Son of a Gun (17 page)

“So,” Brian says, “all we need is two thousand dollars.”

“Do you think you can do that?” Doug says.

“No.” Saying it satisfies me. “That’s too much money.”

“You can start with the two-year membership, get your foot in the door,” Brian says. “That’s only eight hundred.”

“Not bad,” Doug says.

“I don’t have the money.” Another lie: I do have the money, what’s left of my mother’s life insurance. An hour ago, trapped in that dining room, I considered cutting him a check so I could get the envelope and leave and never have to see these people again. But he’s not getting my mother’s money.

Doug looks to Brian, who seems to be deciding something. “OK. We’ll talk more, we have time.” I don’t know what he means. Once I get my hands on that envelope, we’ll never see each other again. I thought he knew that.

Doug shakes my hand and takes the bag inside. Brian reaches into his jacket, pulls out the envelope, and hands it to me. I thank him, and for a moment we stand at arm’s reach, and in the light of the moon we look at each other, at who we’ve both become.

I extend my hand, but he pulls me into a hug instead. His jacket smells like the leather treatment he used to help me break in my first baseball mitt. “It’s good to see you,” he says into my ear. I pull away. He wishes me luck. “I’m glad you’re doing this for your mother,” he says. “I loved her very much.” He stares off at Mount Lemmon looming black and massive to the north. His eyes look wet, but it’s hard to tell. This all seems so scripted, the full moon, the silence, the land stretching soft and silver on every side of us, a goodbye in the desert. The envelope is heavy in my hand. I promise to send it back when I’m done.

A few days later, Brian calls from a conference in Louisville to check in. He wants to see how I’m doing after reading the police reports, and to secure my financial future. I tell him I haven’t read the reports yet, which is true; I haven’t worked up the nerve. I also tell Brian that I don’t have time to do network
marketing, but that’s a lie. I’m lousy with time. I’ve spent the days since I saw Brian sitting alone in my rented guesthouse, sweaty and bored, watching Phillies games and talking to Laura on the phone, begging her to come visit. I could attend network marketing conferences, give in-home demonstrations, recruit my friends. But I won’t. He had something I needed—information, documents, a side of the story—and I got it. I won. I need to think that I won.

After I say no, his voice loses its shine. “OK,” he says. “OK.” The sales pitch is over. “Well, I hope you stay in touch. We’ve still got things to talk about. I’d love to have you come visit sometime.”

Beneath the background noise of the convention, I hear something in his voice, a sadness that I recognize. I remember his words at the end of our first phone call:
It’s hard for me that it ended up that way
. What he said in that moonlit driveway:
I loved her very much
. I always think the pain of her loss belongs only to me, but he misses her, too, and he has his own regrets. He returned to Arizona after he heard, hoping to find her killer, hoping to understand what happened. I want to hate him for a lot of reasons—because he brought her to Tombstone, and because he was once a father to me and then he wasn’t—but I can’t, because we’re not that different.

I get his address and tell him I’ll send back the files. “Some of the old pictures, too. Some of us,” I say, although I wonder if there are any left that he hasn’t been cut out of.

“That would be nice,” he says. “I’d love to see them.”

Despite what he says about keeping in touch, I doubt we’ll speak again. I realize that what I want to say most is that I’m sorry—sorry for dredging up all this old pain and grief, sorry for cutting his face out of pictures, sorry I’m not going to be part of his network marketing downline. Instead, I tell him to take care and we hang up. That night I dig through the box of
my mother’s things and find a few pictures of Brian with my brother and me. We’re sitting on his shoulders in a pool. We’re standing with him on the boardwalk in Tombstone, pointing toy guns at him. We’re at a range, taking turns shooting his .380 automatic, the first gun I ever shot. When I look through these old albums now, I see guns everywhere.

I make copies of the pictures and the documents he gave me and mail it all back to him. I don’t talk to Brian again, but our last conversation lingers with me: I rejected him and he responded not with anger, like I expected, but with sadness and resignation, just like he handled her rejection years ago. Seeing Brian again only confirmed my hazy childhood memories: he’s not a bad man.

But that’s what I thought about Ray.

From the front stoop of my rented guesthouse I watch storm clouds roll in from the south. The concrete step beneath me radiates the heat of the day, and a warm breeze blows ribbons of dust through the streets. The guesthouse is an old adobe with no air-conditioning, four tiny rooms of stifling heat. I sublet it for the summer from a graduate student studying archaeology, and the walls are hung with wooden masks and paintings of dark and faceless figures. Now my mother’s last effects sit in a crate on the living room floor, and the police report of her murder lies unread on the coffee table. I try not to spend much time inside.

It’s monsoon season. Brooding clouds have gathered the last few evenings, and each time I’ve sat here waiting for rain that hasn’t come. Thunder rumbles. Maybe tonight.

Inside, the phone rings. I hurry to get it; I’m expecting a call.

“Justin.” It’s him. His voice is low and raspy, not the bellow I remember, and he sounds older. But it’s definitely him.

“Max.” It’s been a long time since I’ve said his name, felt this sibilant hiss in my teeth. A long breath escapes me. “Thanks for calling me back.”

“I’m sorry about your mother.”

There are a lot of things Max could be sorry about, but he means he’s sorry that she’s dead.

“You heard.”

“Yes.”

“The whole story?”

“Bits and pieces.”

I give him the condensed version.

“Good Lord,” he says. There’s a long pause, and then his voice lifts: “So how are you doing?”

We talk about our lives. He’s remarried and owns a business. He updates me on his sons, the twins who were my stepsib-lings. He asks about my brother and me, and I tell him Josh is married and I’m about to move in with my girlfriend. We talk mostly about women. He says he’s often wondered where we are and how we’re doing. Soon we run out of things to say. He suggests lunch, and we set up a time.

I hang up and go back outside to watch the storm. Max was nice on the phone; I don’t know why I expected otherwise. We hated each other for most of the time they were married, but what does that mean? I was a shithead kid, adolescent and fatherless, and he came along and married her and stuck around longer than anybody else had, so the task of being the evil stepdad fell to him. I hated him mostly because he was there, although he gave me other reasons.

The storm rumbles and glowers for a while, but soon it blows over.

Once Brian was gone, Mom didn’t waste any time: she sold the pizza place and bought a gift shop named Madame Mustache, after a brothel owner from the boomtown era, across the street from where Morgan Earp was killed. We moved into a trailer a few miles outside of Tombstone. It was the first trailer we lived in, but it was nice as trailers go, a three-bedroom double-wide in a neighborhood called Holiday Ranch Estates, which locals called Holiday because it didn’t deserve such a fancy name. Holiday was outside the city limits, with no zoning laws or organizing logic; our trailer sat across the street from a six-bedroom mansion. There weren’t any laws against owning livestock, so my mother bought a couple of horses and went riding every day. She took me with her a few times. I hated horses—still do—how stupid and slow and skittish they are, how much of a pain in the ass: all that shit to shovel, all that hay to stack. I wanted a dirt bike.

Then she married Bill, the other man Brian mentioned, a tourist from Washington, D.C., she’d met at Pizza Magic. Bill and his two sons moved in with us. Bill was my grandparents’ age, and I said as much once, during a car ride early in their relationship, after which my mother scolded me. Bill was also rich. He had a pool built in the backyard to win us over, and took us along to Hawaii on their honeymoon, ten days with the whole family in paradise. Mom let me pack my own luggage, and I tried to take my cap gun on the plane in my carry-on, creating a situation at the X-ray scanner. We had to ship it separately, or that’s what Mom said when she came back from the security room—I never saw that gun again. In Hawaii we went snorkeling and took a helicopter ride. Six months later they got divorced.

Mom was single for a while. We moved into an adobe shotgun shack in Tombstone proper that she’d bought for sixteen thousand dollars. It had holes in the roof and peeling paint and mouse shit caked in the cupboards, no air-conditioning and no heat. During the winter she left the oven on at night to give off a dim orange glow and the suggestion of warmth. She called it a fixer-upper. It was the worst place we ever lived, but I loved it like no other, because for a brief while there were no men around, just Mom and Josh and me.

It didn’t last long. One day she mentioned that she was going on a date with a man who owned a T-shirt printing shop in Sierra Vista, one of Madame Mustache’s suppliers. I was sitting in the living room that night, watching
MacGyver
, when I heard a car rumble into the driveway and looked out the window to see a long white Cadillac beaming its headlights through the cacti in our front yard. Mom came out of her bedroom wearing a dress, makeup, and dangly earrings. When she kissed my cheek to say goodbye, I smelled perfume. I watched through the window as she walked out and climbed into the Cadillac, and I got my first glimpse of Max in the dome light before she closed the door: a big round head with silver hair and a dark mustache. Later I would wonder if he saw me there in the window, staring suspiciously out at him, and if that moment made us enemies.

Their relationship moved quickly; hers always did. A few months later we sold our adobe and moved twenty miles away, into his sprawling house in a subdivision outside Sierra Vista called Country Club Estates. The houses there had green lawns and big garages, backyards bordering fairways and ponds, exotic cars in the driveways: one of the neighbors had two Porsche 911s, a fact I noted with astonishment on our first trip there. For the rest of the brief time we lived in that neighborhood,
I watched the front door of that house every time we passed it, hoping to catch a glimpse of the person important enough to own two different Porsches.

Max’s house had four bedrooms, a garage, a pool, a Solo-flex, a computer, and a dog, a chocolate lab named Buck who chased tennis balls. He also had twin teenage boys, two years older than Josh, who drove an old truck they’d fixed up themselves, played varsity football, and were about to leave for college. They were sometimes nice to me and always tolerant, which was more than I could say for my real brother at the time, so I tried to think of them as brothers, but it never really stuck. Then Max’s T-shirt shop went under. He sold his house, and we moved back to Tombstone.

The movie
Tombstone
had begun shooting in the area by then, and it was the biggest thing to happen to the town in decades. Kurt Russell came into Madame Mustache one day, and a guy who’d worked for us got a bit part as a barber, even spoke a line during the scene when Doc Holliday braces Johnny Ringo in the street. There were rumors that Kevin Costner would play Wyatt Earp in another movie. Tombstone was going to be famous again.

Dozens of movies about the Earps had already been made. Wyatt himself hung around Hollywood in the early years of Westerns—a young John Wayne met him on a movie set, and later claimed to have based his laconic lawman characters on Wyatt—and everyone from Errol Flynn to Henry Fonda to Ronald Reagan played him on the silver screen. But the recent decline of the Western genre had been a bad omen for Tombstone, which depended on tourism for its survival. Like every other shopkeeper on Allen Street, Mom and Max hoped the new movies would bring in business.