Shot in the Heart

by Mikal Gilmore

  I thought he was telling me how to survive in jail. I realize now he was telling me how to survive in our family.

  IN THE YEARS AFTER I WAS BORN, my father kept his own photo albums, and in those books he had almost exclusively photos of me. I suppose that about sums up the reality of my early years: My father kept me. For many years—in fact, until the day he died—my father and I were our own family.

  Nowhere else in life have I known such safekeeping and such love. He would bounce me on his knee and sing “This Old Man” to me (“With a knick-knack paddywack, give the dog a bone/This old man came rolling home”). He would hold me in his arms, tickling me, calling me Tamarac. I have no idea where the name came from or what it meant, I only know it was my father’s name for me when I was a child.

  As I say, nowhere else did I know such love. And nowhere else have I known such loneliness and fear and guilt.

  WHEREAS MY BROTHERS lived through vicious physical fights between my parents—all those occasions when my father battered my mother, and my brothers were made to watch—I remember a different experience of argument. I never once saw one of my parents strike the other—or if I saw it, I simply don’t remember it. I don’t doubt that it happened in the earlier years, but perhaps by the time I was born my father either had learned a certain belated restraint, or was simply too old to whale the shit out of everybody all the time. Maybe beating my brothers was now enough to satisfy his rage.

  To be sure, my parents fought, and fought frequently. Frightful, mean-spirited yelling matches that would approach the brink of violence but never quite cross over. Instead, my mother and father would hurl terrible invectives at each other. My father would call my mother a “python-spitting she-devil straight from hell” and “a crazy, crack-brained bitch.” Even as a small boy—and even as somebody who often took my father’s side in the end—I knew these were exceptionally awful things to call anyone, especially the person you loved. In turn, my mother would lash into my father for all the women he had loved, married, and left, or at other times she would call him a “cat-licker”—a Mormon epithet for Catholic. Compared to the names my father had thrown at my mother, her insults were mild, but they seemed to goad my father even more. After she made fun of his religion, he would go on a tirade about Mormons—about the evil Danites and how they did Joseph Smith’s work of murder, and how Brigham Young, who was once married to twenty-seven women at the same time, had been nicknamed “Bring ’em Young.” At the end of these rants, he would turn to me or my brothers and say: “The next time you’re in Salt Lake City, boys, I want you to take a look at that pompous statue they have of Brigham Young in Temple Square. I want you to look real good. If you look, you’ll see that he’s got his hand to the bank and his ass to the church.” It was a dumb-enough joke (though as it turns out, an apt description of how the statue actually stands), but it would hurt my mother deeply. She probably felt in those moments that my father was denigrating her entire past, reducing it to a petty joke. What maybe hurt more was that, to some degree, she had herself repudiated that past—her history and legacy as a Mormon, her hope of being a good church member and enjoying access to God’s care and truth—so that she could be with the man who now took such delight in belittling her.

  One way or another, these arguments always seemed to mount to the crescendo of a threat. My father would threaten to leave my mother and my brothers and withdraw his support, leaving them to their own inept resources, or he would threaten to throw my mother out of the house and make her live on the street, without money or forgiveness. I can still recall the hubristic, brutish tone with which he would taunt her, and I can still recall how her face became contorted in a pain-filled fury as my father’s warnings wore on. Then he would start in on her sanity. This was probably the most malicious behavior I ever saw from him—even uglier in a way than when he hit my brothers—and it had a wicked, surefire effect. By calling her crazy, Frank Gilmore could provoke Bessie Gilmore to a state where she acted crazy. Her eyes would turn sharp with anger, and her face would become a strange mask that would seem in one moment both frozen and wild—as if she were containing the worst impulses a heart and mind could bear. And then she would say: “You’re right—I am crazy. I am crazy enough to kill. Go ahead, accuse me some more, try to walk out on me. See what I’ll do. I’m crazy enough that some night, when you’re in your sleep, I’m going to take a sharp knife and cut your throat, and I’ll laugh while your blood runs out and you gasp for the last breath of your rotten, cruel life.”

  Whether my mother ever meant her promises of harm or not, she was convincing in her delivery. In those instances, she was the scariest thing I have ever seen. Her eyes fixed on my father with the sort of deadliness that can only come from having been deeply wronged by the person you love most. It was in those moments, when I saw that look of menace on my mother’s face, that I learned to fear anger. In particular, I learned to fear the anger of a hurt woman. Unfortunately, I also learned how to make some of that anger.

  When my mother finally became the crazed creature my father accused her of being, it would break the momentum of the battle. It was as if my father felt he had won his point, but also feared what might come of his victory. He would quiet down and withdraw into his office, and my mother would be left standing there with her anger and her humiliation, in an empty room.

  What made these scenes especially indelible for me was that the fights were often about the same subject: They were about me. They were about which of my parents would enjoy the custody and company of me, from day to day and place to place.

  Maybe my father never fully trusted my mother with my welfare after the incident in my infancy that Frank had told me about. Maybe he felt he had to keep me close to him to assure that no sudden harm would come to me. Or maybe he simply realized he was getting older—he was nearing his late sixties during the period that I am describing here—and perhaps he simply wanted a faithful presence close to him. I suspect I might have been my father’s last chance for love—a love that wouldn’t refuse or betray him, or question his hard ways too much. “That man loved Mike,” my mother told Larry Schiller, years later. “Really loved him. It might be the only person in the world he ever loved, but he loved that kid.” And Gary himself said: “I think Mike was the only one of us that Dad ever really loved.”

  Whatever his reason, my father wanted me with him wherever he went. Since he traveled often for his publishing business, this meant he and I would spend a season or two in Portland, then a few months in Seattle or Tacoma, and then back and forth between these various stations. After I turned six, this meant that I would also have to go back and forth between schools, sometimes attending as many as three or four different schools in a single grade year. (With the possible exception of the first grade, I never attended any school for the entire duration of a single year until the sixth grade, the year after my father’s death.)

  Neither the local grammar school in Portland nor my mother thought that all this moving was such a good idea, and this is part of what became the core of contention between my parents. My father wanted me to go with him when he would travel, and my mother wanted me to stay on Johnson Creek and remain in our neighborhood school. But the argument went further. My mother also viewed my father’s possessiveness of me as an attempt to keep my love to himself and to turn me against the rest of the family. “He’s my baby boy,” my mother would say. “He needs to be with his mother, he needs to be close to his brothers. You’re doing a horrible thing: You’re turning him against me, you’re making him spurn us.”

  I hated these fights. I remember I used to stand among my parents, spreading my arms between them, trying to keep them from hurting each other. I would beg them to stop fighting. It was like I was at the center of two monstrous, clashing forces, and if I could just make plain that I loved and wanted them both, then maybe I could stop their quarrels. Maybe then we could be a family together. Sometimes, when the bickering reached a fever pitch, my mother woul
d say: “Let Mike choose for himself.” My father would agree to this plea, but it was apparent from the way he looked at me or instructed me that I really had no choice. “Go ahead,” he would say. “Choose which of us you want to be with. Stay with your mother if you like. I’ll just go away by myself, and maybe I won’t come back. If you don’t want me, nobody wants me.” Also, by this time the arguments would invariably have reached a point where my mother had been called crazy and was hurt enough to appear that way, and the prospect of staying alone in that house with her terrified me.

  I would be standing there, looking back and forth between my father and my mother, and I would almost always choose my father in these moments.

  I remember well—indeed, will never be able to forget—the impact this decision would have on my mother. Her face would lose its frantic aspect and would fall into undisguised heartbreak and I would feel a horrible guilt, as if I had just hit her myself. I remember one time watching her crumble into a heap on the sofa, crying into her hands. I immediately regretted my choice, and I wanted to comfort her. I went to my mother and reached out to hold her. She flung me back, anger reddening her face, and cried: “Stay away from me. You don’t love me.” I ran to my father’s side for protection. My mother said: “Oh, Mike, I would never hurt you. I do love you. Come to me.” But by that time I was too wary, and I would stand next to my father, my arms wrapped around his strong legs, fearing her, pitying her, and wanting to be as far away from her as possible.

  “That was your cross,” my brother Frank told me, many years later. “I used to see you carrying that around inside you when you were little, the way you stayed away from everybody else. Many years later I used to think about that—you, stuck between them, having to choose which of them to be with. I felt for you at those times, but there wasn’t anything I could say or do. There wasn’t anything any of us could say or do.”

  This is the way I learned how to love: choosing between two loves that I could not live without and that I could never hope to reconcile. I learned that, in some ways, loving could be like killing—or that at least a certain kind of choosing was like murdering. I knew I had to hurt my parents by choosing to abandon one or the other, by being forced to declare which one I preferred over the other, which one I loved more than the other. In effect, I would kill the heart of one of them by revealing this truth, and for the most part, it was my mother’s heart I had to kill. (No wonder I feared her.)

  Years later, all this would feed into not only my own betrayals in love, but my misgivings about the hopefulness of the whole enterprise. Because I knew how awful it was to withhold or withdraw love, I came to fear somebody doing the same to me. I knew that to be left was to be rejected, condemned, declared unworthy. I feared, above all, somebody telling me that they didn’t love me or want me or need me or want to share a life with me. In other words. I became afraid of ending up as the victim of the same sort of choices I’d had to make virtually every season of my early childhood. So sometimes I would withhold love or hedge its bets, sometimes with one too many lovers at the same time. Just as often, I would end up on the receiving end—as the one not chosen, the one left behind.

  It’s possible, of course, that I’m leaning too much on these childhood dramas. Maybe my failures in love are simply mistakes that I alone hold the deed for. I botched the chances God gave me for love, on my own. I made for myself the unworthiness that lives in my life.

  But still I have to wonder: I never thought of my parents when I kissed a woman. So why did I think of them every time I lost or failed a woman?

  A FEW TIMES, WHEN MY mother would threaten my father with murder in his sleep, he took her warnings seriously—or else decided to dramatize her craziness further—and folded out the couch in the living room, to make his bed for the night there. On these occasions, he kept me next to him. The idea was either to keep me under his protection or to ensure his own safety by having me near. Before he would turn out the lights, he would take the chairs from the dining table and line them up in front of the sofa, and then he would take a heavy cord and loop it through the backs of the chairs, stringing them into a barricade. On the cord, he would hang a pair of large, rotund Chinese bells that he usually kept on his desk. That way, if my mother tried to sneak across the barrier, we would hear the bells clang. Sort of a makeshift alarm against familial murder in the dark.

  Then my father would lie down, with him on the side closer to the chairs and me on the wall side, and he would fall asleep. I, however, would lie awake. I could never sleep through these nights.

  I would lie there in the dark, waiting for the sound of my mother’s footsteps, prepared to see the glint of a blade. I heard sounds—maybe my brothers moving around upstairs or stealing off into the night—and I’d wonder: Was it the sound of somebody coming down to kill us?

  I sat up in the bed and studied the shadows of the forms about me. I could see the outline of the chairs. I could see the bells hanging on the string. But in the far reaches of the room’s darkness—in the corner by the staircase, in the doorways leading to and from other rooms—I thought I could see other things. I could imagine what might be moving in that darkness. Anger and hatred and the spirit of murder moved there, in my mind’s view. My mother’s madness moved there. My brothers’ pain. They were crouched in the shadows: forces ready to sweep down on us and stab out our lives.

  Next to me my father kept sleeping, one arm sprawled out toward me, his mouth open, declaring his age: the pink, vulnerable gums that showed when he removed his dentures. In that dim light, in that insensible pose, he already looked like a dead man.

  I lay back and kept listening for a movement. For a creak from the floorboards. For the rattle of the knife drawer. There are so many sounds that make so little sense in the silences of a deep night. So many that could be everything you fear the most. I would shut tight my eyes and try to force sleep to come, but it never would. Then I’d try studying the patterns on the stained wallpaper, the configurations in the lacy curtains. I think sometimes during these all-night vigils, something in me went a little mad. The forms in the wallpaper, the web in the curtains, looked like little silhouettes of demons, vignettes of hell. I was afraid I’d caught some of my mother’s madness. Maybe it had found its way to me, through the straits of darkness that moved in that house and in our lives. Or maybe it was merely the sleeplessness of an anxious child. I’ve never been a very good sleeper. Sometimes, even now, I wake up sudden. I know that something has just moved in the dark room that I am in. I feel somebody standing by my bed, and I have just heard the quick sucking sound they made, as they abruptly hold their breath. Of course, nothing is ever really there. It’s just something that comes up out of my sleep, up out of me and my memory.

  I would lie awake for hours on those nights, expecting my mother to come and keep her promise. When the sky began to lighten, and the room’s blackness turned to the horrible dull gray of morning, I would finally feel safe enough to roll over on my side, press my feet up against my father’s legs, and fade into sleep.

  THAT’S WHEN THE DREAMS STARTED. When I was around five or six years old, the dreams took basically two forms. The first set of dreams had to do with things dwelling in the darkness. My father and brothers had built a wooden porch on the back of our house, and at ground level the porch had a door which led to a storage shed for garden tools. It was a dark, dank place, with a dirt floor, and I hated it. I would never go into it. In the dreams, I would be standing in the night in front of the porch’s door and it would open. I would see things spinning in the dark inside. They had fierce red eyes and sharp teeth, and they ran fast in circles, in coiling motions. I decided they were rats, and I was afraid of being devoured by them. Other times, I dreamed that something lived in our basement. In the dreams, the basement was like a dungeon—like what you might imagine from Edgar Allan Poe’s descriptions of the labyrinths that ran under houses rotting from their own secrets, though I didn’t associate Poe with the dreams until many
years later, after reading him and taking him for my first muse. What moved in that basement in my dreams had no form. It was like a vapor, and stepping halfway down the stairs, I saw it swirl at my feet. I ran upstairs and tried to wake my family and tell them there was something coming for us from the depths of our home, something that would enter our breath in our sleep and kill us. But I could never succeed in waking them.

  My other childhood dreams were more disturbing, and I have never disclosed them until now. The most common scenario of these dreams ran like this: I was a policeman or a detective—a little blond boy in a detective’s suit, with a snap-brim hat and a pistol—and I was investigating a killing. I always had a partner in the dreams, and the partner was always a little girl, also with blond hair—somebody I knew I was in love with. But as the dream went along, I would realize it was I who was the killer I was seeking, and the only way to protect myself and my guilt was to kill the little girl who was my partner, whom I loved. I would kiss her, hold her close, then shoot her. I remember also—in one particularly horrible variant of this dream pattern—that sometimes I would kill any other child or baby that I came across in the story.

  I had no idea what these dreams were about when I was a child— naturally, I had no idea that dreams could be about anything—and even at this date I wouldn’t profess to understand or explain them. I know that I would wake up from the dreams feeling terribly guilty, and I never told anybody about them. Sometimes, I’d go to sleep at night praying to God: “Please don’t let me dream the killing dreams.”

  But prayers never stopped the bad dreams. Never once.

  AND SO I BECAME MY father’s constant companion. Every several weeks, we would pack up and make the two-hundred-mile drive to Seattle or Tacoma. We would sing songs the whole way—silly, spirited stuff, like “Giddyup, Napoleon, It Looks Like Rain” or “Oh, Susannah” or songs from Oklahoma! We even sang “This Land Is My Land” and “Blue Suede Shoes.” And when my father felt like taking the solo spot, he’d try his hand at a Verdi or Puccini aria. We were both god-awful singers, but I don’t think we knew and I’m certain we didn’t mind. On the occasions when somebody else came along for the ride, they could barely withstand the musical part of the trip.