She came to my room and stretched out beside me on the bed, as any mother might lie down to comfort a stricken child, but she came with the gun. Her threats to kill herself always earned my silence, my obedience, my grant of absolution from her parental obligations.
That night, I swallowed my misery as best I could and stifled my tears, but I couldn’t wish away my sore and inflamed throat. To her, my coughing was a demand for mothering, and its persistence brought her to an emotional precipice.
When the threat of suicide didn’t silence my cough, she put the muzzle of the gun to my right eye. She encouraged me to try to see the shiny point of the bullet deep in that narrow dark passage.
We were a long time there together, with the rain beating on my bedroom windows. I have known much terror since, but none as pure as what I knew that night.
From the perspective of a twenty-year-old, I don’t believe that she would have killed me then or that she ever will. Were she to harm me—or anyone—she would doom herself to exactly the interaction with other people that she most dreads. She knows that they would want answers and explanations from her. They would want truth and remorse and justice. They would want far too much, and they would never stop wanting.
I didn’t know if here on the porch steps she would turn the gun on me again, and I didn’t know exactly how I would react if she did. I had come seeking a confrontation that would enlighten me, though I didn’t understand what it needed to be or what I could learn from it that would help me to find Robertson’s collaborator.
Then she lowered the gun from her throat to her left breast, as she always does, for the symbolism of a bullet through the brain will not as powerfully affect any mother’s son as will the symbolism of a shot through the heart.
“If you won’t leave me alone, if you won’t stop forever sucking and sucking on me, draining me like a leech, then for God’s sake pull the trigger, give me some peace.”
Into my mind’s eye came the wound in Robertson’s chest, as it had plagued me for nearly twelve hours.
I tried to drown that insistent image in the swamp of memory from which it had risen. It is a deep swamp, filled with much that stubbornly will not remain submerged.
Suddenly I realized that this was why I had come here: to force my mother to enact the hateful ritual of threatened suicide that was at the core of our relationship, to be confronted with the sight of a pistol pressed to her breast, to turn away as I always do, to hear her command my attention…and then, sickened and trembling, to find the nerve to look.
The previous night, in my bathroom, I hadn’t been strong enough to examine Robertson’s chest wound.
At the time, I’d sensed that something was strange about it, that something might be learned from it. Yet, nauseated, I had averted my eyes and rebuttoned his shirt.
Thrusting the pistol toward me, grip-first, my mother angrily insisted, “Come on, you ungrateful shit, take it, take it, shoot me and get it over with or leave me alone!”
Eleven-thirty-five, according to my wristwatch.
Her voice had grown as vicious and demented as ever it gets: “I dreamed and dreamed that you would be born dead.”
Shakily, I rose to my feet and carefully descended the porch steps.
Behind me, she wielded the knife of alienation as only she can cut with it: “The whole time I carried you, I thought you were dead inside me, dead and rotting.”
The sun, nurturing mother of the earth, poured a scalding milk upon the day, boiling some of the blue from the sky and leaving the heavens faded. Even the oak shadows now throbbed with heat, and as I walked away from my mother, I was so hot with shame that I would not have been surprised if the grass had burst into fire under my feet.
“Dead inside me,” she repeated. “Month after unending month, I felt your rotting fetus festering in my belly, spreading poison through my body.”
At the corner of the house I stopped, turned, and looked at her for what I suspected might be the last time.
She had descended the steps but had not followed me. Her right arm hung slackly at her side, the gun aimed at the ground.
I had not asked to be born. Only to be loved.
“I have nothing to give,” she said. “Do you hear me? Nothing, nothing. You poisoned me, you filled me with pus and dead-baby rot, and I’m ruined now.”
Turning my back on her for what felt like forever, I hurried along the side of the house toward the street.
Given my heritage and the ordeal of my childhood, I sometimes wonder why I myself am not insane. Maybe I am.
FIFTY-FOUR
DRIVING FASTER THAN THE LAW ALLOWED TO the outskirts of Pico Mundo, I tried but failed to banish from my mind all thoughts of my mother’s mother, Granny Sugars.
My mother and my grandmother exist in widely separated kingdoms of my mind, in sovereign nations of memory that have no trade with each other. Because I loved Pearl Sugars, I had always been loath to think of her in context with her demented daughter.
Considering them together raised terrible questions to which I had long resisted seeking answers.
Pearl Sugars knew that her daughter was mentally unstable, if not unbalanced, and that she had gone off medication at eighteen. She must have known, as well, that pregnancy and the responsibility of child-rearing would stress my fragile mother to the breaking point.
Yet she did not interfere on my behalf.
For one thing, she feared her daughter. I had seen evidence of this on numerous occasions. My mother’s abrupt mood swings and hot temper cowed my grandmother even though she was not intimidated by anyone else and would not hesitate to take a swing at a threatening man twice her size.
Besides, Pearl Sugars liked her rootless life too much to settle down and raise a grandchild. Wanderlust, the lure of rich card games in fabled cities—Las Vegas, Reno, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Dallas, San Antonio, New Orleans, Memphis—a need for adventure and excitement kept her away from Pico Mundo more than half the year.
In her defense, Granny Sugars could not have imagined either the intensity or the relentless nature of my mother’s cruelty to me. She didn’t know about the gun and the threats that shaped my childhood.
As I write this, no one knows except me and my mother. Although Stormy has been told all my other secrets, I withheld this one from even her. Only when Little Ozzie reads this manuscript, which I have written at his insistence, will I have shared entirely what my mother is to me and what I am to her.
Guilt and shame have, until now, kept me silent on this issue. I am old enough, even if just twenty, to know that I have no logical reason to feel either guilt or shame, that I was the victim, not the victimizer. Yet I’ve been so long marinated in both emotions that they will forever flavor me.
When I give this script to Ozzie, I will burn with humiliation. After he has read it, I will cover my face, abashed, when he speaks of these portions of the narrative.
Infected minds to their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets.
Shakespeare. Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 1.
That literary allusion is included here not merely to please you, Ozzie. There’s bitter truth in it that resonates with me. My mother had infected my mind with such a potent virus that I had not been able to confess my shameful victimization even to my pillow, but carried it into sleep each night, unpurged.
As for Granny Sugars: I must now wonder whether her peripatetic lifestyle and her frequent absences, combined with her gambling and restless nature, contributed materially to my mother’s psychological problems.
Worse, I cannot avoid considering that my mother’s sickness might not be the result of inadequate nurturing, but might entirely be the consequence of genetics. Perhaps Pearl Sugars suffered from a milder form of the same psychosis, which expressed itself in more appealing ways than did my mother’s.
Mother’s hermetic impulse might have been an inversion of my grandmother’s wanderlust. My mother’s need for financial security, won at the expense of a pregnancy that r
epulsed her, might be my grandmother’s gambling fever turned inside out.
This would suggest that much—though not all—of what I loved about Granny Sugars was but a different facet of the same mental condition that made my mother such a terror. This disturbs me for reasons I can understand but also for reasons that I suspect will not be clear to me until I’ve lived another twenty years, if I do.
When I was sixteen, Pearl Sugars asked me to come on the road with her. By then, I had become what I am: a seer of the dead with limitations, with responsibilities that I must fulfill. I had no choice but to decline her offer. If circumstances had allowed me to travel with her from game to game, adventure to adventure, the stresses of daily life and constant contact might have revealed a different and less appealing woman from the one I thought I knew.
I must believe that Granny Sugars had the capacity for genuine love that my mother lacks, and must believe that she did indeed love me. If these two things are not true, then my childhood will have been an unrelieved wasteland.
Having failed to banish these troubling thoughts on the drive out of Pico Mundo, I arrived at the Church of the Whispering Comet in a mood that matched the ambience of dead palm trees, sun-blasted landscape, and abandoned buildings on the slide to ruin.
I parked in front of the Quonset hut where the three coyotes had encircled me. They weren’t in evidence.
They are generally night hunters. In the noonday heat, they shelter in cool dark dens.