Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [77]
My brother Gary longed to join this gang. Whether he actually knew any of the group’s members at the time, nobody seems to know. Still, even to talk about enlisting in such an outfit enhanced his outlaw standing among his peers. After school, when Gary and his friends would meet at the swimming hole and drink beers, my brother boasted that he knew that the Broadway Gang members needed guns. If Gary could supply them with a few pistols, he claimed, then he could join their league.
Gary took on an after-school paper delivery route, for the purpose of finding homes that might have guns he could steal. He learned to watch the houses on his route carefully, to become familiar with the comings and goings of the residents—when they took dinner or left on a vacation. It was at this time, at about age twelve or thirteen, that Gary began to break into houses. He would look for an unlocked or easy-to-jimmy window, then he would pry it open and climb inside. He liked those first few moments, standing in the stillness and darkness of somebody else’s home, feeling the power of violation that he brought to their world. He soon learned that breaking into homes was a good way of learning other peoples’ secrets—where the residents hid their money or dirty books or photos, what size brassiere the blond girl in his homeroom class wore, whether her parents were heavy drinkers or Bible freaks, or both. He’d feel the intimacy of their underwear, he’d taste their liquor, he’d pocket some of their pornography. To Gary’s disappointment, though, he never found any handguns in those homes. It was a time when most Americans hadn’t yet armed themselves, in fear of the world outside.
For some reason, Gary became convinced that the house down at the corner of our street, right next to the small grocery store, had a collection of guns stowed away in a trunk in its garage. One night, Gary talked a friend of his named Dan into breaking into the garage with him and cracking the lock on the trunk. They didn’t find any guns, but the family that owned the house somehow figured out that it was Gary who violated their place, and they went to the police with their suspicion. The neighbors raised a lot of hell, but since nothing had been stolen and nothing could be proven, the juvenile authorities let Gary off with a warning: He was starting to get a bad reputation for himself, they told him, and from here on out, they would be keeping an eye on him.
ONE NIGHT AROUND Halloween 1954, Gary was waiting for the trolley back home, at the depot in downtown Portland. It was close to Portland’s Skidrow, a rough slum area of town. The trolley only came once an hour, so it was a long wait—long enough to look at all the shop windows in the nearby district. Down the block from the station there was a pawn shop, its window full of .22 rifles. Gary saw a Winchester semi-automatic he liked. A beautiful gun, but at a price much higher than he could afford. It was already past midnight. The streets were quiet, deserted. He was the only person within howling distance. He wandered over to a deserted building and sorted through its rubble until he found a brick and then came back and threw the brick through the window. No alarm went off, nobody reacted. He climbed in, grabbed his Winchester, then filled a paper bag with a few boxes of cartridges. He cut his hand in the process of climbing through the window, but he didn’t much mind.
Gary found a newspaper in the shop. He dismantled the gun—it broke into two parts—wrapped it in the paper and stuffed it in a large shopping bag. It looked like a paper bag of laundry or groceries.