Shot in the Heart

by Mikal Gilmore

  The noise had brought the hotel manager to the door, and she was not happy when she saw the broken chairs and the sprawled man. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but you people will have to leave. This is a respectable place. We can’t have this kind of commotion.”

  Bessie pointed at the prone drunk on the floor, who was now moaning louder and had progressed to saying, “I think I’m dying.”

  “How can we leave,” said Bessie, “with my husband in that condition?”

  “You might have thought of that,” said the manager, “before your husband decided to throw himself around the walls of my hotel room. If you aren’t out of here within the half hour, I’ll call the police and have you put out.”

  Somehow, Bessie got her children and drunken husband packed and out on the sidewalk. It took her the better part of an hour to get everybody the four-block distance to the bus depot. She would walk the bags ahead a few feet, go back and get the boys and have them watch the bags and the baby, then go back and gather her husband, who would have fallen asleep on the sidewalk by that point. So it went, until they reached the depot. Bessie had just enough money to get them all to Sacramento and Fay’s place.

  When it came time to board the bus, Bessie led the boys on and then went back to get Frank, who stumbled and moaned coming up the bus steps.

  The bus driver said, “Hey, lady, you can’t bring that man on here. He’s drunk.”

  Bessie looked at the driver, looked at her husband, who was already falling asleep on the bus steps, then sat down next to Frank and started to bawl her head off, telling the driver her sob story.

  Either the driver softened or he got tired of hearing it. “Okay, okay,” he said. “You can bring him on as long as you keep him quiet. If he creates any disturbances, he’s out on the side of the road.”

  Bessie agreed, wiped away her tears, and dragged her husband to his seat. He passed out immediately and was quiet the whole trip to his mother’s house.

  That was one of the better nights. Other evenings the family ended up sleeping in vagrants’ missions, flophouses, in depots or Salvation Army shelters. Sometimes they had a car of their own, sometimes they rode buses and trains, often they hitchhiked. My brothers grew up around desperate strangers throughout this time—people who had lost everything, people who were mad or drunk or violent, or all three. They saw people stabbed, and they saw people die of hunger and sickness.

  Sometimes my father would say he was going to the store and then not come back for weeks. My mother would go to a local church and beg the bus fare to take her and her sons on to the next town, or back to Provo. It was like that day after day, for the better part of a decade.

  You might think all this sounds heartsickening and damaging, and no doubt it was. Just the same, I would have given anything to have been a part of that time.

  ALL THROUGH THESE YEARS, the mythical something stayed on Frank’s tail. My mother recalled one of the times she actually saw the face of one of those who pursued my father.

  It was an early summer evening, in 1946, in Sacramento. Frank and Bessie had taken the boys to a diner near downtown, and they were seated in a booth, having dinner. Bessie saw a tall, thin man with slicked-back hair walk in and take a seat at the counter. He ordered a cup of coffee, then swiveled around on his stool and stared at Frank. The man was dressed nicely—he had on a cashmere overcoat and a fresh fedora— but he had a mean countenance, and he was definitely looking at Frank as if he knew him. Bessie nudged Frank’s arm. “There’s a man at the counter watching you,” she said.

  Frank glanced up at the stranger, then quickly looked away. “Stop looking at him,” he said. “Pretend you don’t see him.” She could see Frank begin to break out in a sweat. After a few minutes, he got up. “I’m going to the rest room,” he said. Bessie and the man in the overcoat watched as Frank walked into the back. After a few moments, the stranger followed him. A minute later, the man came back, hurriedly paid his bill, gave Bessie a glare, then left. The look the man had sent her spooked her for days.

  Bessie waited for Frank to return from the rest room, and then waited some more. She thought: Is he lying in there, hurt or dead? She asked the man behind the counter to go and make sure her husband was okay, since he’d been gone so long. The waiter returned to say that nobody was there; that the window had been opened and it looked like somebody might have climbed out of it, and he sure hoped nobody was trying to skip out on their dinner tab.

  Bessie paid the bill and took the boys back to the hotel. Frank wasn’t there. She waited for a while and then went over to see Fay. Her mother-in-law listened to the story of what had happened and shook her head. “Bessie,” she said, “I don’t think you should be here right now. I haven’t much money but I’ll give you what I can, and then I want you to go back to your parents’ home in Provo. That’s where Frank will look to find you. I don’t think he’ll be coming back here right away.”

  “What’s going on, Fay? What is this all about?”

  “I can’t tell you, Bess. I don’t know enough for sure to tell you. But I don’t think you should stick around here at the moment.”

  Bessie got the boys ready to travel again. There wasn’t enough money to make it all the way to Provo. They took a bus as far as Reno, then started hitchhiking from there to Utah and saved what money they had left for food.

  A couple of days later, Bessie and her sons were stuck along the highway in Humboldt County, Nevada, trying to thumb a ride. They were miles past the last place to eat and many miles from the next. They were weary, and the kids were crying from all the walking and from hunger. “Boys,” said Bessie, “I want you to kneel down with me and we’ll pray. God won’t let us down.”

  The four of them knelt by the roadside, and Bessie asked for God to deliver them from their hunger and their plight. When she opened her eyes, she looked down the road and saw a man a few hundred yards away, walking their way. As he approached, my mother saw that he was about medium height, plain-faced, bald on top. Looked almost like a monk. When he got up to my family, the man held out a small paper bag to my mother. “Here, lady,” he said, “would you like some sandwiches and fruit and cupcakes? Some stranger gave them to me on the highway a while back, but I’ve already eaten and I’m not hungry.”

  “Oh, thank you, mister,” said Bessie, and broke down crying. “We’ve been so hungry and so alone.”

  The man placed the bag into her hands. He patted her on the shoulder and said: “Things will be all right, ma’am. You and your boys will be fine.” And then he resumed walking down the road.

  Bessie took the sandwiches out of the bag and broke them into small parts for her and her sons. She looked down the road, but she could no longer see the man. She looked the other way, but he wasn’t there either. Gone.

  She decided then that the man must have been one of the Three Nephites. In the Book of Mormon, there was a story about three of Jesus’s American disciples, whom he blessed with the gift of eternal life on earth, as he had once blessed John the Beloved. These men would remain on the continent forever, as witnesses to Christ’s truth, and as ministers to the needy. According to Mormon folklore, these disciples—who were known as the Three Nephites—had been transformed into human angels and still went about in the land, often appearing themselves as the homeless and hungry, in need of care. These angels blessed those Saints who helped them, admonished or cursed those who did not, and gave aid to the lost and desperate of God’s children whenever possible.

  She was sure: This righteous man had been one of the Nephite angels. Perhaps he had lifted the curse she had felt fall on her from the devilish man at the restaurant back in Sacramento. Maybe this experience would make true believers out of her boys. Maybe, as the angel said, things would now be all right.

  But if the stranger was an angel, the angel lied.

  TIME FOR ANOTHER GHOST STORY. Then, a little later, another one.

  THIS FIRST TALE OF HAUNTING takes place not long after the time the stranger
scared my father at the restaurant in Sacramento. Bessie and the boys finally made it back to her parents’ farm in Provo. Frank had already sent a letter there, telling her he was all right and that she should wait in Provo for him. She waited three months, and when he came to retrieve her, his behavior was the same as it had been on similar occasions. He would tell her nothing about the man in the restaurant and why he had run or where he had gone. Later, Fay would tell my mother this much: “I believe that man was one of Frank’s sons, and I believe they went somewhere together to collect something that was owed them.” When Bessie asked Frank about this, he replied: “Don’t go sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong.”

  When Frank came and got Bessie and the boys in Provo, it was the middle of 1946. He had some money and a car, and he said he had some jobs to do. He needed to be on the road by himself for a while, and he wanted to take Bessie and the children back to Fay’s in Sacramento. Frank was worried about his mother. She was seventy-five years old now, and she had been in and out of the hospital a lot in recent years. “Maybe,” said Bessie, “you should be the one who stays with her. Maybe she needs you close to her during this time.”

  “Nah,” said Frank. “I wear on her nerves too easily. All she does is bark at me. She likes you and the boys much better.”

  So back they went to Sacramento, and Bessie, with Frankie, Gary, and Gaylen, moved into Fay’s large old house on M Street. Frank stayed for a few days, and Bessie thought she saw a new warmth happen between Fay and Frank. It was the only time she had seen Fay act melancholy when it was time for Frank to leave on business. What a shame, thought Bessie. All those years Frank needed Fay, and she withheld her love. Now, when Fay finally wanted a closeness with her son, he acted aloof. It made her wonder if people’s hearts ever truly came together at the same time.

  Bessie and the boys took the upstairs in Fay’s house, while the old woman kept her bedroom and parlor in the downstairs area. Frank had left a fair amount of money for everybody to live on, but Fay still insisted on holding her séances. Bessie sensed that these events were starting to drain more and more life from the old woman, and yet she also sensed that Fay could not live without them—that at this point she was summoning the dead as much as a way of negotiating the forestalling of her own death as anything else. Bessie still preferred to be out of the house during these sessions. She would take her sons and sit in McKinley Park until the sky grew dark, then sometimes she would give Frankie and Gary the change for a movie, while she sat waiting at the cafe with Gaylen. Once in a while, though, Bessie would simply keep the boys upstairs at Fay’s home while the séances went on below. It gave her the creeps to be there at those times—there were moments when she could feel invisible presences moving through the house around her—but she didn’t always like being away from Fay at night, given the old woman’s health.

  Finally, there came a night when Fay told Bessie that she would be conducting a séance that was a bit unusual. She had a special dispensation, Fay explained, to contact a spirit that had died under the shameful suspicion of murder, and she told Bessie to take the boys to a movie that night and stay out late.

  When my mother and brothers came back in the late hours of the night, she found Fay in her wheelchair in the kitchen, looking paler and shakier than Bessie had seen her look before. It seemed to my mother that there was an air of unease about the place that night, that there was, in fact, a smell of something old and wretched in the air. After putting the boys to bed, Bessie slowly got Fay into bed. As she drew the night covers over the old woman, she said, she saw Fay wearing an expression that she had never shown before: a look of utter fear and helplessness.

  A few hours later, Bessie Gilmore left that house dragging her three sons behind her, and she never saw Fay alive again. It wasn’t until almost two generations later, long after Gary’s death, that my mother would tell me the full story of what she claimed had taken place on that ghost night.

  Sometime in the hours after midnight, she heard movement in the house. At first it alarmed her, then she remembered that my father had called a day or two earlier to say that he would probably be coming to retrieve her soon, and it was his custom to come in late, drunk and stumbling. She fell back asleep, hoping he would leave her alone when he came to bed. A little while later, she awakened again—this time to an intimate touch. At first, she told me later, it was a gender touch than usual for my father, and still half-asleep in the darkness, she pressed up against him. And then, this hand that had pleased and hurt her in so many ways over the years touched her in a manner that no man had ever touched her before, and she was outraged. She pushed away and opened her eyes—and what she saw, she said, what had tried to caress her so shockingly, was not my father. It did not even look truly human, though it bore a distinctly hungry leer on its face.

  Bessie moved fast—faster than she had ever moved before. She pulled free and ran into the hallway, calling for Frank and Gary. It was there that she met her second shock. Moving slowly toward my mother, her white hair flowing down her shoulders like a wild horse’s mane, was Fay, looking entranced and muttering in a low, frightened voice. Fay—who had been an invalid for all the years my mother had known her—had somehow made her way to the upstairs hallway and was walking toward Bessie. At first, my mother was more furious than shocked. Had Fay been faking her debility all this time? But then Fay’s words froze my mother’s anger. “Bessie,” she said, “you must leave here. You must leave this house now. It knows, Bessie—it knows who you are.”

  Then, my mother told me, Frankie was in the hallway, grabbing my mother’s hand, pulling her toward his bedroom. He was crying and pointing toward the door, saying, “Mommy: Gary. Mommy: Gary.” Again, she moved fast. When she entered the bedroom, she saw the same figure that had been in the bed with her, bending over Gary, staring into my brother’s eyes. Bessie was terrified but she reached over and swept Gary from the bed, and then she grabbed my other brothers and left the house. My mother and the boys spent the night in a bus depot. She was worried about Fay, but there was no way to get her to leave the house. Besides, she figured, Fay knew how to handle spirits.

  Bessie checked herself and the boys into a nearby hotel the next day. She visited and helped Fay in the daytimes but would not stay at the house anymore after dark. A couple of days afterward, my father returned and had a good laugh at the ghost story. A short while later the family moved to San Diego, where my father took a job as a construction worker. On Christmas Eve 1946, my father received a letter: Fay had been returned to the Sacramento County Hospital—which she had been in and out of for the last few years—and died there on December 15. At seven-thirty that evening, her heart just stopped. Shortly after that, Gary started having nightmares. They were always the same dream: He was being beheaded.

  THE LETTER INFORMING FRANK OF FAY’S DEATH had been sent to General Delivery in San Diego, so by the time Frank received the news, Fay had already been buried. A brother-in-law, living in New York, paid $256.45 to cover the cost of her funeral and burial, and the attendance of a Roman Catholic priest to say a prayer at her grave. Robert had tried to find Frank to give him the news and inform him of the funeral plans, but he had no address and no phone number for his father.

  Fay’s death was apparently one of the hardest passages in my father’s life. “It took him weeks to adjust to it,” my brother Frank recalled. “He immediately went off on a crying and drinking binge, and he quit working. He would sit and drink and tell stories about her and call her name. Then he would sit and drink some more. I think there were a lot of things coming to the surface for him then. He felt he had always been refused by her, and he felt he had even been shut out of her death and funeral.”

  It was the longest drunk anybody had ever seen my father on. My mother and brothers would find him on the street, sprawled underneath a lamp, a bottle in his hand and other unopened bottles bulging in his coat pockets. They would help him stagger back to the apartment, him drinking the whole way
. It went on so long that Frank spent all his money on liquor and the family had to eat each night at the Salvation Army. “He had normally been a tough man,” my brother said, “but during that time he just drank and drank, and cried all the time. He had been disappointed in Fay a lot, but he really did care about her. He just couldn’t handle losing her for good, is what it came down to.”

  One night, after coming out of a liquor store, with his wife and kids waiting outside, my father stumbled drunk on the sidewalk and, as he fell, hit his head on a steel pole. The impact cut his face up bad, and Bessie and the boys took him home and put him to bed. Three days later, when he was still lying in bed, Bessie called in a doctor. She was worried that he had hurt himself from the fall, or maybe had poisoned himself from all the alcohol. The doctor took some urine and blood samples and came back with his report: If Frank Gilmore kept drinking at this rate, he would be dead within a year or two. He had destroyed too much of his liver to remain a regular user of alcohol.

  The advice managed to take hold on my father. He stopped drinking more or less on that day, and though there were a few lapses in the years that followed, he never returned to the heavy binges that had been a hallmark of his behavior for so long. This should have been good news, but there was a drawback: For all his clumsiness and stupidity as a drunk, Frank had also always been fairly kind-spirited during his binges. Those were the times he would tell stories about people in show business, about making and losing money, about his days with the circus and his feats as an acrobatic clown and lion tamer. He was also ridiculously generous during those bouts. He’d give his sons money for whatever toy they wanted, and he would magnanimously tell them and my mother that he had forgiven them all for whatever had been their most recent offenses against his rules and pride. It was when he was drying up that he could be a real monster. Those were the times he would beat his boys with a belt over any infraction. He was like Jekyll and Hyde, my brother recalled, except it was the drunken Frank Gilmore who seemed more civilized.