Son of a Gun Read Online Free PDF Page A

turned off the road onto a dim track and stopped at a metal gate. Tire tracks striped the dust: the crooked tread of the police SUVs, the dual rear wheels of an ambulance. Ray’s trail must have been there, somewhere in the latticework of tracks, but this wasn’t one of the cowboy stories I’d read as a kid: I wasn’t going to hunt him down.
    A strip of yellow police tape held the gate shut. I ripped it off and opened the gate, then stood for a moment looking at the land. Ahead, the road dipped and crossed a rocky wash, then climbed a low hill and split to form a loop around the buildings: a small barn with a corral, a shed, and an Airstream travel trailer. Mom and Ray had bought the trailer as a temporary place to live while they researched plans to build a rammed-earth house—another of their crackpot ideas—and it was where they’d lived together, with no running water and no air-conditioning, just a gas generator providing noisy and expensive electricity part of the time. Of all the homes she’d had, all the temporary places with temporary men, the worst was where she died.
    Grandpop’s rental car wouldn’t make it down the driveway, so he and Josh got out and walked. I drove through the gate and paused before realizing there was no reason to close it behind us, then followed the trail across the wash and around the back of the trailer, where I parked by the barn. We met in the boot-trampled clearing between the buildings. Nobody spoke for a solid minute as we surveyed the scene. A lawn chair lay tipped over. The rocks of the fire pit had been scattered. The horse trailer sat empty with its tongue propped up on cinder blocks. The tin-roofed barn was still half full of hay. Dust swirled in the corrals, and at the edge of the clearing mesquitebranches stirred in the breeze. It was a beautiful day, warm and clear, the sky cloudless and deep. I remembered that it was the equinox. Fall had come.
    I’d only been to my mother’s property once, during the previous spring, near the end of my first year in Tucson. The university had sent me a letter threatening to kick me out if my grades didn’t improve. I was broke and in debt. One night, leaving my girlfriend’s apartment after an argument, I backed my truck into a telephone pole in the parking lot and lost it, wound up curled on my bedroom floor, sobbing.
    The next day was Good Friday. I woke up in the afternoon and felt the same, as if a dam had broken and I was drowning. So I did what I always did when I got into trouble: I called my mother. She didn’t answer. Since she’d moved to Gleeson, she rarely answered: her cell phone couldn’t get steady service out there. When I did get through, our conversations were full of static and often ended without warning when she lost the signal. I sat on my bedroom floor staring at the texturing on the ceiling, trying to find a pattern, wondering when she’d call me back, wondering what I would do if I didn’t feel better soon.
    My phone rang. It was Mom. She was in Tombstone running errands, so the signal was clear for once. She said she’d been in the feed store and had missed my call. When I told her how I felt, she said to drive down there, that she missed me and wanted me to see the place where they were living. She gave me directions, said she’d meet me at the entrance to the driveway.
    I got in my dented truck and drove. When I reached Tombstone it was dusk. I went through town slowly, watching the setting of my childhood pass by; I was a sucker for Tombstone’sfalse nostalgia, and missed it even though I remembered how badly I’d wanted to leave less than a year before. But already my hometown had begun to feel strange, and I didn’t know if the town had changed or if I had.
    By the time I made it to the cattle guard where Gleeson Road turned to dirt, the sky was fully dark. The scattered lights of Tombstone receded in my rearview until I crested a hill and they disappeared, the land rolling black to every