The Executioner's Song (22 page)

                Three hours after he kissed her good-bye and left in Mont Court's car, Gary came driving up to the house in her blue Mustang. He was bright-eyed and talking a streak. Told her they had to get down to court fast. It was a real opportunity. The police Complaint, he had learned, wasn't going to be ready until tomorrow.

                If he went over now, he explained to Nicole, there would be no cop around to go into detail over what he had done. He was only up for petty theft. The Judge wouldn't know if it was a dollar or ninety-nine dollars. Besides, he'd also heard the regular Judge was on vacation. There was only a Pro Tem, that is, just a regular lawyer standing in, not a real Judge. He wouldn't know that much. It was made to order. On a misdemeanor, with no prosecutor and no cop to read the Complaint, it could be like coming to pay a traffic ticket.

                Even with Gary's explanation, she was surprised by the Judge. He didn't look more than 30. He was a small man with a large head, and he said aloud that he didn't know anything about the case. Gary kept talking to him as smoothly as a salesman making the deal. He was careful to threw in a "sir" now and then.

                Nicole wasn't so sure it was working. The Judge had the expression of a man who was not getting a particularly good feeling. One uptight Mormon. When Gary asked what the penalties might be on a plea of Guilty, the Judge said he would make no promises. As a Class B misdemeanor, it could amount to 90 days in jail and $299 for the fine.

                She began to wonder. When Gary said, "Your Honor, I think I'm going to enter a plea of Guilty," the Judge asked if he was on drugs or drunk. Did he realize he was waiving his right to a trial and to counsel? The language sounded awful, but by the flat way the young Judge laid it down and Gary nodded, she hoped it was routine.

                Then the Judge said he wanted a presentence investigation through the Probation and Parole Department. Now Gary had to explain he already had a local officer. Nicole thought Gary was hanging himself for sure. The Judge frowned and said he would give him until five o'clock to post bail of $100. Otherwise, he could report to the County jail.

                Gary said he didn't have any hope of getting that much money before five o'clock. Wouldn't the Judge give him a release if his probation officer vouched for him? The Judge said, "I'm a firm believer that people should not be punished because of lack of funds. Since you walked in of your own accord, I will consider your request. Let your probation officer call me."

                Gary came out of the phone booth smiling. Court was pleased he'd turned himself in, so it looked like they wouldn't have to worry for a month. Of course, there would be a presentence investigation, and then he would have to appear on July 4 for sentencing, but maybe it would cool off by then. They walked out of the courtroom together.

                Now, after all that had happened, after the fight with the Chicano, and the terrible night on the highway, after two days of being apart and knowing the fear of being separated for a lot more than that, they were together again. For a day and a night everything was better than if they had never been apart. It was as if somebody had hidden sparklers inside her heart in that place where she had expected to find nothing. God, she loved him while his face was mending.

Chapter 10

IN-LAWS

April came to visit for a couple of days, and didn't stop talking. She was tired, she told Nicole, of their mother. "Man, she's the queen, and I am tired of her power games. She tries to make it look like I'm a rotten defiant child when all I'm trying to do is get away from threats. If I say one damn thing, she threatens me with the hospitals and the doctors. Whereas I," said April, "don't sit around and watch my mother's behavior. She's going to have to go. Queens and princesses don't get along."

                Nicole said yes. She was never around April for more than a couple of days before she decided the whole family was crazy. It was just that April was in touch with the heavy strings on the fiddle.

                April and Gary, however, really got along. April thought Gary was powerful, witty, and very intelligent. The first night, after a few beers, he began to teach her how to paint. April said he must love Sissy very much and certainly the kids.

                Everything Gary painted was sharp as a razor. If he painted a bird, you could see every feather as though under a magnifying glass, but he didn't teach that way. "Just mix the color so it comes out the way you feel," he said. April was looking at Gary like he was her guru.

                Nicole never knew what to make of April's looks. She was short and chunky whenever she didn't watch her diet, which was almost all the time, but she would have been beautiful if a girl needed no other features than eyes. April's eyes were purple blue and yet had green in them—a fabulous color. Like one of those transparent stones that change hue according to your mood.

                April's hair, however, hung down like crooked spinach, and she had the damnedest mouth. Nicole had put enough time in the nut-house to know the lips of a disturbed person. April could look in one direction, and her mouth start to quiver in the other, like the rear end of a car going off on its own. Sometimes, her lips would shiver as much as an old faucet just turned off, or her upper lip would relax and her lower lip get stiff. Her entire face could clamp like lockjaw. Most of the time she had a toothache in her expression.

                Her voice really got to Nicole. April had an awful big voice for a 17-year-old. You never knew where it came from. She was so goddamn sure of herself. Her voice could grate on you with just how impressive she thought she was. Then she could whine like a brat.

                April let them both know that she thought of Gary as a very distinguished person. He was kind of very humble, like a master to his slave. At the same time very tired and sad. He'd been through the same thing a slave'd been through. He was on a much higher level existence than anybody she knew. Just by focusing on his body, said, you could feel that.

                Before they had been painting very long, April wanted to tell them about Hampton. As far as April was concerned, Hampton was everything. "My nearest past," she whispered. She wanted to hate him for all those nights he had her thinking he went home morning to his folks. He would get up at 5 A.M., and April thought he loved her because he didn't take off silently in the dark but woke her to say good-bye. Then she found out he was just returning to his steady chick. Had to get back before dawn, like.

                There was a space in her stomach that got hungry if she didn't talk. "You've heard the song 'Backstabbers,' haven't you?" she sitting on their floor. "Well, backstabbers wouldn't be in my shoes if you paid them. That's because I have some super-freaky memories." When they did not reply, April said, "Do I sound like a robot tonight?"

                "I," said April, "got up this morning and cooked me a two-egg omelet with cheese in the middle and pieces of thin toast, some Tang, and some strawberry milk with sliced banana. Too much. I never tasted anything like that food. Just made me sick. I stuffed myself. Then I dropped my contact lens down the sink. I'm careless." When they didn't say much in return, she said, "I fall in love too easy. It's the kind of love that doesn't wear out. I'm possessed . . . I mean, I was obsessed with my body being so roly-poly." She looked sternly at Gary. "I was not as fat as I am now."

                "You're not fat," Nicole said.

                "You, Sissy," said April, "were skinny!" She confirmed this with a most definite nod of her head to Gary, and then added, "Sissy was most of my childhood." She said this in a strong voice as though that were the last matter ever to argue about. "Me, Mike, and Sissy would go for walks with Rikki down by the gulch. We picked snails out of mossy logs."

                She was remembering the moss and how it was slimy from everything that oozed out of the snarls—that was how she felt. You could rub slime between your fingers and never feel a thing but slipperiness. Like you were the center of slipperiness. Making love. "I miss Hampton," she said. She didn't want to talk about him. She was getting to the point where she wanted to be deaf and blind. Sometimes her thoughts came out so strong, April could hear them twenty seconds before they went into her head. Especially before a real strong thought. "I've gone cold turkey," she said. "I've said farewell to the idea of love."

                Gary's records were mostly Johnny Cash. Full of the love and sorrow of men at how cruel and sweet and full of grit life feels. It wasn't her trip. The men could love the men. Still, she went on a trip with Gary and was very much in his music, and Johnny Cash, wherever he was now, would be able to feel his song stirring in her. Like she had a magic spoon to stir his soup. People could get down without playing an instrument. It was in the way they put the record on.

                "I was crazy about Hampton," April said. "He had so much green in his eyes you knew right away he was going to tell a story."

                "He always bored me," said Nicole.

                "Good in bed," said April. She sighed. She was thinking of the day last week when Sissy had come over and said to Hampton, "You need a haircut." "You want to do it?" he had asked, and Sissy said, "Sure." She had done his hair all right. Like she owned his head. Each time Nicole's scissors cut a lock of his hair, April could feel Hampton's love for herself ending. She could hear it in the sound the hair made when it was cut. Good-bye. Now she could feel Gary hearing the same sound and hating Hampton. "Oh, I loved Hampton," April said to make it right. "He was very spacey."

                Nicole snorted. "You loved him 'cause he was spacey?"

                April felt truly fierce. "That was 'cause I could live in his spaces."

Next day, the Bicentennial Fourth of July, they went to a carnival and April ran into a couple of boys she knew. Next thing, she was gone. Gary and Nicole turned around and she was gone. No great matter. April was that way.

                They got home just in time to pick up the telephone. It was Nicole's father. Charley Baker told Nicole he was up the road at her grandfather's, and Steinie was having a big birthday party for Verna. Would she come?

                It made Nicole mad. That big a family party and they couldn't get around to inviting her until it started. She could hear the noise over the phone. "Well," she said, "I'd like to come, but don't get mad when you see my boyfriend."

                Nicole would find out that the Fourth of July party being given by Nicole's grandfather, Thomas Sterling Baker (nicknamed Stein), for his wife, Verna, had been planned in December, back before Christmas, by all of his six sons and two daughters, all coming from different places to celebrate their mother's birthday on the centennial. Glade Christiansen and his wife, Bonny, came in from Lyman, Wyoming, where Glade was a mine foreman. Danny Joanne Baker, also from Lyman and the mines, were there. Shelly Baker. Wendell Baker drove in from Mount View, Wyoming. Charley Baker, with his brand-new young woman, Wendy, came over from Toelle, Utah, where Charley now worked at the Army depot, and Kenny, Vicki, and Robbie Baker, from Los Angeles, came in. Boyd, Sterling Baker's father, and his wife, also named Verna, were back from Alaska where they'd been working for some years. Many of the children of all these sons and daughters were present. Some of the grandchildren, in fact, were also grown and married, attending with husbands and wives and kids.

                Some began to arrive as early as ten in the morning on the Fourth of July, and the party lasted till eleven that night. Good sunny weather with nearly everybody sitting out in the front yard which was screened from the canyon road by high bushes. The cars went whipping by outside and sometimes would touch the shoulder and throw up gobbets spat-spat against the bushes. That was a sound they knew from childhood.

                It was a big yard which wrapped around the front and side of the house, and Stein had gotten the place kind of cleaned up with the lawn swing and lawn chairs in place and all the food set out in the carport on big tables, the barbecued beef, potato salad and baked beans, the potato chips and various jello salads, the soda pop for the kids and the beer, but you still couldn't help but see into the backyard that was to the rear of the side yard, and that was never going to get cleaned up. It had a huge stack of piled-up grass and other cuttings, and a big old rusting billboard laid on top to keep the cuttings from being scattered by the wind, and Stein's old camper that you lifted onto a pickup truck was next to it, and coils of old hose that had gotten half uncoiled, plus the water-soaked swing hanging from the old tackle pulleys in the tree, the overturned wooden dory that needed painting, and a stove-in old red barrel by the rusted sign. There were gardening tools in a leaning shed and a bunch of old damn black ratty tires strewn around an old car body. The farther back you got in Stein's yard, the more you saw a lifetime of living.

                Inside the house, Verna must have put every color God gave the World to the furniture—one color for each of her kids was the family joke: yellow, green, blue, purple, red, orange, black, brown, and white in that living room. There was a hi-fi set for the Country-and-Western, a TV console, couches with different cushions, framed pictures of animals, a BarcaLounger for Stein, and a black leatherette stool with chromium legs for whoever. It probably came out of the bathroom which was white and pink and yellow with big flat rubber flowers pasted to the wallpaper.