MIKAL GILMORE

Secrets and Bones

I decided to go back to Portland once more—this time to find my brother.

Frank was the last family I had, and I had relinquished him. I had no idea whether he was happy these days or living homeless, whether he was sane or crippled. Too often in my life I had lost those I loved or cared about—sometimes because death took them, sometimes because they gave up their love for me, and sometimes because something in me made it easy to walk away, to withdraw in some irrevocable way from those who might love or need me the most. There were times when it was a frighteningly easy thing to do—something I did almost without thinking—just one of those shameful secrets about myself that I did not fully understand, but now wanted access to.

But the truth is, I missed Frank terribly. I had tried to find him from time to time over the years. I’d get reports that somebody had seen him working someplace, or walking down one road or another in Portland, but I could never track him down anyplace. The last I heard about him had been a couple of years before. A friend had seen him doing some custodial work. By the time I called the employer, Frank had quit and was gone.

I had no idea what I would find when I found my brother, but I did know I wanted to see him. I wanted to talk to him, touch him, see that he was okay and attempt to be fair with him, even if it only resulted in his casting me out of his life for good.

5

I had been in Portland a season before I finally found Frank. I had done everything I knew to locate him, yet despite a lifetime of reading mystery novels, I wasn’t proving very good at the missing person business. I searched death certificates, I went to homeless shelters, I looked at the face of every man I passed on the street who could possibly be my brother. Then one night not long before Christmas, I was having dinner with Jim Redden, a friend who was a journalist and crime reporter. He offered to make some calls for me. The next morning, when I got up, Redden had left a message on my answering machine. He had found where Frank was living. It was ten blocks from where I was living, in Northwest Portland.

I got dressed and walked over to Frank’s address. It may have been only ten blocks, but in those few blocks one walked from one world into another. The area of Northwest Portland I lived in was an old part of town, filled with Victorian houses that had been refurbished. It was now an upscale district with shops, cafés, and bars—just another of those self-conscious, affluent bohemian neighborhoods that have sprung up in most American cities over the last decade or two. But as you walk along 23rd Avenue, you begin to move into the area where the Victorians have not been refurbished—where old homes look simply like old homes, and you come closer to the fringes of northwest Portland’s industrial district. It was a part of town that stood largely untouched and unloved since the 1940s, and where many older folks and several down-and-outers now congregated, hanging around grocery stores that had iron bars across their windows, and guard dogs or guns behind the counters. There were several taverns in the area, and most of them were rough laborers’ hangouts.

Frank lived in the middle of all this, in an old rooming house, situated above a noisy tavern. I had seen places like this before; it was like the places my father had taken me as a child, when he went to find his salesmen. It was the sort of place where new light or fresh air rarely entered. Instead, you found the accrued smells of old men who had come to bide out their time, watching TV, drinking, brooding. The place had a depressing impact on me that felt unexpectedly primal. For a moment, I wanted to run.

I climbed the stairs and knocked on the door that I’d been told was Frank’s. There was no answer. I knocked again, which brought the apartment manager’s attention. He told me that the man who lived there had gone to work and wouldn’t be back until mid evening.

Waiting until night turned out to be one of the longest waits of my life. I kept thinking about the place where Frank was living. I tried to imagine the reality of his life. Whatever problems I felt I had, I’d known comfort and social interaction. Life had been good to me in many ways—better than to anyone else in my family.

10

It seemed amazing to me that the lives of two brothers had taken such different courses. It also seemed terribly unfair. Frank had stayed home and taken care of my mother. Indeed, he was the only one of the brothers who had ever really tried to do the right thing. By contrast, I had simply escaped and looked after myself. I had never thought about taking on the burden of my mother and her problems. For his devotion, Frank had ended up with what looked to me like a devastated life, spent in the company of vagrants and other outsiders. Though I may not have ended up with some of the things I claimed to want in life, the truth is, I had not ended up with nothing. I went places, I did things, I had money in the bank. I was not about to end up in a rooming house.

There’s no point in flogging myself too much here, or apologizing. I don’t believe even now that I would have done anything differently in my life. I think I had to run away from my family in order not to be dragged down by its claims. Still, seeing where Frank lived gave me an idea of what his life must have been like in the last decade, and it did not make me feel good about the distance between us. Nor did it make me feel any better about the prospect of walking back into his life.

I spent the rest of the day driving around, thinking about these things. I wondered what the two of us would have to say to each other after such a long time.

At about nine that night, I returned to the place where Frank lived. At the top of the stairs, I nearly bumped into a man who was zipping up a parka jacket and pulling a stocking cap down over his ears in preparation for the cold outside. I studied the face quickly—a habit I’d picked up in recent months—and I saw something I’d seen so many times in my mind’s eye over the years: a face deep-cut with the lines that come from bad history. I saw the face of my brother.

“Frank,” I said. He looked up. I could tell he didn’t know who I was.

15

“Frank, it’s me, Mikal.” He stood there, staring at me, his face pulled into a questioning look, as if he didn’t believe what I said. I think if he had reached out and shoved me down the stairs I would not have resisted him. I would have thought it was okay.

Instead, he reached out and took me in his arms, and held me. In that moment, the squalor around us didn’t matter. In that moment, I felt like I was in the embrace of home.

A half hour later we were seated in the warmth of my apartment. Frank hadn’t wanted me to see the room where he lived.

As he entered my place, Frank looked around, taking in the clutter of books and CDs, and the electronic and computer equipment. “Man,” he said, smiling, “you’re kind of like Mom. It looks like you don’t ever throw anything away.”

We sat on my sofa, sipping warm drinks, talking. Frank said he had heard I was married, and he wanted to know about my wife. I explained to him that the marriage had been over for a long time, and that it had been one of those honest but sad mistakes that people make. “Geez, man,” Frank said, stirring coffee, “I’m really sorry to hear that. No children?” I said no, and lapsed momentarily into silence.

20

I asked what had happened to him since I had last seen him. He shrugged and cleared his throat. “Oh, I’ve just sort of drifted around for the most part, spending a few months here, then, there. For a few years after Mom’s death, I got into drinking a lot. I felt pretty bad about her dying. I felt responsible in some ways, and I couldn’t get it out of my mind. She had hated and feared hospitals. I sent her to one and she died. Maybe if I hadn’t, I thought, she would have had a chance. I sold the trailer afterward and just took off. I guess I spent years that way—traveling, working, drinking. I spent a lot of time on the streets. Got into a couple of fights. Had my arms broken twice. Got jumped on once by a bunch of fucking skinheads. They took everything I had.”

Frank paused and smiled a gentle smile that was in startling contrast to the litany of horror he had just recited. “I guess I simply went a little crazy during those years. Then I got to thinking about all the other stuff, about Gaylen dying as such a young man, and Gary doing all those horrible things he did . . . had people I barely knew come up to me and ask the most terrible questions, ‘Is it true that your brother did those awful things? How could you have lived in the same home with a man like that?’ A couple of times, when I was working at a job, somebody would figure out I was Gary’s brother. They would want to get in fights with me, like somehow beating me made them bigger or tougher than Gary, or punished him more. A few months ago, I was working a job over in Salt Lake City, and when somebody figured out I was related to Gary, they fired me.”

As Frank talked, I felt the past sitting in the room with us. Maybe he felt it too, because he got up and started to move around. He walked around my apartment looking at things, until he came to the dining table, where I had sprawled several of the photos from our family albums. For some reason, I’d become the caretaker of these pictures. They were all I had left of the family’s possessions. I’d spent a lot of time recently studying these photos, trying to read them for clues to the riddles of our lives.

“I’d wondered what happened to these,” said Frank, picking up one of the pictures and looking at it. “I don’t have many of these left. I’ve traveled so much, had so much stolen or lost. I think about all I have left is a picture of you as a baby, in your playpen with your rubber toad. Do you remember that?”

Frank put down one photo and picked up another. “Do you mind if I sit here and look through these?”

25

I said he was welcome to look as long as he liked, and I’d have copies made 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, 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 photos 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 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.

30

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 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.”

35

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 his family.’ “

40

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.