Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [73]
At first Gary might have climbed back up the hill, but he decided to push on. An hour and a half later, he was hopelessly mired about halfway through the brier patch. He thought about screaming, but it was unlikely anybody would hear him. He figured he could keep pushing on and work his way through, or he could die in this place. Hours later, Gary came out the other side, torn to pieces and bleeding. “I finally got home about three hours late,” he told Schiller, “and my mom said, well, you’re late, and I said, yeah, I took a shortcut.”
When Schiller later related the story to my mother, she said: “And that changed the course of his life, because he figured he could get into things and get out of them? Is that it? That was a dangerous thing for him to do, and it was a dangerous thing for him to think.”
Gary himself told Schiller that the story represented the point at which he became aware that he would never get afraid. “It left me with a distinct feeling,” he said, “like a kind of overcoming of myself.” Of course, whether he knew it or not, my brother was only telling half the truth. By talking about an overcoming of himself, Gary might have meant an ability to surmount his own fear, but I don’t believe that’s something he ever truly accomplished. I saw his face every day in the last week of his life. I knew how to look into his eyes, because I’d been looking into those same eyes throughout my own life, in my mirror. Those eyes would never lose their terror, not for a moment, even when they terrified other people.
The truth is, Gary wasn’t talking about overcoming himself so much as he was talking about having learned to kill or silence the part of himself that needed to cry out in fear or pain. When Gary overcame himself in that manner, he finally found the power to ruin his own life and to extinguish any other life that it might take to effect that destruction.
I went back to Johnson Creek Boulevard during my recent stay in Oregon and found the area greatly changed. Almost nothing is left of the old neighborhood. The dingy, brown house we lived in is long gone, as are all the other dingy houses in the immediate vicinity. They have been torn down and replaced by sprawling industrial constructions. Maybe it’s just as well. Johnson Creek was never much more than a strip of wasteland. Now it’s simply another ugly city boundary road that people drive through as impatiently as possible, to get from one barren place to another. About the only thing that still survives from those days is the stretch of bramble bushes, growing down the backside of the hill above Johnson Creek. Those bushes look as primordial and fateful now as they did forty years ago, and somehow it doesn’t surprise me that nobody has dared to remove them. They still stand, an ugly relic of the moment a boy realized his life was a thicket, and that no matter how much he screamed, nothing would save him from his fear.
AFTER FINISHING OFF their grammar school years at a local Catholic school, my brothers were transferred to Joseph Lane Grade School, where they attended junior high in Portland. Many of the boys who were in the same classes as my brothers would go on to kill or to be murdered. It was that kind of school, that kind of place.
“Joseph Lane had a large population,” said Tom Lyden, one of the men who taught my brothers during that time. Lyden is retired these days, but back in 1952 he was a newly married young man, trying to teach hard boys. “There were nine hundred kids in the school,” he told me one morning