Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [48]
“Yes, I know,” said Bessie. “Well, I don’t plan on it having that name much longer. Let me know if you have any better ideas.”
Every day after that, the woman came by with suggestions for new names. Finally, she decided Bessie should name the child Doyle, in honor of the hotel. After that, the woman called little Faye little Doyle every time she saw him. It drove Frank crazy.
A FEW WEEKS LATER, MY PARENTS and their two sons were driving west, out of Texas. When they passed through El Paso and crossed the New Mexico border, Frank turned to Bessie and said: “Okay, you can rip up the damn birth certificate. We’re going to give him a new name.”
“Yes,” said Bessie, “I know. I’ve already settled on the name. We’re going to call him Gary. Gary Gilmore. I thought I’d name him after Gary Cooper, because he’s going to grow up to be handsome, just like the actor.”
Frank’s response was immediate and forceful. “Like hell we’re going to call him Gary. No son of mine is ever going to have that name.”
“And why not?”
“The name of the man who stole Robert’s mother from me was Grady. The name ‘Gary’ has always reminded me of him. I hated that man, and I hated his name. I’m not about to think of him every time I call my son.”
“Frank, it isn’t even the same name.”
It didn’t matter to my father. The two of them argued about the baby’s name all the way to Sacramento.
My father’s last word on the subject: “I’m not going to keep a son with that name.”
My mother’s last word: “The name stays.”
I NEED TO INTERRUPT HERE FOR A MOMENT. An important thing just happened: The murderer in our story was born. Right now he is a baby with large blue eyes and an inviting face. A little over thirty-six years from this time he will be a man who has killed at least two other men and who sits on death row as the most famous murderer in America, because he is the only murderer in America who demands to be killed. You look into those blue eyes at that point, and what stares back is something that chills you in the deepest part of your instincts. It is a look that is terribly smart and terribly deadly. It is the look of a man who is afraid of everything but death, a man who would kill you if you crossed him, and maybe even if you didn’t. The only thing separating the baby’s face from the killer’s face is a history of destruction.
Or perhaps it was something else that ended up turning this baby into a killer. Many times in the last few years I have found myself dwelling on a simple pair of questions: When and how does murder begin? Or, to put it another way: Could I locate one moment where everything went wrong, one moment—or period of time—that might have made all the difference? And if I could find such a moment, would it be one inside Gary’s life? Or would it be one outside him—one, say, in the secret darkness of his own father’s history? There are no simple answers to questions like these—there are only endless arguments and speculations. Even so, I can’t help searching out our history for those answers, like my mother at the end of her days, examining each terrible link in the fateful chain. Where could we have altered this history? How could we have saved my brother’s soul from murder, and spared the lives of innocents as well? You tell yourself you could learn from such a moment, that understanding it would explain all the destruction and free you from its repetition. But when you start looking at all the links in the story closely enough, you discover something worse: Each moment made a difference, and there were just too damn many of them that were bad. The only way to solve the deathly construction of this man’s history would be to toss out all the moments