Son of a Gun (16 page)

I clench my teeth and look up at the roof of the tent and resist the urge to snatch the envelope and run.

“Eight bullets is nothing but anger,” he continues. “He stood there and he kept pumping in bullets.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Eight bullets,” he repeats. The detective told me it was
seven bullets, but I don’t mention that, because it doesn’t really matter. “Do you know what that means?”

“He was angry. I get it.”

“That pistol doesn’t hold eight bullets. He had to reload.”

The gun in question does hold eight bullets, but Brian is convinced that it doesn’t. He thinks the investigators botched the case, that there may have been two pistols involved. He wants to know what happened to all the money.

“What money?”

Brian ignores me. He has a theory. He’s taken a murder as straightforward as murder can be—the most common murder scenario in America, a man shooting his wife in a fit of rage—and made it into a conspiracy. He says my mother’s body had no defensive wounds, although later I’ll read the police report and discover that a DNA test of skin taken from her fingernails matched Ray. I’ve seen this response before, the need to believe it was complicated. In the months after my mother died, before Ray was found, I heard so many theories about her death: drug smugglers, illegal immigrants, terrorists. We don’t want to acknowledge how simple murder can be.

“Nobody understands,” he says. “You always have to get the truth.”

He gets up and says to follow him. As we cross the tent, he continues. “Probably the greatest hurt I’ve had is your mom getting killed.” His bald head bows and shakes from side to side. “Jesus, if there was anything I could have done to make a difference.” For a moment, I’m on his side. I know exactly how he feels. Then he repeats what the sheriff supposedly said to him:
Well, she made the wrong choices in life
.

I look away, at the jewelers milling in the pallid light, the displays of semiprecious stones, and I ponder that statement: did the sheriff really say that, or is Brian projecting his own thoughts onto another man? And is it true, is she dead because
she made the wrong choices? My mother had bad taste in men, that’s for sure, but his line of thinking is just the same old misogyny, victim blaming, the belief that a woman can ask for it. I’ve heard it before: the rumors after her death, the tone of the questions the cops asked about her past relationships, the Tombstone marshal calling her a black widow, the priest at her funeral mass preaching about penance. It always has to be the woman’s fault. And my rage at Brian’s words makes me a hypocrite, because sometimes I blame her, too—not Ray, but her—because she chose him in the first place.

But what are the right choices? My mother married the first man she loved, had children, tried to make it work, to do what was expected. He left. After that she raised her kids. It cost her her youth, most of her dreams. It meant that when we were gone she had nobody else, nothing to do, nowhere to go. Men took everything from her, finally her life. Now men blame her for dying.

We might as well blame Wyatt Earp. His legacy leads straight to Ray, right down to the mustache and the badge and the belief that a man solves problems with violence. If it weren’t for Wyatt, grown men in Tombstone wouldn’t still dress up like gunslingers, as if there weren’t any other kinds of men in the frontier West. If it weren’t for Wyatt, Tombstone might be known for its silver boom—it was once the largest city between Saint Louis and San Francisco—instead of a thirty-second gunfight that killed three men. If my mother made a wrong choice, it was moving to a town obsessed with Wyatt Earp, where a former deputy would kill her, and other men would say that she deserved it.

Brian stops in front of the booth for Navajo Dancer, where Doug’s sales pitch was stymied earlier. The man behind the table ignores us, but Brian looms patiently by a case of pendants until the proprietor relents and says hello.

Brian gives his magician’s grin. “My associate tells me you think we’re selling a pyramid scheme.”

It’s not the opening I would have chosen. The proprietor is short and wiry, and the face beneath his black hat is as dark and hard as a roasted nut. He named his business after a tribe that’s been cheated and slaughtered by white men for the last few hundred years, and he’s from a rural area of New Mexico best known as the old stomping grounds of Billy the Kid. I’d bet he’s got a gun somewhere in this stall.

Navajo Dancer stares at Brian for a long time, then frowns and glances at me. I spin a display of necklaces, pretending to be shopping, thinking maybe I’ll find something to take back to Laura, but I can’t imagine her in anything this tacky. I tell Brian I’ll meet him outside.

In my car, on our way to the Foothills for Brian’s presentation, he and Doug argue about where to eat. Doug wants to go to a bar and grill near the university; Brian doesn’t think we have time.

“They have great burgers,” Doug says from the backseat. “I could go for a burger.” Brian sits next to me, on the passenger side, fiddling with the radio.

“We can’t get a burger in twenty minutes,” Brian says.

“We can tell them to be quick.”

“It’s not physically possible. You can’t order and cook and eat a hamburger in twenty minutes.”

“We’ve got forty minutes.” In the rearview mirror, Doug checks his watch. “Forty-five.”

“We still have to go to Safeway for snacks.”

They argue for a while about the snacks. Doug says there are still some veggies and trail mix left over from last night’s presentation. Brian says they should get a bottle of wine; he
seems to be anticipating a big turnout. Doug says we can’t bring wine, because the owner of the house—whom they never mention by name—is in AA. Brian returns to the issue of dinner. Neither of them is willing to budge. Doug has drawn his line in the sand: he wants a hamburger. I decide that I’m with Doug, and will vote for hamburgers if they ask for my opinion, but they don’t. Instead, they reach a compromise: we’ll get hamburgers, but at McDonald’s, which will be faster. They try to tell me how to get to the nearest McDonald’s, and begin to argue over that.

“I lived here for seven years,” I say. “I know how to get to McDonald’s.”

The car goes silent as we pass the university, the glowing red letters on the football stadium, the long grassy mall glistening in the rain. The wipers thump across the windshield. Brian eyes the bungalows on his side of the street as if he’s wondering what they’re worth.

At a red light, without looking at me, he asks what I do these days. “For money, I mean.”

His question catches me off guard. I tell the truth, despite myself. “I’m trying to be a writer.” It’s something I never say, and just as I begin to wonder why I’m being honest, if I expect him to be proud of me, if I want him to, he says:

“Boston Market.”

“What?” I look over at him. He’s staring out the window at a Boston Market on the corner.

“Maybe that would be good. Look at that line.” He taps the window with his finger. “They must be doing something right.”

The light turns green. “If you want to go there, tell me now,” I say.

We stick with McDonald’s. Brian buys value meals for all of us with a credit card. As we eat, he talks about his life after he
and Mom broke up, but I don’t really listen. After dinner, I follow his directions west down River Road, past strip malls full of art galleries and snowbird restaurants. We turn north on a dark street that leads into the desert. Half a mile later, the city lights behind us drop under the crest of a hill and disappear. Mesquite branches hang over the road. If not for the address signs and gated driveways in the edges of the headlight beams, if not for the strange men in the car with me, this road might remind me of the way I used to take to visit my mother.

Brian directs me down a gravel driveway that ends at a sprawling brick ranch house. As soon as I stop the car, Doug scurries to the front door, and I wind up carrying Brian’s briefcase for him. Doug holds the door for us. In the foyer stands a plastic zombie holding a tray half full of candy. At its feet sits a stuffed and mounted dog.

“Jesus Christ.”

Doug chuckles. “Oh, it’s just a Halloween decoration.”

Halloween is months away, but I decide not to ask. Brian leads us through a dark sitting room full of Western furniture: kingly wooden rocking chairs, a tree-trunk coffee table, a shadowy set of bull horns above the door to the backyard. In the next room, a bright kitchen done in Mexican tile, a man and a woman are watching a small television on the counter. They don’t seem to notice our presence until Brian introduces me.

“This is my stepson.” I give him a look, but he’s typing on his BlackBerry. “Well, practically.”

Brian says it’s almost time for the presentation; we’re just waiting for the rest of the people to show up. There’s a conference call scheduled that he wants us all to hear. He walks through a doorway into an adjoining dining room to make a phone call. Doug has disappeared down a hallway on the far side of the house. I’m alone with the two strangers. I’ve already
forgotten their names. The man has thick arms and thick glasses, wears a plaid short-sleeved shirt, and paces back and forth across the kitchen; he reminds me of my high school shop teacher. The woman is in her sixties, frail and placid, sitting in a rolling office chair staring raptly at a muted television showing what seems to be an infomercial. The man asks me what I do.

I tell him I’m a writer. They’re about to be subjected to enough lies.

“I wrote a book,” the woman says. “It’s about woodworking.” She looks in my direction, finally, but her eyes seem to see something much farther away.

Brian returns and herds us into the living room, saying the conference call is about to start. The woman stays in the kitchen, watching TV. I sit at the far end of a long varnished table, by a window with a view of the city rolling off to the south. A cabinet full of mismatched china and commemorative plates runs the length of the far wall. Doug reappears and takes the chair across from me. A tall, lean stranger in cowboy boots walks into the room and sits, as if he’s been here all along, although I’ve never seen him before and didn’t hear him arrive. Brian introduces him as Frank, tells us he’s retired air force and a fellow investor in network marketing. The shop teacher slouches in a chair at the far end of the table, between Frank and Brian; the lights in the room seem to focus on him, as if he’s waiting to be interrogated. Snacks have been spread across the table, a plastic tray of vegetables and two bowls of trail mix. The bowl between Doug and me is speckled with white yogurt-covered raisins, which I begin to pick out of the bowl and pile onto a napkin in front of me. Doug sees me and starts doing the same. Brian reaches with evident satisfaction for a carrot.

“OK, here we go,” Brian says. He presses a button on his
BlackBerry and a female voice, tinny and shrill, comes through the speaker:

I scan the faces around me: we’re five grown men, sitting at a table, staring at a red cell phone. Pamela Dodge gives way to a man who sounds like an Applebee’s waiter:
Hey there! This is John in Wichita, checking in to tell you how network marketing changed my life!
And so on. All told, five different white-sounding voices from midsize cities in the South and Midwest give their testimonials. A former housewife just bought a vacation home in Mexico. A happy couple retired in their forties. Entire broods of children have been sent to the finest colleges our great country of opportunity has to offer. It’s the American dream, prerecorded. It lasts exactly ten minutes.

When it ends, Brian brandishes a stack of pamphlets he calls Literature and starts his pitch. It seems like a lot of effort to spend on one person, the guy from the kitchen, who pretends to listen as Brian reads bullet points from the pamphlet. They must have expected more people to show. I reach for the trail mix and catch Doug staring at me as he munches a mouthful of nuts. A smile creeps across his face, and suddenly I realize: they’re not just here for the other guy.

Brian asks a series of rhetorical questions—
Do you
want
to be financially secure for the rest of your life?
—and offers escalating dollar amounts he seems to be inventing from whole cloth. Frank chimes in from time to time with a personal anecdote or a stupid joke; he’s the good cop. Doug just watches and eats. I
could make a run for it, through the living room full of horns and leather, past the ghoulish candy man and the taxidermied dog, out the door and across the driveway to my car. But I wouldn’t have the envelope. It’s in Brian’s briefcase, at his feet.

The presentation drags on for an hour and a half. Brian pulls magazines and contracts out of his bag, draws a diagram to illustrate how much money we’ll make in the first month, threatens to play a promotional video on the TV in the kitchen. Doug and I fight for the final raisins in the bowl. Now and then other people arrive at the house and wisely ignore Brian’s invitations to join us.

I’m staring out the window, wondering how long this can last, when I smell whiskey. An old woman with orange hair and makeup like drywall spackle sits in the chair next to me. Everyone else ignores her. I stare at the trail mix, hoping she won’t strike up a conversation. Under the table, a bony hand caresses my knee. She leans in and says, in what she probably thinks is a whisper: “This is bullshit.”

I push my chair back and stand. “I have to go,” I say, and make up a lie about staying with a friend, his infant daughter, how I can’t go back to his house late. I ask Brian for the envelope. He takes it from his briefcase and says he’ll give it to me on the way out; his overnight bag is still in my car. We walk out past the zombie and the dead white dog. Doug follows. The rain has stopped, the clouds have cleared, and the moon has risen full over the desert. I open the trunk to get Brian’s bag. When I turn around, he and Doug are standing too close to me.