Son of a Gun (28 page)

“You’re going to charge me storage fees for a stolen vehicle?”

“Somebody’s got to pay.”

I asked him how much. He said he’d get back to me, then tried another angle. “It’s in no shape to drive. You’ll have to put it on a flatbed and tow it. The smell … You’ll have to replace the whole interior.”

I made him list exactly what would need to be replaced. His voice rose into a whine. I knew it didn’t matter—I didn’t have a flatbed trailer, and what was I going to do with a spare truck that smelled like death and reminded me of my dead mother and murdering stepfather every time I saw it? But as he went on and on, talking about odors in the plastic, maggots, dried blood, the rage bloomed in my chest. I told him to get the truck ready, that I’d be there in the morning. Then I hung up, threw the phone across the room, and screamed into a pillow until I was out of breath. That night I fell asleep fantasizing about walking into the towing company and opening fire.

For a fleeting moment as I turn out of the park, I think of that man on the phone. It’s not far to Truth or Consequences. The name of the company is in the police report. I could go find him. I could drive on. The choice I make every day: what kind of man to be?

I stop in Hatch for gas. Every small town in the Southwest claims to be famous for something: Hatch is a chile town. Along the road hang signs for chile, red or green, fresh or frozen, strung in bunches, cooked in stew. The town itself is run-down and half deserted, a lot like the parts of Tombstone outside the tourist district, a lot like any small town around here. Driving through, I have the same daydreams that come whenever I see a place this far away from anywhere: I want to move here and start a new life where nobody knows me, renovate an old house, sit on the porch and watch the sunset, lean against a pump at the gas station and gossip with the locals. It’s pure romantic bullshit, an elitist fantasy, the simple life. I ought to know better, ought to remember how it feels to live in a place like this, the grinding poverty, the lack of opportunity, all the kinds of self-defeat—alcohol, drugs, gossip—the gnawing fear that you haven’t gotten away from the world, it’s gotten away from you.

Decades after he left Arizona, Wyatt Earp wanted a simpler life. San Francisco soured on him when he was accused of fixing a heavyweight fight. Rumors followed him to the Klondike, where he was falsely reported to have been knocked out by a midget in a barroom brawl in Dawson. In Los Angeles he was accused of cardsharping and arrested for vagrancy. Every few years the Tombstone stories would appear in the newspapers again, fantastically distorted.

Wyatt bought a mine out in the Mojave Desert, a stone’s throw from Arizona, and spent his winters there, prospecting. It never made him much money, but at least nobody bothered him; out there he didn’t have to be Wyatt Earp. He called his mine the Happy Days.

The day after my mother’s body was found, at around one in the afternoon, as the medical examiner was making his first incisions, as my brother’s phone began to ring, and as I rode my bike home, a pair of detectives were leaving the scene of the crime. They had just finished taking measurements of the trailer and outlying structures, and had talked to an officer from the Department of Agriculture who was trying to find my mother’s horses. The detectives tried to interview the nearest neighbors, but only one was home, the mother of a girl I went to grade school with. She said she’d lived there for twelve years, but she didn’t know my mother and Ray. People out there mostly kept to themselves. She hadn’t heard any gunshots, hadn’t seen anything of interest. The detectives thanked her and left.

After that, they went to Bob and Connie’s. The transcript of their conversation, all twenty-two pages, is in the envelope Freeney sent me. The detectives began by asking them to go over recent events.

Bob said my mother and Ray had spent the night at their place on Sunday, September 16. He didn’t say why, but they often stayed at Bob and Connie’s when they didn’t want to drive home in the dark, when it was too cold in their trailer, or when they wanted company besides each other. They left Monday, promising to return Wednesday to help Bob feed his horses—he’d just turned seventy-eight, he explained, and his legs were acting up, and Connie had to go to California for a couple of days. It was the last time they saw my mother and Ray alive.

Wednesday came and they didn’t show. Bob fed the horses himself. Around noon he still hadn’t heard from them, so he drove out to Gleeson to check. At the property, Chance was running loose and the horses were in the corral, but the truck was gone. He drove back home and called Connie. They agreed that it was strange. Bob kept paging my mother and calling her cell phone but didn’t get an answer. He decided to drive out there again.

At the property, he went to check on the horses, but Chance wouldn’t stop carrying on. Bob went and tried the trailer door, thinking maybe they kept the dog food in there. It was unlocked, so he went inside. He saw my mother on the bed, flat on her face, with her arm like this—his gesture is not described in the transcript—and not wearing any clothes. He thought she was asleep, so he yelled at her a few times, but she didn’t move. He went over and touched her foot. It was cold as ice. He didn’t see any blood, but that foot seemed awful stiff. He looked closer and saw a little blood right up there on her shoulder. He said he just looked at her for a minute, and then he got in his truck to go find the marshal.

Hours pass on the highway as I drive back to Arizona. The roadside is a panorama of the West. A gas station decays on a
frontage road. Strip malls signal the edge of Deming. The boarded hotels of Lordsburg wait for their coup de grâce: a bulldozer, a match. Just past the Arizona border is a sign for the highway to Portal, where Nabokov spent a summer revising
Speak, Memory
and chasing butterflies. Outside Willcox the blue-and-yellow billboards begin, advertising
The Thing?
, a Mystery of the Desert housed in a truck stop near Texas Canyon. My mother took us to see it once, when we were moving to Tombstone; it was the first place we stopped in Arizona. But I don’t remember what the Thing is.

I turn south off of I-10 onto a deserted two-lane highway. Abandoned mining equipment sits halfway up a mountainside, fenced off and rusting. Flashing signs warn me to slow down for a Border Patrol checkpoint. A power plant looms gray against the steely sky ahead. I reach for the stereo knob to search through the static, and look up to see the black eyes of a doe peering through my windshield. I swerve; she springs away; I miss her by inches, watch her leap over a fence into a field, and imagine a foal out there, huddled and afraid, waiting for her to return. To the south, in Mexico, a blue range of mountains basks in the sun, but here in the valley it’s getting dark. A storm is coming.

The detectives asked Bob and Connie if they’d noticed any problems the last time they saw my mother and Ray. Bob said no. Connie said she’d thought something was wrong, that they didn’t seem to want to go home. Bob added something else, but the transcript records it as inaudible. Later in the interview, Connie said that my mother had told her that morning that she needed to take Ray out of her will. I don’t remember her will leaving anything to Ray. She might have changed it;
maybe that’s what they fought about the day she died. Maybe Connie’s memory was wrong. Maybe mine is.

Connie and Bob mentioned that my mother had hurt herself repeatedly in the weeks before she died. She once came to their house limping, saying a horse had stepped on her foot. Shortly before her death, she fell into a fire. She had cleaned out the storage shed on their property and was burning papers in the fire pit, and when she went to get the hose to put out the fire, she tripped and fell backward into the flames. Connie said she wondered, how in the devil can you do that? The detectives asked if there was any indication that Ray had pushed her. They said no.

But afterward my mother had nightmares about it, Connie said, nightmares about burning up. She was distraught. She took down the fire pit.

In the days after her death, writing in a journal every night, I tried in vain to remember the last time I saw my mother. It must not have been long before her death, but it wouldn’t come back to me, the last time I hugged her, the last vision of her walking out a door. All these years later, Connie’s words in the transcript summon a glimpse: my mother in our living room, wincing and hardly able to walk, telling the story of her burning. She seemed so diminished, so much weaker than the mother I had grown to expect, and I worried that she was falling apart, that her and Ray’s vagrant life was unraveling. I felt sorry for her, but a small part of me was glad, thinking she had finally learned some kind of lesson.

That might have happened. She visited us whenever she was in Tucson, and she could have come by our house after she left the hospital. But if it’s true, why didn’t I remember until now?

At the turn for Gleeson, graffiti on a boarded store window: TIMBUKTU. A sign says Gleeson is eleven miles, Tombstone twenty-seven. I stomp on the gas pedal—cops don’t come out here—and roll down the windows. The air is thick and moist and rich and smells like dirt and greasewood. I stop and stand in the road to piss, watching the horizon ahead, green and gray and purple, the hills and the light and the gathering clouds. On the far side of Gleeson rain is already falling, dark wisps descending from the sky. I’m heading right for it.

Warning signs appear:
Flash Flood Area, No Trespassing, Rattlesnake Crafts Ahead
. My cell phone loses signal. I enter Gleeson, what’s left of it, a few decrepit houses and a graveyard, a crumbling jail that’s on the market. The landscape looks familiar—grassland threaded with scrub, mine derricks dotting the hills—but the landmarks are all wrong. I thought the road through Gleeson was dirt, but it’s paved; it turns to dirt past the far edge of town. I remember the rattlesnake store as a roadside adobe shack, but the sign now points down a driveway toward a new house in the distance.

My car clatters over a cattle guard and onto washboard dirt. I thought I’d remember how to find my mother’s property, but I don’t. It’s been a long time, and there are no addresses out here. The police report says it’s between two mile markers. I just passed the first.

On the side of the road a freshly graded driveway runs under a steel arch that says High Lonesome Ranch Estates, an ambitious name for a spread of empty lots. A For Sale sign, an empty flyer bin, and No Trespassing signs in English and Spanish hang from the fence below. Power lines run parallel to the road; were there power lines before?

I pass the second marker, turn around, double back.

The detectives asked Connie and Bob about guns. Bob said Ray had guns, he didn’t know what kind. Connie said Ray had told them that since the World Trade Center, he didn’t go anywhere without guns. He kept them in the truck, loaded. He was just waiting for somebody to try to come onto their property; he was very adamant about that. She also mentioned that one of Debbie’s boys had given her a small gun, she didn’t know what kind, it was a couple of Christmases ago.

The detectives asked about my brother and me, whether we knew. Connie said she had just gotten off the phone with Josh. She’d wanted us to know before the rumors started; she was sure it would be a big gossip item in town. Bob asked why we hadn’t been told sooner. The detectives said they were trying to play catch-up.

Connie volunteered that she hadn’t felt good about Debbie’s mental state the last time she saw her. There was something between her and Ray that made Connie uneasy. But she had never seen them have an argument. They were together constantly, she said, to the point of …

Always together, Bob said.

They would take a shower together, get haircuts together, they were constantly together. I love my husband, Connie said, but I wouldn’t want to be with him 24/7, the way they were. It was hard to talk to Debbie without Ray around.

Again Connie returned to the last time she’d seen my mother, the haunting sense that something was wrong. She sat right there and I looked at her face, she said, and I’ve known Debbie for a lot of years. Then Connie said something about the last few months, but most of it is marked inaudible. She said my mother needed money, that she was concerned about her brother and his kids.

The detectives asked about Uncle Tom, where he lived, his full name, whether he knew what had happened to his sister.
Connie said he’d found out somehow and come out to their house, wanting to know if they had a telephone number. She said whose phone number he wanted, but it’s marked inaudible. I wonder if it was mine.

Bob told the detectives what he knew about Tom, most of which is recorded as inaudible. He said Tom had been an alcoholic for a while.

But Debbie was very proud of him, Connie said.

Very proud of him, Bob said.

The last pictures my mother took were of her brother’s sons, Sean and Eric, at the property near Gleeson. She must have brought them for a visit right before she died. In one, Ray holds a dead rattlesnake by its head in a snare, dangling the body so the boys could touch its skin, feel the scales. Another shows him skinning it on a flat board. I have a few pictures of Ray with snakes; he must have killed a lot of them. Ray’s face is shaded or obscured in every picture of him: by his cowboy hat, by overexposure, by time.