Son of a Gun: A Memoir

Son of a Gun In the tradition of Tobias Wolff, James Ellroy, and Mary Karr, a stunning memoir of a mother-son relationship that is also the searing, unflinching account of a murder and its aftermath Tombstone, Arizona, September 2001. Debbie St. Germain's death, apparently at the hands of her fifth husband, is a passing curiosity. "A real-life old West murder mystery," the local TV announcers intone, while bar... Full description

The Beast

Soon after we learned that our mother was dead, my brother and I went to a bar. We’d already worked the phones. Josh had called our grandparents, who’d been divorced for forty years but both still lived in Philadelphia. Grandpop said he’d book the first flight he could, but air travel was snarled from the attacks nine days earlier. Grandma was afraid of flying, so she stayed in her rented room in suburban Philly, wrecked and helpless. I called my dad’s house in New Hampshire, but he wasn’t home. Eventually he called back. I told him she was dead and a long pause ensued, one in a litany of silences between my father and me, stretching across the years since he’d left and the distance between us, thousands of miles, most of America. Finally he said she was a good person, that he’d always cared for her. He asked if I wanted him to fly to Arizona. I said he didn’t have to and hung up.

I emailed my professors and told them what had happened, that I wouldn’t be back in class for a while. I called the office of the college newspaper where I worked and told my boss. Josh called in sick to his bartending job. Then we sat on the couch with our roommate, Joe, an old friend from Tombstone we’d known since grade school. It was a Thursday, and we had nothing to do. Somebody suggested the French Quarter, a Cajun joint nearby that had spicy gumbo and potent hurricanes. It seemed like a good idea: I’d heard stories of grief in which the stricken couldn’t eat, but I was hungry, and I needed a drink. So that’s where we spent our first night without her.

When we walked in, President Bush was on TV, about to give a speech. The jukebox was turned off, as it had been since the attacks, because now everybody wanted to hear the news. Joe went to the bar to talk to some of the regulars. Josh and I took a booth in the corner. Orion, the bartender and a friend of ours, came over and told us he was sorry, and to have whatever we wanted on the house. I wondered if Joe had just told him or if he’d already heard. I didn’t know yet how quickly or how far the news would travel, that within a few hours we wouldn’t need to tell anyone about our mother, because everyone would already know.

I flipped through the menu but couldn’t understand it. We’d both put our cell phones on the tabletop, and mine rang, chirping as it skittered across the glass. I ignored it.

“What now?” I asked.

Josh kept his eyes on the menu and shook his head. “There’s not much we can do.”

“Should we go out there?” I didn’t know what to call the place where she’d died; it wasn’t home, because we’d never lived there, and it didn’t have a name. It was just a piece of land in the desert outside of Tombstone.

“We can’t. The property is a crime scene.”

I asked him if we should talk to the cops and he said he already had, that we were meeting with them on Monday. I asked about a funeral home and he said the coroner had to do an autopsy first, the cops said it was standard procedure. There was a long pause. My mother and her parents always said Josh was more like my father, difficult to read, and he looked like Dad, too, sharp nosed and handsome. I got more from my mother, they said, the dark and heavy brows, the temper, the heart on my sleeve. But if I was like my mother, why was I so numb?

Food arrived. Through the windows I watched the sky outside go purple and the traffic on Grant die down. A hot breeze blew through the open door. On television, President Bush identified the enemy, a vast network of terror that wanted to kill all of us, and finally he said the name of a murderer.

“Do you think Ray did it?” I asked. The police couldn’t find our stepfather or the pickup truck he and my mother owned. He was the only suspect, but I didn’t want to believe it.

Josh waited a while to respond, chewing, letting his eyes wander the walls decorated with beads and Mardi Gras masks and a neon sign above the bar that said “Geaux Tigers.”

“We’ll know for sure when they find him.”

A pool cue cracked and a ball fell into a pocket with a hollow knock. My phone rang again. I didn’t answer. My voice mail was already full, and the calls kept coming, from distant family, my friends, her friends, acquaintances from Tombstone, people I hardly knew. At first I’d answered, but the conversations went exactly the same: they’d say they were sorry and I’d thank them for calling; they’d ask for news and I’d say there wasn’t any; they’d ask if there was anything they could do and I’d say no. It was easier to let them leave a message.

On the TV, the president talked about a long campaign to come, unlike anything we’d ever seen. He said to live our lives and hug our children. He said to be calm and resolute in the face of a continuing threat.

“You think he’d come here?” I asked. Ray knew where we lived. He’d been to the house a few times, with our mother, staying on the pullout couch in the living room.

“The detective mentioned that. He said he doubted it, but to keep an eye out.”

I wondered what good that would do but didn’t ask. Josh said we’d know more on Monday, after we met with the cops.

“What do we do until then?”

I could tell Josh was wondering the same thing: what the hell were we going to do? “Wait, I guess.”

Behind me the pool table rumbled as the players began another game. I looked down at my plate, realized that my food was gone, and scanned the old newspaper articles from New Orleans pasted beneath the glass tabletop. My mother was dead. I leaned back against the vinyl seat and finished my beer, watching the president try to soothe a wounded nation. He said that life would return to normal, that grief recedes with time and grace, but that we would always remember, that we’d carry memories of a face and a voice gone forever.

Late that night, I said a prayer for the first time in months. When I was a kid, Mom had always made me say prayers before bed, and it became a habit, something I felt guilty if I didn’t do. I’d stopped praying regularly after I left home, but that night I prayed for my mother’s soul, because I knew she’d want me to, and I figured it couldn’t hurt.

I didn’t pray for my own safety; I knew better than to rely on God for that. Instead, I got up off my knees, pulled a long gray case out of my closet, laid it on the bed, and flipped the catches. Inside, on a bed of dimpled foam, lay a rifle, a gift from my father on my thirteenth birthday, an old Lee-Enfield bolt-action. I lifted it out of the case, loaded it, chambered a round, and rested it against the wall by my bed. Then I tried to sleep, but every time a car passed, I sat up to peek out the window, expecting to see Ray in our front yard.

After a few sleepless hours I got up and went to my desk. I turned on my computer, opened a Word document, and stared at the blank screen. I kept a journal, in which I wrote to the future self I imagined, chronicling important moments in my life, because I thought he might want to remember, and because it made me feel less alone. I would write about how much I missed Tombstone, how dislocated I felt after moving from a town of fifteen hundred people to a city thirty times that size, how I felt like an impostor at school, was failing half my classes, would never graduate. I wrote about girls. I wrote about money, how little I had, my mounting debt, my fear that I wouldn’t be able to cover tuition and rent. And I wrote about Mom, how she’d gone crazy after I moved out, how she and Ray had sold our trailer outside of Tombstone and gone touring the country with their horses, camping in national parks, how one day I’d get a card in the mail postmarked from Utah, and the next she’d send an email from Nebraska—all of them signed xoxo, Mom and Ray—and how she’d leave rambling messages on our answering machine at five o’clock in the morning, saying how much she loved and missed us.

I thought I should write something about that day, so the future me never forgot how it had felt to be twenty and motherless, my life possibly in danger, numb from shock and hating my own inability to feel. But I didn’t know what to say. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to do the feeling justice, that I’d choose the wrong words. I was in my first literature class at the time, an American lit survey, and I’d just written a paper on Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle.” So I did what any English major would: I quoted someone else.

My mother is dead. The Beast has sprung.

It worked. I sat down to write at the end of every day for the next few weeks, and each time the words came easily. Sometimes I return to those entries, when I’m afraid I’ve begun to forget. But I can’t read them for long without wanting to write back to my old self, to warn him of what’s to come, to tell him that the Beast will always be with us.

I woke up the first day after learning of her death and turned off my alarm, then went back to sleep until the room got too bright. When I woke again, I looked out the window at the yard full of weeds. I stood, stretched, brushed my teeth. Walking down the hall into the living room, wondering what I’d do with the day ahead—it was Friday, so I had a softball game that night, and afterward somebody would be having a party—I glanced through the screen door at the front porch and remembered.

My grandfather arrived from Philly that afternoon, pale and harried, lighting new cigarettes with the still-burning stubs of the last. We went straight from the airport to a Denny’s by the highway and sat drinking iced tea and watching cars pass by outside, planes taking off and landing, families piling out of minivans in the parking lot, other people going places. The world hadn’t stopped, despite how it seemed to us.

When our food came, we picked at it and discussed our plans. My dad had decided to come and would be flying in the next day. On Monday we had meetings scheduled with the detectives and the funeral director and my mother’s bank and lawyer, a gauntlet none of us wanted to think or talk about. My mother’s closest friend, Connie, was taking care of the horses and Chance, Ray’s dog, who’d been left behind. She said that my mother’s property was still cordoned off, that the cops were there in a helicopter, looking for Ray or for his body. We’d go to Tombstone in the morning. For now, there was nothing we could do but try to get some rest.

Grandpop went back to his hotel. Josh and I went home and sat on the couch watching pirated cable for the rest of the after­noon. As the room began to dim, I checked the time and remembered that I had a softball game in half an hour. I went to my room and changed. When I walked out carrying my bat bag, Josh asked where I was going.