Frank put down one photo and picked up another. “Do you mind if I sit here and look through these?”
I said he was welcome to look as long as he liked, and I’d have copies made of any of the pictures he wanted. “That’s okay,” he said, pulling a chair up to the table. “I don’t really want to carry this stuff around with me. It might be fun to look at it, though.”
We sat together at the table, poring over the old photos. Frank looked at them as somebody who knew a different story about every picture. I looked at them as an outsider. These photos described a certain world, and I had been born at the end of that world.
Frank picked up one of the only color pictures from the batch. It was a picture of a Thanksgiving turkey, of all things. Just the cooked bird itself. No people, no smiling holiday faces.
“I remember that turkey,” Frank said. “I remember how good it looked sitting on the table while we waited for what seemed like hours to sit down and eat it. I remember Mom and Dad getting into a fight immediately. I remember Mom picking the turkey up and throwing it across the room, and I remember it hitting the floor—SPLAT!— and the dressing bouncing out all over the place. I remember that bird sitting there on the floor the rest of the day, because nobody would pick it up, because they were too busy calling each other filthy names. I remember never getting to taste it.” Frank put the photo down and sighed. “It had looked like such a nice turkey.”
A few photos later, Frank came across the only picture I have of my father and Gary alone together. In the picture, Gary is wearing a sailor’s cap. He has his arms wrapped tight around my father’s neck, his cheek pressed close against my father’s, a look of broken need on his face. It is heartbreaking to look at this picture—not just for the look on Gary’s face, the look that would become the visage of his future, but also for my father’s expression. In that moment, my father is pulling away from Gary’s cheek, and he is wearing a look of barely disguised distaste.
Frank studied the picture quietly for several seconds, then he looked up at me. “Did you know,” he said, speaking carefully, “that Gary had a son?”
I told him I had recently learned as much from one of Larry Schiller’s last taped interviews with Gary. I told him I had also heard on one of my mother’s tapes that the boy hadn’t died after all, as Gary thought.
“That’s right,” Frank said. “The baby never died. That was just something Mom and Dad told Gary. In fact, I think I might have run into Gary’s son a couple of years back. It wasn’t a very pleasant meeting.
“It was a late summer afternoon. I was walking along Burnside, not far from the park where a lot of the homeless people hang out. There’s a little tavern up the street. I was coming from work, and I was heading for the tavern to get a pitcher of beer. Just as I got to the place, this guy comes running up and starts talking to me. He asked me if I was Frank Gilmore, and I said I was. He said, ‘Your brother Gary was my father.’ I looked at him and said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ and then I tried to walk on.
“He stopped me. He said, ‘Yes, you do. Your brother was my father. Your family fucked me up real good, and now I’m going to fuck you up.’ Then he tried to lay me out with a punch. I ducked and grabbed him and slammed his back up against a building. Then I saw a dummy stick fall from one of his hands. Those things can hurt you real bad. I kicked it into the street and said, ‘Jesus, can’t you even fight like a man?’ I let go of him and backed off. When I saw that he wasn’t going to move on me, I made my way into the tavern and told the bartender what had happened. He said he noticed that the guy had been hanging around there off and on for a few days, like he was waiting for somebody. I sat there and had a beer, and after a while I looked up, and the guy was standing outside, looking at me through the window. I decided I should go out and try to have a talk with him. By the time I got out there he was gone, and I never saw him again.”
I asked Frank: “Do you think the man might actually have been Gary’s son? Did he look anything like Gary?”
Frank watched me quietly for a moment, then said: “He looked just like Gary.”
Fucking hell, I thought. If this were true, if the young man Frank faced had in fact been Gary’s son, then it might mean something worse than I’d ever imagined. Maybe there was simply no end to a violent lineage or bad legacy. Maybe it just kept spilling over into history, into the world, into our children, into everything that came of our blood.
As I was thinking this, Frank leaned across the table and said to me: “I’m sorry I didn’t get in touch with you for all these years. It’s not like I didn’t know where you were, or didn’t know how to find you. I could always have called or written you at the magazine where you worked.
“It’s just that… I don’t know. I thought you were doing fine. Sometimes, I’d be out there, working some dirt job somewhere, or sleeping under a bridge, and I’d think: ‘Somewhere, I’ve got this brother who’s doing well. He’s a writer, he talks to famous people and people respect him, and he’s married and probably has kids now. Yeah, I’m probably an uncle by this time.’ And I’d wonder if it was a boy or girl, if it had blond hair and blue eyes like you had when you were a baby. I’d think about all that, and sometimes it would help. Like I said, I was a lost man after Mom died. But I’d think about you and I’d feel proud. And I kind of decided I would never bother you, I wouldn’t look you up and embarrass you by making you acknowledge me. I wouldn’t be a reminder of the past that I thought was safely behind you. I thought: ‘There’s one of us—one—who has come out all right, who has made it. I think I owe it to him to leave him alone and let him have his happiness. It’s good to let him go. There’s no reason he should have to stay tied to this family.’”
I didn’t say a word. I don’t think I could have. I sat there, looking at my brother and thinking: This may be all the family I have left in the world, but it is family enough. I had never truly understood the depths of this man’s heart or the expanse of his loneliness, but maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe, just maybe, I was ready to learn something worthwhile about the fidelity born of blood.
FOR THE NEXT YEAR, FRANK AND I GOT TOGETHER at my apartment a few times each week and talked about our past. Frank told me many of the stories that I have repeated here, and through him, I managed to come to a fuller and more balanced understanding of our family. As it turned out, Frank has a remarkable memory, and an impressive knack for recalling vivid details. Time and again, he steered me to elements of the family’s story that I had never suspected, and when he couldn’t answer my questions or didn’t know the solutions to all the various mysteries, he simply told me so. In the course of all this, I got to know my brother in a way I had never known him before, and we each found a chance to talk about difficult experiences and legacies in the sort of candid way that probably too few siblings ever get with one another.
I also came to understand, more indelibly than ever, how much Frank had paid over the years for being a son and brother in our family. One day Frank showed up at my door, looking terribly wrought up. He could barely speak for the first half hour or so. As he began to talk, he told me about a phobia that he had been afflicted with for years. It’s a complex phobia—in part, a fear of blushing or self-consciousness, the sort of fear that inevitably only feeds on itself and becomes worse. But it is also a fear of guilt or judgment. On this particular occasion, the phobia had been activated by an incident that had occurred in a grocery store a short while before. The woman behind the counter had said something that caused Frank to suspect that she thought he might be a shoplifter. Apparently he had felt he was being watched by the woman during other visits to the store. “I’m afraid of being judged guilty for things I haven’t done,” he told me. “I’m afraid that people think I’m a thief or a killer. Sometimes I feel like I’m just alone in this fucking life—it’s me against the world.”
This is not a small fear. In part, Frank believes that the phobia derives from his having been the brother of a
murderer. I think it probably goes beyond that. From the time he was a child, Frank—like some of the rest of us—believed he was responsible for the unhappiness in our parents’ marriage. That’s a big thing for a child to feel guilty about. Then, as he grew older, every time that Gary got punished by my father for something that he did do, Frank got punished along with him, whether he was innocent or not. Such treatment—especially when administered consistently and brutally over the years—would be enough to give anyone a deep fear of being thought guilty.
As I sat and watched my brother cry that day, I realized how deeply the world’s judgments had been embedded in him. More than any of us, Frank has never stopped paying for what happened in our family. He pays for Gary and my mother and my father every day of his life, and that payment has driven him into a fearful and private place.
IN THE MIDDLE OF 1991, FRANK AND I TOOK A TRIP TO UTAH. I wanted to see firsthand the places where my mother had grown up and where my parents had met, and to see, also, the places where Gary had done all his damage. I also wanted to make a peace with what remained of the family there. Years before, during the events that surrounded Gary, I had judged these people harshly and probably unfairly. I held them responsible for much of what happened, but then, that was an awful time, and it was as easy for me to come to bad judgments as it was for everybody else. I now understood that my uncle and aunt and cousins had done the best they knew how with a horrible, bigger-than-life situation. They had not asked Gary to come into their world and turn it upside down, to murder their neighbors and then go out in a self-appointed blaze of glory. He had ruined many lives during those few months. The time had come for me to remember that these people were family too.
Frank and I traveled separately. He wanted to stop and see some friends along the way, and I wanted to drive straight through. Shortly after midnight one night in July, I pulled into Ogden, Utah, and checked into a motel. I turned on the TV to catch up with the news as I was unpacking, just in time to hear a reporter say: “The execution went off smoothly, without any hitches, without any scenes.” I sat down on the bed, dumbfounded. William Andrews, one of the two men who had been known in the state as the Hi-Fi Killers (because they had tortured and murdered people in a stereo store), and who had been on death row at the same time that Gary was there, had been put to death by lethal injection. I had not known that his execution was planned, or I would not have come to Utah. I’ve become like my mother that way: When executions happen now, I run and hide. I can’t stand knowing about them.
Well, I’m truly back in Utah, I thought, and then went in the bathroom and threw up.
IF I REMEMBER RIGHT, I ALSO THREW UP THE NEXT NIGHT. I had driven down to Orem—the town right next to my mother’s birthplace, Provo—to visit the Sinclair service station where Gary had committed his first murder. The old station has been long since torn down, and in its place is a self-serve facility, with a cashier’s booth, a couple of islands of gas tanks, and a rest room building. I was relieved to see this—it meant I wouldn’t have to stand in the actual tiny lavatory where my brother had forced the young Max Jensen down on the floor and fired two bullets into the back of his head. Still, I found something haunting and unbearable about the place. It was one of those spots where history had ended up spilling onto the earth and taking lives. I sat in my car, studying the place, thinking what my mother had thought all those years before: How could you, Gary? How could you have done this to that man? I think I understand well enough what ruined my brother, what made him murderous, but I have never been able to make a certain leap—to imagine putting a stranger with a kind face on a cold floor and shooting him.
I sat there and thought about it until I couldn’t think about it anymore. I felt all the old shame and all the old shock. I drove into Provo and found a place that served good stiff drinks—which is not an easy thing to find in Provo. Then I went back to my motel and threw up.
A DAY OR TWO LATER I MET UP WITH FRANK and we went to see our Uncle Vernon at his home outside Provo. We also saw his daughters, Brenda and Toni. Ida had died years before, and Vernon was now remarried, to a gracious and caring Mormon woman. Brenda had lost her mate as well: John had died of cancer some time ago and was buried next to Ida in the Provo cemetery, not far from where my grandparents and George and Alta lie buried.
For me, the visit was like getting to discover people—people I had never really been close to before, whom I had not really spent any time with since the time I’d visited the farm when my mother brought me back to Utah for her father’s funeral. For Frank, though, it was something else. He knew these people well. He had grown up with them. Watching him talk with Brenda and Toni, I realized that he felt toward them as if they were his sisters. All these people liked each other, and I was glad to see it.
Afterward, driving Frank back to Salt Lake City, we got lost in Provo, and drove in circles for a while, trying to find a main street to take us up to the freeway. I pulled over to look at my map, and after a moment Frank said: “There it is.” I looked up. We were parked just outside the City Center Motel, where, on the night after he had killed Max Jensen, Gary forced Ben Bushnell to lie on the floor and shot him as well. Frank and I sat there in silence for what felt like a long time. Finally I took a deep breath and said: “Do you feel like we should go in the office and take a look around?”
“No,” Frank said. “I don’t want to see it.”
I felt relieved. “Neither do I,” I said, and we drove off into the night.
AT VERN’S THAT NIGHT, MY UNCLE HAD TAKEN ME aside at one point and said: “I have Gary’s clothes here in the house with me. There’s something about them I want to show you. Would you like to see them?”
I said I would be willing to see them another time, but I didn’t think it would be appropriate to do so in front of Frank.
I went back another night and sat at Vern’s kitchen table, on which he placed a large plastic bag. From the bag he pulled out a sleeveless black sweatshirt, white pants, and tennis shoes with red, white, and blue shoestrings, and spread them before me. These were the clothes that Gary was wearing when he was executed. I had expected them to be bloodied and ravaged, but they weren’t. All the blood had since been washed out. I sat there and ran my hands over the clothes. They felt soft to me, and for some reason it did not make me sad to touch them. There was almost something comforting about it.
Vern picked up the shirt and pointed out the pattern of perforations that the bullets had made as they pierced the cloth and ripped through Gary’s heart. Four neat holes, each about the size you could put your finger through.
“Look at this,” Vern said, and pointed out another hole, a little farther apart from the others. “That, too,” he said, “is a bullet hole.”
According to Utah’s tradition—and perhaps its law as well—there are five men on a firing squad, but only four of them have loaded rifles. One of them has a gun with a blank in it. This is done so that if any man is bothered by his conscience, he can always entertain a reasonable doubt that he ever actually fired a bullet into the condemned man.
There should have been four holes in the shirt. Instead, there were five. The State of Utah, apparently, had taken no chances on the morning that it put my brother to death.
I SPENT A LOT OF TIME VISITING MY COUSIN BRENDA during my Utah stay, and I also came to know and like the man she was about to marry, a strong, smart, good-tempered guy named Jack. It didn’t take me long to realize what all my brothers had loved about Brenda. She was funny, earthy, dead-honest, terribly bright and loving. She also had a conscience that she could not violate, and it was in misjudging that aspect of her that Gary had made his most fatal mistake. Brenda loved Gary and felt bad for him, but when he started to kill people, she would not harbor or protect him. She knew that if she did, he would kill others. I knew exactly how she felt, and I knew that when she told the police where they could find him, she had done the right thing.
On the last night I spent in Utah, Brenda
brought me an opaque green jar, with a sealed lid on it. Through the cloudy greenishness, you could make out the contents: They were chips of bone that had been sifted out from the ashes of a cremation.
“I’ve lived with this a long time,” Brenda said. “I think it more rightly belongs with you.”
I now own all that is left in this world of Gary Mark Gilmore. It sits in my office, and it has been close to me as I have written every word these last few months.
BUT BONES AREN’T THE ONLY THING I brought back from Utah. I also brought back the knowledge of a secret that I found truly devastating and that I did not know what to do with.
I had first learned about this secret from the taped interviews that Larry Schiller and Norman Mailer loaned me. In a conversation between Schiller and my Aunt Ida, Ida had told him about something that had happened a long time before. It was during the time when my father had been in prison, and my mother had taken Frankie and Gary back to her parents’ farm, to live in the house out back. One day my mother was showing Ida some photos, when she came across a picture of Robert Ingram. “Isn’t he about the most handsome man you’ve ever seen?” Bessie asked Ida. “I sure miss that boy. You know, he’s Frank Jr.’s real father.”
Bessie went on to tell Ida that she and Robert had a brief affair shortly after she had married my father, during one of the times when Frank Sr. had left her alone in Sacramento with his mother and estranged son. Bessie had liked Robert, and Robert had liked her, plus the affair had been a way of paying Frank Sr. back for all his abandonments. Bessie had not meant to become pregnant, but when she did, she knew it would be easy enough to convince Frank Sr. that the child was his. Still, my father had always suspected something. Ironically, he thought that Gary might have been Robert’s son, and perhaps that played into his later special dislike for Gary, and the intensity with which he beat him. Perhaps the secret also figured into why Bessie used to beat Frankie when he was a little boy. Maybe every time she looked at him, she remembered the affair. Maybe she felt guilt or shame, maybe she blamed the child. In any event, Frank Jr. was the only one of us that my mother ever beat regularly. Between her and my father, Frank Jr. and Gary paid a lot for that secret.
Shot in the Heart Page 47
