The Executioner's Song (23 page)

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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 nuthouse 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 them about Hampton. As far as April was concerned, Hampton 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 loved her because he didn’t take off silently in the dark but woke to say goodbye. Then she found out he was just returning to steady chick. Had to get back before dawn, like.

There was a space in her stomach that got hungry ff she didn’ talk. “You’ve heard the song ‘Backstabbers,’ haven’t you?” she sitting on their floor. “Well, backstabbers wouldn’t be in my shoes i you paid them. That’s because I have some superfreaky memories.’ When they did not reply, April said, “Do I sound like a robot night?”

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“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 ] 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, Apri/.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. Lkke be 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.”

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“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. Goodbye. Now she could feel Gary hearing the same sound and hating Hampton. “Oh,,, 1 lov.ed 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 boy friend.”

Nicole would find out that the Fourth of July party being given Nicole’s grandfather, Thomas Sterling Baker (nicknamed Stein), his wife, Verna, had been planned in December, back before mas, 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 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 mad 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, Vema 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 morn. There was a hi-fi set for the Country-and-

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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.

It was so large a familY, you could hardly count all the members, but nothing compared to the ancestors. On his mother’s side, Stein’s Mormon grandfather from Kanab, Utah, had been old-style polygamist with six wives and fifty-four children. But you didn’t have to go back to Kanab. Stein and Verna had been married since 1929, and there were plenty of memories right here.

It still grated on Stein that starting out as a day laborer and working his way up to be superintendent of the Provo City Water Department, which took u7 years, he still had to quit because the mayor decided to put in an engineering graduate over him. Even had the gall to ask Stein to teach the new boy all about the water business. That was a memory to curdle your good feelings when you give a party to look back over it all.

Charley Baker was in charge of the pit barbecue, and he might as well have planned the goddamned party because he had the major share of the job. He’d bought the beef, a big hindquarter, and mari nated it three days in a sauce he prepared himself. Then, morning he’d carried the beef leg over to Spanish Fork, a trip from Toelle, after first wrapping it in cheesecloth to keep moisture in, then wrapped the hell out of it in brown paper, and in burlap. Of course, he kept it wet all the while he was digging big goddamn hole in Stein’s yard, bigger than a slit trench, packed it with rocks he had to dig up himself, then got a fire and watched it burn for hours to get those rocks hot all the through. You had to get rocks hotter than hell for a pit barbecue work. The idea was to put the leg in all wrapped up and theories on this-either pack dirt on top, or, as Charley

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use a lid so you can get in and spray the burlap every once in a while. That really made for a more juicy tender barbecue.

Now Charley had been planning to stay up all the night before to watch the fire so he planned to take a little nap in the late afternoon of July 3. Went to ask his mother for a room. She had three bedrooms available for company and he’d had the pressure of buying that leg, marinating it, worrying it, trucking it, digging the trench, hefting the rocks — all he wanted was go to bed and take a little nap so he’d be fresh through the night, and his mother said, “You can’t go down there and lay on Kenny’s bed — you’ll sweat on it, and make it stink.” Real friendly. It pissed Charley off something terrible. There was his new bride-to-be, Wendy, with him, young as an angel, and Charley was feeling funny enough already because it was the first time he would be seeing all these brothers and sisters without Kathryne-why, if they’d been married a couple more years, everybody would have been coming to Kathryne and his 25th anniversary-but now they were divorced. He was here with Wendy, half his age. And had to sleep in a tent out on the lawn at his mother’s suggestion.

His feelings were building. It was too much to ask a man to watch a fire when he was tired and sleepy and had a lot of unhappy memories-nothing to bring out unhappy memories like a fire. Darned if he didn’t fall asleep out there. In the early hours of the morning when he woke up, the fire had gone out and the rocks were cold. Well, he kept working to build that fire back, but it was a lost cause. All next day during the party, there was a lot of irritation building because they finally had to hurry the barbecue up on a spit, and that didn’t compare in flavor. There was a lot of smoke you couldn’t control and soot, and the marinade got charred, instead of there being a juicy tender really deep old-fashioned pit barbecue. Charley couldn’t even excuse himself for letting the fire go out. He wasn’t about to tell anybody how bad some of those memories had been. Only thing a man could do when memories got too bad, was sleep.

It started off because his father mentioned that Nicolo was living down the road with a fellow. Of course: all through the night Charley Was thinking off and on about Nicole. Which got him onto Kathryne and that gave him terrible recollections. Before he got back from

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Vietnam, Kathryne used to write loving letters. Things were better between them. He hadn’t been home a week before there a terrible fight, and Kathryne said, “I wish they’d shipped you back a box.” Hell of a homecoming. It was like the fights they in Germany about him drinking beer, the best goddamn beer in world for I8 cents, a big stein. How could you keep from loaded every night on beer? Then have to come home and face carping. He was supposed to be a Sergeant. At home, she had downgraded to fool. He’d still get mad to think of that. Did him good at all. He could feel that kind of thing getting into his and roiling them up.

Then, of course, he would never get over that business of and Nicole. Hell, it was true. They told him as much at the when he visited Nicole. The fact of the matter was that were never comfortable with one another.

Watching the flames, deeper woe was coming to him from fire. April getting raped by three niggers in Hawaii, and him. Going back from Hawaii to Midway, Kathryne had said, April a real bad case of gas and has to go to the bathroom