Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [149]
The military court sentenced Frank to three years of hard time at Fort Leavenworth. “If I’d had a civilian lawyer,” he told me years later, “I could have gotten thirty days and a dishonorable discharge. I saw it happen to a lot of the white guys who had fancy lawyers. But Mom had no money left for me. By then, she had spent it all on Gary and Gaylen.
“In those days, I was into praying a lot. I thought, ‘I’m just going to hang by God and see what happens.’”
GAYLEN GREW TIRED OF NEW YORK. It was a long way from home.
During the time Frank was in Fort Leavenworth, Gaylen turned up in Provo, Utah. Like Frank and Gary, he had fond memories of my grandparents’ farm, and he wanted to see his cousins and aunts and uncles. He also had an old friend, named Kerry, who now lived in Salt Lake with his new wife.
Gaylen stayed at Brenda’s during his visit. She had recently been divorced, so she was grateful to have the companionship, plus, Gaylen was gracious about helping with house and yard work. He was captivating, cute, and bright, and she liked him as much as everybody liked him when Gaylen wanted to be likable. She could see, though, that he had a thing for women. She could hardly take him anywhere without Gaylen eyeing the good-looking locals or trying to sweet-talk somebody into a date. The Provo girls found him attractive—“He was just about the handsomest, most different kind of boy they had ever met,” said Brenda—but Mormon women weren’t too liberal about kissing or petting, and they were death on premarital sex, so Gaylen’s desires were repeatedly frustrated.
Gaylen had a hard time going without a woman’s intimacy. One day, he went up to Salt Lake to pay his friend Kerry a visit. Kerry wasn’t there, but his wife was. Gaylen tried his moves on her, and she liked them. Gaylen and his friend’s wife started having an affair. They were fucking a couple of times a week and they were liking it—until Kerry came home from work early one afternoon and saw his good friend Gaylen going at his wife from behind. Kerry was a big man, and he decided his friendship with Gaylen was over. He picked Gaylen up and heaved him through the window, then went after him. He kicked Gaylen in the stomach and face for several minutes before his wife could pull him off.
Gaylen spent several weeks in a Salt Lake hospital. His jaw had been broken in five places. He had to eat through a straw, and he couldn’t talk too well. Uncle Vern ended up paying all his medical expenses. He also visited Gaylen a couple of times. “You stupid son of a bitch,” said Vern. Gaylen couldn’t say much in return.
Vern bought Gaylen a bus ticket back to Portland. He showed up at our door late one afternoon, his mouth still wired shut, trying to smile sheepishly. My mother just shook her head and asked him what kind of soup he felt like eating.
GAYLEN’S TROUBLE IN SALT LAKE SLOWED HIM for a while. He started thinking about finding one woman and settling down. He also started attending the Mormon church with me and my mother, and to her great surprise and pleasure, he ended up joining the church within a few weeks.
My mother was glad to have him back. She had recently regained some of her strength and had taken a job working as a bus-woman at a restaurant called Speed’s, on Milwaukie’s Main Street. Now, with Gaylen back, and apparently rehabilitated, she renewed her hope that our large house might be the thing that would hold us all together.
This was the calmest I saw Gaylen, and it was also the closest the two of us ever became. Our new friendship had little to do with Gaylen now being a Mormon. Something about his conversion never seemed quite solid to me; it was more like a desperate longing for love and community than a declaration of belief. Also, Gaylen was hardly pious about sex. Every once in a while I’d come home from school to find him running around naked upstairs with one neighborhood girl or another. “Don’t you dare tell Mom about this,” he would say to me, and