Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [214]
A few photos later, Frank came across the only picture I have of my father and Gary alone together. In the picture, Gary is wearing a sailor’s cap. He has his arms wrapped tight around my father’s neck, his cheek pressed close against my father’s, a look of broken need on his face. It is heartbreaking to look at this picture—not just for the look on Gary’s face, the look that would become the visage of his future, but also for my father’s expression. In that moment, my father is pulling away from Gary’s cheek, and he is wearing a look of barely disguised distaste.
Frank studied the picture quietly for several seconds, then he looked up at me. “Did you know,” he said, speaking carefully, “that Gary had a son?”
I told him I had recently learned as much from one of Larry Schiller’s last taped interviews with Gary. I told him I had also heard on one of my mother’s tapes that the boy hadn’t died after all, as Gary thought.
“That’s right,” Frank said. “The baby never died. That was just something Mom and Dad told Gary. In fact, I think I might have run into Gary’s son a couple of years back. It wasn’t a very pleasant meeting.
“It was a late summer afternoon. I was walking along Burnside, not far from the park where a lot of the homeless people hang out. There’s a little tavern up the street. I was coming from work, and I was heading for the tavern to get a pitcher of beer. Just as I got to the place, this guy comes running up and starts talking to me. He asked me if I was Frank Gilmore, and I said I was. He said, ‘Your brother Gary was my father.’ I looked at him and said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ and then I tried to walk on.
“He stopped me. He said, ‘Yes, you do. Your brother was my father. Your family fucked me up real good, and now I’m going to fuck you up.’ Then he tried to lay me out with a punch. I ducked and grabbed him and slammed his back up against a building. Then I saw a dummy stick fall from one of his hands. Those things can hurt you real bad. I kicked it into the street and said, ‘Jesus, can’t you even fight like a man?’ I let go of him and backed off. When I saw that he wasn’t going to move on me, I made my way into the tavern and told the bartender what had happened. He said he noticed that the guy had been hanging around there off and on for a few days, like he was waiting for somebody. I sat there and had a beer, and after a while I looked up, and the guy was standing outside, looking at me through the window. I decided I should go out and try to have a talk with him. By the time I got out there he was gone, and I never saw him again.”
I asked Frank: “Do you think the man might actually have been Gary’s son? Did he look anything like Gary?”
Frank watched me quietly for a moment, then said: “He looked just like Gary.”
Fucking hell, I thought. If this were true, if the young man Frank faced had in fact been Gary’s son, then it might mean something worse than I’d ever imagined. Maybe there was simply no end to a violent lineage or bad legacy. Maybe it just kept spilling over into history, into the world, into our children, into everything that came of our blood.
As I was thinking this, Frank leaned across the table and said to me: “I’m sorry I didn’t get in touch with you for all these years. It’s not like I didn’t know where you were, or didn’t know how to find you. I could always have called or written you at the magazine where you worked.
“It’s just that… I don’t know. I thought you were doing fine. Sometimes, I’d be out there, working some dirt job somewhere, or sleeping under a bridge, and I’d think: ‘Somewhere, I’ve got this brother who’s doing well. He’s a writer, he talks to famous people and people respect him, and he’s married and probably has kids now. Yeah, I’m probably an uncle by this time.’ And I’d wonder if it was a boy or girl, if it had blond hair and blue eyes like you had when you were a baby. I’d think about all that, and sometimes