Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [81]
When my mother came downstairs, she saw Gary sitting in the dark, his hand still on the phone. “Were you listening in on my conversation?” she asked.
Gary nodded.
“Damnit, Gary, why are you always where you shouldn’t be?”
Gary didn’t say anything at first. By this time, he was already a hardened man who had spent many seasons in jail. He was no stranger to theft, drugs, violence, or the criminal rationale. But the conversation he had overheard, my mother could see, had clearly shaken and saddened him. “Man,” Gary said, “I knew Dad could be a real bastard. That was bad enough, but it would have been okay remembering him that way—as a bastard who didn’t love me. I didn’t need to know this about the old man.”
“I’m sorry you had to learn this about your father,” my mother said, “but you shouldn’t judge him too harshly. This is something that he tried to protect us from for many years. I don’t think you would be doing your brothers any favors to share it with them. Don’t ruin what good memories they have left of their father.”
Like my mother, Gary kept the secret. No matter how terrible another man’s crimes were, Gary would never divulge somebody else’s trespasses. He had learned the code of silence well, both at home and in jail, but I have sometimes thought that what my mother and Gary learned about Frank Gilmore did something to them, haunted them in ways they couldn’t erase and couldn’t admit. In the last few years of her life, my mother referred over and over to the horrible mystery that surrounded my father, as if it were something she felt could still rise up and hurt us all. And on the last day of his life, Gary’s final comment about his father said much regarding the cost he had paid for being Frank Gilmore’s son. “My father was the first person I ever wanted to murder,” Gary told our Uncle Vern in his last few hours. “If I could have killed him and got away with it, I would have.”
MY BROTHER GARY SPENT the first half of 1955 trying to cram as much experience into his life as possible. Looking back, it makes a sort of sad sense. These were among the last free months of his adolescence. For that matter, they were among the last free months he would know for the next twenty years.
In February, Gary quit school and hitchhiked with a friend to Texas, with my parents’ permission. Gary’s first few months at Franklin High School had been a full-force disaster, and my mother thought that maybe if Gary got away and worked out some of his restlessness, he would soon settle down. By this time, my father simply liked the idea of Gary being gone for a while.
The trip was brief, but it became one of the legends that Gary later told about his youth. His main objective was to see McCamey, the oil workers town he had been born in. Along the way, he later said, he and his friend got picked up by a man who tried to make a sexual move on them. Gary said he beat up the guy, dumped him at the side of the road, and took his car into Odessa. Within a few days, Gary and his friend were running a poker game out of a hotel and making enough money to keep themselves stocked in liquor and hookers. Then the boys got homesick and made their way back to Portland, hitching rides and hopping freights.
Back home, Gary and a couple of other friends started a small car-theft ring. They would steal a car, repaint it, drive it for a few days, then abandon it and steal another. Once, for the hell of it, they stole the same car ten nights in a row, always returning it to the owner’s driveway before dawn. In early May, they got caught at their dangerous hobby and were hauled into court. My father was adamant that it was all a big mistake, that Gary had been an unwitting accomplice in the whole affair. The judge was inclined to be lenient and released Gary to my father, with a warning.
Two weeks later, Gary