At one point, though, my father decided it was okay for the family to own a rifle. (This was probably after Gary’s adventure with the stolen Winchester.) My brothers were reaching the age where boys went hunting, and my father thought they should learn how to handle a gun safely.
In the abandoned yard behind our house there was a thicket in which lived a couple of pheasants. In the early evenings, we would watch as one of the pheasants—the male, I think—would rise into the sky and fly off. A half hour or so later, he would return to his mate. We loved these birds and admired their beauty and their freedom of movement—and so, of course, my brothers decided to kill them, and my father agreed to supervise the shooting. He figured it would be a good test of their hunting skills to try to hit a moving target.
I remember these sessions pretty well. It was late spring, in the hours after school was out and before dinner. It was one of those few occasions all the males in my family, including Gary, gathered together for a common pleasure. My brothers would take turns shooting at the male pheasant as it made its flight upward and then back. Because the bird usually made this flight only once each evening, the shooting sprees were fairly limited ventures. Each brother—except for me, who was too young to handle a gun—only got to squeeze off a few shots each night.
During these times, my father sat on the back porch, watching his sons shooting, saying little, except to offer an occasional instruction or caution. The shooting sessions went on for a few days, without anybody scoring a hit on any of those poor dumb, lovely birds. Finally, my father lost his patience. “Jesus Christ, some shooters you guys are. You couldn’t even hit the broad side of a barn.”
Gary turned to my father and said: “I don’t see you doing any better. It’s pretty easy just to sit there and criticize, oh, great white hunter.”
My father got up off the porch and walked over to where we were standing. He took the rifle out of Gary’s hand. “Watch,” he said. A few minutes later, the pheasant was making his return sweep. In one move, my father lifted the rifle’s butt to his right shoulder, took a quick sight on the bird, and squeezed the trigger. The pheasant seemed to explode in a circular spray of red and dropped to the ground. My father lowered the rifle, turned, and walked off. He went inside the house and shut himself into his office.
Gaylen ran to the thicket to find the pheasant. It took a few minutes to locate it amid all the brush. After a bit, he came running back, holding the bird by the neck. He laid it on the ground before us. What had a few minutes before been the bird’s head was now an ugly mess of bloody pulp.
“Son of a bitch,” said Gary. “He nailed the fucker right through the head.”
Looking at the bird, I felt sick and awful. I had wanted to see this creature shot dead as much as my brothers had wanted to shoot it, but now that I was looking at its sprawled, lifeless form, I realized I would never see the pheasant fly again or hear its call. It felt like we had just committed an unforgivable sin.
I went off and sat a few feet away while my brothers plucked the bird’s feathers. I told myself that I would never pick up a gun, never fire one, never shoot anything.
And to this day, I never have.
The graves grow deeper.
The dead are more dead each night.
Under the elms and the rain of leaves,
The graves grow deeper.
The dark folds of the wind
Cover the ground. The night is cold.
The leaves are swept against the stones.
The dead are more dead each night.
A starless dark embraces them.
Their faces dim.
We cannot remember them
Clearly enough. We never will.
“THE DEAD,”
by Mark Strand
I HAVE SAID VERY LITTLE so far about my other brothers, Frank Jr. and Gaylen. In part, that’s because the marriage of my parents and the troubles with Gary occupied so much space in our family drama. But by concentrating on those stories—particularly Gary’s—I run the risk of saying that those are the family’s only stories that truly mattered. Also, by reporting that Frank Jr. and Gaylen were physically and emotionally mistreated just as much as Gary was, and yet neither of them went on to match Gary’s criminal life or to kill anybody or to die at the executioner’s hands, is to invite some people to say: “Look, these boys had it bad too, yet they did not kill. Therefore, Gary’s evil must have been his own doing—it had to arise out of his own will and his own peculiar meanness.” Even my mother had to face this possibility. “I raised both Frank Jr. and Gary side by side,” she told Larry Schiller in 1977. “One son picked up the gun. The other did not pick up the gun. Why?”
That one child killed and the other did not is, obviously, an important matter. But the fact that my brother Frank wasn’t a killer does not mean he did not also suffer a damage worthy of killing. There are all kinds of ways to die in this world. Some die without taking others with them. It’s a victory, no doubt, but that doesn’t make it the same as redemption.
I HAVE ALREADY MENTIONED that Frank was a magician. As a child, I spent many hours watching him pull silk scarves out of thin air or make a bouquet of flowers materialize and then disappear with a wave of his hand. I begged him to show me how to perform the same wonders, but Frank took pride in what he had learned and would not easily give up his secrets. He showed me how to accomplish a few tricks, but when he tried to show me the intricacies of his legerdemain—for example, how to manipulate or hide coins or playing cards with a subtle movement of your fingers—I couldn’t match his skills. Frank Jr. simply had remarkably deft hands and a keen patience. A few times over the years, when he would perform at local schools, he let me work as his assistant on a handful of tricks. Those were some of the proudest moments I ever had with any of my brothers.
I never really understood why Frank Jr. didn’t stay with his avocation. Obviously, magic or any other performance skill can be difficult to parlay into a successful career, but Frank probably had the talent to make such an ambition work. For that matter, he is still an accomplished sleight-of-hand artist. One day, a year or so ago, Frank came over to my apartment in Portland and showed me a few card tricks he had been working on. He would tell me to draw any card from the deck, memorize it, and put it back in the deck. He’d ruffle the cards, pass his hand over them, and the card I had chosen would rise mysteriously upward from the pack as he held it upright in his hands. He could even make my chosen card pop up in the deck backward. I was just as impressed that day by Frank’s artistry as I had been as a child, and so I asked him: Why had he never gone on to become a professional magician? Frank smiled that shy, broken smile of his, folded his deck and put it back in his pocket.
His interest in magic, he told me, stemmed from a time when he was nine years old and had seen a magician perform a few feats at a Portland school assembly—standard stuff, like pulling rabbits from a hat, producing doves from a silk handkerchief, drawing half-dollar coins from an unsuspecting schoolboy’s mouth. Frank Jr. went back home and told our parents what he had seen. It was all he talked about for a week or two. When Frank Sr. saw that his son was interested in magic, he told him he knew a thing or two about the craft himself. Said he had been around it a lot during his circus career and in the years with Fay, and had learned how to perform many of the stock tricks when he worked as a clown with Barnum & Bailey. My father offered to introduce Frank to some local magicians and to supply him with some texts about the secrets of magic.
Frank Jr. started learning a few tricks, and he would take them to my father and practice them for him. My brother had a trick where he would break an egg in a pan and then make a little chick appear. My father showed him ways to improve on the effect. “I never showed Dad a trick that fooled him,” Frank Jr. told me. “He never watched one on television that he couldn’t tell me how it was done. I don’t care if they were sawing a lady in half, making her float, making somebody disappear, he would tell me how it was done. Dad kn
ew all about it. He was way ahead of me.”
When he was about fourteen, Frank Jr. was preparing for a show at the Portland Magicians’ Society. “It was my initiation show,” Frank said, “and I was real nervous about it.” Frank proceeded to rehearse his routine in front of our family, but at one point, when he faltered a little in a particular trick, my father stepped in and finished the effect for him, showing him how a polished magician would present it. Frank Jr. was astonished at how good Frank Sr. was. “He was totally confident and smooth,” he said. “In fact, I had never seen anything at the Magic Society to match it. He was good, Mikal, very good. But he also embarrassed me that day. He said, ‘What you have, Frank, is a love for magic. You don’t really have the talent.’ He told me that. It’s pretty obvious he was right. I do have a love for it. I did a lot of it at one time. I actually did it for months and months. But I was never as good as I wanted to be. Certainly not. I was never as good as Dad, to be honest with you.”
I was discussing this episode with a friend one day—a woman whose heart and mind have taught me much—and she commented: “What a dirty, rotten trick. To intimidate a fourteen-year-old kid like that, and to make him feel shitty about the one positive thing in his life.” She was right, of course. My father’s criticisms of Frank’s vulnerable pride effectively ended my brother’s magic career, just as he was starting it. He went on to give his show at the Magicians’ Society, and it went well. But in his heart, Frank Jr. believed he could never match his father’s talents in this area. My friend said: “It’s as if your father took any accomplishment on his sons’ parts as a diminishment of himself. In fact, he made damn sure that they didn’t dare do anything he could do. I feel so sorry for fourteen-year-old Frank. And he just accepts this as fact—‘I’m not as talented as my father.’ Poor guy. He was just a kid.”
FRANK NEVER HAD THE appetite for trouble that Gary developed, though when the two of them were young they shared a flair for mischief. Kid stuff, like squirting strangers with squirt guns, tossing eggs and water balloons at passing cars, getting in slug-outs with neighborhood kids.
One night recently, Frank and I were having dinner at a wonderful low-end Chinese restaurant in Portland, memorably named Hung Far Low—a place we had been eating in since we were kids with our family. Over a bowl of soupy Chinese noodles, I asked Frank if he had ever been tempted to try his hand at criminal acts, as Gary had. Frank laughed hard enough that he had to stop eating his soup.
“The beginning and the end of my life in crime,” he told me, after a few moments, “involved a Milky Way candy bar. When I was a youngster—in fact, when I was in Catholic school and before the time, I’m sure, that Gary started stealing things—I went into a grocery store and stole myself this Milky Way candy bar. Grabbed it, put it in my pocket, took off. That is, I almost took off. The guy working there, he had been watching me. He stopped me and took the Milky Way candy bar from me and said: ‘Where do you come from?’ Wanted my name and everything. I was real scared, and I told him: ‘Well, I go to this Catholic school up the street.’ So he called them up and one of the nuns came, down and said: ‘Yes, that’s Frank. What did he do? He stole a candy bar? Well, we have got to do something about this. You can’t let this go.’ And the man said, ‘I’m not going to let it go.’ He had me dump all these garbage cans, then he had me take the dust mop and dust all the aisles, up and down all of them. Had me go out front and sweep the sidewalk. Man, for a little kid it seemed like a mountain of work. I took all the stuff back in and I said: ‘Well, I think I got everything done, and I’m sorry about what I did.’ And the man said: ‘Okay. By the way, here’s your candy bar. You finally earned it.’
“I said, ‘Thanks,’ and I took my candy bar. I went back home, ate the candy bar, and I wasn’t going to say anything. When I went to school the next day, the sister made me go to confession and tell what I did, and when I came back I had to write ‘I will never steal again’ on the board two or three hundred times. I said to myself, ‘Now I know I’ve earned the candy bar—I’ve done all this.’ When I got home that night one of the school’s priests had called Dad and told him. On top of everything else I got the razor strap for stealing that candy bar. So, you want to know why I never became a thief? That was the reason. At the time it really bothered me, but to this day, when I think about it, I wonder: What if I got by with that candy bar? I think I would have kept stealing candy bars. And who knows—it might have wound up being a lot worse for me.”
If punishment deterred Frank, I asked my brother, then why had it never deterred Gary?
Frank thought about the question for a long time. After a bit, he said: “In a way, I would have liked to have seen Gary get that just to see what it would have done. At the same time, he did get punished all the time. Not only did all that punishment fail to deter him, it actually seemed to make him act worse. In fact, I think something in Gary wanted all that punishment. Something in me, though, definitely did not. I don’t know why. I sometimes think that Gary and Gaylen got the crazy side of Mom and Dad, and you and I did not.”
Frank looked at me, smiled, shrugged, and went back to eating his soup.
As GARY PURSUED TROUBLE more, and got into worse fights with my father, Frank Jr. found himself trying to hold the peace at home whenever possible. But it wasn’t easy. My father would go to Frank Jr. and Gary and tell them: “I want the garbage out and the lawn mowed tomorrow.” The next day, Frank would take the garbage out and mow the lawn, but Gary wouldn’t. To save hell for everybody, Frank Jr. would do Gary’s share of the work. But none of that seemed to count for much with my father. Apparently he only reacted if you defied him or somehow failed his instructions. If he figured out that Frank had done the work and Gary hadn’t, he’d punish them both anyway—forbid them their allowance or their weekend movie or some other promised privilege or reward.
“One time,” Frank said, “Dad wanted the basement cleaned up. At that time I had some allergies and I didn’t want to go down and clean it up—there was too much dust and dirt down there. I knew I’d get rashes all over me, and when you’re a teenager, it’s important to look your best. But I didn’t know how to tell him. I just said something like, ‘Couldn’t Gary do it this one time?’ Dad said, ‘No, I told you to do it, and I want it done.’ So the next day when he came in, it wasn’t done. I wasn’t trying to break his rules. But he wasn’t the kind of man you could explain things to. I couldn’t be honest and say, ‘Well, Dad, I’m worried about these allergies I have.’ He would have found a way to make sure that I did that particular chore all the time. It was safer to keep it to myself and to take the punishment that I took, which was to be kicked out. He came up to me; his fists were up. He told me to get out, and he wasn’t messing around. Said, ‘This is my house. You’re under my roof. You didn’t do what I told you. Get out!’ Hell, I’m not going to fight with him, so I got out. Went downtown and lived in a cheap hotel for three or four days, and then I came back. There were plenty of times when he hated me just as much as he hated Gary. And I would go for long periods when I wouldn’t even talk to him. We would be at the dinner table, and I wouldn’t even talk to him.”
My father’s minefield of rules became so treacherous that Frank grew tired of trying to traverse it. Toward the end of high school, Frank Jr. decided he wanted to learn the craft of carpentry. He found a good local carpenter’s school, enrolled in it, and took a part-time job to help cover the cost. My father agreed to pay the remaining tuition. But during the first week of the course, on four different occasions, Frank Jr. happened to run afoul of various house rules, and on each occasion, my father threatened to cancel the course.
My brother looked at the prospect of a year of school along these lines and decided it wasn’t worth all the pain. Frank Jr. went to my father and told him he was quitting carpentry school. He did not want my father holding that power over his future. “The idea that he could build you up to something like that,” Frank said, “and then four times in one week
take it away from you … I thought, man, I’m not going to study all these months just to have him wait until the last moment and say, ‘Well, now I see you have something you really want. You’ve studied for nine months, you’re ready to graduate next week, but you’re not going to because I’m not sending the check; you displeased me or violated my rules in some way or another.’ Dad would always say, ‘My word’s my bond,’ but that only held true if he promised he’d punish you. If he promised something else, his word was not always his bond. That sort of thing … it takes something out of you. I felt like I was being half-killed sometimes.”
I hate to say it, but hearing Frank’s stories, I became grateful my father died when I was still young, before my own hopes got in his way. I say it in part because I’m glad I never had to fight with him, never got stepped on in the way my brothers did. I also say it because I know the range of my own anger and determination, and my own awful, unswerving stubbornness. If my father had held out the world to me and then taken it from my grasp, I know I would have hated him for it. I may even have killed him for it. Or worse, I might have killed the next person who did such a thing to me. I am glad that my hope and ambition weren’t murdered in this way, but more than anything, I’m glad I never killed anybody as revenge for my dispossession.
LIKE GARY, FRANK JR. WAS starting to find his own life outside the family. He was a little embarrassed to tell me about it, though he shouldn’t have been.
“I had a friend,” Frank Jr. told me during one of our evening visits. “His name was Ron. We were buddies for a long time, quite a few years, and we ran around here in Portland. We would just… Well, I’m going to try to put this so you don’t look down on me too much, but in those days there used to be a fair amount of prostitution to be found in Portland. Ron and me, we would save our money and go down to this one particular place, and we would mess around. At that time, it was a lot safer and we both ran kind of wild for a while. But then Ron, through his mother, got involved in the study of religion—in particular, a study of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. He would talk to me about it all the time, but I wasn’t interested. In fact, I had spent several years of my life telling myself I was an atheist. I had big doubts that there even was a God. So when Ron got into this religious thing, I didn’t want to hear it, because we were into these other things I was telling you about. At the time and because of my age, I was far more interested in that than religion.
Shot in the Heart Page 24