Son of a Gun (15 page)

Tombstone burned down, was rebuilt, busted. The mines flooded and silver prices tanked. Within a decade the boom years had become a distant memory, and so had the Earps. When Bisbee took the county seat away in 1929, Tombstone had no reason to exist. The town needed a story to survive. It chose Wyatt Earp’s.

The first Helldorado, a Western festival timed to roughly commemorate the gunfight, was planned to drum up tourism. The gunfight was reenacted for the first time. The timing was right: a glut of books and movies about the Wild West brought visitors in droves, that year and for decades after. Seventy years after the shootout, a Hollywood movie gave it the name it’s been known by ever since: the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Now the gunfight happens every day.

When my mother and Brian went to Tombstone that day to see the O.K. Corral, she was about the same age Wyatt had been when he arrived, and like him she was looking to start over. Brian says they were walking up Allen Street when she said she wanted to live there. It was a small town, a good place to raise a family. They could buy a house, maybe start a jewelry store. Brian makes it sound as if he was always a part of her plan, but I have my doubts about that. She knew she could do it alone.

They stopped into a real estate office and struck up a conversation with the owner, Sandra. She and her husband, Tony, would become my mother’s first friends in town, and were among the few who stuck with her through the ensuing years; she was managing Tony’s restaurant when she met Ray. Sandra
had a house for rent on a dead-end street near the elementary school, with a clear view north across the valley all the way to the Dragoon Mountains. When they went to see the house, my mother and Brian stood in the yard looking at the mountains and tried to find the rock formation the locals called Sheep’s Head.

They told Sandra they’d think about the house and went to dinner at a steakhouse on Allen Street. As they were eating, the owner, George, came by to say hello. They hit it off, and Brian told him they were getting out of the service and thinking about starting a business.

“You know how quickly I make friends,” he tells me.

George asked if they’d ever thought about a restaurant. He took them through a doorway at the back of the steakhouse and into the kitchen, past the steaming dishwashers and the bustling cook line, the humming ice cream maker and the walk-ins clacking shut, through another set of doors until they were standing in another kitchen, bare except for a pizza oven. The former owner had left in the middle of the night and taken everything he could carry, the plates and silverware and glasses, the cash register, the tables and chairs. My mother and Brian wandered through the empty space and imagined what they could build there. They just didn’t have the money.

“But George saw the entrepreneurial spirit in us,” Brian says. “We were young and vivacious and wanted to change our lives.” They struck a deal. They went to Tombstone to see the O.K. Corral, and left with leases on a house and a restaurant.

Brian stops in midsentence, looks over my shoulder, and says, “You found more food.”

I turn around to see a beanpole of a man with a bad sunburn
standing behind me eating popcorn. He’s wearing a white T-shirt that says “Lemonade,” with a picture of a lemon in place of the
o
. He says he’s been carrying a tray of lemonade around all day.

Brian asks how business is going, and Lemonade says he’s made a hundred and ninety bucks. Brian perks at the mention of money, and asks what he’s going to do with it.

“Hoard it,” he says. “I have CDs in the bank.”

He’s walked right into the trap. Brian tells him he ought to go into business for himself, and launches into an ad hoc analysis of the potential profit margins: the lemonade costs ten cents, the owner charges four dollars, pays him a dollar a cup, and so on. They debate the price of plastic cups, whether they’d be cheaper if you got them from Mexico.

“You’re an entrepreneur,” Brian says. “I’ll teach you how to make money in business.”

“I’m an opera singer,” Lemonade says.

Brian hardly blinks. “Well, you need to go to Branson.”

“I don’t do country music.”

“They have opera there.”

The longer I watch Brian operate, the better I understand his approach. He has an answer for everything. His answers don’t make any sense, but it doesn’t matter: his game’s about projecting authority. He’s a confidence man.

Lemonade shoves more popcorn into his mouth. Pieces of it stick to his pink cheeks. “I do epic, heavy metal rock opera,” he says.

Even Brian pauses at that. “Well,” he says, “it’s an entertainment town.…”

Lemonade continues. “I do other things, too. Show tunes, whatever. As long as it has good pitch.”

Brian doesn’t respond for some time, but the lemonade man
sticks around, munching popcorn, surveying his kingdom. Brian invites him to the presentation later tonight, and he shrugs and leaves. Brian asks where he was in the story.

My mother and Brian went to work building the restaurant. They bought equipment and furniture at swap meets, purchased supplies on credit, tried to learn how to make a decent pizza. Brian says they made an agreement: he would work the front of the restaurant, waiting tables, handling the cash, and doing tableside magic tricks. He admits he wasn’t very good at magic back then, and would often get caught stuffing handkerchiefs and playing cards up his sleeves, but he says the gimmick was solid gold. Mom would do the cooking. Josh and I would help after school and on the weekends. We decided on a name, drew up a logo of smiling rabbits and a top hat, made T-shirts, hung a sign over the boardwalk, and opened the doors. Pizza Magic was in business.

It didn’t take long to see why the last owner had skipped town. Brian says that within a few days of our grand opening, the owner of a restaurant across the street came in and threatened him. We’d unknowingly moved into the middle of a turf war between George, the steakhouse owner who also owned our building, and a group of rival businessmen. Each side had important allies, councilmen and cops. Buildings were vandalized, windows broken, threatening notes left on doors. Rumors started and spread. Tombstone was split into factions, just like it had been with the Earps and Clantons, just like it has been ever since.

We had other problems: Pizza Magic was bleeding money. The location didn’t help, on a side street blocks from the main attractions. We tried bringing in a frozen yogurt machine, which infuriated another local businessman, who until then
had held a citywide monopoly on the yogurt trade. We bought VHS tapes and started a rental service, but the movies disappeared, and there was no way to collect, because my brother and I had taken most of them. We watched
La Bamba
until the tape wore out.

A carnival came to town for Helldorado. It sucked even by carnival standards, a few sputtering rides and game stalls full of dying goldfish staffed by leering carnies, but we kids loved it. The carnival set up in an empty lot at the end of our street. For a weekend, Pizza Magic was packed.

The day after the carnival left town, a sinkhole opened where the Ferris wheel had been. An old mine stope underneath the surface, one of hundreds like it in Tombstone, had collapsed. The street was cordoned off for months as the city dawdled fixing it. We kept the restaurant open, but nobody came. We wondered if we’d been cursed.

Mom had another idea: movie night. She said the kids in town got into trouble because they were bored, and she thought they’d show up in bunches if we played a movie on a weekend night and sold cheap pizza and soda. I told her the idea was dorky, especially because she wouldn’t show
The Lost Boys
like I’d suggested. She picked something PG-13, because she didn’t want to get in trouble with any parents. She hadn’t figured out yet that most parents in Tombstone didn’t give a shit where their kids were or what they were doing, so long as they didn’t have to leave the bars to bail them out.

We made signs and posted them on the boardwalk. On movie night the pizzas sat steaming in their trays, pitchers of soda sweating puddles onto the counter. A dozen chairs circled the TV we’d brought from home, all of them empty. My brother and I fiddled with the tracking on the VCR for longer than we needed to, while my mother walked back and forth from the kitchen to the dining room, glancing at the clock.
Brian wasn’t there that night; maybe she didn’t want to watch him do the same old tricks again. Through the windows, the Pizza Magic sign hung above an empty boardwalk.

Eventually Mom took off the apron, tossed it on the counter, told us to eat and drink as much as we wanted, and went into the kitchen to clean up. She was gone awhile. She’d seen harder times than that, and she must have thought of them: the operating table, my father leaving, hanging tangled in that tree.

To me it seemed like a catastrophe, like we were failing, like
she
was failing. That wasn’t true; her and Brian’s next idea, to bring in video games and make one of the dining rooms into an arcade, saved the business. But on movie night, for the first time in my life, I doubted her.

Brian keeps talking. I watch people pass by. I haven’t been paying attention for a while; it’s hard to listen for this long, and the more he says about those years, the more my own memories take over. Doug’s baseball cap bobs through the crowd. He arrives and leans into our conversation, pointing to a stall in the middle of the tent.

“See that little guy over there? At the stall for Navajo Dancer?” We nod. “I went to talk to him, and he said it was a pyramid scheme.”

“How’d you handle the question?” Brian asks.

“I said I’m a business owner,” Doug says indignantly. “That didn’t work.”

“Did you tell him it doesn’t cost anything to look?”

“No.” Doug glances again at Navajo Dancer. He tugs at the brim of his hat. “Should we double-team him?” Doug is getting testy. I like him better this way.

“We’ll wander over in a minute,” Brian says. “Let me finish my story.”

Once the street was fixed and the video games arrived, Pizza Magic began to turn a profit. Brian says it was his magic tricks, his knack for attracting customers, but I wonder about that. I remember my mother in the kitchen, covered in sweat and flour, kneading dough and chopping vegetables, sliding pizzas in and out of that furnace-like oven. She worked open to close every day for a couple of years. Only a decade later, when I had a job as a line cook at the steakhouse next door, did I understand what that was like, the suffocating heat, the cuts and burns, dreading each new ticket going up on the wheel, cleaning everything at the end of the night knowing you’d dirty it again in a few hours.

Brian says she left him without warning. He got a line on a job and flew out of state to interview. He thought it would be their ticket out of Tombstone, that they could sell the restaurant and stop having to work those grueling hours. He was gone a week, and when he returned, she’d taken up with another man.

“Just like that?” I ask.

“By the time I came back, there was a restraining order,” he says. “She said she was afraid of me.”

I don’t remember any violence between her and Brian; arguments, sure, raised voices coming from their bedroom, but nothing physical. Brian says the only time he ever laid a hand on her was to lift her onto a counter during an argument to try to calm her down. He says she was the one with the temper, that she’d snap and start throwing dishes or slap him.

That’s true about her temper. Once—only once—she hit me. I was about thirteen. We were in the car and I made the kind of wiseass remark she loathed. I didn’t see her hand come off the gearshift. She had a ring on and it opened a cut next to
my eye. I told her if she ever did that again, I’d break her fucking arm. I didn’t mean it, but I said it anyway, because by then I’d seen her get hit enough to know how it worked: if I’d kept quiet and accepted her apology, it would have given her permission to do it again.

Brian says he was stunned when she left him. He hung around Tombstone for a while, trying to get her back, but eventually took the new job and moved. He says he later heard from his friend in the CIA that she’d remarried. “And then the rest of it I learned when I did this,” he says. He reaches into his briefcase, pulls out the envelope, and sets it on his lap. He says he spent three days in Tombstone last year, talking to old friends and the police.

I ask for the envelope. He pats it. “Sure,” he says. “I’ll show it to you later. But I can tell you what happened.” He proceeds to tell me his version of my mother’s death. She and Ray got into an argument. She rejected him somehow, made a sarcastic comment, impugned his manhood. “I say this very carefully.” He lays one hand flat on the envelope and gestures with the other; he’s in magician mode, doing a trick. “He didn’t have a sense of humor.”

“Excuse me?”

“She took every cent I had,” he says. “Stole everything that I earned. Destroyed me financially. I had a sense of humor about it. But this other guy, he was a failure at everything he did. When she rejected him, he couldn’t handle it. He didn’t have a sense of humor.”