but got tired of the pay, so he moved to Tombstone, where he was getting tired of his boss. There were holes in his history, and he mentioned an ex-wife and kids whom he obviously didn’t want to talk about. I could understand that; our family knew how to handle past lives.

When he moved in a few months later, I didn’t make a scene. Ray didn’t seem so bad anymore; in fact, I was starting to like him. He took over some of the tasks I hated most, feeding my mother’s two horses, unloading hay bales, shoveling horseshit. He didn’t say anything when I came home drunk, and sometimes when Mom wasn’t there, we’d go out into the carport and he’d smoke his pipe and I’d smoke the cigarettes my mother threw away whenever she found them in my pockets. Ray knew a little bit about computers, and had brought an old one with him to our house, which he showed me how to use. When he discovered the sort of sites I’d been visiting, he didn’t say a word, just cracked a crooked smile and showed me how to clear the history. He even tried to teach me how to play the guitar, but it was hopeless: I have fat fingers and a tin ear, and he only knew a few chords. Ray also brought his dog with him, Chance, a Rottweiler-chow mix. I felt the same way about the dog as I did about his owner: he seemed mellow but protective, and while we would probably never quite be friends, he was good to have around.

By the time I moved out, Ray and I got along fine. The day
I left, we stood out in the driveway, me and Mom and him, just past the shade of the carport awning, by the pickup truck she’d bought me when I turned sixteen, now loaded down with everything I owned worth taking, its springs sagging to the stops. It was around noon, midsummer, bright but not that hot at Tombstone’s elevation, almost a mile high, the air clear, the city sharp and gleaming in the distance, the cypresses tall and green, tin rooftops glinting in the sun like shards of glass. The hills between our place and town were covered in scrub brush and barbed wire and trailers sitting crookedly in bulldozed lots, front yards full of rusting cars. At the edge of our lot the horses nipped each other in the corrals, and the wind blew the smell of horseshit up to us. I knew this place, loved it, and wasn’t sure I wanted to leave, but knew I had to. Everybody in town had been telling me that my whole life, even Mom, though she’d stopped saying it as this day got closer.