Shot in the Heart

by Mikal Gilmore

  I went home. I spent that Christmas with my mother and brother. In many ways it was a good visit, in many ways a disheartening one. By now, my mother’s health was the worst I’d ever seen it. She sat in her chair at the kitchen table, dressed in her age-old bathrobe. She stayed there the whole time, like a frightened animal that adopts a spot as its safety zone and will not venture from it.

  At one point, Frank went out for a long walk, and that was the time my mother told me some of the horrible stories that I would never forget—such as the story about her father forcing her to watch a hanging that had never happened. “You were wise to go away,” she told me that day. “I miss you terribly, but you were wise. There is some curse that has devoured us one by one, and before long it will take me too. But living so far away, maybe it will never find you. I want you to be the one of us who is forever safe. I don’t want anything ever to get you.”

  Then she laughed. “Oh, but there I go, prattling like an old woman. You must think I’m awfully silly.”

  A moment later, she was studying the dark dirt of her floor, as if she were looking for secrets under all its blackened levels. “God, I miss Gary,” she said. “Why did he want to die? Why did he kill those two boys, and then want to die? I don’t think I’ll ever understand it.” And then she covered her face with her hands, and her sobs filled the darkened space of her trailer.

  That was the last time I saw her alive.

  YEARS LATER, FRANK TOLD ME ABOUT THE END. He told me about other things as well. He told me about what it had been like to live with my mother in the years after Gary’s death.

  “She was hurting, obviously,” Frank said, “but the combination of all the physical and emotional pain sometimes pushed her toward the irrational. She would sit around and say stuff like, ‘Is there anything in the world besides hurt?’ She would say that a lot. She became convinced that somehow the renewal of the death penalty had been designed to get Gary—or to get her by getting Gary. Sometimes she would go completely off her rocker, screaming: ‘Gary’s the only one they’ve killed, the only one who will ever be killed—they’ll never kill another person in this country. Those goddamn Mormons did it because they hated me. Those are the people who shot your brother’s heart right on the ground.’ It would become so bad and so relentless, finally I would get up and leave.

  “Part of what made her difficult during this time was her diet. She had to be careful about what she ate, but of course she wasn’t. Chocolate became her basic diet, and with her stomach in that terrible shape, you can imagine how healthy that was. One of the few things she would eat was a special kind of bread. I remember one time I went to the store and they didn’t have it and she just went hysterical. Accused me of not bringing it home on purpose. The argument between us got so bad, I’m sure the neighbors must have heard it.

  “I didn’t want to be mean, but she was impossible. She wouldn’t do commonsense things, and she wouldn’t take anybody’s advice. And sometimes I’d forget myself, and I’d get loud—the way you get when you’re frustrated. I’d say, ‘Man, you’ve got to start eating better. If you don’t, I’m getting a nurse and bringing the nurse here.’ Then she just went completely hysterical and said. ‘You boys, you boys—you want to put me in a rest home.’ And then I’d say, ‘Oh, come on—please, just calm down. The last thing Mikal or I will ever do is put you in a rest home. We’ll never put you in a rest home.’

  “Mom had this thing in her mind that when I grew up, all I would ever do is care for her—that I would never think of having my own life. But I couldn’t stay there all the time. I’d leave—sometimes a week at a time, but usually only a weekend. She considered this a betrayal. I was still, at my age—almost forty—staying there most of the time. That’s far more than most sons ever did. But because I couldn’t handle it all the time, and I’d get away for a few days, she considered this a betrayal, like I was a Judas. When I’d return after some time away, she’d say: ‘You’re just like your father.’

  “This was the thing I was living under. If I tried to help her I was accused, all the time, of trying to put her in a rest home, and that was not something I was going to do. But I couldn’t get that through to her. It was just like getting her to take the right medicine or eat a solid meal-impossible. It was a bigger job than I could handle. I shouldn’t have even tried to help because I wasn’t qualified. But what else could I do? I tried many times to get her to see doctors or a counselor, but her response was always the same. She would grow frantic. She’d throw things. She’d cry. She did not want to leave her home for anything, and even though I hate to say it, I don’t think she really wanted to get better. I think I always had in the back of my mind that someday Mom was just going to get up and change. That was a big weakness I had. I always thought she was going through a phase. But as the years kept rolling by, I began to see it wasn’t all that different than things had been with Gary. We always thought, ‘Well, the next time he gets out, he’ll be different. He’ll change.’ I felt that way about Mom too. Someday, we’re going to get up and magically she’s going to change and be the real mother that she should be. When we lost her, I realized that was never going to happen in this world. That was one of the things that hit me real hard.

  “I should have done what you did. I should have gone away. Maybe then she would have learned things. She would have learned that she didn’t have to be dependent on other people. She could have survived in her own world, in her own life, made her own friends, learned to turn the TV on. She would have learned to overcome some of her other fears. In many ways, it was her fears that just took her right down—so many ridiculous fears that just totally monopolized her health. You could not erase them, no matter how hard you tried or reasoned. She was afraid of everything. Of filth and cleanliness. Of water and dirt. Of medicine and illness.

  “In the end, she wouldn’t accept any help, and the pressure was just too damn much for me. She used to say to me: ‘Why am I so sick? Why is this happening to me?’ I felt like saying: ‘You’re sick because you won’t be healthy. You’re sick because you want to die.’ But I couldn’t let go of that last bit of hope, and as angry as I got with her at times, I couldn’t bring myself to be that mean to her.”

  One day it suddenly became apparent to Frank that things had reached a crisis point. For several days, Bessie had been sick. She would lie on her bed for hours, then get up and make her way to her chair in the kitchen. She complained of being exhausted all the time, and she wouldn’t eat anything Frank put in front of her. After a couple of days, Frank said: “Mom, I’m getting an ambulance here.” She became horribly upset at the suggestion.

  “I’d been patient for a long time,” Frank said. “Probably too long. It was agonizing to see what she was going through. Finally, after two or three days of her not eating anything, I decided, ‘That’s it.’ ”

  Frank called the ambulance and Bessie was taken to a hospital in Milwaukie, screaming that her son was trying to kill her. At the hospital, the doctors told her that her son had done the right thing and she should have come sooner. But she wasn’t having it. She took almost every dish the nurses brought her and threw it against the wall.

  Frank went to see her two or three times every day. He saw the color coming back into her face, saw her becoming more cogent. After two days, the doctors said she was going to be okay.

  “I was feeling so good,” Frank told me, “I walked all the way back home from the hospital. I got back and I was fixing dinner, and all of a sudden people started banging on the doors. Said, ‘They had to put your mother on this machine.’ They drove me over there, and when I get there, the doctors had her on a machine that’s breathing for her. I’d been there just a short time before and she was talking and looking better. I got upset and I talked to a doctor. He said, ‘Well, we put something in there to kill the infection that she has.’ She’d gotten some kind of infection from not keeping herself clean for so long. But her body rejected the antibiotic.

  �
�She died on the thirtieth of June 1981, sometime in the afternoon. I remember it was a warm day and there was an eclipse going on. She had always been terrified of eclipses. She used to always say she would die during one. It turned out she did.”

  I DID NOT KNOW THAT MY MOTHER WAS IN THE HOSPITAL. She hadn’t written my Los Angeles phone number anywhere that Frank could find. She had been dead for two days when word finally got to me. I had been through several family deaths before, but this was the first time that the news crumpled me up into a weeping wreck.

  I went home and helped my brother bury her. He was forty years old, and he seemed lost without her.

  The night of her funeral, Frank and I stayed at a friend’s house. The next day, I had to fly back to Los Angeles. I told Frank I wanted him to come to California soon and stay with me for a while. We shook hands outside my friend’s house, and I watched my brother turn and walk down the road where we had once lived for so many years—a road we had all walked down countless times before.

  I wrote Frank as soon as I got back to L.A. Within a few days, the letter came back. It was marked: NO LONGER AT THIS ADDRESS—NO FORWARDING ADDRESS. I tried to find him for a long time, but I couldn’t. It was as if, on the morning that we said good-bye to each other on that haunted stretch of Oatfield Road, he just walked into the void with all the other ghosts.

  ANOTHER DREAM:

  I am living in a single-room apartment in Portland, when one day my father shows up at the door. He tells me that he has recently located my mother, whom we both have lost track offor some time. Apparently she is living somewhere in Seattle, and my lather thinks we should go visit her.

  We get into his car-an old Pontiac station wagon-and set out for Seattle. My father should know this drive well-he has made it literally hundreds of times-and yet for some reason, every exit he takes turns out to be the wrong one, confusing him and making, him increasingly angry. What’s worse, all the exits appear the same: They are big, careening loops that encircle vast marshes. After a few wrong turns, after no longer being able to find what should come easilyand familiarly for him, my father takes to driving off the loops and onto the marshes, digging his wheels into their softness and turning their turf into muddy tracks. A state policeman sees him doing this and pulls us over. My father explains that somebody has hidden his exit from him, and that he can no longer find what was once as common as home to him. The policeman seems to like my father—he doesn’t arrest or ticket him, doesn’t even lecture him—and he guides us the rest of the way into Seattle.

  When we arrive there, it is early evening, and my father takes me to a small apartment that he has rented for me. It looks just like the desolate firetraps we used to live in when I was a child. The major difference is, this place comes with a live-in woman, whom I am expected to sleep with. My father leaves, saying he will see me later. The woman fixes us some drinks and we begin to make love, when we are interrupted by the arrival of two other women: friends of hers, bearing sleeping bags. They have arrived to spend a few days with her. We all talk for a while, and then they lay out their bags on the floor, at the foot of her bed, and we all go to sleep.

  I awaken in the middle of the night, unable to sleep. I get up and fix myself a drink, and then I see the blond woman in the bag at the foot of the bed sitting up, watching me. She also is unable to sleep and invites me to join her on the floor. We begin to kiss. I start to move down on her. “Ah, we don’t want to be tacky, do we?” she says, then presses my face between her legs, holding it tight and hard against her, until I can taste her need and my own.

  After we have finished, I get back in bed with the woman who is my “girlfriend” and fall asleep with my arm around her.

  The next day, my father shows up and says it is time for us to go see my mother. Next thing I know, it is night, and my father and I are seated in a restaurant, sharing drinks with two women; I am with my live-in partner, and my father is with the blond woman I’d gone down on the night before. Everybody is getting along well and having a good time, and there seems implicit in all this the promise of unlimited and uncensored pleasures still to be had.

  My father gets up, a little drunk and happy, and says he is going to find my mother. He comes back a little while later and indicates! should follow him. Suddenly, everything feels solemn, as if we are on our way to something ritualistic and unpleasant—like a funeral or execution. To find her, we have to wind our way through the rest of the restaurant, which is like a maze, taking us through rooms and rooms of drunk people. Finally, we round a corner and see my mother sitting at a table, dressed nicely. At a nearby table there is a younger woman, cute and sexy, and she beckons my father. He goes over and sits by her. He puts his arm around her and says, “Here she is, here’s your mother.”

  We both know he is wrong, but now that he has found my mother, he is obviously embarrassed by her and doesn’t want to jeopardize his chances with this younger woman. I turn to my mother. She smiles at me politely, timidly, an almost fragile smile. She looks old and frail, as if she would crumble if I put my arm around her, but she also looks happy and grateful that I have found her. In her eyes I see unimaginable sadness and fear, as if she is afraid of what I might say, or how I too might reject her. I put my arm around her, even though I know she’ll crumble, and then the dream ends.

  WITH MY MOTHER DEAD AND FRANK DISAPPEARED, I felt like I no longer had a family. Blues singers will tell you about what an awful condition it can be to end up as a motherless child in this world—how devastating it can feel to be cut off from not just the love and solace that a mother can give, but also the wellsprings of your own history. To lose your mother, the singer says, is to lose your anchor in this world. Everything that made and protected you is now gone. You are adrift, and even if you find your place, you will have forever lost your most vital link to your ancestry. You will have lost something sacred.

  I always liked those songs, but I don’t think that’s how I felt. Yes, I mourned my mother. I felt heartbroken and outraged for the pains she had suffered in her life, and it is true that in experiencing the knowledge of her death, I felt a sense of loss and severance—a feeling of absolutely piercing and inconsolable pain—that I did not feel with any of the other deaths in my family. In the seasons to come, I would miss talking to her and I’d miss the hope that someday I might be able to bring her good news that could help make up for all the decades of bad news that she had endured. In addition, I had now lost track of Frank, and I worried what might become of him, with his shyness and depression, in such an unkind land.

  But the truth is, I did not feel lost in the world when I lost my family. If anything, I felt a relief: I was no longer tied to the wreckage that had been my family’s spirit, and whatever undoing might come in my life, at least now it would be my own. I would no longer have to sit around and dread the next kindred disaster.

  A FEW MONTHS AFTER MY MOTHER’S DEATH, I met a young woman with eyes that I thought needed loving. Her name was Erin.

  Like me, Erin had come from a family with a history of death and other troubles, and we each believed we might be able to help make up for some of the losses in the other person’s life. We fell in love, and in August 1982 we were married in Tucson, Arizona.

  Around this same time, I learned that Larry Schiller was finishing a four-hour TV-film adaptation of The Executioner’s Song, for broadcast in November 1982. Schiller and I had not been on good terms in a long time. In 1977, right before Gary’s execution, I left Utah without talking to Schiller again or taking his calls. I had come to feel that his involvement in the whole affair had helped turn Gary’s execution into a media commodity and an invasive reality in my family’s life.

  Later, after I’d moved to L.A., Schiller called me to say that he had convinced Norman Mailer to write a book about Gary’s life and death, and he asked me to contribute an interview to the work in progress. I declined. I respected Mailer, but I had too many doubts about Schiller’s credibility to participate in such a pr
oject. Also, I simply did not want to keep retelling and reliving the tragedy of my family.

  When The Executioner’s Song was published in 1979, I realized that Schiller—who had conducted most of the interviews for Mailer’s book— had served his material more scrupulously than I might have imagined. Mailer did not attempt to make myth or discourse of Gary’s story, but instead seemed interested in the truths revealed through the unfolding of surface details: the interplay of characters and incidents that propelled the event with such fateful force. Just the same, I still felt that Schiller’s stance as a recorder of history might amount to a kind of moral ruse designed to let the record keeper off the hook.

  Once, after the book’s publication, Mailer asked me why I had refused to be involved with The Executioner’s Song, and I said, “Because of Larry Schiller.” Mailer thought for a moment and replied: “I know what you mean. You know, Larry and I have had our disagreements over the years. But I have to say, I think there was something about this experience that deepened Larry.”

  Now, Schiller had made a film of this story, and I knew that I would once more have to witness the re-creation of painful parts of my family’s past. In addition, I knew that filmic accounts often seem to have an authority which written accounts do not; because films have real faces and real voices, people often believe that they are telling real stories. But I knew too well that the truth of what had happened in Gary’s life could not easily be conveyed in a television drama, and I wanted to say so. This time, I decided, I should not hide. The editors at Rolling Stone agreed, and gave me an assignment to cover the film of Gary’s life.

  Soon enough, Schiller learned about this assignment and called to invite me to see the film, and to offer his cooperation. It seemed a surprisingly gracious (not to mention shrewd) offer, considering that I had turned down his numerous requests for me to participate in Mailer’s efforts.