The Executioner's Song (31 page)

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John was back from the hospital and sleeping on the couch a

Brenda was ready to go to bed. There was a knock on the door. It

Gary with this strange little girl.

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“Well, coz,” she said, “where you been?”

“Oh,” he smiled, “we went to see One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” “You didn’t see that again?” asked Brenda. “Well,” Gary said, “she hadn’t seen it yet.”

Brenda took a good look at the girl. “It looks to me,” she said, “as if she wouldn’t know what she’s seen.”

Gary said, “This is Nicole’s sister, January.”

The girl got mad. She came alive for the first time.

“It’s April.” Gary chuckled. Brenda said, “Well, April, May, June, or July, whatever your name is, I suppose I’m glad to meet you.” Then she said to Gary, “What’s wrong with her?” This girl looked awful.

“Oh,” Gary said, “April’s having flashbacks from LSD. She took it a long time ago, but it keeps catching up.”

“She’s sick, Gary,” Brenda said. “She’s awfully pale.” At that point the girl said she wanted to go to the bathroom. Following her, Brenda asked, “Honey, are you all right?” The girl said, “I just feel sick to my stomach.”

Brenda came out to Gary and said, “What’s going on?”

He said nothing in reply. Brenda had the impression he was ner vous but careful. Very nervous, and very careful. He was sitting on the edge of his seat, as if to concentrate on every sound in the si lence.

April came back and said, “Man, you really scare me when you act like that. I can’t take it.”

“What scared .you, honey?” Brenda asked.

April said, “Gary really scares me.”

He drew himself up then. “April, tell Brenda I didn’t try to rape you, or molest you.”

“Oh, man, you know I didn’t mean that,” April said. “You’ve

been nice to me tonight. But man, I really get afraid of you.” “Afraid of what?” asked Brenda.

“I can’t tell you,” April said. There was something so broken-assed about it, that Brenda was getting ill herself. “Gary, . what have you done?” she asked. To her surprise, he winced.

“Hey,” he said, “let’s drop it? Okay?”

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Gary said, “Can I talk to you in the other room?” When he got her in the kitchen, he said, “Look, I know John is just back, and you guys won’t be getting your check right away from the hospital insurance, so, listen, Brenda, could you use fifty?”

“Gary, no,” she said, “we’ve got groceries. We’ll make it.” Gary said, “I really want to help.”

Brenda said, “Honey, you are generous.” She knew what he was up to, but she was moved in spite of herself. Ridiculously moved. She felt like crying at the fact that even in this phony way he could think of her a little. Instead, she said, “Keep your money. I want you to learn to handle it.” Saying that, she was suddenly suspicious, and had to ask, “Gary, where in the hell did you get a lot of cash?”

“A friend of mine,” said Gary, “loaned me four hundred for my truck,”

“You mean you stole the money.”

“That’s not very nice,” he said.

“If I’m wrong,” said Brenda, “then it’s not very nice.”

He took ahold of her face and kissed her on the brow and said, “I can’t tell you what’s going on. You don’t want to be involved.”

“All right, Gary,” she said. “If it’s that bad, then maybe “you shouldn’t involve us.”

“Okay,” he said, “fair enough.” He wasn’t angry. He took

and went to the truck. Picked April up by the elbows, so to ushered her out.

Brenda found herself following. He had a half gallon of milk the back of the truck and a bunch of clothes with a rag around them. She said, “Gary, you’ll tip your milk over. Let me He said, “Don’t touch it. Leave it alone! …. All right,” Brenda “spill your milk. See ff I care.” After he drove off, she what there was about the bunch of clothes that he hadn’t to see.

Gary asked April if she’d like to go to a motel, but she just she didn’t want to go home. So they began driving around and got lost.

Just as he discovered he had come all the way from Orem Provo by back roads, the truck ran out of gas.

It came to a stop on the lonely part of Center Street between

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exit from the Interstate and the beginning of town. He got out and plunged into a little ravine off the road and hid the gun, the clip and the coin changer in a bush. Then he headed for the nearest store.

Wade Anderson and Chad Richardson were at the 7-I grocery down on West Center Street when this fellow came up to them. He said if they would take him to a gas station, he would give them five bucks.

He looked all right, except he was kind of tired and certainly in a hurry. He gave up the five dollars as soon as they got in the truck and sat by the window looking out. Kept saying that his girl was sitting alone in the truck and he didn’t want no one to hassle her, especially cops, she’d mouth off.

They said, Well, okay, you know, we’ll hurry as quick as we can. The trouble was, when they got to a gas station that was open, there was no gas can. Wade then said they could go to his house for one. The guy said, Well, we gotta hurry.

It took a few minutes to get over to the east side of town, pick up the can from his dad’s garage, come back to the gas station. Once they returned to the man’s truck, Wade started pouring. Since he would soon be a junior in high school and was therefore trying to get a little better at talking to girls, he sprung up a conversation every chance he got and was looking to chat with the one in the truck. Of course he kept his eye on the tall man who was walking around in the little ravine below. The fellow had borrowed a flashlight from Chad’s truck, and was beaming around down there looking for something.

Wade said to the girl, ‘,How you doing?” and she looked at him very seriously and said in this big voice, “Are you Gary Gilmore’s son?” He said, “Oh, no, ma’am, I’m… I never met him before tonight,” and about that time the fellow in the field found what he was looking for. Wade saw him pull a pistol out of the bushes, and a clip

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with it, and a coin changer, then he came walking back to them. Even slammed the clip into the handle of the gun as he did. Put it under the seat with the coin changer. Chad had been standing back a little as Wade poured the gas, and now they just looked at each other. Wow.

After they finally emptied the can, this fellow said, “Thanks a lot” and was ready to take off. Went to start his truck. It wouldn’t go. He had wore the battery down. So they gave him a push with their truck. That was it.

Back on the mad, Gary said to April, “No more riding around. I want a fancy place to sleep like the Holiday Inn.” He turned onto the Interstate and bore down the two miles to the next exit.

“I’m not going to fuck you,” April said. “I’m feeling too para noid.”

“I’ve got to work in the morning,” Gary informed her. “We’ll get two beds.”

Frank Taylor, the night auditor at the Holiday Inn, was at the front desk when a tall man carrying a half gallon of milk came in with a short girl who was holding aloft a long Olympia beer can like she was the Statue of Liberty. Frank Taylor thought, Here comes a real case. Since he was not only the night auditor but doubled as a desk clerk his next thought was that he wasn’t going to get his auditing first thing tonight. The girl didn’t look like she’d quiet down too soon. i Still, the tall man seemed sober when he came over to register.

The girl kept asking snippy questions of Frank Taylor. Did like working in a motel for a living? Were there bedbugs? Then inquired for the ladies’ room. The moment Frank Taylor told her was across the lobby on the left, she started down the hall to right. Taylor was yelling directions by the time she disappeared. tall man only smiled. A couple of minutes later she passed across lobby the other way. The tall man asked for a place to eat, and tened carefully to the answer that the Rodeway Inn, two doors

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was open 24 hours a day. Then he signed his name in large block let ters, GARY GILMORE, gave Spanish Fork as an address, and reached into his pocket where he pulled out an awful lot of small bills to pay for the room.

Taylor assumed Gilmore and the girl were shacking up but that was not really any of his business. You could get in a lot of legal trou ble if you were too inquisitive. Just once, suggest to a real married couple that they were not really married. It was established practice to accept anybody who was orderly and paid in advance. Taylor watched them go off together hand in hand with the key.

A while later, they were buzzing the switchboard. Gilmore was calling down from 212 to say he’d gone out in the hall and put some money in the machine to buy toothpaste and razor blades and Alka Seltzer, but the machine had not worked.

It never worked, thought Frank Taylor. He got the items out of the supply case and walked down long corridors with green carpeting and yellow-brown walls, past dark brown plywood doors, past an ice chest and a candy vending machine. He went by an iced-drink ma chine and reached 212. When Gilmore opened the door, he had on red slacks and no shirt. He reached into his pocket and took out a big handful of change, kind of held it down as if to scrutinize it, then picked out what was needed. Taylor couldn’t see the girl, but heard her giggle as the door closed.

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for messages kept flashing on the phone. Since it was on by error, it did not go off. Neither did the air conditioner. After a while, its hum vibrated in the bowels.

THE MOTEL ROOM

On the door frame of the bathroom was a switch that in the dark glowed like a squared-off fluorescent nipple. Turned on, the overhead light showed white walls and a cement-colored tile floor. A plateglass mirror was attached above the sink by five plastic glass-clamps screwed into the wall. The sixth had fallen out. Its exposed screw hole looked like a motionless dark bug.

At the far end of the bedroom, to one side of the far wall, was the only window and it looked out over the swimming pool. Since the window was sealed, there was an air conditioner installed beneath. On either side hung drapes made of a green-blue synthetic fabric, and they were drawn apart by white vertical cords that passed around milk-colored plastic pulleys. Two black leatherette barrel chairs and an tagon-shaped synthetic-walnut table sat in front of the window, and next to the table was a TV set on a swivel stand. Its chromium feet were set in rubber casters which buried themselves in a shaggy synthetic-fabric rug.

A long synthetic-walnut combination desk and bureau was tached to one wall. In the interior of the flat drawer of the desk stationery in a flat wax-paper envelope that bore the Holiday logo: “Your Host from Coast to Coast.” A copy of the regulations and a room-service menu lay next to a long thin strip paper that read: PLEASE BE A WATT WATCHER.

The washbowl was set in a synthetic-walnut top. Along this top, two glasses wrapped in cellophane carried the logo of Holiday Inn, and two small cakes of soap in the Holiday Inn wrappers were placed next to a small tent-shaped piece of yellow cardboard that read, “Welcome to Holiday Inn.” There was also a notice that the liquor store would be open from io A.M. to IO P.M. These pieces of paper were damp. The rounded surfaces of the washbowl acted like a centrifuge when you turned on the tap and threw water out of the sink onto the floor.

A strip of white paper was looped around the seat of the toilet bowl to certify that no one had sat there since the strip was placed in position. The toilet paper from the toilet-paper holder in the wall to the left of the toilet seat was soft and very absorbent, and would stick to the anus.

The beds on the opposite wall had headboards of synthetic nut and their coverlets were of green-blue synthetic fabric. They off the same smell as the room. It was the odor of old and old cigars.

Between the beds was an end table with a lamp and an

glass ashtray that carried the green logo of Holiday Inn. A red

“April,” Gary said, “are you going to tear that strip off the toilet, or do I have to?” She glowered at him, and threw the paper at the wastebasket. “The world makes you work,” she said, “because of the rich. Every organization is rich, you see.”

“Man, you sure can talk,” said Gary. He walked over and gave

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her a kiss: She said, “Sissy. Sissy wouldn’t like this.” He walked away from her and took out a stick of pot. “I want some,” said April. He laughed and held it out of her reach. “Give us a kiss,” he said.

“I can’t kiss you because of Sissy,” she said. “Sissy has vam pires.”

Gary lit the stick, and took a puff. “A toke?” he asked. But when she came near, he held it out of her reach again.

Walking around the room she started taking off clothes. She felt as if they were congesting her. First her peasant blouse, then her Levi’s. Walking around in her bra and her panties, she felt better. “Did you ever get up at four in the morning, Gary, and make cook ies?” He was lying on the bed and taking his time on the marijuana. He just waved a hand. Then he sat up and burped. A look of pain came over his face, and he reached for the milk and took a swig. “Hey, kid, let’s unwind,” he said. “I’ll give you a massage and you give me one.”

“The FBI,” she said, “look in on houses to see if people are mitring any crimes. They do it through the TV, you know.” She back on the bed and the room was spinning. It was like she had gone to with a rich man. She had felt so alive that because the plastic was so dead.