Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [130]
SEVERAL DAYS AFTER HIS SURGERY, my father was released from the hospital. My mother and I went to help him make the trip back to the apartment. He was still too weak to drive, so we took a taxi back to our apartment. The taxi pulled up across the street from our home, and my mother gave me the keys so I could run ahead and open the doors for my father. As I started up the steps to the building, I heard a raw growl. I turned around to find a large dog—a German shepherd, I believe— facing me from about six feet away. He had followed me up the stairs without my seeing him, and for some reason, this dog did not like me. He was baring his teeth, growling louder and moving steadily toward me. In a moment, he had me backed into a corner. My father, climbing out of the taxi and leaning on my mother for support, saw the dog closing in. Quick as an acrobat, he bounded across the street and up the stairs, then grabbed the startled animal by the neck and hurled it down to the sidewalk. It ran off, yelping. My mother came rushing up to my father. “Frank,” she said, “you shouldn’t be exerting yourself like this. You could have yelled at the damn thing or thrown something at it.”
“That dog,” said my father, almost windless, “was going to hurt my son. As long as I have a breath of life in me, nothing will ever hurt him.”
A WEEK OR SO LATER, MY FATHER was strong enough to drive the three of us back to Milwaukie. At home, my mother rearranged their bedroom so that my father would have easy access to his medicine and a television. Their bedroom was right next to the room I shared with Gaylen, upstairs, at the front of the house. Down the upstairs hallway, at the back of the house, was a second sunporch, which my father had turned into his home office. Next to that was the bathroom and, just a few feet in front of that, the staircase. At the bottom of the staircase was a pair of French doors that opened into the downstairs sunporch—the room, we understood, where the doctor had died.
One night, about 3 A.M., we were all settled in bed, asleep. My father woke up, feeling the need to use the bathroom, and began making his way down the hall. The noise that awakened us a few moments later was horrible. It was the sound of my father screaming my mother’s name in absolute fear, followed by a terrible crashing. Next, I heard my mother running down the hallway, pounding on all our doors. “Get up, boys,” she yelled. “Your father’s fallen down the stairs.” We rushed to the top of stairs and looked down. My father was sprawled on the downstairs floor, lying halfway through the entrance to the sunporch, as if he had crawled or been dragged there. There was blood on the wallpaper above him, from where his head had hit the wall during his fall. Gary and Frank Jr. were the first down the stairs to get to him, and they carried him around to the green leather sofa in the front room. My mother wanted to call a doctor, but my father said he’d had enough of doctors.
“What happened, Frank?” my mother asked. “Did you fall over the banister?”
“No,” my father said. He had a dazed look on his face. “I heard somebody whisper something to me, and then it felt like something grabbed me by the throat and threw me down the stairs. I think somebody might be in the house with us.”
My brothers searched the place, but they found nobody, and there was no sign that anyone had entered or left. My father wanted to remain on the sofa, and he asked me to stay in the room with him and keep him company. I lay on top of a sleeping bag on the floor the rest of the night, listening to my father’s troubled breathing.
For the remainder of the time that he stayed in our house on Oatfield, my father would never again venture upstairs. He moved his office into the living room, and confined