Son of a Gun (14 page)

Mom liked this poem enough to make a copy, and to leave
it in the Bible to be found in case she died; on the back she wrote a note:
I am forever your mother and my love is with you always
. She must have thought the poem would comfort me, but all I see when I read it is a series of saccharine clichés. Maybe if she had learned to recognize clichés, she would have seen that her fantasy of retreating from society to a remote place in the West to live a simpler life was itself a great American cliché, a doomed and foolish pipe dream. Or maybe all the books I’ve read have made me a snob.

A family register inside the Bible records births and weddings and deaths. The births are current—the last one listed is mine. But the marriage records stop at my mother’s first, and the list of deaths is hopelessly outdated.

I put it all back in the crate and we watch the Phillies lose. When the game is over, I say goodbye to my brother, load our mother’s things into my car, and leave for Tucson, where I’ve rented a guesthouse for the summer, and where I’m supposed to meet the man we moved to Arizona with.

I’m sitting in a Wendy’s in South Tucson eating a sandwich I can hardly taste, watching planes descend into the airport, when Brian calls. We were supposed to meet twenty minutes ago. I’ve been sitting here, having second thoughts, but I make up an excuse. We’ve been emailing back and forth and talking on the phone for the last few weeks, and I find myself lying to him a lot. I lied about what I do and where I live. He’s retired military and a midwesterner, so I didn’t want to deal with whatever he’d have pictured if I’d said I’m a writer and I live in San Francisco: pride parades, Communist rallies, Nancy Pelosi. Besides, an unaccountable instinct tells me that when this is over, I won’t want him to know where to find me.

I pull into the lot outside Tucson Electric Park, and I spot him standing where he said he’d be, by the ticket booths, in almost the exact spot where I’d camped overnight to buy World Series tickets a month after my mother’s death. He’s wearing a dark blue shirt with khakis and white running shoes,
an outfit he described to me on the phone, but I would have recognized him anyway. For a brief moment I consider stomping on the gas pedal, speeding back to the highway, going home. Instead I pull over and he gets in, says hi, shakes my hand, says it’s good to see me. His once-balding head is now completely shaved, and his mustache is now a Fu Manchu, but otherwise he looks about the same. He was older than my mother; she would have been fifty-two this summer, so he must be pushing sixty.

A light rain has just resumed. We talk about the weather as I find a place to park, then walk through the mist toward a white tent stretching across the far end of the parking lot. I ask why he wanted to meet me at the gem show. He doesn’t live in Tucson, and he’s not a jeweler; he’s a part-time magician. He’s also into some other business he mentioned on the phone, an opportunity he wanted to talk to me about.

“My business partner is a gemologist,” he says. “I’ll introduce you.”

We walk past a pod of outdoor toilets and through a set of tent flaps. Inside, the tent is busy, at least a hundred people, and most of them seem to be selling something. The air is moist and thick, the light antiseptic. We step across a giant puddle and pass a stall displaying geodes cut in half. The place looks like a field hospital in some geologic war. Brian says the roof has been leaking all day, looks up at the peaked fabric and scowls. “Some tent,” he says.

He leads me on a crooked path between racks of beads and turquoise jewelry. The signs above the booths follow no obvious format. Some have a business name, location, and logo—lots of animals and Native or New Age iconography, White Horse Silver from Oklahoma City, Buffalo Spirit from Santa Fe, that sort of thing—but others simply advertise what they sell, Lucite Bracelets and Sterling Silver Jewelry Handmade by
Hopi Indians and chunks of Fordite, which is, according to the man behind the table, layers of automotive paint dried into rock and mined from closed-down factories. Some stalls don’t have signs at all. I glance at prices as we pass. We’re in the cheap tent.

Brian stops at a stall near the back, beneath a purple sign bearing an indiscriminate reptile, and points to a short, doughy white guy dressed like an undercover cop: a Hawaiian shirt and khakis, a baseball cap pulled low on his head. Brian calls him over and introduces him as his business partner, Doug. Doug’s grip is loose and clammy, and although he’s much shorter than me, he doesn’t look up at my face, choosing instead to stare directly at my chest. Brian says they’re partners, but Doug is obviously his sidekick. As they discuss their plans for the evening, it dawns on me that Brian doesn’t have his own vehicle. He turns to me and asks where I’m staying, if I want to share a hotel room. I tell him another lie, that I’m staying with a friend; the last thing I want is him crashing on my couch.

Brian tells Doug that I have a car, and volunteers my services as a chauffeur. I ask where we’re going.

“We’re doing a presentation later at a house in the Foothills,” Brian says. “You’re coming. I’m going to secure your financial future.”

“How’s that?”

When he grins, his bald head looks like a skull. “Network marketing.”

“OK,” I say. Whatever it takes.

He leads me past a group of bored security guards and back out into the parking lot. We stop next to a blue van he says belongs to Doug. They’ve both by now mentioned the thousands of dollars they make each week from network marketing, and yet Doug drives an old conversion van, windowless
and battered, the kind terrorists and pedophiles drive in movies. Brian opens the van’s side door, extracts a rolling bag, and hands it to me. I carry it across the lot to my car and dump it in the trunk. He reaches into an outside pocket of the bag and pulls out a thick manila envelope.

“Can’t forget this,” he says. “This is the stuff about your mom.”

He doesn’t give it to me; instead, he tucks the envelope under his arm and leads the way back inside the tent.

I found Brian a few weeks ago, before I left California, by searching for him online. I saw a picture and recognized him right away, although before I saw it, I would have had a hard time describing him. He’s been cut out of most of our family pictures. I remember doing it, Mom and I, after they broke up. We sat cross-legged on the living room carpet with scissors and a trash bag and snipped. At first it seemed like fun, and we’d show each other the results and giggle as we dumped bits of him into the garbage, but soon a sadness crept over us as we realized it was harder than we thought—traces of him remained, a phantom hand on our shoulders, a stray shoe at the bottom of the frame.

In the email I wrote him, I tried to find the right tone, civil but cool. I said Mom was dead, and that I was trying to find out more about her life, that I wanted to talk to him. He replied the next day:
We will meet and I will help you in your quest
. He gave me his number, told me to call.

I called. We exchanged greetings—awkwardly, but with a strange warmth—and he told me the story of their relationship in a long monologue that seemed rehearsed. “She was the best thing in my life,” he said. “And also my greatest heartbreak.”

He told me he’d heard about her death a year ago from a friend in the CIA, which he referred to exclusively as “the agency.” At first he didn’t know that Ray had killed himself. He couldn’t find anything about it in the papers.
*
So Brian went back to Tombstone. “I was going to find the son of a bitch and kill him myself.”

The Tombstone marshal stonewalled him, so he looked up some old friends and pieced together the story of what happened in the years after he left town. He heard Mom got involved with some shady people. He heard about beatings.

“Beatings?”

“The motorcycle guy,” he said.

“What motorcycle guy?”

“My friend in the agency told me about him.”

Only later, after we hung up, would I wonder why the CIA would have cared about my mother, or why they wouldn’t know that Ray’s body had been found. Brian said he’d gone to the Cochise County sheriff and talked to the detective who’d handled the case. He also got the police report. “The complete files,” he said. “Except the pictures. I didn’t want to see those.” He said he had names, Social Security numbers, phone numbers, addresses, everything. I asked him to send it to me. He said he’d do me one better: he was going to Tucson soon for business, and if I met him there, he’d give me the documents and tell me what he knew. He mentioned an opportunity, a company with a vaguely official name.

“The company logo is a Lamborghini,” he said, “so you know we’re talking big bucks. I’ll make you a lot of money.”

In a back corner of the tent, Brian and I find a couple of empty chairs and sit down. Doug disappears down an aisle as Brian begins to tell me how he met my mother. It was in North Carolina, when she was in the army. He was the jumpmaster of her airborne unit. Their marriages fell apart and they started dating; he doesn’t say which happened first. She went to Fort Huachuca on a temporary duty assignment and came back raving about how beautiful Arizona was. I don’t remember most of what he does, but that part I do: for the rest of her life, when asked why she’d moved to Arizona, my mother would mention that month, say she’d felt at home, as if she’d lived in the desert in some past life. They arranged a transfer.

“I think we were engaged by then,” he says. “I don’t remember.” He looks past me toward the far end of the tent. “Some memories you put away, because you don’t want to go back and relive them.”

He says we packed our house in North Carolina, rented a truck, and drove across the country. We moved into a Motel 6 in Sierra Vista and they started looking for jobs and a place to live.

“We decided to take a day trip to Tombstone. She said she’d always wanted to see the O.K. Corral.” That doesn’t sound right; she never seemed to care about the Western myths. It was the land itself that drew her, all that emptiness, something she needed to find. But I don’t want to interrupt. Brian’s face has relaxed, his eyes focused off in the middle distance; he’s found the story.

“And that trip changed our lives.”

Wyatt Earp came to Tombstone late in 1879, at the age of thirty-one, searching for a better life. He’d made a reputation
for bravery as a lawman in Kansas, but it was dangerous work, and there wasn’t any money in it. Tombstone was a remote silver camp in the throes of a breakneck boom. Wyatt arrived with his common-law second wife and his brothers, hoping to go into business. He wanted to start a stagecoach line, but found two already running, so he diversified: filed mining claims, bought real estate, rode shotgun for Wells Fargo, acquired an interest in the faro game at the Oriental Saloon. The Earp brothers cut a wide swath in the infant boomtown. They were young and handsome, ambitious and swaggering; they were outsiders, Yankees, Republicans, lawmen. It didn’t take them long to make enemies.

A loose-knit gang of cowboys and outlaws operated on ranches around Tombstone, running and rustling cattle and robbing stages. They were mostly from the South and mostly Democrats, and many had been in the area before the silver boom, so they took exception to the latecomer Earps and the eastern law-and-order interests they represented. A feud began, a series of conflicts over stolen horses, shootings, robberies, political deals gone awry. Still, it might have come to nothing if it weren’t for the rumors; the town kept talking about a fight until it got one. On October 26, 1881, in an empty lot behind the O.K. Corral, the Earps and Wyatt’s friend Doc Holliday shot it out with the Clantons and McLaurys. Wyatt’s party won, or so it seemed at first: they all lived and three of their enemies died in the street.

But Tombstone turned on the Earps. Murder charges were filed, then dismissed. Their political alliances and business interests soured. Two of the Earp brothers were ambushed in revenge, Virgil crippled and Morgan killed, which sent Wyatt on a murderous rampage. Newspapers in California and New York published embroidered stories of the latest lawlessness in the Wild West, while the local media argued over who was to
blame. By the time Wyatt finally left Tombstone, two and a half years after he’d arrived, he’d lost a brother, most of his money, many of his friends, and his good name.