Shot in the Heart

by Mikal Gilmore

  I was, however, able to obtain Gaylen’s Clackamas County hospital records. Though I did not know it at the time, he was in and out of the Oregon City Hospital often during the spring through autumn of 1971. Every time it was for the same thing—intense stomach pain—and every time there wasn’t much that could be done. Twenty-three years later, as I was reading through those hospital records, I came across a technical medical description of the depth and severity and number of his wounds, and it all finally caught up with me. I cried over the horror of his pain and the loss of his life in a way that I had never cried for him before.

  My mother, as I said earlier, knew all along about the severity of Gaylen’s wounds and how he had received them. It was simply another one of those ugly truths that she thought I should be protected from. It would not be until almost a decade after his death that I would come to understand that Gaylen had in effect been murdered while he was in Chicago, and that it had taken him longer to die than it did most people.

  IN THE SUMMER, GAYLEN’S GIRLFRIEND, JANET, followed him from Chicago to Oregon. She had missed him as much as he had missed her, and so she left the violence of the world she had known for an unknown small town in the American West. Janet and Gaylen got a motel apartment down the boulevard from where my mother and Frank lived. Janet was a kind, caring person, and one of the few young women my mother would let enter her home. Janet also seemed to love Gaylen very much.

  But it was a tempestuous love. The two of them would drink too much and then yell and throw things, until one or the other would stomp out of the motel to go and drink alone. Invariably, Gaylen would find a bottle of liquor and drink it to its bitter end. In contrast to the beer and red wine he had favored years before, he was now drinking stomach-churning rot like peppermint schnapps. I would take one sip of the sickly-sweet stuff and want to vomit. Gaylen, though, could drink it all night long.

  On several occasions, at about three in the morning, I would hear a banging at my front door, I would go downstairs and it would be Gaylen, standing in my doorway, swaying in the summer night air, weeping like a baby. He would come in and we would sit and talk, and he would continue to nurse off his schnapps until he passed out on my sofa. I’d put a pillow under his head and a blanket over him, and then I would sit and watch him as he slept his fitful sleep. The next morning, when I’d wake up, he would always be gone.

  GAYLEN TURNED HIMSELF INTO THE COURT and the court dismissed the charges pending against him. The judge and prosecutors could probably see he was in no condition to be put inside a jail. Also, he had lost all his appetite for crime. He had no more interest in writing bad checks, or stealing, or dreaming about the perfect crime. Instead, he wanted to marry Janet and have a family of his own. He wanted, he told me, to start life over.

  One night, around one in the morning, Janet called Grace. Gaylen, Janet said, was in intense pain and needed to get to the hospital right away. He wasn’t able to drive, and they didn’t have the money for a taxi. Therefore, Janet was asking Grace to help them.

  Grace drove Gaylen and Janet to a hospital in Milwaukee, but the emergency room would not accept Gaylen because he did not have insurance or a welfare card. Grace then took them to the Oregon City Hospital. Again, the hospital didn’t know what to do with Gaylen—he’d already been there so many times. When it was past five in the morning, and no doctor had yet seen him, Gaylen asked Grace to drive him and Janet home. “What’s the fucking use,” he said. Somewhere, during that night, in a moment of intense pain, Gaylen had pulled up his shirt and rubbed at his stomach. It was then that Grace saw the massive hole in my brother’s abdomen. Gaylen’s wounds had never healed. They were open, and they were bleeding.

  The day after this incident, Grace received a letter from Gary. He was paying back some money she had loaned him for a new set of dentures, but he also sent along a letter that was full of hatred and venom for the world around him. Grace almost felt the violence jumping off the page. That’s when the accumulation of all the bad news caught up with her and made her see how she was spending more and more time surrounded by lives of disaster. Also, there was her spiritualism: Grace looked down the long psychic highway of our future, and she saw something monumental and deadly bearing down on us. She could tell it might take a few other people along with it. So she did the only thing a smart person could do. She called my mother and said: “I do not mean this to offend you—I love you—but I cannot go any further with your family. I have only so much time and energy, and I should be giving it to my own family.” When my mother told me the news, I understood. In fact, I was surprised that Grace could have hung in there so long.

  ON OCTOBER 8, 1971, GAYLEN AND JANET WERE MARRIED in a simple civil ceremony, across the Columbia River from Portland, in Vancouver, Washington. My mother and my brother Frank and I attended the wedding, and then we all went out to a restaurant and had dinner. My mother was happy to make it her treat. She had never had a son get married before.

  Gaylen looked happier that evening than I had ever seen him. I had known nothing about the night that Grace drove him all over town, seeking medical care, nor did I know about any of his other hospital visits. For the first time since he had returned home, I thought Gaylen might have a second chance after all.

  A few nights later, Janet showed up at my door. She was drunk, and she was crying. “I’m through with that lousy bastard,” she said. “He’s yelled at me for the last time. I’m going back to my friends in Chicago as soon as I can raise the money. Until then, can I stay here with you for a day or two?”

  I knew exactly what Janet was asking, and the thought scared the hell out of me. Just then the phone rang. It was Gaylen. “Have you seen Janet?” he asked. “Yes,” I said. “She’s here right now. I think the two of you should have a talk.”

  Gaylen showed up a short time later, and he and Janet were in each other’s arms right away, crying, promising to be better to one another. Soon, the three of us were laughing and playing Johnny Cash records. As they were leaving, Gaylen paused at the door and turned to me. “I want to thank you for helping us tonight,” he said. “I also want to thank you for coming to my wedding. It meant a lot to me.”

  I was unprepared for this moment of sincerity, so I made a dumb joke: “Oh, you’re welcome. Hell, I’ll even go to your funeral if you like.”

  It was one of those things you say that you can’t retract—that you later never forget and never forgive yourself for. Still, we both laughed. Brothers could laugh about anything.

  Gaylen leaned over and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Good-bye,” he said, and turned and walked down the stairs.

  You could already feel winter emerging from the fall. The air was turning cold.

  A COUPLE OF WEEKS LATER, ANOTHER CALL FROM MY MOTHER: “I thought you should know. Gaylen went into the hospital today. It looks like he’s going to need a little surgery.”

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “It’s his stomach. He’s been having some more trouble lately, and the doctor thought he should go in and have the problem taken care of.”

  “Well, what sort of trouble is it? An ulcer?”

  “It’s some kind of perforation. That’s all I really know.”

  I asked for the name of the hospital.

  “He’s at Oregon City Hospital, but I think you should wait for a few days before going to see him. It might be a little while before he’s ready for visitors.”

  This didn’t sound good to me, but my mother insisted. I hate to admit it, but it wasn’t that hard to convince me. I despised going to hospitals even more than I despised visiting prisons. Both places scared and depressed me.

  Next I heard, the surgery was delayed for a few days. Gaylen was improving, and the doctor didn’t want to operate unless it was necessary. It all seemed less urgent, and I let that suffice as my excuse for not going to see him.

  A week after he went into the hospital, my mother called again, at night. “Gaylen had his surgery late this afternoo
n,” she told me. “He’s still unconscious, but the doctor thinks he’ll be fine.”

  I told her to keep me informed.

  For the next few days, the reports were good. Gaylen was doing a little better each day. Meantime, I always found some reason not to visit him. He would be out soon, I told myself. I would see him then.

  FRANK WAS BEHAVING MUCH MORE RESPONSIBLY THAN I WAS. He visited Gaylen several times during his hospital stay. Over twenty years later, he told me about those visits. I would like to think that if I had known how things really were, I would have gone to see Gaylen every day. I would like to think that, but what I imagine doesn’t matter. The truth is, I never went to see Gaylen once. It would have been like visiting Gary: I could not go see people in places that were built to carry them to death.

  This is what Frank told me about seeing our brother:

  “One of the times I visited Gaylen, he had several tubes running in and out of him, to feed him food and medicine, and carry his waste out. The next time I saw him, he had pulled the tubes out that were in his stomach because they were bothering him. I don’t know if that effected his death or not. I do know that he was very nervous. He felt people were mistreating him, and he was yelling at everybody around him. One time when I was up there, a nurse came in and just slammed his food at him. I guess he had been giving them a lot of trouble. I spoke up to the nurses and said something about it. I don’t know if that was wise or not.

  “In any event, I never once thought Gaylen would die. The last time I saw him, he was sitting up and talking. Said he was eating Jell-O, and he was starting to feel good. I told him: ‘ You be sure and eat everything they give you, then I’ll come up and visit you tomorrow.’ We had been talking all afternoon about Evel Knievel, the daredevil, who was getting ready to make some big jump. Gaylen said: ‘Yes, come back tomorrow and let’s talk some more about Evel.’ He was in fairly good spirits. But he also kept telling me that he was getting a lot of severe cramps in his hands. That worried me. I know that when you get cramps in your hands it can be a serious matter. But I thought, ‘Well, he’s in the hospital. They know how to take care of him.’ That was my last thought, as I shook hands with him and then walked out of the hospital.”

  TWO O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING, ONE OF MY ROOMMATES knocked on my bedroom door. I was sitting up in bed, reading, listening to the radio. “There’s a woman on the phone for you,” he said. “She says it’s important.”

  I was used to friends and girlfriends calling me at odd hours. I lived during odd hours.

  I picked up the phone.

  “Mikal, it’s Janet. Gaylen’s dead.”

  “What? Are you sure?”

  “He just died on the operating table. He had to go back into emergency surgery.”

  I was stunned. There was no reprieve for news like this. When you heard such a thing, you would have to find a way to accept it and still be able to breathe in the next moment. Otherwise, you might fall into a pit of such deep fear and pain, you could never climb out.

  “Janet,” I said, “stay where you are. I’m going to call a cab and come out to get you.”

  “No,” Janet said, “I don’t want to stay here. One of Gaylen’s friends, John, is here. He’ll bring me over to get you. We have to go tell your mother.”

  I hung up the phone and went back to my bedroom. A song by folk and country singer Mickey Newbury was playing on the radio. It was called “An American Trilogy.”

  “Hush little baby, don’t you cry,” sang Newbury, in his mournful, brandytone voice. “You know daddy’s bound to die/And all my trials, Lord, will soon be over.”

  Years later, Elvis Presley would adopt this tune as one of his signature songs. Elvis was the American artist that Gaylen loved above all other singers or poets, and a half decade later, when Elvis died—only a few months after Gary was executed—I never heard that song but what I thought of my brothers, leaving behind so many fragmented, incomplete hearts to ache over them and all their terrible deeds.

  I put on my coat and went out on the front porch to wait for Janet. I sat there in the night and began to shake. Death had come very close. It had swooped in, with its unerring scythe, and taken my brother. It could have taken me—it was just a matter of death making the choice. I wondered what it was like to pass into whatever realm or place of nonbeing that Gaylen had passed into, only minutes before. I looked around at the silent streets and then above, at the darkness and its few stars. I thought I saw something moving up there. I thought it was death. I felt it hover, and I felt it regard me. If I tell it to take me instead, I thought, and return Gaylen to Janet and my family, death will do that. But I could not bring myself to make this offer, and then death moved on.

  I am glad it was not me who died, I thought, and a chilly wind kicked up, around me, as if in reprimand to my ugly and selfish thought.

  GAYLEN’S FRIEND JOHN DROPPED ME AND JANET at my mother’s trailer in Oak Grove at about four in the morning.

  I knocked on the door. In a few moments, a light went on and I heard my mother fumbling at the latch. “Who is it?” she asked.

  “It’s Mikal, Mother. Mikal and Janet.”

  My mother flung the door open. Her eyes were wide. “It’s Gaylen, isn’t it?” she said. “He’s dead, isn’t he?” And then she and Janet wrapped their arms around each other, crying for everything that was now lost and would be forever dead.

  My mother woke up Frank and gave him the news. “Don’t say that,” I heard Frank yelling from the other room. “You have to be lying.”

  ASTHE SUN WAS RISING, WE WERE ALL STILL SITTING around the trailer’s small living room. My mother gave Frank and me a necessary assignment: We should go to Oregon State Penitentiary and give Gary the news. He should not hear it the same way he learned of his father’s death—from cruel guards.

  As Gary entered the visitors’ room that morning, he looked unusually old, unusually tired for a man of thirty. He also looked frightened. He knew, by the earliness of the hour that something was wrong.

  “We have some bad news for you, Gary,” Frank began.

  “It’s not Mom, is it?” Gary asked, his face sharpening in pain.

  No, it wasn’t our mother, but as we told him of Gaylen’s death, Gary doubled over in tears. It was only the second time I had ever seen him cry.

  GAYLEN’S FUNERAL WAS A FEW DAYS LATER, at the same parlor where my father’s funeral took place. My mother paid the prison overtime fees, so a pair of guards could escort Gary to his brother’s funeral. The guards sat behind us, in the family’s private pews. They wore pistols under their suit jackets.

  I spoke a few words at one point from the chapel’s altar. For the life of me, I can’t remember what I said: something about how we would always love and never forget our lost brother.

  When I sat down, Gary was watching me. He leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. Then he put his arm around our mother and held her close to him for the rest of the service. She kept her head on his shoulder the whole time, crying softly.

  LAST NIGHT, I HAD A DREAM ABOUT ONE OF MY BROTHERS being executed. I have these dreams often.

  This time, it is Gaylen who has been sentenced to die, and it is for a crime that should not have earned him the death penalty—something like being simply an irretrievable, small-time sinner. My family and I are waiting for a reprieve to be granted him. It doesn’t come, however, and the time for his death draws near. Finally, it is somehow decided that I should be the one to do the killing—the one who would do it with the most expediency, the most kindness.

  We go out to a field. It is sunrise. I am handed a rifle, and a target is pinned above Gaylen’s heart. He is watching me, his dark brown eyes wide open. They seem to be pleading for me to get this over with, to do it fast and clean.

  I don’t think I can do this, I say to myself, and yet I know I have to—that whatever other way Gaylen would have to die would be so much worse. I take a careful bead on my brother’s heart, and I hold my aim steady. For
a moment I think I’ll just hold the aim, then close my eyes and pull the trigger. But I know that would run the risk of a missed or botched shot, which would only make his suffering worse. This is why they have firing squads, I tell myself: in case somebody loses his nerve or misses his aim. It is a great responsibility, I realize, to put a man to death.

  And so I aim at Gaylen’s heart—a careful, steady aim. I tell myself that after I’ve done my duty, the moment I have pulled the trigger, I can wake up from this awful dream. So I pull the trigger. I see the bullet enter Gaylen’s chest. But before I can awaken, I see his heart burst out from him and fall to the dry dirt, pulsing blood onto the dust. It is then that I remember my mother’s often-repeated admonition to my brother Frank about Gary’s death in Utah: “They shot your brother’s heart out, onto the ground.”

  Blood is our only permanent history, and

  blood history does not admit of revision.

  — HARRY CREWS.

  Fathers, Sons, Blood

  There is no crime of which I cannot

  conceive myself guilty.

  — GOETHE

  I dreamed that love was a crime.

  —O. V. WRIGHT,

  Eight Men and Four Women

  AFTER GAYLEN’S DEATH, GARY SEEMED TO CHANGE. He had lost two members of his family without the opportunity for some final reconciliation, and he wanted desperately to be free. He and I started writing each other more frequently. In his letters, Gary began to express more concern for me, more curiosity about what I was doing, who my friends were. He was trying to be my brother.

  The supervisors at the prison were also taking note of this change in Gary. One day a few months after Gaylen’s death, the warden allowed Gary a supervised home visit with my family. An armed guard drove him in a car from the prison in Salem to my mother’s trailer in Oak Grove. Gary, my mother, my brother Frank, and I sat around the whole afternoon, eating snacks, talking about old memories and future hopes. I brought along my guitar and Gary and I played and sang some Johnny Cash songs together. It would be hard to say who had the worse voice, but it hardly mattered. Gary and I then got into a discussion about music. We shared a lot of the same favorites: Duke Ellington, Hank Williams, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry. It was nice to realize we had a few things in common. As we talked, the armed guard sat in an easy chair close by, reading magazines, keeping a quiet eye on Gary.