Shot in the Heart

by Mikal Gilmore

  Whatever Frank was doing in Alabama this time, it went on too long for Bessie’s liking. She kept pressing him to leave—she wanted to have the new baby back home in California, in Los Angeles, or at Fay’s, in Sacramento. Frank said: “Soon. We’ll leave soon. I have to finish what I came here to do, get paid, and then we’ll go.”

  Thanksgiving Day that year Frank got up before dawn, got dressed and left, and didn’t come back until after midnight. Bessie was sitting in the small cabin with her baby in the dark, like Barbara Solomon ten years before. She was wondering what to do if she never saw Frank again, how she would get out of this frightful place. Or maybe they would come for her too, in the night. About 2 A.M., Frank came in and said: “I’m done here. I think we should leave right now. You can sleep in the car while I drive.” She was dead tired, but something about the way he said it made her exhaustion beside the point. It was another one of those towns they left without packing their belongings, another moonlight flight. This time, Bessie didn’t mind. She was glad to leave that awful land.

  Frank again wanted to take the long way back, bypassing Texas altogether. Bessie said: “It makes no sense, when we can drive straight across. I don’t want to have this baby along the side of this road, Frank, in the back seat of this car. I want to get back to California.” For once, Bessie won the fight, and they began making their way across the infinitely wide state of Texas. This time, there was no doubting it: Frank did not want to be in Texas. He seemed nervous every mile of the trip, and since Texas was so damn big, Frank’s nervousness lasted. He tried driving all night so he could get through the state faster, but there’s no such thing as an unbroken drive across Texas. Bessie would wake up in the morning light, in the backseat with the baby, and find her husband passed out from sleeplessness in the front. It felt so urgent to get through and out of the place, Bessie drove the car herself a few times, eight and a half months pregnant, though she barely knew how to drive.

  Then, driving along Route 67, it became evident that they wouldn’t make California. The baby was coming and they needed to find a hospital. A man at a gas station directed them down the highway to McCamey; it was an oil worker’s town, he said, and it had a good hospital. As the car wheeled into the hospital driveway, and Bessie sat in the backseat clutching the door handle with one hand and her overfull belly with the other, Frank turned to her and said: “Don’t tell anybody a damn thing in this place. Let me do all the talking.” That was all Bessie could remember. Next thing she knew, she was on a gurney, being wheeled under hallway lights into the delivery room.

  A FEW HOURS LATER, SHE AWOKE TO THE SOUND of a Texas nurse’s twang. “Mrs. Coffman?” the nurse said. “Are you all right, Mrs. Coffman? Can you hear me?” In her groggy state, Bessie thought: Why doesn’t Mrs. Coffman answer the woman? Is Mrs. Coffman all right?

  Then she felt my father’s hand on her shoulder, shaking her lightly. “Bessie, can you hear us? It’s okay, it’s me, Walter.”

  Bessie opened her eyes to see her husband, standing on the right side of the bed she was in. On the other side stood the nurse, holding my mother’s new baby. Seeing the baby, Bessie came to and reached out to hold her child.

  “Here’s your baby, Mrs. Coffman. You have a healthy and beautiful son. In fact, I’d say that little Faye here is just about the prettiest baby I’ve ever seen in these parts.”

  That finished waking Bessie. “Little Fay?” she asked.

  “Yes,” said Frank. “I already gave them the information for the birth certificate. I told them we had settled on the name Faye Robert Coffman.”

  “It’s a beautiful name,” the nurse said. “And you have a truly devoted husband. He insisted on staying here by your bedside. He wanted to be here when you woke up.”

  All Bessie could do was stare at the new baby and its already vivid blue eyes and think: Did I wake up a different person? Or have I gone crazy?

  LATER, WHEN THEY WERE ALONE, IT HAD ALL COME BACK to Bessie: the desperate drive across Texas, and the news that they were using yet another name. All that made sense to her—at least as much as anything made sense in their lives at this point—but what she couldn’t fathom was the particular name that Frank had come up with for their new son. “How,” she asked, “could you give a child a name like that: Fay Robert Coffman?”

  “I don’t think it’s such a bad name. You couldn’t do any better. Besides, I spelled it a little differently. I put an e at the end of Fay.”

  “I don’t care how it’s spelled. You’ve still named your son after your mother and another one of your sons—somebody you don’t even love. What the hell has gotten into you?”

  “Calm down,” said Frank. “We’re not going to stay in Texas forever. But while we’re here, his name is Faye Robert. And my name is Walter. Don’t forget it.”

  A couple of days later they checked into a local hotel, the Doyle, while waiting for Bessie to get her strength back for traveling. The hotel manager, an older woman, came by on their first night to fuss over the baby. When Bessie told her the baby’s name, the woman looked quietly dumbstruck. “Yes, his father named him,” my mother said, while Frank—that is, Walter—swelled with pride. The next afternoon, while Frank was out getting food, the woman came back. “Too bad about the baby’s name,” she said, stroking the child’s head.

  “Yes, I know,” said Bessie. “Well, I don’t plan on it having that name much longer. Let me know if you have any better ideas.”

  Every day after that, the woman came by with suggestions for new names. Finally, she decided Bessie should name the child Doyle, in honor of the hotel. After that, the woman called little Faye little Doyle every time she saw him. It drove Frank crazy.

  A FEW WEEKS LATER, MY PARENTS and their two sons were driving west, out of Texas. When they passed through El Paso and crossed the New Mexico border, Frank turned to Bessie and said: “Okay, you can rip up the damn birth certificate. We’re going to give him a new name.”

  “Yes,” said Bessie, “I know. I’ve already settled on the name. We’re going to call him Gary. Gary Gilmore. I thought I’d name him after Gary Cooper, because he’s going to grow up to be handsome, just like the actor.”

  Frank’s response was immediate and forceful. “Like hell we’re going to call him Gary. No son of mine is ever going to have that name.”

  “And why not?”

  “The name of the man who stole Robert’s mother from me was Grady. The name ‘Gary’ has always reminded me of him. I hated that man, and I hated his name. I’m not about to think of him every time I call my son.”

  “Frank, it isn’t even the same name.”

  It didn’t matter to my father. The two of them argued about the baby’s name all the way to Sacramento.

  My father’s last word on the subject: “I’m not going to keep a son with that name.”

  My mother’s last word: “The name stays.”

  I NEED TO INTERRUPT HERE FOR A MOMENT. An important thing just happened: The murderer in our story was born. Right now he is a baby with large blue eyes and an inviting face. A little over thirty-six years from this time he will be a man who has killed at least two other men and who sits on death row as the most famous murderer in America, because he is the only murderer in America who demands to be killed. You look into those blue eyes at that point, and what stares back is something that chills you in the deepest part of your instincts. It is a look that is terribly smart and terribly deadly. It is the look of a man who is afraid of everything but death, a man who would kill you if you crossed him, and maybe even if you didn’t. The only thing separating the baby’s face from the killer’s face is a history of destruction.

  Or perhaps it was something else that ended up turning this baby into a killer. Many times in the last few years I have found myself dwelling on a simple pair of questions: When and how does murder begin? Or, to put it another way: Could I locate one moment where everything went wrong, one moment—or period of time—that might have made all the differen
ce? And if I could find such a moment, would it be one inside Gary’s life? Or would it be one outside him—one, say, in the secret darkness of his own father’s history? There are no simple answers to questions like these—there are only endless arguments and speculations. Even so, I can’t help searching out our history for those answers, like my mother at the end of her days, examining each terrible link in the fateful chain. Where could we have altered this history? How could we have saved my brother’s soul from murder, and spared the lives of innocents as well? You tell yourself you could learn from such a moment, that understanding it would explain all the destruction and free you from its repetition. But when you start looking at all the links in the story closely enough, you discover something worse: Each moment made a difference, and there were just too damn many of them that were bad. The only way to solve the deathly construction of this man’s history would be to toss out all the moments and build a new chain of better links.

  Obviously, this child’s life is not off to an auspicious start. He has just been born of two people who carry their own bad legacies and who are presently in flight from certain unknown demons. If a parent’s fears can be passed on to a child at its birth, then Gary began life as a bundle of insecurity. On top of that, he has been given two names: one, the name of the woman who could never bring herself to love his father; the other—the name he will be known by, that he will become famous by—is a name that reminds his father of a loss that will always invoke his bitterness. There’s a horribly ironic twist that comes from all this name switching: What it means is, Gary Gilmore was never born; he would only die. (Years later, in fact, the federal penitentiary system would refuse me access to my brother’s files because I could not prove that any such person by his name had ever been born, or had ever had an official name change.)

  I have to marvel at the complexity and stupidity of all these circumstances of birth—particularly the thought of two adults bringing a child into an atmosphere of fear and forcing on him identities that, one way or another, would ensure a loss of love. Do any of these factors matter? Does something as seemingly small as a wrangle over a child’s name really play any role in determining the child’s bloody fate? I can’t say for sure— I’m too mired in the webwork of my family’s mythology to sort it all out. It’s too easy for me to read significance into every oddity of fate, and I’m afraid I’m close to doing that here. At the same time, I know that all this business about the names would later matter to Gary a great deal, though by then he was already well down his particular road to hell.

  SOMETHING IN FRANK STARTED TO GO A LITTLE WILD after Gary’s birth and the return from the South. It was like he needed to be somewhere different all the time. In the first few months of 1941, the new family drifted in and out of small towns every couple of weeks. Meantime, the fights between Frank and Bessie were becoming more frequent and rougher. One time in Santa Barbara, Frank went off on a five-day drinking binge. By this time, Bessie was used to these episodes. She knew to stay put with the boys and wait for Frank to return. This time, he came back wearing an exceptionally unpleasant mood. He walked into the hotel where they were staying, moved over to the bed where the new baby was sleeping and pointed down at Gary. “This isn’t my son, is it?”

  Bessie wasn’t prepared for such an out-of-the-blue remark. “What are you talking about? Whose son could it be?”

  “It’s Robert’s son, isn’t it? You think I don’t know about what’s gone on between the two of you back in Sacramento when I haven’t been around.”

  Bessie looked at Frank for several long moments. Then she laughed. “You’re crazy,” she said. “You’ve been drinking so much it’s softened your brain and turned you into an old man.”

  Frank hit her, hard, in the face. “Don’t lie to me, you python-spitting she-devil straight from hell. I’ve been lied to enough.”

  He kept hitting her until she lay on the floor, her face bloodied all over, while the children cried. Through the whole ordeal she insisted the child was Frank’s. But after that instance, my father spent much less time holding his new baby son.

  The two of them fought and shouted their way around America, with two babies in tow. One day in late spring, they were driving through northern Missouri. Frank had been in a miserable mood the entire day, yelling at my mother and driving the car at reckless speed, and the babies were growing restless from being cooped up for so long. This time, Bessie thought something was closing in on Frank. It was the only way to explain his behavior. It was like she could fed the hot breath on both of their collars. Late in the afternoon, Bessie insisted Frank pull into a service station along the highway. She needed to change little Frankie’s diaper, and she wanted to move her legs around a bit. She could see Frank wasn’t happy with the stop. “Be quick about it,” he said, and stayed in the car, watching the baby.

  After a few minutes, Bessie and Frankie came back out of the rest room. She looked around. The car was gone, her husband was gone, the baby was gone.

  “What happened to the man who was sitting here waiting for me?” she asked the service station attendant.

  “He took out of here a few minutes back. He seemed in a hurry.”

  “Did he say anything before he left? Did he say he’d be back in a little while?”

  “No, ma’am,” said the attendant. She could tell from the look the young man was giving her he’d never seen anything quite like this. A man driving off with one kid, leaving his wife and the other kid in the middle of nowhere. Great, Bessie thought. Frank’s got some wild hair up his ass because I made him stop, and now he’s taken off for a while, to teach me a lesson. What a royally spoiled son of a bitch.

  She and Frankie sat at the service station for hours, awaiting Frank’s return. The sun went down, the moon and stars came up, and the attendant began putting away his signs and equipment. Just before he locked the door and switched on the night light, he said: “Lady, I don’t think your husband is coming back, and I can’t really leave you sitting here. Let me give you and your boy a lift over to Chillicothe. They have a hotel there, and a bus station.”

  From the bus station Bessie called her parents and got them to wire her enough money to return to Provo. When she got home, Will Brown wanted her to call the police, but Bessie refused. She told her parents that Frank was deeply worried about something and that she shouldn’t have kept fighting with him at such a time. His leaving had been her fault. She was confident that he would be back, and she was sure he wouldn’t do anything to harm the baby.

  “If he shows up here,” said her father, “there will be trouble. No man has a good reason to walk away from his wife and child and leave them stranded.”

  SEVERAL DAYS LATER, BESSIE GOT A CALL from an orphanage in Des Moines, Iowa. They had Gary; he had been turned over to them by his father, who was now sitting in a neighboring county’s jail, doing thirty days on a bad check charge. Did Mrs. Laffo want to come and claim her child, or did she prefer to leave him in their care and surrender him for adoption? My mother later said, “If it all hadn’t been so tragic, I could have laughed out loud at the Mrs. Laffo part. That was the first time I’d been called that.”

  Bessie borrowed more money from her family, gathered Frankie, and went to Iowa. She got Gary out of the orphanage and took a job doing housekeeping in exchange for room and board, while she waited for her husband to finish his jail stretch.

  On the morning he got out of jail, she was waiting for him outside with Frankie and Gary. “What the hell,” she said, “do you have to say for yourself? What were you thinking, leaving me there and running off with our baby?”

  “Somebody got too close that day,” he said, looking weary. “I had to leave. That’s all there is to say about it.”

  Bessie began to wonder. Maybe all this business about Frank fleeing from something was just an excuse. Maybe nothing was on his trail, except his own fear of staying with his family and being a committed father. Maybe Fay had been right after all. “Frank,” she
said, “no matter what it is, you can tell me about it. If it’s another woman or another family, let me know. I won’t turn it against you. Only tell me the truth.”

  Frank shook his head. “No,” he said. “Anything but that. It’s a frightful truth, Bessie. You’re better off not knowing.”

  THAT’S THE WAY IT WENT FOR THE REST OF THE YEAR. Zigzags across the American West, Frank carting the wife and kids from sinkhole to sinkhole, drinking harder and harder along the way. By the start of the holiday season, Bessie and Frank and the boys were living in a wheat and cattle-farming town called Holyoke, in the topmost northeastern corner of Colorado. Frank was running his usual scam of hundred-percenting— he had phony business cards, a telephone listed under an assumed name—this time they were Mr. and Mrs. Harry F. Laffo—and a checking account from a bank in a larger nearby town, Sterling. He was hitting businesses throughout the area, gathering advertising money for a regional travel magazine, like Arizona Highways. One day he cashed a check with one of the merchants he was selling advertising to. The merchant got suspicious and called the bank right away. When it turned out the check wasn’t good—there was only three dollars in the account, and the check had been for fifty—the man had Frank traced to his hotel and arrested. It was early December 1941. The day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, my father was sitting in a dirt-water jail on a bad check charge.

  The police did a little checking around, realized Frank was selling phony advertising all over the place for a nonexistent publication. This was worse than simply passing a bad check; the charge was bumped up to running a confidence game. At the trial—held three days before Christmas—the prosecutor managed to produce a copy of Frank’s criminal record, insofar as it was known. Bessie was surprised by what she learned that afternoon, as the district attorney detailed her husband’s previous offenses. The record began in May 1914, when Frank had been arrested as Harry Sevilla, in Fresno, California, on charges of contributing to the delinquency of a minor; he had served ninety days in the county jail. The next known crime occurred in August 1919, when, as Frank Gilmore, he had been arrested in Sacramento, on a charge of embezzlement. The judge asked for clarification. “Apparently,” said the prosecutor, “the accused managed to steal a truckload of fur coats from a place where he was employed.” Frank somehow finagled probation on the embezzlement charges (Fay, Bessie learned later, had hired a well-connected lawyer) and was ordered to remain in the state. But he didn’t. Less than two years later he was picked up under the name Walter Saville in Seattle as a fugitive from justice, and returned to Sacramento. Once he was back in California, the sentencing judge revoked his probation and gave him ten years in San Quentin. He was paroled after two years of hard labor.