The Executioner's Song (2 page)

                "What do you mean, is he tall?" asked Johnny.

                "I don't know, I hope he is."

                In junior high, if she put on heels, the only person big enough to dance with her was the gym teacher. She used to hate like hell to kiss a boy on the forehead and tell him good night. In fact, she got so paranoid about being tall it could have stunted her growth.

                It certainly made her like boys taller than herself. They let her feel feminine. She just had this nightmare that when they got to the airport, Gary would only come up to her armpit. Why, she would abandon the whole thing right there. Shift for yourself, she would tell him.

They pulled up to the island that ran parallel to the main entrance of the terminal building. So soon as she got out of the car, there was Johnny over on the driver's side, trying to tuck his shirttail in. That annoyed Brenda no end.

                She could see Gary leaning against the building. "There he is," Brenda cried, but Johnny said, "Wait, I have to zip my pants."

                "Who gives a shit about your shirttail?" said Brenda. "I'm going."

                As she crossed the street between the parking island and the main door, Gary saw her and picked up his satchel. Pretty soon they were running toward each other. As they met, Gary dropped his bag, looked at her, then encircled her so hard she could have been hugged by a bear. Even Johnny had never gripped Brenda that hard.

                When Gary put her down on the ground again, she stood back and looked at him. She had to take him all in. She said, "My God, you're tall."

                He started to laugh. "What did you expect, a midget?"

                "I don't know what I expected," she said, "but, thank God, you're tall."

                Johnny was just standing there with his big good face going, um, um, um.

                "Hey, coz," said Gary, "it's fine to see you." He shook hands with Johnny.

                "By the way, Gary," said Brenda demurely, "this is my husband." Gary said, "I assumed that's who it was."

                Johnny said, "Have you got everything with you?"

                Gary picked up his flight bag—it was pathetically small, thought Brenda—and said, "This is it. This is all I have." He said it without humor and without self-pity. Material things were obviously no big transaction to him.

                Now she noticed his clothes. He had a black trench coat slung on his arm and was wearing a maroon blazer over—could you believe it?—a yellow and green striped shirt. Then a pair of beige polyester trousers that were badly hemmed. Plus a pair of black plastic shoes. She paid attention to people's footwear because of her father's trade and she thought, Wow, that's really cheap. They didn't even give him a pair of leather shoes to go home in.

                "Come on," said Gary, "let's get the hell out of here."

                She could see then he'd had something to drink. He wasn't plastered, but he sure was tipped. Made a point of putting his arm around her when they walked to the car.

                When they got in, Brenda sat in the middle and Johnny drove. Gary said, "Hey, this is kind of a cute car. What is it?"

                "A yellow Maverick," she told him. "My little lemon."

                They drove. The first silence came in.

                "Are you tired?" asked Brenda.

                "A little tired, but then I'm a little drunk too." Gary grinned. "I took advantage of the champagne flight. I don't know if it was the altitude, or not having good liquor for a long time, but, boy, I got tore up on that plane. I was happier than hell."

                Brenda laughed. "I guess you're entitled to be snockered."

                The prison sure cut his hair short. It would, Brenda judged, be heavy handsome brown hair when it grew out, but for now it stuck up hick style in the back. He kept pushing it down.

                No matter, she liked his looks. In the half-light that came into the car as they drove through Salt Lake on the Interstate, the city sleeping on both sides of them, she decided that Gary was everything she expected in that department. A long, fine nose, good chin, thin well-shaped lips. He had character about his face.

                "Want to go for a cup of coffee?" Johnny asked.

                Brenda felt Gary tighten. It was as if even the thought of walking into a strange place got him edgy. "Come on," Brenda said, "we'll give the ten-cent tour."

                They picked Jean's Cafe. It was the only place south of Salt Lake open at 3 A.M., but it was Friday night and people were sporting their finery. Once installed in their booth, Gary said., "I guess I got to get some clothes."

                Johnny encouraged him to eat, but he wasn't hungry. Obviously too excited. Brenda felt as if she could pick up the quiver in each bright color that Gary was studying on the jukebox. He looked close to being dazzled by the revolving red, blue, and gold light show on the electronic screen of the cigarette console. He was so involved it drew her into his mood. When a couple of cute girls walked in, and Gary mumbled, "Not bad," Brenda laughed. There was something so real about the way he said it.

                Couples kept coming from parties and leaving, and the sound of cars parking and taking off didn't stop. Still, Brenda was not looking at the door. Her best friend could have walked in, but she would have been all alone with Gary. She couldn't remember when somebody had absorbed her attention this much. She didn't mean to be rude to Johnny, but she did kind of forget he was there.

                Gary, however, looked across the table and said, "Hey man, thanks. I appreciate how you went along with Brenda to get me out." They shook hands again. This time Gary did it thumbs up.

                Over the coffee, he asked Brenda about her folks, her sis, her kids, and Johnny's job.

                Johnny did maintenance at the Pacific State Cast Iron and Pipe. While he was blacksmithing now, he used to make iron pipe, fire it, cast it, sometimes do the mold work.

                The conversation died. Gary had no clue what to ask Johnny next. He knows nothing about us, Brenda thought, and I know so little about his life.

                Gary spoke of a couple of prison friends and what good men they were, Then he said apologetically, Well, you don't want to hear about prison, it's not very pleasant.

                Johnny said they were only tiptoeing around because they didn't want to offend him. "We're curious," said Johnny, "but, you know, we don't want to ask: what's it like in there? What do they do to you?"

                Gary smiled. They were silent again.

                Brenda knew she was making Gary nervous as hell. She kept staring at him constantly, but she couldn't get enough of his face. There were so many corners in it.

                "God," she kept saying, "it's good to have you here."

                "It's good to get back."

                "Wait till you get to know this country," she said. She was dying to tell him about the kind of fun they could have on Utah Lake, and the camper trips they would take in the canyons. The desert was just as gray and brown and grim as desert anywhere, but the mountains went up to twelve thousand feet, and the canyons were green with beautiful forests and super drinking parties with friends. They could teach him how to hunt with bow and arrow, she was about ready to tell him, when all of a sudden she got a good look at Gary in the light. Speak of all the staring she had done, it was as if she hadn't studied him at all yet. Now she felt a strong sense of woe. He was marked up much more than she had expected.

                She reached out to touch his cheek at the place where he had a very bad scar, and Gary said, "Nice looking, isn't it?"

                Brenda said, "I'm sorry, Gary, I didn't mean to embarrass you."

                This set up such a pause that Johnny finally asked, "How'd it happen?"

                "A guard hit me," said Gary. He smiled. "They had me tied down for a shot of Prolixin—and I managed to spit in the doctor's face. Then I got clobbered."

                "How," asked Brenda, "would you like to take that guard who hit you, and get ahold of him?"

                "Don't pick my brain," said Gary.

                "Okay," said Brenda, "but do you hate him?"

                "God, yeah," said Gary, "wouldn't you?"

                "Yeah, I would," said Brenda. "Just checking."

                Half an hour later, driving home, they went by Point of the Mountain. Off to the left of the Interstate a long hill came out of the mountains and its ridge was like the limb of a beast whose paw just reached the highway. On the other side, in the desert to the right, was Utah State Prison. There were only a few lights in its buildings now. They made jokes about Utah State Prison.

                Back in her living room, drinking beer, Gary began to unwind. He liked beer, he confessed. In prison, they knew how to make a watery brew out of bread. Called it Pruno. In fact, both Brenda and Johnny were observing that Gary could put brew away as fast as anyone they knew.

                Johnny soon got tired and went to sleep. Now Gary and Brenda really began to talk. A few prison stories came out of him. To Brenda, each seemed wilder than the one before. Probably they were half true, half full of beer. He had to be reciting out of his hind end.

                It was only when she looked out the window and saw the night was over that she realized how long they had been talking. They stepped through the door to look at the sun coming up over the back of her ranch house and all her neighbors' ranch houses, and standing there, on her plot of lawn, in a heap of strewn-about toys, wet with cold spring dew, Gary looked at the sky and took a deep breath.

                "I feel like jogging," he said.

                "You've got to be nuts, tired as you are," she said.

                He just stretched and breathed deep, and a big smile came over his face.
"Hey, man," he said, "I'm really out."

               
In the mountains, the snow was iron gray and purple in the hollows, and glowed like gold on every slope that faced the sun. The clouds over the mountains were lifting with the light. Brenda took a good look into his eyes and felt full of sadness again. His eyes had the expression of rabbits she had flushed, scared-rabbit was the common expression, but she had looked into those eyes of scared rabbits and they were calm and tender and kind of curious. They did not know what would happen next.

Chapter 2

THE FIRST WEEK

Brenda put Gary on the foldout couch in the TV room. When she began to make the bed, he stood there smiling.

                "What gives you that impish little grin?" she said after a pause, "Do you know how long it's been since I slept on a sheet?"

                He took a blanket but no pillow, Then she went to her room. She never knew if he fell asleep. She had the feeling he lay down and rested and never took off his polyesters, just his shirt. When she got up a few hours later, he was up and around.

                They were still having coffee when Toni came over to visit, and Gary gave her a big hug, and stood back, and framed her face with his hands and said, "I finally get to meet the kid sister. Man, I've looked at your photographs. What a foxy lady you are."

                "You're going to make me blush," said Toni.

                She certainly looked like Brenda. Same popping black eyes, black hair, same sassy look. It was just that Brenda was on the voluptuous side and Toni was slim enough to model. Take your pick.

                When they sat down, Gary kept reaching over and putting his arm around Toni, or taking hold of her hand. "I wish you weren't my cousin," he said, "and married to such a big tall dude."

                Later, Toni would tell Brenda how good and wise Howard had been for saying, "Go over and meet Gary without me." She went on to describe how warm Gary made her feel, not sexy, but more like a brother. He had amazed her with how much he knew of her life. Like that Howard was six foot six. Brenda kept herself from remarking that he had not learned it from any letters Toni had written, since Toni had never written a line.

                Before Brenda took Gary over to meet Vern and Ida, Johnny showed a test of strength. He took the bathroom scale and squeezed it between his hands until the needle went up to 250 pounds.

                Gary tried and reached 120. He went crazy and squeezed the scales until he was shaking. The needle went to 150. "Yeah," said Johnny, "you're improving." "What's the highest you've gone?" asked Gary, "Oh," said Johnny, "the scale stops at 280, but I've taken it past there. I suppose 300."

                On the drive to the shoe shop, Brenda told Gary a little more about her father. Vern, she explained, might be the strongest man she knew.

                Stronger than Johnny?

                Well, Brenda explained, nobody could top Johnny at squeezing the scales, but she didn't know who had ever beaten Vern Damico at arm wrestling.

                Vern, said Brenda, was strong enough to be gentle all the time. "I don't think my father ever gave me a spanking except once in my whole life and I truly asked for that. It was only one pat on the hind end, but that hand of his could cover your whole body."

                The mountains had been gold and purple at dawn, but now in the morning they were big and brown and bald and had gray rain-soaked snow on the ridges. It got into their mood. The distance from the north side of Orem where she lived, to Vern's store in the center of Provo, was six miles, but going along State Street, it took a while. There were shopping malls and quick-eat palaces, used-car dealers, chain clothing stores and gas stops, appliance stores and highway signs and fruit stands. There were banks and real estate firms in one-story office compounds and rows of condominiums with sawed-off mansard roofs. There hardly seemed a building that was not painted in a nursery color: pastel yellow, pastel orange, pastel tan, pastel blue. Only a few faded two-story wooden houses looked as if they had been built even thirty years ago. On State Street, going the six miles from Orem to Provo, those houses looked as old as frontier saloons.

                "It sure has changed," said Gary.

                Overhead was the immense blue of the strong sky of the American West. That had not changed.

                At the foot of the mountains, on the boundary between Orem and Provo, was Brigham Young University. It was also new and looked like it had been built from prefabricated toy kits. Twenty years ago, BYU had a few thousand students. Now the enrollment was close to thirty thousand, Brenda told him. As Notre Dame to good Catholics, so BYU to good Mormons.

                "I better tell you a little more about Vern," Brenda said. "You have to understand when Dad is joking and when he is not. That can be a little hard to figure out because Dad does not always smile when he is joking."

                She did not tell him that her father had been born with a harelip, but then she assumed he knew. Vern had a full palate so his speech was not affected, but the mark was right out there. His mustache didn't pretend to hide it. When he first went to school it didn't take him long to become one of the toughest kids. Any boy who wanted to kid Vern about his lip, said Brenda, got a belt in the snout.

                It made Vern's personality. To this day, when children came into the shoe shop and saw him for the first time, Vern did not have to hear what the child was saying when the mother said, Hush. He was used to that. It didn't bother him now. Over the years, however, he had had to do a lot to overcome it. Not only did it leave him strong, but frank. He might be gentle in his manner, Brenda said, but he usually came out and said what he thought. That could be abrasive.

                Yet when Gary met Vern, Brenda decided she had prepared him too much. He was a little nervous when he said hello, and looked around, and acted surprised at the size of the shoe shop, as if he hadn't expected a big cave of a place. Vern commented that it was a lot of room to walk around in when customers weren't there, and they got on from that to his osteoarthritis. Vern had a powerfully painful accumulation in his knee that had frozen the joint. Just hearing about it seemed to get Gary concerned. It didn't seem phony, Brenda thought. She could almost feel the pain of Vern's knee pass right into Gary's scrotum.

                Vern thought Gary ought to move in with Ida and himself right away, but shouldn't plan to go to work for a few days. A fellow needed time to get acquainted with his freedom, Vern observed. After all, Gary had come into a strange town, didn't know where the library was, didn't know where to buy a cup of coffee. So he talked to Gary real slow. Brenda was accustomed to men taking quite a while to say anything to each other, but if you were impatient, it could drive you crazy.

                When she and Gary went over to the house, however, Ida was thrilled. "Bessie was my special big sister, and I was always her favorite," Ida told him. She was getting a little plump, but with her red-brown hair and her bright-colored dress, Ida looked like an attractive gypsy lady.

                She and Gary began talking right away about how when he was a little boy, he used to visit Grandma and Grandpa Brown. "I loved them days," Gary said to her. "I was as happy then as I've ever been in my life."

                Together, Gary and Ida made a sight in that small living room. Although Vern's shoulders could fill a doorway, and any one of his fingers was as wide as anyone else's two fingers, he was not that tall, and Ida was short. They wouldn't be bothered by a low ceiling.

                It was a living room with a lot of stuffed furniture in bright autumn colors and bright rugs and color-filled pictures in gold frames and there was a ceramic statue of a black stable boy with a red jacket standing by the fireplace. Chinese end tables and big colored hassocks took up space on the floor.

                Having lived among steel bars, reinforced concrete, and cement-block walls, Gary would now be spending a lot of his time in this living room.

                Back at her house, on the pretext of helping him pack, Brenda got a peek at the contents of his tote bag. It held a can of shaving cream, a razor, a toothbrush, a comb, some snapshots, his parole papers, a few letters, and no change of underwear.

                Vern slipped him some underclothes, some tan slacks, a shirt, and twenty bucks.

                Gary said, "I can't pay you back right now."

                "I'm giving you the money," Vern said. "If you need more, see me. I don't have a lot, but I'll give you what I can."

                Brenda would have understood her father's reasoning: a man without money in his pocket can get into trouble.

                Sunday afternoon, Vern and Ida drove him over to Lehi, on the other side of Orem, for a visit with Toni and Howard.

                Both of Toni's daughters, Annette and Angela, were excited about Gary. He was like a magnet with kids, Brenda and Toni agreed. On this Sunday, two days out of jail, he sat in a gold cloth-upholstered chair drawing chalk pictures on a blackboard for Angela.

                He'd draw a beautiful picture and Angela, who was six, would erase it. He got the biggest kick out of that. He would take pains on the next one, draw it extra-beautiful, and she'd go, Yeah, uh-huh, and she'd erase it. So he could do another one.

                After a while he sat down on the floor and played cards with her. The only game Angela knew was Fish, but she couldn't remember how to say each number. She would speak of 6 as an upper because the line went up, and 9 was a downer. A 7 was a hooker. That tickled Gary. Queens, Angela said firmly, were ladies. Kings were big boys. Jacks were little boys.

                He called: "Toni, would you explain something? Am I playing some illicit game here with your daughter?" Gary thought it was very funny.

                Later that Sunday, Howard Gurney and Gary tried to talk to each other. Howard had been a construction worker all his life, a union electrician. He'd never been in jail except for one night when he was a kid. It was difficult to find much common denominator. Gary knew a lot, and had a fantastic vocabulary, but he and Howard didn't seem to have any experiences in common.

Monday morning, Gary broke the twenty-dollar bill Vern had given him, and bought a pair of gym shoes. That week, he would wake up every day around six, and go out to run. He would take off from Vern's house in a fast long stride down to Fifth West, go around the park, and back—more than ten blocks in four minutes, good time. Vern, with his bad knee, thought Gary was a fantastic runner.

                In the beginning, Gary didn't know exactly what he could do in the house. On his first evening alone with Vern and Ida, he asked if he could get a glass of water.

                "This is your home," Vern said. "You don't have to ask permission."

                Gary came back from the kitchen with the glass in his hand. "I'm beginning to get onto this," he said to Vern. "It's pretty good."

                "Yeah," said Vern, "come and go as you want. Within reason."

                About the third night, they got to talking about Vern's driveway. It wasn't wide enough to take more than one car, but Vern had a strip of lawn beside it that could offer space for another car provided he could remove the concrete curb that separated the grass from the paving. That curb ran for thirty-five feet from the sidewalk to the garage. It was about six inches high, eight inches wide, and would take a lot of work to be chopped out. Because of his bad leg, Vern had been holding off.

                "I'll do it," said Gary.

                Sure enough, next morning at 6 A.M., Vern was awakened by the sound of Gary taking a sledgehammer to the job. Sound slammed through the neighborhood in the dawn. Vern winced for the people in the City Center Motel, next door, who would be awakened by the reverberation. All day Gary worked, cracking the curbing with overhead blows, then prying chunks out, inch by inch, with the crowbar. Before long, Vern had to buy a new one.

Gary didn't like television. Maybe he'd seen too much in prison, but in the evening, once Vern went to bed, Gary and Ida would sit and talk.

                Ida reminisced about Bessie's skill with makeup. "She was so clever that way," said Ida, "and so tasteful. She knew how to make herself look beautiful all the time. She had the same elegance about her as our mother who is French and always had aristocratic traits." Her mother, said Ida, had a breeding that she gave to her children. The table was always set properly, not to the stiffest standards—they were just poor Mormons—but a tablecloth, always a tablecloth, and enough silverware to do the job.

                Bessie, Gary told Ida, was now so arthritic she could hardly move, and the little trailer in which she lived was all plastic. Considering the climate in Portland, that trailer had to be damp. When he got a little money together, he would try to improve matters. One night Gary actually called his mother and talked for a long time. Ida heard him say he loved her and was going to bring her back to Provo to live.

                It was a warm week for April, and pleasant talking through the evenings, planning for the summer to come.

                Those thirty-five feet of curbing took one day and part of the next. Vern offered to help but Gary wouldn't allow it. "I know a lot about pounding rocks," he told Vern with a grin.

                "What can I do for you?" asked Vern.

                "Well, it's thirsty work," said Gary. "Just keep me in beer."

                It went like that. He drank a lot of beer and worked real hard and they were happy with the job. When he was done, he had open blisters on his hand as large as Vern's fingernails. Ida insisted on bandaging his palms, but Gary was acting like a kid—a man don't wear bandages—and took them off real quick.