Son of a Gun (8 page)

The morning of my mother’s funeral mass, I pulled into the parking lot of the Sacred Heart Church in Tombstone a half hour early and sat staring at the basketball court behind the rectory where I’d played as a kid. The rim was low and bent by years of hanging boys. The steps of the church were empty. I’d stayed at a friend’s house in Tombstone the night before, so I wouldn’t have to get up early and drive down from Tucson. I was the first person there, and I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do, go stand under the plaster Jesus and hold the door open, sit in the front pew and try to weep. I wished I had a basketball.

I got out of my truck and smoothed the wrinkles from my shirt and walked to the entrance of the church. I went inside, blessed myself with holy water in the vestibule, and walked past the shuttered confessionals and a short way up the aisle toward the altar. My mother had tried to teach me the names of places in a church, the nave and crossing and so on. She had
gone to Catholic school and knew all the jargon, all the rituals; she used to sit next to me on Palm Sunday folding fronds into crosses, explaining the stations of the cross. She tried to raise me in the faith, but we only went to church on Christmas and Easter, or for a few Sundays in a row whenever she began to feel guilty. In the last years of her life she returned in earnest to Catholicism, started reading the Bible again, convinced Ray to convert, and cajoled me into taking classes to get confirmed.

I still have a picture from my confirmation, in a frame my mother bought and signed on the back in gold marker:
Congratulations Justin, xo Mom
, beneath a drawing of the Jesus fish. In the picture I’m kneeling at the feet of a priest who’s about to rub chrism on my forehead in the shape of a cross and tell me to repeat his words accepting Christ and rejecting Satan. Ray stands behind me with his hand on my shoulder; he was my confirmation sponsor. My mother stands next to him, a bit behind. She’s reaching for something, but the camera’s angle hides her hand: it’s not clear whether she’s reaching for me or for him. That was the last time I’d been inside a church.

I went outside and stood on the sidewalk watching the sun rise, warming away the chill of morning. A green Dodge pickup parked across the street. I’d been gone for more than a year, but I could still identify most residents of Tombstone by their vehicles. The Dodge belonged to Dave, my mother’s last boyfriend before Ray. He stepped down from the truck, straightened his bolo tie, and shrugged into his jacket. He was clean shaven and he’d tried unsuccessfully to tame his wild hair. I hadn’t seen him since we’d moved out of his house. Now he was the first person at her funeral besides me.

Dave walked over. He asked how I was and I said all right, considering. We stood looking out at the cracked asphalt of Safford Street as cars parked and people in church clothes got out, pulling purses and coats from their trunks.

“I could never make her happy,” Dave said abruptly. “I thought she’d found someone who could.” The last words caught in his throat.

“I always liked you, Dave,” I said. It probably wasn’t much comfort, but it was the best I could do.

He put his hand up to shield his eyes from the sun. It looked almost as if he were saluting. The muscles worked along his jaw, and I knew he wanted to say more than that he was sorry, just like I wanted to say more than thanks, although that’s all we said before he shook my hand and walked inside.

It was the first of many halting and deficient conversations I would have that day. Soon Josh and Dad and Grandpop showed up, and we stood for a while by the doorway, thanking the people who stopped to offer their condolences, until we realized we were only making things worse for everyone and went inside.

I was surprised to see the church half full. The funeral was held on a Thursday morning, and Mom didn’t have much of a social life, so I hadn’t expected a big turnout. I saw some friends from college and a few old friends from high school I hadn’t talked to since I’d moved away. I saw the ex-girlfriend who’d broken my heart for the first time and wished she hadn’t come. And I saw the families who’d helped raise us, our mother’s few friends and our friends’ parents, people who had fed us at their tables and cheered for us at baseball games and told us, over and over, to get the hell out of Tombstone the first chance we got. Half the people in that town had a hand in raising me, and it seemed like all of them were there.

But so were some of the other half, people who’d hardly known my mother, people she’d avoided because she’d been the victim of their gossip. You can’t date as many men as she did in a town that small and hope to escape a reputation, the word the older boys on my junior high baseball team had called
her to taunt me—
whore
—or the term a friend had overheard the town marshal call her while gossiping about her death in the Circle K:
black widow
. Now a lot of those same petty gossipmongers were at her funeral, wearing black, shaking their heads and dabbing their eyes and saying how sad it was.

The priest came out of the sacristy and I sat in the front pew next to my brother. I tried not to focus on the faces behind me aglow with pity. The brass box of my mother’s ashes sat on a table in front of the altar. The priest was a hoary brimstone Jesuit my mother had disliked so much that she joined a different parish and drove all the way to Sierra Vista every Sunday rather than worship here. Whenever the Jesuit mentioned my mother, he looked at the urn, as if she were a jack-in-the-box waiting for someone to crank the handle. He flung some holy water and said it was time to say our final farewell to Deborah, and I bowed my head with the others.

The funeral director had offered us the chance to speak, and I’d tried to write something. But I couldn’t do justice to her loss, so I’d declined. As I sat in that church with people I knew had been whispering her name, listening to a priest talk about judgment and redemption, I wished I had tried harder. I was lost in a fantasy of barring the doors and lighting the place on fire when a hand squeezed my shoulder.

I turned and saw a man’s broad back disappearing down the aisle behind me. He was thick and tan and had a dark Mohawk. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew who he was: my mother’s only sibling, her younger brother. Uncle Tom.

When I was growing up, Uncle Tom would come stay with us for a while whenever he got fired or evicted, or whenever he’d blown all his money on drugs. Tom moved out to Arizona with his family a few years after we did, following his sister
with the same idea: to start over. I was never told the details—I was too young—but I can guess why he moved. He had no job and a drug problem and a lot of old friends who didn’t help in either respect, and North Philly was no place to be in the eighties, with the factories shut down and crack on every corner. If you had somewhere else to go, you went. Tom moved his family out West, thinking at least it would be different.

It was different; it was worse. Soon after they moved to Tucson, the first of his five children, Tom Jr., was killed by a car while crossing the street. His third child, a daughter, died in her crib during a nap. After that, Tom wanted to be closer to his sister, so he moved to Tombstone, a town with ten bars and no grocery store, smack in the middle of the biggest drug-trafficking corridor in America. It was the worst place in the world for an addict.

He spent the ensuing years in and out of our house, in and out of jail. My mother used Uncle Tom as a fuckup bogeyman through my years of teenage rebellion, when I was getting high every morning before school and drinking shoplifted tequila in parking lots at lunch. She’d come into my room at night and sit on the edge of my bed and say she knew what I was doing and wished I would stop, because she couldn’t bear to see me turn out like Uncle Tom. I’d sometimes see my uncle at parties out in the desert, a figure on the far side of a fire, but we didn’t acknowledge or talk to each other; I guess we were ashamed. He acquired the nickname Cool Breeze among Tombstone’s slacker circles. Josh and I thought it was hilarious, but hearing it made Mom detonate.

The last time I’d seen Tom was after Ray moved in, a few months before I left home. I found my uncle sprawled across our yard-sale couch one day, wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, his Mohawk grown out into a black shock of tangled hair, still asleep at noon. I knew when I saw him that he’d be staying
awhile—he always did—and I bitched and moaned a little about how long he spent in the bathroom, but otherwise I was OK with it. My first memory of my uncle is him telling me a dirty nursery rhyme, and since that moment I’d always liked him. But I made sure not to leave any cash lying around.

Ray didn’t like Tom staying with us, and he didn’t try to hide it. He rarely spoke to my uncle, and when Tom wasn’t in the room, he’d start complaining. Tom didn’t give a shit what Ray thought. He’d seen enough of my mother’s men come and go, and he’d outlasted all of them, so he wasn’t about to start kissing some cop’s ass. Their grudge seemed too strong to be new; I wondered whether Ray had ever arrested Tom, although neither of them mentioned meeting before.

My uncle volunteered to help around the house, to earn his keep, as he put it. Which was how I wound up spending an entire weekend that summer with Tom, building a barbed-wire fence around our property. One of us would hold the fence post, trying to keep it straight, while the other beat it into the ground with a driver. It was a shitty job. The dirt of southeastern Arizona is hard and dry and full of cement-like rock deposits called caliche. Whoever held the posts had the driver tolling like a church bell right in his ear, and whoever swung the driver had to lift twenty pounds of steel a dozen times a post. It was a long fence that crossed uneven ground; it took a lot of posts. After a few hours we were both half deaf and hungry and sick of earning our keep.

At lunchtime, Tom and I sat on rocks and ate sandwiches. I told him about my new girlfriend, with whom I’d been anticipating having reckless unprotected sex in my pickup truck that weekend until Mom had told me I had to build the fence. Tom listened to me gripe, but didn’t say where he would rather be. We finished our lunch but didn’t want to go back to work, so he started telling stories about his time in the army. I knew
he’d been in the military but had never heard him talk about it. I was thinking of enlisting myself—my high school counselor had said it was that or community college—so I listened as he told me about a night he’d spent sitting in a guard shack somewhere in Germany. Snow was falling all around him and he couldn’t see a thing, so he smoked cigarettes and drank whiskey from a flask until he fell asleep. He had a dream about enemies advancing through the snow. When he snapped awake, he thought he saw a person out there in the field.

Tom posed as if he were holding an invisible gun to his shoulder. “I’m fucking pointing my rifle and yelling at this dude, telling him I’m going to shoot, and then I look closer and there’s nobody there.” His bloodshot eyes flared wide. “I was about to kill nothing.”

“Should I join the army?” I didn’t typically ask my uncle for advice, but I thought that maybe if we dragged our feet enough, the sun would go down and we wouldn’t be able to finish the fence, and Mom would either forget about it or make Ray do it.

“You can have a good time, man.” He chuckled and looked off into the middle distance as if he were remembering another story. “I got to go all over the place, Germany and Europe. But there’s always somebody telling you what to do.”

That evening, after we’d finished working for the day, I walked down the hall of our trailer and found the bathroom door closed. I was about to knock when from inside I heard the squeak of a rubber band as it cinched tight, and then the telltale slapping. Soon there was a long sigh, and the toilet groaned as he slumped backward against the tank.

I sold him out. I didn’t want my sketchy uncle shooting up in my house, so I told Mom what I’d heard. I came home from work a few days later and Tom was gone. I bet Ray did the talking when they kicked him out, and I bet he enjoyed it. For
the rest of the time we lived there, I thought of my uncle every time I passed that slapdash fence, and wondered where he was, if he was all right.

The service ended. I tried to dodge the groping hands of the congregation to find Tom. He was hard to get hold of, with no steady phone number or address, and if I lost him then, I might not see him again for a long time. I thought I saw his Mohawk parting the crowd, and I called his name but he didn’t stop. By the time I shrugged my way outside, he was nowhere in sight. I asked Grandpop and Josh if they’d seen him and they said no. I walked around the side of the church to the back, where a giant rosebush canopied the yard: I thought Tom might have gone there to be alone. But he’d vanished. I went back inside still feeling the weight of his hand on my shoulder.

In the aisle of the church, Tom’s children—Leighanne and Sean and Eric, the three who had survived—were talking to my brother. I went over and hugged Leighanne, the oldest and my mother’s favorite. The kids had lived with us on and off growing up, whenever the state took them away from Tom, and my mother often said Leighanne was like the third child she’d never had.

Leighanne kept glancing toward my mother’s urn, still sitting on the altar beneath the empty pulpit. I hadn’t seen her in a while, and I’d always thought of her as a little girl, but she’d suddenly become a teenager, willowy and pretty, red-haired and pale and preternaturally mature. Her face was calm and her eyes were steady; she understood. There would be no more weekends at Aunt Debbie’s, no more horseback rides. Her brothers were younger, nine and eight, respectively, and they didn’t seem to get it, kept fiddling with hymnals and casting restless looks around the room. I thought of their older
brother, Tom Jr. I was about their age when he died; it was my first inkling of death. My mother answered the phone one day and listened for a few seconds before hanging up and bursting into tears. She sighed deeply, sat me down, and tried to explain in terms I could understand. If I could have remembered how she’d put it, I might have been able to explain her death to my cousins. I could have told them why they were standing in a church surrounded by adults, why their father had hurried away, why people kept looking at a brass box when they said my mother’s name. But in order to do that, I would have had to grasp it all myself.