The Executioner's Song (6 page)

                "You did?" said Brenda. "My God, how?"

                "Well, you see, the fellow was known as a faggot around here. I guess the cops were on my side, and talked him into dropping the charges. I don't have to go back."

                "I can't believe it," said Brenda.

                "Coz, there's just one thing," said Gary, "I used up my money to post the bail, I don't know how I'll get back."

                "You better," said Brenda. "If you're not here by morning, I'm calling Mont Court. He'd love to give you a free ride back."

                "Mont Court knows already," said Gary.

                Brenda blew. "You dodo bird," she told him. "You're really dumb!"

                It was a long Sunday. A spring snow had started and by evening it was close to a blizzard. In the living room, Brenda got tired of looking at her red rug, her red furniture and her black wrought-iron lamps. She was ready to start kicking a few kids' toys. Kept going over it with Johnny, trying to find some kind of hope for Gary in all this. It was good, she thought, that he hadn't run off from the guy he beat up. That showed some sense of responsibility. On the other hand, had he rode off with him in the truck because the man would be easy to rob that way? And how had he gotten the fellow to drop the charges? By his boyish smile?

                It was time to recognize, Brenda decided gloomily, that when you had Gary around, there were questions for which you would not get answers. The snow kept coming down. Out on the roads, the universe would be just one big white field.

                Around nine in the evening, Gary called from Salt Lake. Now he was broke for sure. He was also stranded in the snow.

                Johnny was watching a show he liked on TV. "Well," he said, "I'm not going to get the damn fool."

                Brenda said: "It is my side of the family that's acting up, so may I take your truck?" It had four-wheel drive and a CB radio, and her Maverick was too light.

                Toni happened to be over and she said she'd go along. Brenda was glad. Toni knew the roads better in Salt Lake.

                It was snowing so hard, Brenda almost missed the exit on the Interstate. The bar was out past the airport, and proved to be the dippiest damn dive Brenda ever laid eyes on. Leave it to Gary to find the trashiest place to land.

                When they walked in the door, he was chatting with the bartender. It struck Brenda immediately that he had plenty of change on the counter.

                Gary gave them a great wide smile. "How's the two foxiest ladies in the whole world?" Oh, was he sopped! So proud: his private peacocks had just come parading through the door. Brenda looked at Toni and said, "What do we do with the drunken sot?"

                They had their arms around his neck to steady him. He put his arms around them.

                "Are you ready to go, Gary?"

                "Let me finish my beer."

                Brenda said, "Drink it by the door." She didn't want to stand in the middle of this bar with all these drunks leering at them. Never in her life had she been undressed as many times in 30 seconds.

                "Gary, you found yourself a dandy place to stop."

                "Well, it was warm," he said. He always had a real explanation for things.

                "By the way," he said, his mouth on the glass of beer, "I've got my turn coming up to play pool."

                "You," Brenda said, "are planning to stay here and play pool?"

                "Well," he said, "I got a good bet in the making."

                "You told me you were broke."

                They looked at the dollars on the counter next to his glass. He said, "There's been this guy buying me drinks all night."

                "You lying turkey," Brenda said. "I'm leaving."

                Gary came around then, "All right, all right," he said loudly, "if it'll make my little ladies happy, I'll go now." He made a delicious face of regret at the lost pool game, and gave her a kiss on the nose. Then a peck on the cheek for Toni. "C'mon, you two foxy bitches," he said loudly, "let's go."

                He probably would have fallen in the snow if they hadn't held him up long enough to get to the truck. Suddenly, he looked wiped out. They managed to prop him between them on the front seat, but he said, "Oh, no, I can't stand this. I'm gonna barf."

                Brenda shrieked, "Let me out."

                They got it rearranged with Toni in the center and Gary on the outside, window part open. The damn fool sang on the way home. He couldn't sing.

                "Bottles on the Wall," was the song. There were one hundred bottles on the wall, and something happened to one of the bottles, so there were only ninety-nine. It was like "Roll Me Over in the Clover." They went through one hundred bottles on the wall.

                Brenda said, "Why don't you try something you can do? God, you can't sing."

                "I can too," he said, and started another verse. Nothing ahead but to suffer.

                When they reached Point of the Mountain, it was that snowy on the Interstate, Brenda could not see the taillights ahead, and with no load in the back of the pickup it was beginning to slide. Soon it would be like driving in a barrel of snakes. She got on the CB and tried to pick up a weather report from a truck on the other side of the mountain. If word was bad, she would pull over and let the storm pass.

                Gary, however, was upset about Brenda hitting the CB. He had heard of them, but he didn't really know what they did. He got paranoid. Thought Brenda was talking to the cops. "What are you doing?" he asked.

                "Getting a Smokey report."

                "What," asked Gary, "is a Smokey report?"

                "That," said Brenda, "is the name for the police."

                "Hey," asked Gary, "are you going to turn me in?"

                Brenda said, "For what? Being an asshole? You can't turn somebody in for being an asshole."

                "Oh," said Gary, "Okay, I got you."

                "No," Brenda said, "I'm not going to turn you in. But that was a dumb thing to say."

                "I'm not dumb," he stated.

                "Gary, you have a high I.Q., but you do not have a drop of common sense."

                "That's just your opinion."

                He seemed to think getting into the damnedest situations and finding a way out of them was common sense.

                The Smokey report said the weather was less bad on the other side of the mountain, but Brenda didn't know whether to try it. Over the CB, an eighteen-wheeler coming up behind her said the road ahead was treacherous. Then the fellow asked what kind of unit she was driving. After Brenda described Johnny's pickup, the trucker said, "I got you. You're right ahead of me." Then he told her, "I have a buddy behind. We'll escort you."

                "Well," said Brenda, "I don't get off till Orem."

                "We'll stay with you."

                So Brenda drove down the Interstate in line between two large semis. She stayed on the taillights of the fellow up ahead and the guy behind kept close. They moved right along with her.

                The lead truck stayed in the lane to the left so she wouldn't slide off toward the island. The other was to her right and just behind. If her back end started to veer out to the shoulder, he could tap the back bumper near her rear right wheel. That would stop the slide. Truckers knew how to do it. It was crucial assistance. Due to the drainage problem, the shoulder on this stretch of the Interstate chopped off sharply into a drainage canal and since it was a spring blizzard, there weren't old snow banks to protect you. Nothing to the right, in fact, but gravel and the drop-off. So the fellow behind kept talking her in. "Don't worry," he kept saying, "you aren't going over."

                This all impressed Gary. He said, "You've got protection." Then he gave a wide smile and said, "But don't you think you need it against me?"

                "Why," Brenda said, "what a rotten thing to say. Would you hurt me?"

                "That," said Gary, now offended, "was a dumb thing to say."

                "No dumber than what you just said."

                Toni said, "Children, children, don't quarrel."

                So they drove along and got home and Gary went to bed at Brenda and Johnny's house that night.

                Monday morning, in the wet and slush, Gary went to see Mont Court. He told his parole officer the following story:

                He had gone to a party and become somewhat intoxicated. Then he decided to go to Salt Lake to solicit a prostitute. En route, he thumbed a ride with a man who told him that he knew some girls in Twin Falls, Idaho, who would shack up with them. By the time they reached Twin Fails, however, the fellow that made this promise just dropped him off.

                He then made telephone calls to Utah and was instructed by his cousin to thumb a ride back. Was able to secure such a ride with a man he met at a bar. En route, the man began to have convulsions and finally passed out. So Gary was obliged to get behind the wheel of the car and try to locate a hospital. At this point he was arrested for driving without a license and had Mr. Court contacted. He, Gary Gilmore, was now reporting in as instructed.

                Mont Court didn't feel too happy with the story. Gilmore was sitting in his office, super-nice and very polite. But he wasn't explaining an awful lot. Just answering questions. It didn't give a good feeling. All the same, there were a lot of cases where you just had to keep living with them.

                Court had about eighty people on parole or probation, and he got to see thirty or forty a week, each for five to fifteen minutes. It meant you had to take chances. He had taken one yesterday by gambling that Gilmore would come back on his own from Idaho.

                On the other hand, if he had been kept in jail in Idaho, Court would have had to refer him to the Oregon authorities, which is where his parole originated. It would have been difficult in the extreme to find any members of the Oregon Parole Commission on Sunday afternoon. In fact, it might even take a few days before they could meet to decide on Gilmore's violation. Gary would be sitting in a Twin Falls jail all that time. Right there, a lawyer could spring him on a Writ of Habeas Corpus, and Gilmore could take off. The more he was really in trouble, the more he'd look to get himself lost real fast. Whereas, Gilmore, coming back on his own, would be fortifying the positive side of himself. He would know Court had been right to trust him. That would give a base on which to work. The idea was to get a man into some kind of positive relationship with authority. Then he might begin to change.

                Court had been a Mormon missionary in New Zealand and he was a believer in the power of authority to be a change-agent, that is, be able to effect a few real changes in people's personalities. Of course, a person had to be willing to accept authority, whether it was Scripture, the Book of Mormon, or in his case, just accept the fact that he, Mont Court, a probation officer, was neither a hard-nose, nor superheat, but a man willing to talk openly and take a reasonable chance on you. He was there to help, not to rush a man back to an overcrowded prison for the first minor infraction.

                Of course, he laid it out. Gilmore had certainly been in violation of his parole agreement. Any more violations would jeopardize his parole. Gilmore nodded, Gilmore listened politely. He was looking old. They were about the same age, but Gilmore, Court was thinking, looked much older. On the other hand, if you put up a profile of what an artist of 35 might look like, Gilmore could fit that physical profile.

                Court had seen some of his artistic work. Before he met him, Brenda had shown Mont Court a couple of Gary's drawings and paintings. The prison information he was receiving from Oregon made it clear that Gilmore was a violent person, yet in these paintings Court was able to see a part of the man simply not reflected in the prison record. Mont Court saw tenderness. He thought, Gilmore can't be all evil, all bad. There's something that's salvageable.

                After the session with Mont Court, Gary decided to talk to Spencer McGrath about a new job. Brenda took him out to Lindon for the meeting, and took a liking to McGrath. He was really okay, she thought, just a little guy with rough features, a dark mustache, and a down-to-earth manner, who you could think was a plumber when you first looked at him. The kind who would walk around and say to his people, "Okay: guys, let's get this done." She thought he was terrific even if he was short.

                A couple of days back, Gary had been to see a man with a sign-painting company but had been offered only $1.50 an hour. When Gary said that wasn't even minimum wage, the man replied, "What do you expect? You're an ex-con." Spencer agreed it wasn't fair. If Gary was doing the same work as somebody else, he should be paid the same money.