Son of a Gun (22 page)

When I’m done, I toss the papers onto the passenger seat and stare at a crumbling stucco wall. My mother used to worry that I’d end up like Tom; instead they ended up the same, both found dead in a deserted place.

When I lived in Tombstone, signs along the boardwalk marked where people had been killed. Outside the Oriental, where Wyatt once ran the faro game, was a sign saying that Marshal White had been shot dead in that spot by Curly Bill Brocious, in what was later ruled an accident. At the former site of Campbell and Hatch’s pool hall stood a sign commemorating Morgan Earp’s death. I liked the signs, thought they were a fitting gesture to the victims.

The house in Tucson where my uncle died has a For Sale sign out front. The derelict building described in the report is gone, demolished and replaced by a freshly painted duplex. The gravel driveway is smooth and pristine, with no tire tracks or footprints, and a new plank fence surrounds the yard. The building looks brand-new, like nothing ever happened here. For a moment I think about calling the number on the sign and asking how much it costs. I could buy it and burn it down.

When Tom was squatting in the house that used to be here, fresh out of prison, cooking up his last hit, I was living a few miles away. I hadn’t seen or heard from him since he squeezed my shoulder and then vanished at my mother’s funeral mass, but I knew he was somewhere nearby. I wonder why he never tried to call me, if he was ashamed, if he thought I was. He might have assumed that I wouldn’t want to see my junkie uncle, to be reminded of a former life. If so, he was probably right. I was in grad school when he died, had just spent the summer in Europe, had my own apartment and all kinds of theories, one of which was that I deserved that better life because I’d lost someone. Tom lost someone, too, his sister, his rock. He got a bag of heroin, a box of needles, and a mattress in a stranger’s house to die on. Nobody deserves what they get.

My old college friend Orion calls, says he heard I was in Tucson, and invites me to a barbecue at his house. He’s turning thirty. At his party, I see a lot of Orion’s former coworkers from the French Quarter, some of the same faces I saw the night we heard about my mother. They looked much younger then.

I find Orion and his family by the pool and we start to catch up. I ask if Chance is here.

“He’s hiding,” Orion says.

“From what?”

He shrugs and gestures indiscriminately, at the sky, at the swimmers in the pool. “He hides from everything.”

I find Chance in the corner of the bathroom, his head shoved deep into the space between the toilet and the tub. I call his name and he doesn’t move. I sit on the edge of the tub and pet him, rub behind his ears how he used to like, and still he doesn’t move.

In the movie
Tombstone
, during the scene in which Morgan Earp is dying, his dog paces the doorway of the pool hall, barking up a storm. Finally, Wyatt yells for somebody to get rid of the goddamned dog. That really happened: according to a newspaper account, after Morgan died, the dog even followed his master’s body as it was carried to the undertaker. I wonder what happened to that dog afterward, whether Wyatt adopted it, if it became a stray.

Chance lived with me for about a year after the murder. He seemed to know what had happened: he was afraid of loud noises, hated to be left alone. During thunderstorms he’d cower in the bathroom, nose stuck in a corner, whimpering. One day I left him inside while I went to the grocery store across the street and he jumped through a plate-glass window and greeted me at the gate, trailing blood from gashes in his snout.

I asked the vet if she saw this kind of thing a lot.

“If there’s some kind of trauma, sure. Abuse, abandonment. Sometimes moving into a new house will do it.” She told me I should try a counselor and gave me a business card for the Dog Whisperer.

“You’re kidding.”

“Sometimes it works,” she said. “You’d be surprised.”

I didn’t call the Dog Whisperer. I’d just tried a shrink myself, a counselor on campus, who’d said I was coping well, and that when I felt sad I should think of a safe and peaceful place. When I tried it, I saw a beach. I don’t like beaches, but my mother did.

Chance got worse. I tried leaving him in my bedroom and he ate through a doorjamb. I bought him a crate and he broke it, ate through an ocotillo fence and ran away. At the pound he
huddled in the corner of his cage, watching silently as the doomed dogs around him whined and howled. My landlord saw the damage he’d done and threatened to evict me. Orion had a dog that was friends with Chance, and being around other dogs was the only thing that calmed him down. Orion said he’d take him temporarily. That was seven years ago.

Orion appears in the doorway of the bathroom. Chance still hasn’t moved.

“Is he always like this?”

“Pretty much. He’s on drugs.” Orion opens the medicine cabinet and tosses me an orange prescription bottle. “They’re for humans, but the vet said they’d work.”

The pills don’t seem to be doing Chance much good. I have to pry him out of the corner, and only then do I see how old he looks, his whiskers gone white, slow in his motions, so thin in the haunches that it makes me cringe. I lead him into the hall, pet him, talk to him, but there’s no response, no recognition in those wet black eyes, no wolfish smile like the one he used to give.

“At least he hasn’t bit me.”

“He can’t,” Orion says. “His teeth are gone.” He says a few weeks ago he left Chance at home during a thunderstorm, and he bit through his crate and jumped out a picture window. Orion found him at the pound. The vet pulled his broken teeth. Orion got a thicker window. Chance got pills.

Orion returns to the party. Chance shoves his snout into my shin. I sit on the floor and hold his head in my hands and knead the thick fur around his neck. His eyes have been dulled by age and medication, but they still look sad and scared. I whisper his name. He doesn’t lick my hand, doesn’t whine like he used to. On the drive over here I imagined taking him home with
me, but that was a fantasy. I’m not sure he remembers me, and even if he does, he must know I’m going to walk out that door again and leave him behind. We have different lives now, in different places, where nobody knows or cares about our pasts. We’re both better off this way.

But he’s still afraid of thunder.

My hands dig into his fur. He looks away, then back at me.

Chance
.

Tell me what you saw
.

A lot of factors caused the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral—rivalries and rumormongering, broken deals and betrayals, business and political tensions—but in the most literal sense it was a fight over gun control. The usual boomtown violence, and especially Curly Bill’s killing of Marshal White, prompted the citizens of Tombstone to pass an ordinance banning firearms within the city limits. The day of the gunfight, Virgil Earp was repeatedly told that the Clantons were at the O.K. Corral, carrying weapons. He would later claim that he only went down there to disarm them.

San Francisco passed a similar law in 2005, banning handguns in the city limits, but it was ruled unconstitutional. I first tried to buy the gun that killed my mother there, at the last gun store left in the city, only to be told that the model wasn’t approved for sale in California. When I first got to Tucson, I tried every gun store in town with no luck. One owner told
me the distributor was sold out because there had been a run on handguns and ammo since Obama’s election. He told me to try the gun show.

I get there around noon, and it’s a hundred in the shade, the parking lot bleached and wavy in the sun. Near the entrance a bunch of sweaty white people in straw hats wave clipboards and shout idiotic slogans about socialism, trying to get me to sign some petition. I don’t acknowledge them, and neither do the other people walking past. We’re not here to talk politics, we just want air-conditioning.

I’ve never been to a gun show before, and the scene in the lobby is not what I expected. The staff is young and respectable, smiling and polite. They wear shirts with sleeves. A teenage blonde behind the counter checks Facebook as I buy a ticket for eight bucks. Just when I think I was wrong to expect a bunch of militia wingnuts, a man walks by wearing a sign around his neck that says, “Ask Me About Nazi Daggers.”

The showroom reminds me of a small-town high school gym. Throngs of people mill around folding tables fondling guns, and private sellers carry rifles slung over their shoulders. Signs advertise the arcane alphanumerics of gun culture: AK-47, AR-15, M1911A1. A table by the entrance bears stacks of flyers, some of which make sense—the NRA, the Libertarian Party, superchurches, veterans’ groups—and some of which surprise me: the Arizona Medical Marijuana Project and an upcoming science fiction and fantasy convention called FiestaCon.

Just inside the door, a young black guy waves me over to his stall. He asks what guns I own. I tell him I have a hunting rifle and a 12-gauge shotgun. He asks what I use as a lubricant, and I finally notice the banner above his head: “Gun Juice!”

“Oil,” I say. “Gun oil.”

“Feel this,” he says, holding out the receiver of a Glock 19 and pointing at the slide. I rub my finger along the metal. It’s slick. “Now rub your fingers together. What do you feel?”

“Nothing.”

“Exactly. No greasy residue.” He hands me the gun. “Now smell it.”

“What?”

He nods. “Go on.”

It must be a joke, something the sellers do to pass the time—let’s see how many morons smell the gun. But nobody’s watching, so I smell it.

“And what do you smell?”

“Nothing.”

“See? Odorless and permanent. You’ll never need another lubricant.”

I walk away while he’s still talking. I’m not here to buy Gun Juice; I’m here to buy a gun.

The manufacturer’s website describes the Beretta 21 Bobcat as “trustworthy and precise,” says it measures 4.9 inches and weighs 11.5 ounces, and comes in either .22LR or .25ACP. The .25 caliber model, which my mother had, holds eight bullets. She kept it in a nylon holster, which she carried in her saddlebag when she was riding horses, in the backseat pocket of her truck when she wasn’t. It wasn’t legal at the time in Arizona to carry a concealed weapon without a permit, but my mother didn’t care. The laws have since been changed; now you can take one into a bar.

It was the last of many guns she owned. She qualified as expert with the M-16 in the army, and she owned a few different pistols after she got out. Most of the men she dated were former military or police, so they all had guns, too, and they’d
take me shooting as a way of trying to bond with me or bribe me. The first time I shot a gun, I was six years old, and my mother was standing behind me.

And even though a gun killed her, I still own a couple. I don’t love guns, don’t belong to any organizations, don’t have any bumper stickers. I know about the studies and statistics, all the arguments against them, and I’ve seen firsthand what they can do. But I sleep with a loaded shotgun under my bed for one simple reason: in case there’s a man at the door who means me harm. My friends in San Francisco tell me that if that happens, I should call the police; I tell them that the police won’t show up in time to save them, and will only catch their killer half the time. Nobody ever wins the argument. They don’t believe in the man at the door. I do. I’ve met him.