Son of a Gun (25 page)

Three men died in the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral: Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers, Frank and Tom. Frank was thirty-three at the time of his death, Tom was twenty-eight, and Billy was just nineteen. All three had lived in the area before the silver boom, unlike the Earps, who had come to Tombstone hoping to get rich quick. The McLaury brothers and Billy Clanton associated with outlaws but weren’t outlaws themselves, certainly no more so than the Earps, who moonlighted as gamblers and pimps. Accounts of the three men’s reputations vary but agree on one thing: their funeral drew the biggest crowd in Tombstone’s history.

They’re buried at the edge of town, in a shared grave in Boothill, beneath a marker that reads “Murdered in the Streets of Tombstone.” Tourists tend to snap a picture and walk on by, searching in vain for the Earps, and I don’t blame them. Who wants to see the victims?

Laura comes to visit. I spot her standing on the airport curb in a long skirt and a tank top, new sunglasses and a ponytail, and when I get out of the car and pull her into a hug she smells like soap and perfume, reminding me of a whole world I’ve forgotten these last few weeks, a cleaner life with her in California. If my mother had lived to meet Laura, she would have called her classy.

We play house, cook dinner, take walks through the neighborhood at night making plans for the future. We’re moving in together at the end of the summer, when I get back to San Francisco. We talk about what it’ll be like to have our own place, discuss neighborhoods, rents, furniture. Maybe we’ll get a dog. I’ve never cohabitated before, and as a new life forms in my mind, I do my best not to think of the dreams like this I’ve seen end badly.

Until my mother died, I’d never had a serious girlfriend; afterward, I couldn’t be alone. That first date I went on afterward,
with Eliza, my coworker at the college newspaper, turned into a yearlong relationship, the first in a series. I tried different ways of telling the women I dated about my mother. I learned to wait, to choose a private moment, preferably at night—otherwise it lingered for the rest of the day—and I settled on the passive voice, used
killed
instead of
murdered
, didn’t specify the method unless they asked, and they usually wouldn’t, not right away. I dated one woman for more than a year and never told her the truth.

Things changed once they knew. They wouldn’t ask about my mother, wouldn’t talk about theirs, wouldn’t even say the word
mother
. When we argued, they would watch me warily, like I was some wild animal. I knew what they were afraid of, the same thing I was. I’ve never touched a woman in anger and I never would. But that’s what they all say.

As women came and went, I began to feel like I was living out some kind of prophecy, becoming like my mother, restless and demanding, chasing a delusion of a better life to come. When my last girlfriend before Laura, an Ivy League knockout I’d met in grad school, left me to return to New York, I tried to do what I’d never done after my mother died, what she’d never done at all: learn to live alone. It was hard at first, passing days without speaking, knowing there was nobody to see me brood, but over time I grew to prefer being alone. I began to think maybe I’d never get married, never have kids, never subject myself or anyone else to my family legacy of failed relationships.

Then Laura came along, like a revelation. She knew about my mother, and she knew the risks of loving a man like me, a man so full of rage. But she did it anyway. Since I met her, failure doesn’t seem so certain anymore.

After a week in the guesthouse, things get tense. Five hundred square feet, the swamp cooler creaking, the middle of July. A buck ten in the daytime, thunderstorms at night. We spend every moment together, sit on the couch reading and sweating, go to matinées of shitty movies just for the AC. Laura’s never been to Arizona and wants to do the tourist thing, but I’ve always hated tourists, how they gather in herds where their guidebooks tell them to, saying it’s not what they expected. Eventually I relent and take her to Tombstone.

Halfway there, we pass a billboard for the O.K. Corral: a man in a black coat and hat, mustached and severe, staring down the barrel of a revolver at us. It’s supposed to be Wyatt Earp, although the man on the billboard doesn’t look much like him, and he’s way too old to be Wyatt in his Tombstone days. Thirty miles away, I’m already throttling the steering wheel, breathing fast. This was a bad idea. I could pull over, turn around, but what would I tell Laura? She wants to see my hometown, the place I talk about so much, and I don’t know how to explain why I haven’t been back in years, how every time I climb that last long hill into town I feel marked. Everyone there knows me as Debbie’s son. They probably wonder why I never go back, probably assume that I think I’m too good. Or maybe they don’t care; maybe the town has forgotten. But I doubt it—Tombstone loves a murder.

Tucson is neutral ground, which is one reason I decided to stay there for the summer. But once I cross the Cochise County line, everything reminds me of my mother. On Benson’s main drag, the storefront of Ziering’s, a mercantile with a wall of exotic candy in jars, run by a gentle old man who took a shine to Mom the first time we went in. Farther down the highway, the feed store where she bought hay, a house where one of her boyfriends lived, the swimming hole outside Saint David we went to in the summer until some kid broke
his neck and they shut it down. This county is a minefield of memories.

Finally we top a rise and there it is, on a plateau in the middle of the valley, a cluster of low buildings ringed by bare brown hills: Tombstone. It’s not much to look at, and disappoints almost everybody at first sight. The town’s early settlers wrote east to report its ugliness; it hasn’t gotten prettier since. Tourists used to tell me they were expecting a real ghost town, not paved streets and power lines and so many people.

Some things have changed—the new high school on the edge of town, a new hotel along the highway—but mostly my hometown looks the same. Rental cars cluster in the Boothill parking lot, and a police cruiser sits outside the Circle K. The brown clapboard we lived in on Fremont Street, across from Wyatt Earp’s house, is now a real estate office. The original house was a shotgun miner’s shack built in the 1880s, since shoddily expanded, all slanting floors and doors that don’t close and closets overrun with spiders. I lived there with my mother for a year when I was fourteen. My brother was gone and no man was living with us, and I would sneak out at night and drink and get high and not even try to hide any of it from her, daring her to stop me. I’d hear her crying at night in her room, and I knew it was partly because she felt so alone, and partly because she thought she had lost me to the town she’d grown by then to hate, the town that had already turned her only brother into a hopeless case. One night I saw her through the window, standing in the backyard among the knee-high weeds, holding a hamper of clothes she’d just taken off the line, bathed in white and blue from the Chevron sign across the street, staring blankly into the distance, and she stood there motionless for so long I wondered if I was dreaming or hallucinating, if she was a ghost. I don’t fully believe that memory, but it’s the image I remember most vividly from that
time. If I wanted to show Laura my Tombstone, if I thought anyone else would care or understand, I’d point out our old house and tell her all this.

The sky is low and gray over town, and rain begins to fall as we park on Toughnut Street. Town seems busy for a weekday, the parking lots almost full, but it’s the summer, the busy season. We start at the courthouse, where we can see some of the real history before all the bullshit uptown. We do the rounds, the saddle you can take a picture sitting on, the restored courtroom, the gallows yard in back. The original gallows have been replaced with a replica, dangling nooses and all. Only a handful of men were hung here, but the eeriness is unmistakable: it feels like a place where someone died. Visitors speak in whispers in the yard, and nobody stays very long. When I was a kid, my friends and I would play touch football in the front yard of the courthouse, and when the game was done, we’d scale the wall and peek over at the gallows, pretending to see ghosts.

Next is the World’s Largest Rosebush, just a block up Toughnut, where for five bucks apiece we enter a courtyard walled off from the street and step from stone to stone through a vast puddle of rainwater beneath a canopy of branches the size of a small house, supported by a latticework of wood and metal pipes, strung with pale yellow bulbs. It’s my favorite place in all of Tombstone, the only pure thing in this whole town, the only attraction that doesn’t depend on somebody dying. A hundred years ago a man planted a clipping behind his house, and tended it faithfully as it grew. On a day like today, dripping rain slicing the sky into diamonds, it’s beautiful. It’s a block from the O.K. Corral and gets half the traffic.

The woman behind the ticket counter at the O.K. Corral asks if I want to see the show; they’ve built an amphitheater next to the scene of the shootout for staging reenactments. I
decline. We walk through the gift shop and out the back, taking the opposite route the Earps did—they walked down Fremont, never entering the corral itself. In fact, the gunfight didn’t happen at the O.K. Corral; it happened in a vacant lot to the north, between a back alley and what is now the highway. But try putting that on a T-shirt.

In my Tombstone, the O.K. Corral is the least important place on this block. Just across the highway is the house where my friend David lived; I spent a night in his bathroom vomiting and praying to God the first time I got drunk, at thirteen, on straight tequila. Thirty feet east is the Tombstone Marshal’s Office, where Ray worked, and where I was read my rights and made to give a statement after the pellet gun incident. To the west is the RV park that my old roommate Joe’s family used to own. To the south, past the stucco wall of the amphitheater, is a park with a swing set I used to play on as a kid. If I were here alone, I’d avoid Allen Street altogether, and instead go to the places I remember, to see what’s changed or been destroyed, what’s been bought and sold. Nothing ever changes in these places, the museums, the tourist attractions: that’s the point, to pretend the past can be preserved.

But the diorama of the gunfight
has
changed. I notice it right away, from across the yard: the statues are different somehow. The old ones were bad plaster effigies of the Earps and Clantons, grossly undersized, and the effect was tragicomic, two distant groups of dwarfs battling to the death. The new statues are bigger and closer together, and a low iron fence surrounds them. Animatronic gun arms move up and down on cues from a push-button voice-over. A sign explains the new orientation, claiming that a map of the gunfight has recently been discovered, drawn by Wyatt Earp himself, and that it “resolves a century-long debate over the exact location of the gunfighters.” Wyatt drew the map in 1924, forty-three
years after the fact. It’s reproduced on the sign, a single sheet of paper, boxes and scrawls and
X
s for the combatants, an eerily childish diagram of the killing of three men.

For all the attention it gets, the books and movies and daily reenactments, the millions of tourists who’ve visited the site, the minor controversies about who shot first and who killed whom, and the entire town that lives off its legend, there wasn’t much to the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Two groups of men in a vacant yard. About thirty shots in about thirty seconds. Three men injured, all from the Earp party: Virgil shot in the leg, Doc’s hip grazed by a bullet, and Morgan with a nasty wound across his back. Three men killed: Billy Clanton and both McLaury brothers. Of the men who fought, only Wyatt walked away unscathed.

It’s a hell of a thing to wish for, but I wonder how history might be different if Wyatt hadn’t been so lucky. If he’d died in the gunfight, he never would’ve become a legend, and Tombstone would have wound up like all the other crumbling ghost towns dotting the desert around here, abandoned and forgotten. My mother would never have come here to see the O.K. Corral, never decided to move, never met Ray, and so on. I like to imagine that she’d be living in some trailer by the beach, riding horses in the surf, watching sunsets. But she probably would have wound up in some other nowhere town, with some other man, who would have hurt her in some other way.