Shot in the Heart

by Mikal Gilmore

  “What happened, Frank?” my mother asked. “Did you fall over the banister?”

  “No,” my father said. He had a dazed look on his face. “I heard somebody whisper something to me, and then it felt like something grabbed me by the throat and threw me down the stairs. I think somebody might be in the house with us.”

  My brothers searched the place, but they found nobody, and there was no sign that anyone had entered or left. My father wanted to remain on the sofa, and he asked me to stay in the room with him and keep him company. I lay on top of a sleeping bag on the floor the rest of the night, listening to my father’s troubled breathing.

  For the remainder of the time that he stayed in our house on Oatfield, my father would never again venture upstairs. He moved his office into the living room, and confined all his movements in the house to the downstairs.

  KNOWING THAT MY FATHER WAS DYING had some unpredictable effects on the family. My mother was truly grief-stricken and tried to show him tenderness and care, but sometimes all the years of his abuses and her hatred took their toll. I remember one afternoon, as my father slept in the nearby living room, my mother sat in the kitchen and talked about the many ways he had hurt her and betrayed her, and all the ways she had come to hate him—and how she hated him more now that he was going to leave her alone with this family, with no easy way to support us all. They were the most bitter and pain-filled words I had ever heard from her. After listening for a long time, I left the room to use the bathroom, and as I walked past the place where my father was presumably sleeping, I looked in on him. He was sitting on the side of his bed, holding his head in his hands, and when he looked up at me, I saw a look of agony on his face. I went back to my mother and told her that I was afraid he had overheard what she had said. “Good,” she replied. “I wanted him to hear.”

  I was stunned. I couldn’t imagine wanting to hurt somebody that bad. Also, I was afraid he may have heard too much; this was not the way my father should discover he was going to die.

  I was too angry to say another word to my mother. I turned around and walked out on her. I stayed away for a long time.

  Later that night, I found my parents sitting at the kitchen table, holding hands, talking softly. My father was crying, and my mother was petting his hand. I had never seen my parents hold each other’s hands before.

  “How would you feel,” he asked her, “if you just couldn’t get better if you just kept feeling worse no matter how hard you tried? What would you think? Nothing has ever hit me like this before.”

  “I know, Frank, I know,” she said, petting his hand.

  FOR A TIME, THERE WAS AN AWKWARD TRUCE between my father and Gary, but sooner or later it had to crack. My brother was using drugs a lot in these days—uppers, grass, cough syrup, some heroin, plus plenty of alcohol—and he was coming and going at odd hours, bringing strangers around, who sat waiting in his car outside. I never liked the faces I saw on those men. I felt as if they were a danger, just waiting for entrance to our home.

  One afternoon, when we are all at home, Gary asked my father for some money. My father was in a bad mood—the cancer was making him nauseous—and he told Gary: “Why the hell can’t you get a job and make your own money, like other adult men? Why can’t you stay the hell out of trouble for five minutes, you goddamn son of a bitch?”

  That was all it took. Immediately, Gary and my father were embroiled in one of their terrifying shouting matches, and as had now become our custom, the rest of us removed ourselves to an upstairs room to wait for the storm to blow over.

  Only this time, I could tell, it might not end easy. I heard a mean edge and slur in Gary’s voice that frightened me, and I heard a helplessness in my father. I think Gary must have sensed that as well, because he was making threats about tearing the house apart if he didn’t get what he wanted. I turned to my mother and Frank and Gaylen and asked them if somebody would please go down and stop the fight. They looked at me and quietly shook their heads. They had seen plenty of these fights, and they knew better than to try to get in the middle of them. I went down to the kitchen myself. My father was seated at the kitchen table, dressed in his bathrobe, and he looked gray-faced and exhausted. Gary was wearing his black raincoat and straw porkpie and was standing across the room, leaning against the kitchen counter.

  “I want the goddamn money,” said Gary.

  “And I want you to get the hell out of my house and never come back,” my father said, as forcibly as he could muster the words.

  Gary picked a glass up off the counter and hurled it at my father. If my father had not moved his head quickly, the glass would have hit him in the face. Instead, it smashed against the wall behind him and shattered all over his head and shoulders. My father looked up and saw me watching all this and said: “Get out of here.”

  I ran back upstairs to my mother and brothers. “You have to do something,” I said. “Gary is going to kill him.”

  Frank got up and went down and stood between Gary and my father. “Leave him alone, Gary,” he said. “Can’t you see he’s too weak to fight?” Gary shoved at Frank. Frank shoved back. Gary hit Frank in the face. Frank returned the blow. Then the two of them were brawling, furniture and dishes flying all over the place. “I’m not a great fighter,” Frank told me later. “I’m not tough. But Gary knew almost nothing about fighting. He was strong but he was also awkward. If he got hold of you he could hurt you, but I made sure that he didn’t, and I was coming out ahead.”

  Then my mother entered the fray. She came into the room with a broom and started to hit Frank Jr. over the head with it, saying: “Stop this, you’ve gone far enough. I’ve called the police on you, Frank—I want you out of here.” Both Frank and Gary stopped fighting and looked up, startled, at my mother. “Leave Gary alone,” she told Frank once more. Frank looked deeply wounded, got up off the floor and walked out of the house, slamming the front door behind him. My mother sat Gary in a chair, dabbed the blood off his face, and handed him a wad of twenty-dollar bills. “Now please leave before the police get here,” she said. “I’ll take care of everything.”

  Frank Jr. came back after midnight. My mother had gone to bed, but my father was sitting up at the kitchen table, still in pain. When my father saw Frank walk in, he said: “I want to thank you, son, for what you did today.”

  Frank Jr. was a little drunk by this time and was still stinging about the way his mother had thrown him out of the house. “Man,” he said, “I didn’t think Mom would ever call the cops on me. I was trying to help.”

  My father said: “She didn’t call them on anybody. She just said that to stop the fight. She couldn’t very well say she had called them on Gary, because who knows what he would have done? He would take that real serious, because she’s the person he feels he can always trust. He might have killed one of us at that point. So she said she called them on you, just to get things straightened out.” Frank thought about it and decided it all made sense. Nobody could confront Gary. They had to protect him and themselves at the same time. He finally decided it was one of the smarter things his mother had ever done.

  FRANK WAS IN DOWNTOWN PORTLAND a few evenings later when he ran into Gary on the street. They hadn’t seen each other since the fight. Gary came up to Frank and extended his hand. “Hey, man, I’m sorry about what happened,” Gary said. “I shouldn’t have acted that way.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Frank said. “It shouldn’t have happened, and I’m sorry that I hit you, but I got all upset when I thought you were going to hurt Dad.”

  “Well, you were doing the right thing,” Gary said. Frank accepted Gary’s apology. He didn’t want any bad blood to stay between them.

  “Hey, you hungry?” asked Gary. “Let’s go over to George’s Coney Island, get a couple of chili dogs, then get a beer afterward. It’ll be my treat.”

  Frank agreed.

  George’s Coney Island was a hot dog diner in the lower part of Portland. It served one thing: hot dogs, but th
ey were the best dogs in town. The place was run by an old Greek man named George. The myth about George, according to my father, was that he was a millionaire who lived in a mansion in Portland’s West Hills. But he loved making and serving hot dogs, so he ran the diner as a way of keeping busy and staying in touch with people. My father had known George for many years, and whenever we were downtown, he’d take us to George’s Coney Island for a meal. He and George got along famously. “Ah, my favorite customer,” the burly George would say in his Greek accent when my father walked through the door.

  Gary and Frank took a seat at the counter, and George greeted them warmly. “How’s your father? Any better? No? Don’t worry, your father’s a strong man. He’ll kick this. He’ll be back on his feet in no time.”

  As George was cooking the hot dogs, Gary talked to Frank. He said: “I think I’m going to have to go back to jail soon, Frank. Let’s face it, I’m institutionalized, plus I miss my friends. That’s where all my real friends are: in jail. Also, if I don’t go back soon I’m going to wind up hurting somebody. Hell, I’m going to have to hurt somebody. I miss my friends.”

  Frank said: “Don’t you think it’s time, Gary, for you to start thinking about a career?”

  Gary replied: “I already have a career. I’m a professional criminal.”

  Frank was trying to take all this in when a man seated on a stool a few feet away—a biker—turned to Gary and asked him to pass the ketchup. “Get the goddamn ketchup yourself,” Gary snapped back. “You’ve got two arms. I’m not your fucking waiter.” The man stood up, hefting his muscles, and Frank tried to step between the two of them. Punches flew and Frank got knocked down. He woke up a minute or so later with George pouring cold water in his face and talking furiously. “What the hell happened here? Your brother and this guy get in a fight, tear the place apart, and run out. Who’s going to pay for all this? What am I going to do, call the police?” Frank got up and felt his lip. It was split open. He dug into his pockets and gave George some money. “You a good boy,” said George. “You welcome here. Tell your brother never to come back. I don’t like him anymore.”

  Frank stumbled out to the street, still reeling from the hard blow he had taken. He felt as if he needed a drink. He made his way to the bar on the corner. When he looked inside, he saw Gary and the biker seated at the bar, drinking beers and laughing together. Later, Frank learned, Gary and the biker visited the biker’s girlfriend, and they ended up having a three-way. “I looked at the two of them in there drinking beer,” Frank said, “and I just turned around and walked away. I was fed up. When I got back home, I talked to Mom about it. I told her, ‘I’m really finished with him now, this is it. I’m finished.’ As it turned out, that was the last thing I ever did with Gary in public.”

  MY FATHER, MY MOTHER, AND I went back to Seattle in early June 1962. My father felt the need to catch up with his business. His illness had been holding up the book’s production schedule and was now jeopardizing the family’s income.

  One morning two weeks later, Gary showed up at the front door. He said he had come to help my father with his work. It was obvious from his slurry speech and blazing eyes that he was on one drug or another. My father had not forgotten their last fight, and he wasn’t welcoming Gary’s offer. My mother could tell that Gary was seeking some sort of last-chance reconciliation, but because he was loaded, she was afraid he might blurt out something about my father’s fatal condition. She took my brother aside, told him she thought he should return to Portland, and gave him a hundred dollars.

  I remember the look on Gary’s face as he walked out the door. I could tell he wanted to embrace my father one last time, to give him a kiss good-bye. But neither man could easily cross the lifetime barrier of damage that separated them. They could not move toward each other. Gary walked out of the apartment with a look of loss that I would not see again on his face until the last few days of his life, when he knew he would die without getting to say good-bye to the woman he loved.

  That night, we got a call from Frank Jr. Gary had been arrested in Vancouver, Washington, for driving without a license. Also, there was the matter of an open bottle of liquor in the car. My father put his head down on his desk and cried, long and hard. “Why,” he said between sobs, “are they always picking on my son?”

  After that, my father began to deteriorate rapidly. He took to his bed one night, and never got up again. He lay there, coughing sputum into a nearby bowl. I can still remember the smell of it: sickly-sweet, like a spoiled flower. That surprised me, that death would end up smelling fragrant.

  TOWARD THE END or THE MONTH, my mother had Gaylen come up to Seattle to stay with my father and help him with his work. She and I went back to our home in Milwaukie. I don’t remember what my father said to me or how he looked the last time I saw him alive. I wish I could, but I can’t.

  A few days later, Gaylen called us early one morning. Our father’s condition had grown much worse during the night and he had taken him back to the hospital. Gaylen had stayed with him all night, but his condition continued to deteriorate, and at about 5 A.M. he slipped into a coma. Gaylen had just returned to the apartment to get some sleep.

  Maybe an hour later, the phone rang again. I answered. “Give me Mom,” said Gaylen.

  “Is it Father?” I asked.

  “Give me Mom.”

  My mother took the phone. When she heard the news, she cried out: “Frank, my God, where are you? Where have you gone to?”

  THE NEXT FEW DAYS WERE SPENT with the business of making funeral arrangements, getting my father’s body back from Seattle, picking out a cemetery plot. My mother tried to find Robert Ingram to give him the news, but she did not have a current address for him. We had lost him, and we would never find him again.

  The day before the funeral, we went to view my father’s body as it lay in state at the funeral parlor. My father was in an elegant bronze casket, surrounded with bouquets of flowers. He was dressed in a handsome brown suit and his head was propped up on a cream-satin pillow. His arms were folded across his chest. His eyes were closed. Striations of decay were already starting to line the lower part of his face. My mother broke down and cried, and Gaylen sagged against a wall, looking like he was in pain. My brother Frank put his arm around me and held me close. “Are you all right?” he asked. I nodded. I couldn’t take my eyes off my dead father’s face. I thought he no longer looked much like the man I had known—the man who had once held me on his lap, or saved me from the dog, or yelled at my mother and brothers. I thought: There’s nothing there. When you die, you leave your body, and it no longer holds any memory of you. In death, your face could not show any of the love or anger it had known in life. I did not think this was a good thing.

  As we left the funeral home, Gaylen said: “Man, seeing something like that takes a lot out of you. I need a drink.” He left us, and the rest of us went back home.

  GARY WAS IN ROCKY BUTTE JAIL at the time of his father’s death. He later told us that a guard had awakened him and said: “Your son-of-a-bitching father just died. That should make you happy.” Gary went berserk. He tore his cell apart; he smashed a lightbulb and slashed his wrist.

  My mother begged the jail officials and a county judge to let Gary attend the funeral. She offered to pay double-time for guards to accompany him, as a guarantee that he would not attempt an escape. But the officials and judge refused. Gary was placed in “the hole”—solitary confinement—on the day of his father’s funeral.

  I don’t remember much about the funeral itself. We sat a few yards to the side of the bier, behind a veil. Afterward, as I rode to the cemetery with Gaylen in his car, a rock & roll song played on the radio. It was “Point of No Return,” by Gene McDaniels. The disc jockey announced that it was a new song, just released that day. “I’m at the point of no return,” sang McDaniels, “and for me there’ll be no turning back.” I was spellbound. In the months that followed, every time the song came on the air, I’d rush to the rad
io and turn it up.

  That July afternoon, we stood beside the casket at the graveyard, while a Catholic priest said a prayer. I was surprised that we would not be there as my father’s coffin was lowered into its grave. My mother said, “No, that’s not the way these things are done. The families can’t stand those last moments.” Somehow, it didn’t seem right to me, him having to go down into the ground alone.

  I remember I was surprised at how hard my mother and brothers took my father’s death. I was surprised they still loved him enough to cry over him. Or maybe they were crying for the love he had so long withheld, and the reconciliation that would now be forever denied them.

  Looking back, I think I was the only one who didn’t cry. I don’t know why, but I never cried once over my father’s death.

  IT HAS BEEN OVER THIRTY YEARS NOW since my father died and I still haven’t cried, though in my dreams it is different.

  Not long ago I dreamed that my mother came to me. She said: “I have a surprise for you. We’ve found your father. He never really died—he ran away from us—but we didn’t know how to tell you.

  “He came back the other day, and he wants to see you. But I have to warn you: He is very old now, and now he is truly sick. Be kind to him because he will not live much longer.”

  She takes me into a room, and there is my father, seated on a chair. He is dressed in a plaid shirt with a string tie, and he is wearing baggy slacks with suspenders. He has his glasses on his face and his fedora on his head. As my mother warned, he looks terribly old and fragile. And yet when he sees me, he smiles and stands up and takes me in his arms.