Son of a Gun (29 page)

In another photo, my cousin Eric stares through binoculars at the camera. The trailer looms above him, the open window she was facing when Ray fired the first shot. I was wrong, and so were the cops: the trailer’s not an Airstream, it’s an old Nomad.

The last few pictures she took have nobody in them, only the desert, a hummingbird at a feeder. The final one is mostly dirt, a line of rocks, the trunks of two mesquites, a blur in the corner that might be the bird flying away.

It might not be the last picture. She might have left me a clue, and I just didn’t find it. I didn’t know how to use her camera, and when I opened it, some of the film was exposed. Then I waited years to have the film developed, let it sit in boxes, on a litany of to-do lists. I didn’t see the pictures until recently, and they were disappointing, as by then I knew they
would be. There are no clues left, no mystery to solve. I know what happened. I just don’t know why.

Halfway between the mile markers noted in the report, two paths lead south from the main road. I passed by them the first time because neither looks familiar, but one of them must be it. Both run dimly through the tall grass for a hundred yards, then crest a rise and disappear. No buildings in sight. The one on the left heads straight, due southwest, and sees regular use—the tracks are wide, no weeds between them. The one on the right winds roughly south, faint and overgrown. I take the one on the right, but not because it’s less traveled; it climbs the spine of a rise and offers a better view of the surroundings, and if anyone else is around, I want to see them first. The hair on my arms prickles. Showing up unannounced and uninvited to a stranger’s land out here is a good way to get shot.

The steering wheel jerks as my car’s tires drop in and out of ruts. I think of the spare I don’t have; I got a flat months ago and never replaced it. When I lived in Arizona, I drove trucks. Now I have a city car that sits low to the ground, the worst kind of vehicle for this terrain. If I get stuck, it’ll mean a fifteen-mile walk in the rain and a bitch of a towing bill, and that’s the best case. The road ahead narrows and twists, drops down a rocky hill.

A quarter mile in, I can’t see anything but a lot of empty land. My mother’s place wasn’t this far off the main road. I turn around.

The last time I spoke to my mother, we talked about the World Trade Center. It was a few days after the attacks, a few days before she died, and I don’t remember much of what we said.
On the 11th, she had watched on Bob and Connie’s TV as the second plane flew into the tower again and again, becoming a ball of flame, and every time she hoped it might end differently. When she’d heard about the plane in Pennsylvania, she’d worried about Philly, about her parents. She’d had plans for that day, but instead they all just sat on the couch, watching.

She said that Ray was worked up, kept saying a war was coming. She didn’t say how Bob reacted, but I bet he wasn’t as excited. Bob had served in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, although he didn’t talk about it. Ray had driven a truck in Desert Storm. He talked about it.

My mother was glad not to be in the army anymore; back then she’d always worried that something like this would happen and she’d get deployed, away from us. We talked about terrorists, about fear, about the possibility of more attacks. But mostly we talked about how awful it was, all those people, their families, can you imagine?

We changed the subject, talked about the future. We did that a lot. What I was going to study, what I was going to be, what she was going to do next. She’d just turned forty-four. Money was tight, for both of us, but that would figure itself out. It always had. She and Ray were planning to build a house out on the property, had been doing research about rammed-earth buildings. You did all the work yourself; she liked that idea. By the end she sounded just like she always did, optimistic, convinced that it would all work out. We said goodbye. I’d like to think I told her that I loved her, but I’m not sure I did.

Maybe Connie was right; maybe something was wrong. Maybe my mother had a sense of what was coming. I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary, but she might have fooled me. You never know what a person’s capable of.

As the interview went on, Connie and Bob mentioned the World Trade Center repeatedly. The first time they tried to call my mother was on Tuesday, a week after the attacks, and the transcript records a cryptic remark of Bob’s:
I told Connie for sure, (inaudible) the World Trade Center (inaudible) about that you know, (inaudible) something like that
.… When asked about alcohol, Connie and Bob said that my mother hardly drank at all, and that Ray drank some, not excessively, but
he likes to drink in times like this
.…

In the closing pages of the transcript, more and more of the conversation is marked as inaudible. Maybe their voices tired. Maybe the recorder’s batteries were dying. Maybe the person transcribing it got lazy, and thought it wouldn’t matter.

The detectives asked if they’ve heard from Ray. Everything Bob said from that point on, the entire last page, is marked inaudible. Connie said she hadn’t heard from him, but made a prescient guess:
If he did he probably (inaudible) his truck by now. Ray was a police officer and he wouldn’t want to go to jail … what’s the word?

Bob answered, but the word is marked inaudible. Only snippets of the final pages are preserved. The transcript ends with a series of questions, the answers to which are lost forever. The transcript is the only surviving record of that conversation. The tape has been destroyed. Bob’s dead. Connie left town, and even if I found her, she probably wouldn’t remember. There’s no way to recover exactly what was said, no way of knowing.

The interview began just after Connie called my brother, just after I stood on the porch of our house in Tucson and watched him hang up the phone, and only now do I remember what I was doing while the detectives were asking these questions: walking from room to room in the house where I last saw her, picking things up and putting them down,
thinking there must be an answer somewhere if only I could find it.

All these years later, I’m still doing the same thing.

Wyatt Earp died the morning of January 13, 1929, in a one-room apartment in Los Angeles. The man a bullet never touched died quietly, at eighty, of a prostate condition. Wyatt had outlived all five of his brothers and two wives, and he had no children. He’d lost most of his money during decades of gambling and bad investments, was living off of charity, and years of reading lies about his life had made him bitter. But his biographer claimed Wyatt was optimistic to the end, still planning another trip out to the desert. As he died in that cheap apartment, delusional and broke, I doubt anyone said of Wyatt Earp that he’d made the wrong choices in life.

He’d ridden out of Tombstone fifty years earlier, but he could never live it down. Wyatt said he hoped he’d fade into obscurity after he died, that he’d finally be left alone. But he told that to a biographer whose tall tales of Wyatt’s life would cement his legend.

Wyatt claimed to have no regrets about the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and its aftermath, except that those few months defined his life. He didn’t mention the three men killed in the fight, nor his own brother Morgan, murdered in revenge. He said that if he had the gunfight to do over, he would have done exactly what he did.

But his last words were an unfinished question:
Suppose, suppose …

The last person to see my mother alive was a former neighbor, Mrs. Miller, who owned a ranch outside of Tombstone. The
final pages of the police report are a deputy’s interview of her. Mrs. Miller said she saw my mother and Ray on Wednesday morning. She was driving toward Tombstone and they were headed out, Ray at the wheel, one arm out the window. She waved. He waved back.

The deputy interviewing her asked if my mother and Ray were heading toward Gleeson. Mrs. Miller said they could have been. He asked if there was anybody else in the truck and she said no. He asked when Mrs. Miller had last been to my mother’s house and she said never, but that she’d known my mother for many years. She mentioned some of the businesses my mother had owned, and that she had dated several different men.

The deputy asked if they appeared to be having any problems when she saw them. Mrs. Miller said no, they were just driving slowly up the road, like they always did. She saw them often, on the road or in the post office or at the Walmart in Sierra Vista, and they’d be holding hands and sticking close together. She didn’t know them to ever have had problems—they were always kissing and hugging when she saw them—but on that Wednesday she did wonder to herself if they were still as lovey as they’d always been. She didn’t say what gave her that impression, and the deputy didn’t ask.

Mrs. Miller said she saw them at about nine-fifteen. Bob found her body between three and three-thirty, already cold. When Mrs. Miller saw my mother, she had a few hours left to live, and was leaving Tombstone for the last time, being driven slowly out into the desert.

The road on the left hugs a barbed-wire fence for about a quarter mile until it comes to a rusted gate hanging open. My memory sparks but doesn’t catch until I imagine that gate
closed, and remember my mother standing by the gatepost, twisting the combination lock, swinging it open, turning, smiling, waving me through. She kept the gate closed. The police report says it was open the day they found her. The last time I was here, I removed the police tape and opened it again. Whoever lives here now leaves it open; they must feel safer than she did.

Past the gate the road dips sharply, crosses an arroyo, rises again. My car won’t make it any farther, but it doesn’t have to. It’s coming back to me now. Ahead, that side track to the left must have been the turnoff to their driveway. After I left the trailer, I walked down to that wash and stared at her blood on my hands. She died halfway up that hill.

I don’t know what I expected, if I thought I’d come here and replay that day eight years ago, walk into the trailer, stare off down the valley again, wondering what had happened. But there’s no reason to get out of the car, nowhere to go, nothing to see. Everything I remember is gone. No trailer, no corrals, no red sign saying “WHOA.” A square shape on the horizon might be a small building, a shed, but it’s too far away to have been hers; otherwise it’s a bare hillside, just another patch of land parceled off by a barbed-wire fence.

Maybe I have the wrong place; maybe I can’t even remember where she died. Or maybe the new owners removed the reminders of the murder that happened here, and who can blame them? We sold it for a song, didn’t want to be reminded. Now I show up all these years later and it’s not what I expected. What did I expect? A diorama showing where they stood and shot and died, like the one at the O.K. Corral? Coming here was a bad idea. Now I’m just another tourist.

My vision blurs. My hands begin to shake. A burn spreads through my chest. Whatever closure I was hoping to find here
is never going to come, only more of this same old rage. Since she died, it’s like I’m trapped in a house on fire.

I turn the car around and drive back toward the main road, breathing deeply, trying to calm down. A blue sedan turns in ahead of me and pulls over to let me pass. I stop next to it and roll my window down. Inside, an old white couple watches me like a threat; these might be the new owners of my mother’s land, the people who erased all sign of her. The man’s large balding head turns to the woman, and his jowls shake as he speaks. Her glasses cover her entire face, reflecting a warped view of the desert. He pushes a button and his window falls.

“Is this your land?” I say it loud, and he recoils. I’ll buy it back, right here and now, no matter what it costs. I’ll build that rammed-earth house with my bare hands, make her a monument.

The stranger shakes his head and gives a sheepish smile, a little shrug. “Nope,” he says. “We’re just looking for the ghost town.”

She would have been facing west. It was warm that day, ninety at noon; the windows of the trailer were open, and through them she saw the mottled hills, tawny and green, rising and falling into the distance; the horses ambling in the corral, muscles bunching beneath their sleek hides as they moved; the charred ring where the fire pit had been. Outside, the door of the truck slammed shut. She returned to her crossword puzzle, reread the clue. What was the word?

The trailer door opened. A shaft of light, a breath of wind, a boot thumping on the step. She ignored him. They had fought about something, said things that couldn’t be unsaid. She tried to forget about it, to focus on the clue. She wasn’t
one to brood. If she had made a decision, to leave that place, to leave Ray, she wouldn’t have wavered. She knew how to make decisions.

He said something or he didn’t. She replied or she didn’t. I hope he hesitated before he raised my mother’s gun and pointed it at her back, hope it was hard for him to become that man. If she sensed what was coming, she didn’t turn around.

A tug at her shoulder. A crack split the room. Another. The pain arrived an instant later, in her shoulder, in her chest, spreading, ricocheting. She had known pain, but this was fresh and terrible.
Pain
was just a word.