The Executioner's Song (67 page)

October 20

I am reminded constantly of the almost awesome unreal situation we are in. I have to accept it I have no choice you choose to accept it. You amaze me, the utter strength and beauty you show. It would be so easy for me to die, I have but to fire those two idiot lawyers drop all appeals walk out of here Monday Nov. 15 at 8 AM and quickly and easily be shot to death. If you choose to join me it would be much harder for you would have to do it yourself by whatever means you decide on: sleepin pills, gun, razor blade whatever—it would have to be by your own hand—and that's hard, I know. I'm also not blind to the fact that you believe a heavy debt is incurred when a person commits suicide. I'm also not unaware of Sunny and Peabody. Oh, Jesus! There's no reason why you should acquire a debt that I may not if I am simply shot to death.

                Baby I'm not asking or telling you to go with me. I just can't do that.

                But I've told you that's what I want—if that's a contradiction well, I can't help it. I'm just trying to be honest.

October 21

I've felt fucked up and shitty all day. Depressed. Down. This fuckin cell is too small.

                When I was a little kid I used to sing all the time. I'd go down to Johnson Creek, this was in Portland and this was a real neat creek, all woods and swimmin holes where I used to swim naked and when I was alone I'd sing my little ass off!

October 23

Oh Baby. You said in your letter that sometimes you can't feel my love. Baby it's here! It's there every second, every moment, every hour of every day. I send it all to you—I want to give you all that I am. I want you to know all of me.

                Even the things that I don't particularly like about myself and have always sort of hidden or altered, changed a little, in my own mind so they wouldn't seem so bad—I would willingly show to you.

                Goddam, this is a noisy place. Some fool ass fool is in the background screaming, screaming for no other reason than to scream. I'd like to put one of my size 11's right in his ass. This is football season and there seems to be a game on every nite. I hate football and I hate to listen to these nuts screechin every time some sonofabitch gains a couple yards.

                Well, fuck that. I just never was one to make a lot of noise and I can't understand how other dudes can make all that noise all day and nite. I don't even like to talk from these cells—it's weird carryin on a conversation with someone you can't see—think of a whole gang of motherfuckers locked in cells all day and nite and about 10 different conversations going on at once—some of them clear from one end of the building to the other.

                I was hopin' it would stay quiet in here for a while. But it never does. These doors, Jesus, how they clang and bang. The mother-fuckin' TV blasts all day. I hear those guys all day long takin' votes about what to watch—it takes five or ten minutes—some fool reads the whole TV Guide hourly, loud as he can, then they vote on each idiotic show. Insane. The Boob Tube.

                I've done a lot of time—and it ain't never been any different than it is now.

Nicole wrote Gary about a girl hitchhiker who was raped and then knifed twenty or thirty times by some guy in a white van. She wrote how she wasn't afraid of that creep or any other. If she was ever in such a situation, nobody was going to make it with her body, unless she was not in it.

                Gary didn't say much in answer, and Nicole was glad. She realized it was her way of trying to apologize for the ex-president of the Sundowners.

Sometimes while hitchhiking, she would have a flash on her death. In her mind she would see the car she was in jumping off the freeway. She would wonder then what would happen in the next moment when she was dead. The thought was like an echo. She would keep seeing the car going off the freeway. Then she would feel the worry. What if death was a mistake? What if in that last moment, just as it was happening, she realized her action was truly a mistake?

                It was the only concern she had. That she might not have the right to die.

Now in the visits, Gary began to talk about pills. You faded out under them. It was peaceful, he said. Not at all like the nausea she felt, and the cold in the tunnel. Pills were gentle.

                She still didn't know if it was okay to die. All through this month, she couldn't come to a decision. She went back and forth in her mind about the kids, and finally decided she would do it rather than be without him. Sooner or later she would have to take a shot at it. That was cool.

Of course, Gary kept writing to her about it. A couple of times she got mad and told him he pushed the subject too much. Then he would get apologetic and say he was only expressing how he felt. But his talking about it would get her wondering if she wanted to go ahead.

Gary woke up in a panic, and sent word to the Mormon Chaplain in the prison, Cline Campbell, that he had to see him. Campbell came by a little later, and Gary told of a dream he had. Pure paranoia, he said. Nicole was hitchhiking and the driver started to molest her. It was crucial that he see her today. Would Campbell bring her to the prison? Campbell would.

The first time Cline Campbell visited Gary, he mentioned that years ago Nicole used to be his student in seminary class. He had spent hours counseling her. The news seemed to go well with Gary.

                After that, they got along. Shared a few conversations.

Campbell believed the prison system was a complete socialist way of life. No wonder Gilmore had gotten into trouble. For twelve years, a prison had told him when to go to bed and when to eat, what to wear and when to get up. It was absolutely diametrically opposed to the capitalist environment. Then one day they put the convict out the front door, told him today is magic, at two o'clock you are a capitalist.

                Now, do it on your own. Go out, find a job, get up by yourself, report to work on time, manage your money, do all the things you were taught not to do in prison. Guaranteed to fail. Eighty percent went back to jail.

                So he was curious about Gilmore. Looked forward to counseling him. Took the first opportunity, in fact, a few days after the man came to the prison. One evening Campbell just walked into his cell and said, "I'm the Chaplain, my name's Cline Campbell."

                Gilmore was dressed in the white clothing they wore in Maximum Detention, and he was sitting on his bunk engrossed in his drawing. He had a pencil in his hand and a half-finished pencil portrait before him, but he got up, shook hands, said he was happy to meet Campbell. They got along fine. The Chaplain saw him often.

Until now, Cline Campbell had never been involved with counseling a person who was going to be executed. The men on Death Row were always there, and Campbell had chatted with them, and joked with them, but did not have serious counseling sessions. Those men were not close to being executed—their appeals had gone on for years—and their conditions were depraved. But then all of Maximum was a zoo, a flat one-story zoo with many cages.

                At right angles to the main hall were the regular units. Behind a gate would be a series of five cells facing another five cells. Each prisoner had a full view therefore of the prisoner across from him, and partial views of the remaining prisoners on the other side. Sometimes all ten men could be speaking at once. It was a bedlam of cries, and sound reverberated from steel and stone. Echoes crashed into one another like car collisions. It was close to living on the inside of an iron intestine.

Most men were in Maximum Security for three months, no more. But prisoners on Death Row were there forever. Other men could leave their tier at mealtime to move to the cafeteria, or go to the yard. On Death Row, your meals were served in your cell. You never went to the yard. One at a time, each man could leave his cell for a half hour a day and walk up and down the tier. You could talk to the other men, take out—as Campbell had seen—your God-given penis, or invite the other man to stick his through the bars. You could be threatened—and Gilmore was the man to issue such a threat—to get away from the bars, or you'd catch a cup of urine in your face.

                That was exercise on Death Row.

Compared with other convicts there, Gilmore was relaxed. In fact, Campbell marveled at this ability. Campbell would make a point of going to the kitchen first to bring him a cup of black coffee, and Gilmore would grin, "How you doing, preach?" and speak in a quiet voice.

                Sometimes they would talk in Gilmore's cell. More often, Campbell would have him called out, and they would go into a counsel room in Maximum Security in order that nobody overhear their conversation. Several times, Gilmore would say, "I really appreciate rapping with you. I can't talk with anybody else here."

Once in a while they got into deeper conversations. Gilmore would say, "This is stuff I wouldn't even tell the shrinks," and mentioned a time when he first went to MacLaren and a couple of boys held him and he was raped. He hated it, he said, but would admit that as he got older, he participated in the same game on the other side. They nodded. There was the old prison saying, "In every wolf is a punk looking for revenge."

One time, Gilmore made a statement Campbell did not forget.

                "I've killed two men," he said, "I want to be executed on schedule." Then he added, "I want absolutely no notoriety." His voice was emphatic. He told Campbell he didn't want news coverage, TV, radio interviews, nothing. "I just believe I ought to be executed, I feel myself responsible."

                Campbell said, "Well, that can't be all of your motive for wanting to die, Gary, just responsibility?" Gary answered, "No, I'll be honest with you. I've been in eighteen years and I'm not about to do another twenty. Rather than live in this hole, I'd choose to be dead."

                Campbell could understand that. Generally, the LDS Church did believe in the death penalty. Campbell certainly did. He thought to watch a man become more debased, more hateful, more resentful and mean, both to himself and to others on Death Row, was absolutely cruel. The man was better off, and would change less, and be more himself after he was executed, than right here. It was wiser to pass into the spirit world—and await resurrection. There a man could have a better chance to fight for his cause. In the spirit world, one would be more likely to find assistance than degradation.

Campbell had been an LDS missionary in Korea, then a Chaplain in the Army with an airborne outfit. He taught seminary for six years after he got out. Also worked as a weekend cop. He would pick up a patrol car at six on Friday night, and turn it back in Monday at 8 A.M.

                Since he had grown up in the boonies on a Utah ranch, he never needed any training in firearms. He had carried a gun as a boy, and was pretty quick with it. From the hip, he could hit a gallon can fifty feet away in a quarter of a second. Grew up thinking of himself as a second Butch Cassidy.

                He was not too tall, but he would have considered it on the side of sin not to be in good shape and well groomed. He stood real straight, shoulders back, and looked like a marksman. He had the patina of finely machined metal. During those weekends when he used to work as a cop, he was on for 24 hours a day, taking all calls. Of course, it was a small town, and he usually had time to go to church, but he carried a beeper so he could always be contacted and actually made more arrests in Lindon City than the other two officers put together, since on the weekend you had to handle every drunk and fracas.

The last time he had seen Nicole was one of those weekends, at two o'clock in the morning. He was driving down a road in Lindon and there she stood hitchhiking. He said, Get in the car, what are you doing out here? It's dangerous.

                He had heard she had a child, and now she was obviously loaded on drugs. He had every reason to take her to jail, but she trusted him, and he saw that she got home. He kept thinking of all the times he had counseled her once a week from five to thirty minutes, and knew what a bad situation she had at home. She had told him about Uncle Lee. It was a touchy thing, however. He could not really get her to go into it. Sometimes she would sit in his seminary class looking dreamy, and have no idea she was there.

Now, on this morning that Campbell went over to find Nicole for Gary, she was asleep on the couch and her two children were asleep on the floor with a blanket over them. After she kind of combed her hair a little, she let Campbell in. Didn't even know who it was.

                Cracked the curtain. Didn't recognize him. He said, "How are you, Nicole, do you remember me?" She looked hard and she said, "Sure, come on in." He said, "I'm Brother Campbell." She said, "Yes, of course, come in." They exchanged a few courtesies, and he said he'd come because Gary wanted to see her.

                She dropped the children off with her ex-mother-in-law, Mrs. Barrett, and on the way out to prison, Campbell discussed her situation. She just said to him without any particular ado, that if Gary died, she might also.