Dave’s parents tried to sneak into St. Vincent’s, where they looked for AIDS patients who were dying alone. The parents sat with the dying patients, until someone asked them to leave. After a while, they’d stopped coming, but the Russian chauffeur still parked the limo and sat in it, waiting for someone; the woman driver still stretched on the hood, as if she thought Dr. Dave were still alive in St. Vincent’s. Maybe the Russian driver was crazy, I was thinking, but the snowshoer said the limo driver must know something. “Maybe the driver knows the parents have killed themselves, or she knows they soon will,” Elliot Barlow said.

“What do you think my mom would do, if I had AIDS?” I asked Mr. Barlow.

“Your mom wouldn’t wait for you to die, Adam—she would shoot you first,” the snowshoer said. I thought this was true. My mom would have shot me if I had AIDS; she wouldn’t have watched me die with one or more of those AIDS-associated, opportunistic illnesses. She would have shot me first, and then shot herself. Little Ray was not inclined to prolong things, except for dramatic effect.

As for shooting someone else, I didn’t doubt that my mother could have done it. At the end of the 1980s, Little Ray would express her surprise that only one person had shot Ronald Reagan. “And it was a guy,” my mom said, in her wide-eyed, disbelieving way. What my mother meant, Molly said, might have gotten Little Ray fired as a ski instructor—even in Vermont, where President Reagan wasn’t as popular as he was in the rest of the country. What my mother meant was something Molly and I tried to discourage Little Ray from saying. “But it’s true,” my mom always said. “A mother who lost her son to AIDS could be forgiven for shooting Ronald Reagan, sweetie.”

38. PLAGUE SONG

There were a lot more guns in my mom and Molly’s Manchester house after Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan went off the road. Those two Norwegians left all their guns to their children, but the guns ended up with Molly and my mom—originally, “for safekeeping.” Or that’s what Henrik had said.

Henrik wanted the entire arsenal for himself, but he sensed there might be “compromising complications” for him—a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, transporting firearms from New England to a southern state, “across state lines.” Henrik had a plan—“one gun at a time,” he said. He’d persuaded Nora to drive a carload of lethal weapons from New Hampshire to Vermont.

“I drove a shitload of guns across state lines—Henrik wasn’t worried about compromising complications for me,” Nora complained. I liked Em’s pantomime about the political radical and stand-up comedian who was arrested for gunrunning, but Nora didn’t think it was funny.