Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [103]
I remember one place in particular where we lived in Seattle. It was set back off the sidewalk about two hundred feet—a dark old house poised on top of a large, trestle-style wooden framework. To get from the sidewalk to the front door, you had to cross a half-rotten wooden bridge that had a few planks missing. Beneath the bridge was nothing but a jungle of briers and weeds, so overgrown and vast that you couldn’t see down to the ground where the tangle began. There were steps off the side of the building going down into that snarl, but nobody in their right mind would have walked those stairs. According to my father, in the early twentieth century there had been a massive fire that had half-leveled many of Seattle’s homes. When the area was rebuilt, he said, a false ground was raised over several of the collapsed homes. In other words, there was a dead city buried under the part of town we lived in. Some people even thought that some of the old houses still stood under the ground, or at least, the husks that were left of their burned remains still survived there. Down in that web of thorns and bushes beneath our house, my father told me, were the remnants of another house. Sometimes I’d stand on the bridge and look down into that moat of undergrowth, and I’d imagine the skeleton of the other house down there. I would wonder if it was still full of the skeletons of the people who had once lived in it. Every time I saw a rustle in that underbrush, it gave me a chill. I didn’t dream well in that house, but that was nothing new.
JUST AS MY FATHER LIKED old houses, when he went out on a shopping spree he preferred to make the rounds of secondhand and rummage outlets, like the Salvation Army, Goodwill, or St. Vincent de Paul stores, or Seattle’s Farmers’ Market complex (these days a refurbished mall of hip stores and cafes sprawling along the city’s downtown pier, but in the late 1950s a maze of rummages and old bookstores, and coffee shops full of vagrants). These were my father’s favorite places to find old clothes to dress us both in, and to find antediluvian furniture for our antediluvian dwellings.
Naturally, I accompanied my father on these outings. I was his appointed shadow. He dressed me in fashions that matched his own. He’d slick my hair back with a thick pomade—the same pomade he used on his own thinning gray hair. He’d outfit me in slacks and sport coats and pastel or woolen dress shirts like his own, and then he would put a string tie on me and a fedora on my head. I know we were a striking and strange pair—an old man with a nearly identical little boy. Because of his age, many people assumed that my father was in fact my grandfather. I would reply that, no, he was my father, and people seemed surprised, even disbelieving. I couldn’t understand this, and it bothered me. Later, when I began to make a few friends in grade school and would go over to visit at their homes, it was my turn to be shocked when I saw that they had parents who seemed so unaccountably young—parents who, no doubt, were in their late twenties or mid thirties. I had never been around people of such age or manners. I couldn’t understand them, couldn’t relate to them and, to tell you the truth, couldn’t really relate all that well to their children, who were supposed to be my friends. They seemed like aberrations to me, though of course it was me and my father who were the aberrations. Maybe that’s why I never formed any lasting friendships with other kids until after my