Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [50]
After a few minutes, Bessie and Frankie came back out of the rest room. She looked around. The car was gone, her husband was gone, the baby was gone.
“What happened to the man who was sitting here waiting for me?” she asked the service station attendant.
“He took out of here a few minutes back. He seemed in a hurry.”
“Did he say anything before he left? Did he say he’d be back in a little while?”
“No, ma’am,” said the attendant. She could tell from the look the young man was giving her he’d never seen anything quite like this. A man driving off with one kid, leaving his wife and the other kid in the middle of nowhere. Great, Bessie thought. Frank’s got some wild hair up his ass because I made him stop, and now he’s taken off for a while, to teach me a lesson. What a royally spoiled son of a bitch.
She and Frankie sat at the service station for hours, awaiting Frank’s return. The sun went down, the moon and stars came up, and the attendant began putting away his signs and equipment. Just before he locked the door and switched on the night light, he said: “Lady, I don’t think your husband is coming back, and I can’t really leave you sitting here. Let me give you and your boy a lift over to Chillicothe. They have a hotel there, and a bus station.”
From the bus station Bessie called her parents and got them to wire her enough money to return to Provo. When she got home, Will Brown wanted her to call the police, but Bessie refused. She told her parents that Frank was deeply worried about something and that she shouldn’t have kept fighting with him at such a time. His leaving had been her fault. She was confident that he would be back, and she was sure he wouldn’t do anything to harm the baby.
“If he shows up here,” said her father, “there will be trouble. No man has a good reason to walk away from his wife and child and leave them stranded.”
SEVERAL DAYS LATER, BESSIE GOT A CALL from an orphanage in Des Moines, Iowa. They had Gary; he had been turned over to them by his father, who was now sitting in a neighboring county’s jail, doing thirty days on a bad check charge. Did Mrs. Laffo want to come and claim her child, or did she prefer to leave him in their care and surrender him for adoption? My mother later said, “If it all hadn’t been so tragic, I could have laughed out loud at the Mrs. Laffo part. That was the first time I’d been called that.”
Bessie borrowed more money from her family, gathered Frankie, and went to Iowa. She got Gary out of the orphanage and took a job doing housekeeping in exchange for room and board, while she waited for her husband to finish his jail stretch.
On the morning he got out of jail, she was waiting for him outside with Frankie and Gary. “What the hell,” she said, “do you have to say for yourself? What were you thinking, leaving me there and running off with our baby?”
“Somebody got too close that day,” he said, looking weary. “I had to leave. That’s all there is to say about it.”
Bessie began to wonder. Maybe all this business about Frank fleeing from something was just an excuse. Maybe nothing was on his trail, except his own fear of staying with his family and being a committed father. Maybe Fay had been right after all. “Frank,” she said, “no matter what it is, you can tell me about it. If it’s another woman or another family, let me know. I won’t turn it against you. Only tell me the truth.”
Frank shook his head. “No,” he said. “Anything but that. It’s a frightful truth, Bessie. You’re better off not knowing.”
THAT’S THE WAY IT WENT FOR THE REST OF THE YEAR. Zigzags across the American West, Frank carting the wife and kids from sinkhole to sinkhole, drinking harder and harder along the way. By the start of the holiday season, Bessie and Frank and the boys were living in a wheat and cattle-farming town called Holyoke, in the topmost northeastern corner of Colorado. Frank was running his usual scam of hundred-percenting— he had phony business cards, a telephone listed under an assumed name—this time they