The Executioner's Song (48 page)

                Nicole, I believe we always have a choice. And I choose, that when I die, or change form, or whatever best describes this thing called death, I choose that I wait for you, that I meet you, that I find you—the part of my heart and soul I have sought for so long—the only real love I've ever known. Then we will know. We'll know everything that we know now but can't consciously recall.

                You said that girl's letter was like a slap in the face—Baby, Baby, I didn't mean anything like that when I gave it to you! I just thought I'd let you read it. Guess I wasn't thinking, huh?! I'm not gonna write to her. You're the only girl in my life Angel. I wouldn't take a thousand girls for you.

August 25

Maybe when you get your next check you could get me a couple things, okay? What I would like to have is a couple "Flair" felt tip pens, one brown and one blue with fine points—and a fairly decent watercolor brush: a Grumbacher Sable Round No. 5 watercolor—and a decent pad of paper. If you can't afford it, it's okay honey, 'cause I know they don't give you much on that fuckin welfare and I don't want you to be broke again like you was this month.

                I got into a search for Truth real heavily at one time. I was looking for a truth that was very rigid, unbending, a single straight line that excluded everything but itself. A simple Truth, plain, unadorned. I was never quite satisfied—I found many truths though. Courage is a Truth. Overcoming fear is a Truth. It would be too simple to say that God is truth. God is that and much, much more. I found these Truths, and others . . .

                I found a lot of Truths. But I was still hungry—and it's true that hunger teaches many things. So I kept looking. And one day I was fortunate. I saw a simple, quiet Truth, a profound, deep, and personal Truth of beauty and love.

It came down on Nicole what an expression like "horrible loss" really meant. It was throwing away the most valuable thing in your life. It was knowing you had to live next to something larger than your own life. In this case, it was knowing that Gary was going to die.

                She began to think there was not even a minute when she stopped loving him, not for a minute. Not a minute of her day in which the guy was not in her mind. That she liked. She liked what was inside of her. But it was spooky. She would take in a breath and recognize that she was falling more and more in love with a guy who was going to be dead.

One night Tom Dynamite came over, but she couldn't bring herself to screw him. That surprised her. Sex had nothing to do with Gary. It was just that this night she had been thinking about him so hard she didn't want to separate herself from the pleasure of continuing to think about him. Somehow, she got Tom to sleep on the floor next to the couch where she always lay down, and Nicole even put her hand on Tom's shoulder in gratitude while they slept. He left in the morning without waking her.

                On opening her eyes, she remembered that even while falling asleep, she had decided to kill herself in the morning. She awoke with the same thought. She sat as quietly as a bird not moving in its nest.

                If she died first, Gary would soon be with her. He had told her that. She didn't know where she would be then, or what else might happen, but she would be with him on the other side. His love would be so strong that she would be attracted to him like a magnet. It would be like the magnet that pulled her to him the day she first saw him in jail.

                She didn't have any decent razor blades, and considered going next door to borrow one, but thought that might be too suspicious. So she broke open a Daisy Shaver, a kind of disposable plastic dingus, cracked it with a steak knife and got the blade loose. Then wrapped it in some notebook paper, and put it in her bra. She thought if she didn't move around too much it would be safe and not cut her. She felt strange leaving the kids over to a friend's house, but set out to hitchhike to the jail. A couple of guys picked her up.

                One was an ex-con, and he was really foul-mouthed. Kinda cute. He talked real rough, and kept asking if she wasn't worried that he and his buddy would take her up in the mountains, rape her, cut her throat. Nicole kind of laughed at them. Here she had this blade in her bra, all set to take care of the job herself.

                Anyway, they dropped her off by the jail without further ado. Of course, when she told them she was going to visit her boy friend, and the ex-con recognized the name, he had to make a smart-ass remark. "Well," he said, "he's going to get a little lead poisoning." That cracked Nicole up. She didn't feel bad laughing about Gary. She knew he would have laughed over it too.

                She went over to the back, and hollered a couple of times and somebody else finally answered her and said Gary was in another cell. Then she heard him, so faintly, trying to holler back. The cops came and threatened to arrest her. Of course, she didn't give a fuck.

                This time, they took her around to the front and kept her inside for a half hour, and she made herself right at home, using the floor for an ashtray, laughing at their threats, she didn't give one shit. They could let her go, or lock her up. Without female cops they couldn't shake her down, and she still had the razor.

                After a while, they let her go. On the way out she noticed a small cement tunnel that went under the freeway. It was just a few feet in width and dark enough so you couldn't see far. She crawled in, and it was sure dark. Her sleeves were rolled up over her biceps, but she pulled them up further, and then cut herself as hard as she could right across the vein and the artery. It was a good feeling. Really warm, really bleeding and splashing on the cement. She could feel blood running down her arm and it was hot, and good. She liked the way it felt, kind of soothing. There was so much going on. Like the ocean was coming into the tunnel. She could see the opening where she had come in, and all the light Nicole could see in the world was in the circle of that hole.

                She sat there, and the nice warm feeling changed. She began getting sick. Then she was nauseated. Started shaking all over. She wasn't cold but she was shaking. There was blood all over the cement. Every nice long slow thought faded, and now she didn't feel as if she was slipping into something warm, but as if everything was getting colder. She didn't like that. But she made herself sit. Even made herself lie down and try to go to sleep. Then she tried to talk herself into not moving. Just stay there until it was over.

                Finally, she thought, I got to get to a doctor. At least, I got to try. That's the best I can do, is give it a good try. Then I can handle dying.

                She got up, and couldn't even walk straight, and kept feeling she was going to pass out. She would walk a few steps, and spots would come in front of her eyes, and she'd squat. But it was just a little way from the jail, and she made it back over, and there was a cop washing a truck, wasn't even in uniform. She told him she'd been climbing a chain-link fence and slipped and showed him how her shirt was bloody. He took her down to the Utah Valley Hospital.

                The doctor didn't believe her shit about climbing a fence. He said, Looks like a pretty sharp thing did the job. Asked her how much she bled, was it a pint or a quart. She said, well, she didn't know what a pint or a quart was. Not when it was running out of you. They took her blood pressure, and she began to feel better, and hitchhiked home. By the time she got back, she was sick to her stomach again, couldn't really stand up without getting dizzy. Slept a lot. In the morning she found out they were mad out at the jail and had lifted her right to visit.

August 29

 Fucked me up that I couldn't see you today—these chickenshit pricks. Give a motherfucker a little authority and they think they have to start taking privileges away from people . . . bunch of slack-jawed fizz-gurgling come-drunk punks.

Nicole went to bed with Cliff Bonnors the night after she got home from the hospital. Her arm was stitched and it hurt like hell. All the time she was making love she kept thinking that if she didn't watch out it would start bleeding again. Night after, she found herself in bed with Tom Dynamite. Same damned thing. Her arm hurt like a fucker, and it got to her. She had to stop making love.

                Sometimes she was convinced Gary could hear her think. It wasn't that she thought it was right or wrong to be doing this while Gary was in jail, it's just that it came over her how it might seem peculiar to be in love with a man and still make it with guys on the outside. She had never experienced this feeling before. That it was important to be faithful. Something she had to ponder.

                She finally decided to test the water, and say something in a letter. She decided to use Kip as an example. Kip, of all people, had dropped in on her almost a month ago. He had changed so much, she told Gary in the letter, that she couldn't believe it. Kip had become a Mormon. Now he would get naked and play with her, but he wouldn't go to bed. It was like he had become the cock-teaser, not her. That was really freaky.

One morning, for instance, Kip went to an LDS church right down the street, and came back all dressed up in his Sunday pants, all fired up with religion. He was planning to go to the evening services but she started fooling around with him. Before she was done she made Kip cream his pants. That messed him up. The pants were so wrinkled and wet, he couldn't go to church.

Well, she told Gary a little of that in her letter. Wanted to see what sort of reaction she would get. After all, it had happened weeks ago, and wasn't important. But Gary simply ignored it.

Sheriff Cahoon wasn't surprised when Gary asked if he could come out and talk. Cahoon even took him into the front room and they sat by the desk. Had a nice friendly conversation. Gary said he agreed with Sheriff Cahoon on the way the place should be run and to come to some agreement on what was expected from him and Nicole. Well, said Cahoon, he wanted Gary's lady to come and act ladylike, not create no problems. Come decently dressed. When he saw the spark in Gary's eye, he remarked that, of course, her dress wasn't that far out. Her attitude was creating the problem. Gary agreed they could arrive at an understanding. Cahoon said they were having a good one, and he would permit Gary a phone call to Brenda to notify Nicole she was reinstated.

On the next visit, she told Gary about using the razor blade in the underpass. She had tried and couldn't do it. Scared of dying. He told her it was very hard to bleed to death. Most people who tried it got sick. It was one of the hard ways to die.

                She had a bandage on, but he finally asked her to show him the stitches. Then said, "That's a fucking deep cut," and the tone went through her like praise, as if he had said, "Baby, you did that for me."

       He never did mention Kip.

                Having agreed to these visits, Cahoon got concerned all over again. Gilmore and his girl friend were having the damnedest correspondence. One letter actually talked about how she cut her arm and felt the warm blood dripping. Heard it make a puddle on the ground. The guard who brought it to Sheriff Cahoon said, "What kind of message is this to be writing to a guy on First-Degree Murder?"

                Cahoon sure read it carefully. Nicole kept talking about the silver sword and life after death. How they would have a better kind of life with the silver sword. She wrote about going up to the spot where she had been bleeding and the rain had washed most of the blood away. Since she was always bringing him books, Cahoon inspected one of them, and it was all about the hereafter. How to get jubilant.

       It made the guards so nervous that next visit when Nicole turned around from talking to Gary and went to reach into her purse for a cigarette, the officer on watch was so jumpy he actually grabbed her wrist. It was that silver sword she kept talking about.

                Cahoon was debating whether to stop her visits again, but all of a sudden, she stopped coming to the jail. Her letters also stopped.

Nicole had decided to take the plunge. At the end of a long letter to Gary that had been full of love, she put in a couple of sentences at the end to say how pointless it was that she spent so much time—and she wrote it right out—"getting fucked." Had to know what he thought.

September 5

I just read your letter. It's a long and beautiful letter and full of love. But on page 5 you said "it's such an ugly thing to do. I spend so much time either getting drunk or getting fucked." I felt like I had been hit or something—a cold numbness moved thru me and I couldn't go on reading the letter for a few minutes. Nicole, don't ever tell me anything like that again unless you want to hurt me. I don't want anybody to fuck you and I try not to think of that—I do pretty good until you write and tell me.

She felt as if somebody had socked her right on the side of the head. She could hear his voice ringing in her brain. It spoke in a terrible anger, as if he was capable of biting his teeth clear through his tongue. He didn't want her ever to get with a guy again. Didn't want to have those thoughts in his head. "Everybody fucks Nicole,, said his voice in her head. "Don't fuck those cocksuckers. It makes me want to commit murder again. If I feel like murder it doesn't necessarily matter who gets murdered—don't you know that about me?" Way inside, a part of her felt extra-loving. It was that important to him.