Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [122]
As I get closer to the top of the house, I find that the rooms are empty. I notice that I have lost track of my friend the reporter and Nicole. I start back down the stairs to find them, but I find nobody there. I go outside to the front yard. I see that it is now getting dark. I also see that the terrain surrounding the house has changed. A crosswork of train tracks now encloses the place, stretching into an empty distance, filled only with the blink of an occasional signal light.
I go back into the house to seek a ride out of here, but all the rooms are either empty or locked. I realize that I am left alone here, and that my only company is the presence of evil that I had felt earlier, upon entering the house. I am alone in the house with its evil, and I must stay there.
I wake up in a panic, certain that somebody has just walked into the room where I am sleeping.
OUR NEW HOME WAS ON THE SOUTHERN BORDER of Milwaukie, the town that lay just across the tracks from our old house on Johnson Creek Boulevard. Milwaukie was one of the larger cities of Clackamas County— an area considerably more rural than Portland’s Multnomah County. Clackamas didn’t have the sort of diversions that Multnomah offered— the variety of nightclubs, whorehouses, gay bars, and twenty-four-hour movie theaters that made Portland a tempting place to seek vice in the late-night hours. Just the same, there was something dark at the heart of the place: In Clackamas, it was possible for people and their families to live their lives in utter isolation and disinterest. Anything could come from such conditions—transcendence or destruction—but often what came was not for the better. Multnomah may have had a higher crime rate—robberies, drugs, and such—but there was a deeper natural meanness to be found in the outlands around Milwaukie. Many of Oregon’s deadliest men—killers and country-bred gangsters—came from homes in Clackamas County. My brother Gary was one of them.
We knew none of this, of course, when we bought our new home. My father was now making decent money, and as the family became wealthier, my mother renewed her fight for a better house. In part, I think she simply wanted the sort of nice surroundings that her sisters had long enjoyed with their families back in Utah. But she also wanted to give her sons a new start. She thought that if Gary was released from OSCI to return to the world of Johnson Creek, he would simply drift back into old ways and bad company. But if he could come home to a better neighborhood, a higher standard, maybe that would be enough to turn him around. Something about this argument finally convinced my father that it was time to move his family up in the world. It was a fine idea, as far as it went. But what my parents didn’t understand was, it was what went on inside a house, rather than what street the home was on, that made all the difference. Perhaps it was too late to understand that.
In any event, we got our new home, and a nice new address as well. To get to the new place, you had to drive across the train tracks into Milwaukie, along the winding stretch of 45th Avenue. That would take you through the poorer section of town—an area where some people still lived in hapless shacks and tar-paper lean-tos—until you came to another set of train tracks. Take a right, follow those tracks west toward the Willamette River, and you would come to Milwaukie’s city center, such as it was. Milwaukie was (and remains) essentially a one-street downtown—a five-or six-block stretch called Main Street, with a couple of pharmacies, grocery stores, and cafés. You drove along Main Street until it ran out onto a highway called Lake Road. It was a long, spacious stretch of road that carried you past several solidly built farm-style houses, set back off the street, overlooking large yards filled with chestnut trees. At the top of Lake Road, you took a right onto a street called Oatfield Road. Suddenly, the whole