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pressure, like he was really going to show Gary. Just like that, Gary went crazy. He got out from under Jim and clambered on top of him. He got a grip around Jim’s throat and began to choke him and pound his head against the ground. Jim passed out and Gary continued beating on his face. Charlie stood there watching the violence until he decided it had gone too far, then ran in the house, yelling for help. Jim’s father came out, a big man named Buck. He hit Gary. Then he lifted my brother up by the back of the neck and held him in one hand, his other fist doubled. Gary could tell the man wanted to punch him hard. But he didn’t. Instead, Buck helped up his son, who was choking and bleeding and gasping for breath. Gary had given him quite a beating. Jim’s father asked his son if he wanted to go out in the yard and finish it, but Jim backed down in front of his dad. Gary didn’t say anything, but he was ready to fight more. He could see that Buck didn’t like the fact that his son wouldn’t fight anymore. The father turned on Gary and said: “Leave right now, and don’t ever come around here again.”

Gary didn’t say anything. He got on his bike and left. The incident didn’t bother him much, but he remembered thinking that Jim’s father had looked at him in a way that a grown-up shouldn’t look at a child. Somehow, it made my brother feel good, like he had accomplished something.

The next day at school, Jim didn’t show up. Charlie approached Gary between classes and seemed to want to talk about the whole affair but didn’t know what to say. He walked up to my brother, looked at him, and then turned around and walked away. Twenty-three years later, after telling Larry Schiller about his friendship with Charlie and Jim, Gary said: “Charlie was a pretty sensitive kid, and it’s like he’d seen something he didn’t want to see. Something that was more than just a fight, which at first he was enjoying. We’d fought all the time. But this was the most vicious fight I’d ever been in as a kid, and I don’t know what would have happened if Charlie hadn’t gone in and got Jim’s dad. The way Charlie looked at me the next day, it was like he’d seen something he didn’t understand.”

GARY’S MISADVENTURES CONTINUED.

In early 1954, he ran away from home and was picked up by the police in Burley, Idaho. It is one of the few early incidents in Gary’s life that my brother Frank can recall nothing about, and I have no idea what the reason was for Gary’s running away. Most likely, he had simply taken one beating too many and decided to find a better reality somewhere else. Maybe he and everybody else would have been better off had he never been caught. Chances are, though, he would simply have come back on his own. The ruin was already in his blood, and he couldn’t quit it.

After that, Gary’s life was one long unbroken chain of trouble until the day he died.

The following summer, after school had let out for the season, Gary and a couple other friends visited Joseph Lane early one evening and threw rocks at the school windows. “We weren’t going to leave any windows unbroken in that place,” one of the friends said, many years later. The school pressed charges. Though there was no doubt about Gary’s guilt in the affair, my father hired a private investigator to prove that his son had been out of town at the time of the incident. He also went to the extraordinary length of hiring a lawyer to defend Gary on the matter in juvenile court. The court was offended by the extravagance of my father’s actions, but just as Fay had once saved her son from jail time many years before, Frank Gilmore got Gary off the hook for his vandalism.

My brother Frank recalls: “All Dad or anybody cared about was Gary not going to jail, as much for what that would do to the family’s reputation as for any other reason. I think everybody saw that Gary was going down the road of shortcuts to hell. They just kind of took it for granted, like it was something that was supposed to happen. I don’t remember anybody taking him aside and saying, ‘Listen, if you keep going this way, you could