None of that would matter. By the time we got to the new home, the ghosts were waiting for us, prowling the hallways and crawl spaces.
A DREAM: I AM DRIVING PAST the house where we once lived on the hill—the house we moved to after we left Johnson Creek. In the car with me are two people: one, a famous newsman and interviewer; the other, Nicole, Gary’s last girlfriend. It is late afternoon as we make the drive, and I can see that my old home has changed dramatically. An extension has been built on to its main structure; a tower reaches up into the air for seven or eight stories. At the top, there is a Victorian-style turret. House of Usher, I think to myself.
For years now I have been wanting to revisit this old home. I have wanted to find a way back into it, so I could once more walk through its insides. I feel like I’ve lost or left something there, and that if I could just explore the rooms once more, Yd find what I’ve been missing. Also, I’m convinced there are secrets I need to know, and the only way to learn them is to reenter the house where I grew up, the house I once fled.
Now, I see a way back in. There is a sign out front: ROOMS FOR RENT— UPPER LEVELS. The reporter agrees to pose as my brother, and Nicole as our sister. We are a family, looking for a new home. We enter through the front door into what was once the living room. Now it’s a central office of some sort, though it’s outfitted remarkably like the foyer in the funeral parlor where ceremonies were held for my father and mother and my brother Gaylen after their deaths. There’s a desk in the middle of the room, with a nice older woman seated at it. I think: So much once happened in this room; now I barely recognize it. Nevertheless, I can tell that something is still dwelling inside this house. I can feel it in the air around me. It feels thick and malicious.
The woman arranges for us to have a tour. She tells us that we shouldn’t take too long, because after dark all the employees leave. Then, the buses will stop running and we would have a hard time getting back to the city.
We climb narrow, turning stairs and enter many rooms. Some of the rooms have unfinished plank floors, and in the middle of those rooms are trapdoors leading down into nothing. Other rooms are windowless, like cold offices.
In room after room I come across people who want to tell me their stories. The stories go on forever and ever. I don’t remember much about them, except most are sad, as are the people who are telling the stories. A young black woman tells me that when she goes out to walk around the neighborhood, the other people in the area act as if they don’t know her or see her. “They treat me like a zombie,” she says. “Maybe I am a zombie.”
As I get closer to the top of the house, I find that the rooms are empty. I notice that I have lost track of my friend the reporter and Nicole. I start back down the stairs to find them, but I find nobody there. I go outside to the front yard. I see that it is now getting dark. I also see that the terrain surrounding the house has changed. A crosswork of train tracks now encloses the place, stretching into an empty distance, filled only with the blink of an occasional signal light.
I go back into the house to seek a ride out of here, but all the rooms are either empty or locked. I realize that I am left alone here, and that my only company is the presence of evil that I had felt earlier, upon entering the house. I am alone in the house with its evil, and I must stay there.
I wake up in a panic, certain that somebody has just walked into the room where I am sleeping.
OUR NEW HOME WAS ON THE SOUTHERN BORDER of Milwaukie, the town that lay just across the tracks from our old house on Johnson Creek Boulevard. Milwaukie was one of the larger cities of Clackamas County— an area considerably more rural than Portland’s Multnomah County. Clackamas didn’t have the sort of diversions that Multnomah offered— the variety of nightclubs, whorehouses, gay bars, and twenty-four-hour movie theaters that made Portland a tempting place to seek vice in the late-night hours. Just the same, there was something dark at the heart of the place: In Clackamas, it was possible for people and their families to live their lives in utter isolation and disinterest. Anything could come from such conditions—transcendence or destruction—but often what came was not for the better. Multnomah may have had a higher crime rate—robberies, drugs, and such—but there was a deeper natural meanness to be found in the outlands around Milwaukie. Many of Oregon’s deadliest men—killers and country-bred gangsters—came from homes in Clackamas County. My brother Gary was one of them.
We knew none of this, of course, when we bought our new home. My father was now making decent money, and as the family became wealthier, my mother renewed her fight for a better house. In part, I think she simply wanted the sort of nice surroundings that her sisters had long enjoyed with their families back in Utah. But she also wanted to give her sons a new start. She thought that if Gary was released from OSCI to return to the world of Johnson Creek, he would simply drift back into old ways and bad company. But if he could come home to a better neighborhood, a higher standard, maybe that would be enough to turn him around. Something about this argument finally convinced my father that it was time to move his family up in the world. It was a fine idea, as far as it went. But what my parents didn’t understand was, it was what went on inside a house, rather than what street the home was on, that made all the difference. Perhaps it was too late to understand that.
In any event, we got our new home, and a nice new address as well. To get to the new place, you had to drive across the train tracks into Milwaukie, along the winding stretch of 45th Avenue. That would take you through the poorer section of town—an area where some people still lived in hapless shacks and tar-paper lean-tos—until you came to another set of train tracks. Take a right, follow those tracks west toward the Willamette River, and you would come to Milwaukie’s city center, such as it was. Milwaukie was (and remains) essentially a one-street downtown—a five-or six-block stretch called Main Street, with a couple of pharmacies, grocery stores, and cafés. You drove along Main Street until it ran out onto a highway called Lake Road. It was a long, spacious stretch of road that carried you past several solidly built farm-style houses, set back off the street, overlooking large yards filled with chestnut trees. At the top of Lake Road, you took a right onto a street called Oatfield Road. Suddenly, the whole world looked different. Oatfield coasted down a lovely, wooded hill lined with oaks and pines, until it hit a stone bridge, spanning a creek lined with chateau-style nice houses. Then the road began to climb left, around a large hill. As you ascended that hill, each house you passed was an unmistakable statement: old money, old ways, no disorder or disruption.
You followed that road up the hill in a long, semicircular loop, and just before it crested out, it turned sharply left. You made that swing and you were at the top of the hill. There, on the left, at the highest point of Milwaukie’s nicest hill, was our new home. In those days it was a two-story gray structure, set back off the highway, high upon an embanked yard. Several wide steps took you up to a large front porch, with squared pillars and a hanging bench swing. On the left of the house was a large side yard, and to the left of that was a long driveway loop that circled around a teardrop-shaped garden island. In back there was another acre of yard, with a big cherry tree at its center.
Walk through the front door of the house and you entered the living room, with a red brick fireplace along the main wall. To its right there was a double-width sliding door that took you into the dining room, and alongside that was the kitchen. At the rear of the house was a glassed-in sunporch. The upstairs held four bedrooms, plus the main bathroom and another sunporch. From the upstairs windows you could see the church steeples and rooftops of Milwaukie, and beyond that, you could see the skyline and night lights of downtown Portland, eight miles away. It was a mesmerizing view.
I loved that house on the hill, and I also grew to fear it. It is, beyond question, the central house of my mind, my life, my memory. Not a week goes by that I don’t dream of it.
I know that if I could return there, I would. When I was living back in P
ortland a couple of years ago, I wrote the people who were the current residents of our old home. I told them I was working on a book about my family’s life, and I asked if I could pay the house a brief revisit. I never heard from them. I can’t say that I blame them. I’m not sure I’d want somebody connected with such a bad past walking through my front door.
As I SAY, MY MOTHER SAW THIS RELOCATION as a new start for the family. This was the home she had always wanted, and she set about landscaping the yard with elaborately-patterned flower gardens, while filling the house with fine furniture imported from Europe and Japan. I think she hoped that a new, better home would rehabilitate the family— that it would give my wayward brothers some new pride and, in turn, win back my father’s faith and support for his sons. She wanted us to be the family on the hill, not the family near the tracks.
But something that none of us had counted on was about to happen. We began to die.
There’s an episode I’ve always thought of as the harbinger to this development, though I can’t say exactly why the particular memory works this way in my mind.
I had just started school at Milwaukie Grammar School—the middle part of the third grade. It was my father’s custom to drive me there and pick me up afterward; he did not like me riding the bus with other children. This one afternoon in early December a heavy snow had started to fall on the Willamette Valley. As school let out, our teachers advised us to check the radio listings early the next day, since they expected the school would be closed due to weather conditions. That afternoon, at four-fifteen, I waited in front of the school for my father’s 1960 green Pontiac station wagon to pull up. He was late this day—something I had never known him to be before—and it gave me a bad feeling.
When he finally pulled up, long after all the other kids and school buses had departed, he had a worried look on his face. “Whatever you do,” he instructed me after I got in the car, “don’t say anything to your mother that might upset her. We’ve had painters and decorators at the house all day, and she hates the colors and patterns of everything, especially the kitchen floor tiles. She wants to redo the whole goddamn place, and right now she’s having a royal shit-fit.” These remarks, which might have inspired humor or disgust or exhaustion in others, froze me and inspired in me real terror—in part, because it announced to me we would be dealing with my mother’s formidable madness and unpredictability. But there was more to it than that. As we climbed the snow-covered hill of Oatfield Road, I saw something in my father’s manner—an exhaustion in his face, a resignation in his voice—that seemed to signal something new: a weariness and sadness that I had not heard from him before, and this frightened me even more than what I had seen of his strength and his rage. It’s possible my father had put more hope in the regenerative ability of this new house than the rest of us. Maybe he thought that buying a new home would finally buy not only respectability for his family, but also a lasting peace with my mother. However, we all knew it wasn’t panning out that way. My mother wanted our new home to be perfect in every detail, and when something failed her standards, she would rage at my father, and he would simply give in to her demands and then walk out of the room. From this time on, I would see him more and more as a tired and helpless man—somebody who just wanted a little concord and who looked increasingly drained by all the troubles.
Of course, the other thing my father’s statement about my mother announced to me was a rotten home life for the next few days. Since my mother was having the entire place re-wallpapered and repainted, the rest of us had been told where we could and could not move in the new house. There was a narrow pathway we were allowed to navigate between the downstairs kitchen and bathroom and two of the upstairs bedrooms. We also weren’t allowed to touch the walls outside of the light-switch panels. If we did, there was real hell to pay. The practical result of all of this was that, for the next few days, anybody who wanted to live in that house (and since it looked like it was going to be frozen over outside, that meant all of us) would have to live in the dining room, which was already filled with a TV, unpacked boxes, and extra furniture. Now, during the family’s nonsleeping moments, it would include two adults and three restless boys. I had already made a corner in the room where I could sit and read my favorite stories: tales of Jesus and monsters and Odysseus and Captain Ahab.
That late afternoon, when my father and I entered the house through the back door into the kitchen area—the present object of my mother’s obsessiveness—I saw my brothers Frank and Gaylen sitting around the dining booth. They were looking unmistakably like men who had been trapped in a room with my angry mother for a few hours too long. I saw my mother sitting on a steel chair in a corner of the room, her arms folded over her chest, studying the linoleum patterns on the floor tile that had just been laid that morning. A few days before, when she had picked this tile, she declared it one of the most handsome domestic designs she had ever seen. But now, viewing the new floor under her feet, she decided the pattern was actually a product of somebody’s hellish vision, and she was brooding about it. I saw her sitting there, and I instantaneously felt a great compassion for her. I not only recognized her familiar wrath, but I think I also saw the private tickings of a mind that knew such vast and deep grief and anger that what it wanted and feared most were one and the same thing: the space to live inside its own private madness, unhindered. I remember that in this moment, I simply wanted to go up to her and hug her, comfort her, say to her that I understood, that she should get what she wanted—she should get a floor pattern that truly fitted into her own inexplicable sense of order.
I don’t remember what happened next exactly, but I know that in some way I acted on that impulse. I went up to my mother. I hugged her, kissed her cheek—things we were all forbidden to do, and had always been forbidden to do. Next thing I knew, I was shoved across the room. “Keep away from me, you little bastard,” she yelled. Immediately, my father was between her and me, shaking his fist; my brothers were between him and my mother, trying to calm the two of them down; and I was holding on to my father and reaching out for my mother, trying to make it all okay. I remember my father pulling me out the door and my mother regretting what she had done, crying, reaching out, saying, “No, Frank, bring him back! I’m sorry. You know how much I love him!” And I remember Gaylen saying, “Jesus Christ, I’m getting the hell out of here, I can’t take any more of this shit,” and Frank following us all out to the car. From there, my father and brothers and I went to a Chinese restaurant, and it was dark before we got back home. My mother had baked some chocolate chip cookies while we were gone and had them waiting for me. It was my favorite thing that she made, and she was the best cook I’ve ever known. She had also decided by then that she didn’t really mind the floor pattern all that much, and she’d be happy to live with it—provided, that is, they could just redo the entire wall patterns throughout the downstairs in a different color. “That’s fine,” my father said. “Whatever you want.”
I felt horribly sorry for both my parents at that moment—for my father because, I guess, I recognized then that he was a broken, finished, doomed man; for my mother because I knew that none of this was what she really wanted, and that she would have to live with this disappointment for the rest of her life. The funny part is, it was a fairly common floor pattern of various-sized squares, one you still see in many kitchens and bathrooms. I never see it without memories of that day and without memories of what was about to happen in that haunted palace of ours.
LATE ONE WINTER AFTERNOON, MY MOTHER was home alone at our new place, working in the kitchen. She heard an odd noise in the adjoining dining room and looked around the corner just in time to see the figure of a man disappearing through the glass doors of the back-room sunporch. She thought it must have been Frank Jr. or Gaylen, home early. She went and opened the door to the room, but nobody was there.
This could have been discounted as merely another example of my mother’s hyperactive imagination, but the incidents
kept happening. One evening a week or two later, Gaylen was seated in the back sunporch, watching one of our four televisions. The door opened, and a man in white clothes with gray hair, he said, stood staring at him for a moment, then moved back through the doors. Gaylen went and found my mother and asked her who the stranger was. She said: “What stranger?”
Before we moved into the house on Oatfield, it had belonged to a well-known local doctor. According to one report we heard, the doctor had died in the house, lying on a sofa in the back sunporch. The stuff of a typical haunting, except there was no emotional resonance to the story. Did this doctor die an unhappy or bedeviled man? Not as far as I know. So what would keep him bound to the house he died in? Why would he bother to spook the place?
These questions hardly mattered. Once my mother heard this story, she was convinced we had another haunted house on our hands. For a while, she even thought we should give up the place, but my father was not moved by this suggestion.
Still, odd things kept happening. They never stopped happening. Let me repeat what I said before: I do not believe in ghosts. But like everybody else in my family, I heard and felt strange things in that house that I could not account for. There was an unusually large gap space between two of the upstairs bedrooms, and we could not figure why that space existed, or what it might hold. There was an attic structure built onto the house, but there was no entrance available to the attic—no trapdoor, no ladder or staircase. Maybe the gap space had once held a narrow staircase, but like the stairwell in Robert Frost’s poem “The Witch of Coos,” maybe it had been sealed over once the house’s evil had been trapped up the stairs. Anyway, we all heard inexplicable noises in that area—the sounds of a heavy breath or painful moan, the sound of 3 A.M. voices holding muffled conversations. For a time, Gaylen actually theorized that another family might be living above us in our inaccessible attic. You should have seen the look on my mother’s face when Gaylen voiced this idea.
Shot in the Heart Page 27
