Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [145]
Soon, the police were coming over to our house at all hours. There would be a pounding at the door at three in the morning and I would look out and see a police car parked in front of the house. They were always looking for Gaylen for one thing or another. Often, he was there when they would come in and search the place. He had a special dark hole, behind a false wall in the basement, under the porch, where he liked to hide, and where they never found him. A few times, when the police would be walking up to the front, with their stiff boots clumping on the steps, Gaylen would take off out the back, slide into the front seat of his car, then wheel out onto Oatfield, honking and waving at the cops as he sped away. The police would take pursuit, but they rarely caught him. He was like the ill-fated hot-rod moonshiner in his favorite movie, Robert Mitchum’s Thunder Road.
Sooner or later, of course, Gaylen would get arrested, and my mother would have to bail him out. This was a common ritual of our family life in these years. I got to know the face of every policeman and bail bondsman in the district, and I grew accustomed to accompanying my mother, in the post-midnight hours, during her numerous trips to the local police station, on Milwaukie’s Main Street, while she went about the business of bailing out her troubled, drunken son.
It was inevitable, I suppose, that in time I would be seen as an extension of my brothers’ reputation. I can remember, while still in grammar school, being called into the principal’s office and receiving a warning that the school would never tolerate me acting as my brothers acted; I was told to watch myself, that my brothers had already used up years of that district’s good faith and leniency, and if I was going to be like them, there were other schools I could be sent to. At various times and in various forms, I received admonitions like this throughout the remaining years that I attended junior high and high school in Milwaukie. Once, I was waiting for a bus in the center of the small town when a town cop pulled over. “You’re one of the Gilmore boys, aren’t you? Goddamn, I hope you don’t end up like those two. I’ve seen enough shitheads from your family.” Another time, I was walking down the local main highway when a car of older teenage boys pulled over and piled out, surrounding me. “Are you Gaylen Gilmore’s brother?” one of them asked. They shoved me into the car, drove me a few blocks to a deserted lot, and took turns punching me in the face. I remembered Gary’s advice from that Christmas years before—“You can’t fight back; you shouldn’t fight back”—and so I let them beat me until they were tired, and then they spit on me and got back in their car and left.
I cried every foot of the way back home, and I hated the world around me. I hated the small town I lived in, with its ugly, mean people, and for the first time, I hated my brothers. I felt as if I would never have a future because of them, that I would be destined to follow their lives whether I wanted to or not, that I would never know any relief from shame and pain and disappointment. I felt a deep rage of violence: I wanted to rip the faces off the boys who had beat me up. “I want to kill them,” I told myself, “I want to kill them”—and as soon as I realized what I was saying, and why I was feeling that way, I only hated my world and my brothers more.
EVENTUALLY, THINGS STARTED TO CATCH UP WITH GAYLEN. The affair with Eve had not gone well. Or maybe it had gone too well. Eve was now pregnant. She loved Gaylen