Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [65]
It didn’t take long for Bessie to figure out that her new home was haunted. She began to feel malevolent presences near her, and she heard noises, both day and night, that made no sense. She wasn’t the only one; the boys, too, felt these things breathing in their faces in the dark. After a while, my mother noticed that most of the odd occurrences seemed to take place in the rooms and space surrounding the family’s newest and youngest member—me. There were times when I would be alone in the bedroom, I was told later, and my mother and brothers would hear me babbling away, and they could swear they heard somebody talking back to me. But when they came into the room, it was just me, chattering and pointing. This went on for some time, and then one night, when my mother was home by herself with me, she heard the second voice again, this time more distinctly than before. She made her way quietly toward the room, and when she entered, she saw a face much like the one she had seen those years before at Fay’s, and she swore it was reaching out to kiss me. She yelled, and then it was gone. When my father came back to town, my mother tried to tell him about these things, but he wouldn’t take any of it seriously. He’d been around “hauntings” his whole life, he said, and he had never seen or known of an instance that could be called the real thing.
“Chances are,” he said, “all you’re hearing in the night is the sound of a mouse. If we got a cat, you’d be rid of your spooks.”
“I saw the damn thing, Frank,” my mother said. “If it was a mouse, then it was a big mouse, with a face from hell.”
It was also during the Salt Lake stay that, according to my mother, Gary first started to go wrong. He and Frank Jr. missed the friends they had made back in Portland, and the new companions that Gary found were ones that Frank Jr. wanted to have nothing to do with. The new friends were rough boys, who made a point of swearing, smoking, stealing, and talking about guns. But whatever their bad habits, Gary aspired to outdistance them. Frank remembered finding him once with some kids, playing Russian roulette with a pistol. It was one of the few times that Frank told on his brother. Gary insisted the gun wasn’t loaded, but he got a whipping anyway. Another time, Gary got into a fracas with one of the men in the neighborhood. The man chased the eleven-year-old boy, and when he caught him, he started to beat Gary’s head against the wall of a garage. Frank Jr. ran and got my mother. She leaped a fence, grabbed the man, and began pounding his head against the garage, until neighbors had to pull everybody apart. Later, when she told my father, he went and found the man, bent him backward over a sawhorse, and beat the hell out of him. I think we always had a little trouble getting along with our neighbors.
For months during this period, Gary was stealing things and hiding them in the garage. It was mostly little things—packages of cookies, yoyos, comic books—that he pilfered from the Big C grocery store down the street. He didn’t seem to be doing it for any particular reason. He just stole and stockpiled the things and then would show them off to his friends and my brother. Somehow, Frank Sr. found out about it, and the shit hit the fan. He beat the hell out of Gary and made him put all the stolen objects in boxes and furtively return them to where he’d stolen them. Nobody ever found out about it; no charges were pressed. My brother Frank thinks the whole thing may have scared my father more than Gary. Maybe in that moment he saw something of himself coming alive in his child, and he wanted to kill it before it grew.
In the lateness and darkness of night, though, Gary was a smaller child. He would have bad dreams most nights of the week, and he would wake up, calling for my mother, swearing to her that something had been in the room with him, that he had seen it.
One night, following one of these episodes, Bessie studied Gary as he fell back asleep. Maybe he had spent too much time around Fay and her damn