Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [126]
When I recently asked Frank Jr. if he remembered the sounds in that hallway, he said: “Yes, I remember them well. I’ve given those noises a lot of thought over the years. I finally realized there was probably some sort of crawl space between the walls that an animal of some sort—maybe a bird or a rodent, maybe even a cat—had managed to enter and couldn’t escape, probably by crawling through a hole somewhere in the eaves of the house. I think what we were hearing was the sound of that poor trapped creature as it was trying to escape and was slowly dying.”
Frank’s explanation sounds reasonable, except that if something was dying in those walls, then it took several years for it to finish the task. That, or there were a lot of dumb animals that wandered into our walls over the years. No, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I know this: There were rooms in that house—like that downstairs sunporch, which always felt horribly chilly and uncomfortable to me—that I did not like entering, and whenever I walked through the upstairs hallway, I walked as quickly as possible. It always felt like something was at the back of my neck when I was moving through that space.
MY FATHER KEPT TRAVELING TO SEATTLE for business, and I kept going with him. By this time, my leaving no longer resulted in fights between my parents. I think my mother had grown to accept the condition. Also, she had her new home to keep her increasingly busy. She worked constantly on furnishing its central rooms with fine Victorian-era furniture—marble-topped tables, velvet-covered easy chairs, coffee tables with Moroccan leather inlays imprinted with gold leaf. She also spent countless hours landscaping the yard, planting rare Japanese trees out front, and cultivating a lovely flower garden in the driveway’s island bed. I guess all this work must have given her pleasure, but it never quite felt that way. A slight imperfection or blemish in a new item of furniture was enough to send my mother into one of her enraged depressions, and if a flower pattern in the garden didn’t turn out the way she planned, she would rip up the offending plants and trounce them, then stomp inside the house. She would slam a few doors and then sit at her table in the kitchen, crying. Anybody who was smart learned to stay away from her when she was gardening.
In Seattle, my father and I settled into an older district, not far from Queen Anne Hill. Down on the corner was a general store with a good diner attached, and next door was a well-stocked bookstore that also carried all the newest comics. We lived only a mile or two from down town, and as usual. I was free to come and go as I liked. This was during the time when Seattle hosted the World’s Fair, and I visited the grounds several times a week. One day, astronaut John Glenn was touring the site, and I got to shake hands with him. I hurried home and told my father. He was proud of me. We both had watched TV the whole day when Glenn made his historic orbits of the earth.
In an apartment building next to ours lived a middle-aged couple with a teenage son. My father took a special liking to this family, and we would visit with them several evenings a week. My father was always taking them presents. Sometimes he would sit around with Walt—the husband—and have a beer or two and play draw poker. The son’s name was Larry, and he took a kind interest in me. In fact, he treated me as I had always wanted my brothers to treat me. Whenever a classic old movie was on television—like The Sea Wolf, or The Last of the Mohicans, or The Heiress—Larry would have me over and make popcorn for us, and then he would try to explain to me some of the