Son of a Gun (6 page)

I pretended that I hadn’t heard him and changed the subject. I asked what he was reading. I don’t remember what he said—maybe Melville—but it worked. We started talking books and we relaxed. The danger dissipated. Soon, over his shoulder, I saw my mother emerge from the darkness into the light of the fire. Another moment I come back to: I can still see her there, returning, her eyes rising to meet mine, the tiny smile, the shadows flickering across her face as she approached, reaching out a hand. I was so relieved to see her, as if she had been gone a long time. Her hand settled on Ray’s shoulder and squeezed. He looked at me, and in the dim light I thought I saw a smile play across his mouth. Maybe he thought that he had won.

Josh and I never had our talk with Mom. From Gabaldon she and Ray left again, back onto the road, and we went home. We didn’t see Mom and Ray again for months, but the postcards they sent told us where they’d been: Springerville, Arizona; Corona, New Mexico; Corpus Christi, Texas; Memphis; Oklahoma City; Paducah, Kentucky, which the postcard says is “halfway between Possum Trot and Monkey’s Eyebrow”; Rapid City, South Dakota.

Sometime in those next few months she sent me a letter postmarked from Saint Louis and return addressed to a national park in Missouri. Four sheets of paper from a yellow legal pad, both sides covered in her looping scrawl, and except for brief notes on postcards, they’re just about the only words
she ever wrote to me. Before she met Ray, we never stayed apart long enough to need the mail.

She describes where she’s writing from, their campsite in the Mark Twain National Forest near Bourbon, Missouri. She’s sitting by a fire, writing in the light from a Coleman lantern and listening to country music on the radio. She says she’s happy.
We have hay for the horses food for us & our dogs and a pen and paper to write to my darling—the basics in life and honestly—Justin—I couldn’t be happier
. But after recounting their recent horseback adventures and telling me that their next stop is Kankakee, Illinois, she changes tack midparagraph, and suddenly she doesn’t seem so content. She claims that the reason she’s living primitively, without electricity or running water, is so that I can have tuition; she says she’s sacrificing.

And part of that is true: she helped me pay for school, and if she hadn’t, it would have been hard for me to afford. The army sent her a check every month for a partial disability—she’d broken her wrist on a parachute jump gone awry—and she gave that money to me. Between that, financial aid, and the money I made working at the campus newspaper, I scraped by. But it’s also true that nobody asked her and Ray to quit their jobs and traipse around the country aimlessly in what amounted to an early and reckless retirement. If they had chosen to live more normal lives instead, like the people they claimed to pity—with a steady job and a home address—then they would have had all those luxuries, like electricity and
running water. She’d helped my brother pay for college, too, and she’d gotten by just fine. No matter what she chose to believe, she wasn’t homeless because of me.

It’s also true that my mother spent most of her life sacrificing for us: the C-sections, the long hours at work, staying in Tombstone so we could finish high school there, the money for college. My whole life, I watched her dreams die or be postponed—she wanted a third child, she wanted to see Europe—and I promised myself that one day I’d take care of her.

But she also loved to play the martyr. Whenever I got in trouble at school, I’d hear it:
I gave my whole life for you, and this is how you repay me?
In one breath she would say we didn’t owe her anything, and in the next she’d list everything she’d suffered so that we could have a better life. Most of the marks on her ledger were true, but she also tried to pin her failed relationships on us; once or twice she even tried to claim that we were the reason she stayed through the abuse, as if we were the ones who wanted whatever sort of family we had with those men. There had to be someone to blame, and it was never her.

By the time she wrote that letter, she didn’t have to sacrifice anymore. Josh and I were adults, living on our own. She could have finally lived for herself, done all those things she’d always talked about at the dinner table while she picked at her food and stared out the window: joining the Peace Corps, moving closer to the ocean. She was barely forty and she had some money saved and she was free; she could have done whatever she wanted. But she’d been sacrificing for so long that she didn’t know how to live for herself, and so she gave up everything for yet another man. I couldn’t understand then how she must have felt: alone and abandoned, as if nobody needed her. And there was Ray, a man adrift, a project. She played the martyr until she became one.

A few hours after we left the crime scene, my dad flew into Tucson, and I picked him up at the curb outside baggage claim, where he stood smoking a cigarette and talking to a stranger, gesturing at the saguaros planted there for tourists. Dad liked to make small talk; it was the only kind he was good at. I pulled over and honked but he just stared—he didn’t know what vehicle I drove—so I got out of the truck and gave him a hug and loaded his bag in the back. I hadn’t seen him in about a year but he looked the same as I remembered, nothing like me: a jutting chin, blue eyes a bit too close together. He blinks a lot, always looks like somebody’s just taken his picture with a flash. He’d just turned forty-four, and I’d forgotten to send him a card.

We drove the streets of South Tucson in silence. When a family friend from Tombstone called my cell phone, I was so grateful for the distraction that I answered and listened for the umpteenth time in the last few days to condolences. It was a
friend’s father, a man I hadn’t seen or talked to in years, and listening to his desperately sincere offers of help only made me angrier at my real father sitting across the cab from me, who had asked if I wanted him to come rather than just showing up, and then arrived too late to do much good. I knew I shouldn’t blame him—at least he was making an effort—but I blamed him anyway. It was one thing my father was always good for: whenever something went wrong in my life, I could blame it on him.

We stopped at our house on the way to the hotel so Dad could see Josh. Some of our friends were over, so we all went out on the back porch and sat around cracking jokes and telling stories and avoiding the subject of my mother. Surrounded by friends and my brother and my dad, all of us sitting on mismatched lawn furniture and rusty weight benches and coolers turned upside down, drinking and bullshitting on the back porch late into the night, I was surprised by how easily I forgot what I’d seen earlier that day. The next day was Sunday, so there was nothing to do but rest, and that night felt almost like a holiday, almost like a party.

Hours passed. Somebody took Dad to his hotel, and our friends came and went. Soon there was only one beer left, and it was too late to buy more.

“If anybody takes that beer,” my brother said, “there’s going to be another murder.”

Josh put his hand to his face after he said it and looked down at his feet. The circle went quiet and our friends exchanged glances. I found myself laughing out of sheer relief: if we could find a way to joke about Mom’s death, maybe we would survive it.

Soon it was just Joe and me at a table full of bottles, passing a quart of tequila and smoking cigarettes. When the sky began to fill with light, Joe stood up and said he was going to bed. I
told him I might stay out awhile longer; I was as tired as I’d ever been, but I didn’t want to go to sleep because I was afraid of nightmares. I didn’t want to see the inside of that trailer again.

Joe took a step toward the sliding glass door that led to the house, then paused and turned to me. His eyes were glassy from the liquor and bloodshot from lack of sleep. He’d been with us through everything. I knew he didn’t want to leave me alone out there. He said that if I needed him, he was right down the hall. He looked up at the sky and shook his head. “It was a hell of a day. You should try to get some sleep.”

I agreed. We walked inside, and he gave me a hug and went into his room. I went to mine and wound up where I’d been every night since she died: at my computer, too tired to focus, trying to think of what to write about what I’d seen that day, where to begin. I’d slept two hours in the past two days. My thoughts were so cloudy that I believed the worst was over:

I’ve done the hardest thing I’ll ever have to do
.

The next day Josh and I were sitting on our front porch watching cars drive by when our father walked up the driveway wearing sneakers, denim shorts, and a polo shirt with the logo of the company he worked for. He stopped on the step and stood in the shade with his hands on his hips. We were supposed to meet him and our grandfather at the hotel where they were staying in an hour.

“Did you just walk here?” Josh asked.

Dad nodded.

“That’s like four miles,” I said.

“I felt like taking a walk.”

“It’s a hundred degrees.”

“It’s not so bad,” he said. His face was pink and sweaty as he smiled. “It’s a dry heat.”

Dad sat on the edge of the porch with his feet dangling in the row of dead plants our landlord had asked us to water. I thought about offering him my chair but didn’t. A car passed in the street, the glare off its windshield blinding.

“Do you think you’re safe here?” Dad asked.

It seemed like a stupid question: if any of us could have predicted what Ray would do, my mother would have been alive. Besides, we weren’t going anywhere, and we all knew it. Ray would come and find us or he wouldn’t. There was no point in talking.

“We don’t even know if it was Ray,” I said.

Josh drummed his fingers on the windowsill. “Who else would it be?”

“It could have been anybody,” I said, although I knew he was right.

“You knew him best,” Dad said.

Did I? I thought I had.

“It was him,” Josh said. “It had to be him.”

I didn’t reply. It had been almost four days. Ray was still missing, and so was the truck. A helicopter search of the area hadn’t found any sign.

Dad slapped his thighs. He was working up some wisdom. “I guess you never know what somebody’s capable of.”

The blinds in Grandpop’s hotel room were drawn, letting in just enough light for us to see one another slouching on the twin beds, making desultory gestures. We were supposed to be discussing our plans for the next day, but nobody wanted to take the lead, and suggestions for action went ignored, silenced
by the drone of the air conditioner. Josh and I were sick of talking. Dad didn’t know what to say. And Grandpop was under so much stress that he kept confusing my mother’s death with his second wife’s less than a year before; he’d say his wife’s name when he meant his daughter, conflating them into one long process of grief. The room wasn’t helping—dim and cool and sealed off from the bright hot world outside, it felt as if we were sitting in a coffin—but none of us wanted to move. I didn’t see how we were going to complete all these tasks when none of us could get up to turn on a light.

Despite all the things we could have worried about—the murderer at large, our own fragile states of exhaustion and stress, the unfathomable future—the most immediate problem was money. My mother’s life insurance company was refusing to pay because her murder was unsolved, and we needed a lawyer, but we couldn’t pay a lawyer without the life insurance money. We also couldn’t pay for her cremation or funeral. Josh was a bartender and I worked part-time at the college newspaper for minimum wage; my primary source of income was Mom’s monthly VA disability check, which would expire now that she was dead. Without that money, I couldn’t make rent or pay my tuition. Grandpop lived on a fixed income. And even though Dad had already promised to send us a check when he got back to New Hampshire, we knew better. Dad’s checks were always in the mail.

Our mother’s will only made it worse. She had written it before she blew all her money on the Adventure: it was long and profligate, doling out more than a hundred thousand dollars among Josh and me, her mother, her brother Tom, and his kids. But as we were slowly learning with each phone call, whatever money she’d once had was gone: her bank accounts were nearly empty, she was carrying mountains of debt on her
credit cards, and the only possessions she had to her name were a missing pickup truck and the land where she died.

Somebody suggested splitting up into teams: Grandpop with Josh, my dad with me. We could divide the duties.

I said I didn’t like the idea.

“Fine,” Josh said. “We’ll take care of it. You don’t have to do anything yourself.”

He was probably being merciful, but that’s not how I took it. “Fuck you.”

“Take it easy,” Dad said.

“No. That’s bullshit.” I jabbed my finger toward Josh. “I’m all you have left. Remember that.”