The Executioner's Song (112 page)

Mikal saw how it looked to Gary. Wealthy liberals who never gave a damn about him in other years, were now gathering their wealth and power to frustrate him. “It’s not important,” Mikal tried to say.

They fought over Amsterdam and Giauque. “Who do you think they are,” asked Gary, “holy men? They’re trying to use you.”

“Just recognize,” said Mikal, “that I can take action without them. I can still go in and get a commutation of your sentence. They wouldn’t be doing it, I would.”

“Could you really?” asked Gary.

“I believe I could.”

Gary paced around. “Look,” he said, “I’ve spent too much time in jail. I don’t have anything left in me.”

A guard’s voice came into the room. “Time’s up.”

“Come back,” said Gary. “Talk to me tomorrow.”

Even as Mikal was passing through the door, Gary called out. “Where wen you, years ago, when I needed you?”

All the way back to Salt Lake, Mikal heard, “When were when I needed you?” He had been ready to sign the paper Giauque, but now he did not know if it was his choice or Gary’s. brother’s voice kept saying, “I don’t have anything left in me.” wanted to disappear into a place when choices did not exist. bad night, he decided to write a letter to Gary.

In it, he said that when he was face to face with his brother’s anger, he could never remember what he wanted to him. He wrote to Gary that he had always been frightened Only in their last two meetings had he come to realize that, in he loved him. Whatever choice he made would come from

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Gary chose to live, he hoped they could take down the barriers be tween them. He ended by speaking of his belief: one’s best chance for redemption was found through choosing life over death. In life was when one found redemption, not death.

That afternoon at the prison, a guard read Mikal’s letter and de livered it to Gary on the other side of the glass.

Gary looked it over quietly and began to cry. Just a tear or two. Then he wiped an eye with his finger and smiled. “Well put,” he said over the phone. He asked Mikal, “Are you familiar with Nietzsche? He wrote that a time comes when a man should rise to meet the oc casion. That’s what I’m trying to do, Mikal.”

They sat then. Gary nodded, “Look, kid, I was thinking of what I said yesterday. That was unfair. I wasn’t around when you were young. So get it straight. I don’t hate you. I know you’re my brother and I know what that means.”

Gary’s hand might just as well have been laid on Mikal’s heart. Mikal could feel himself being manipulated here, softened then. He obliged himself to say, “What would you do if I tried to stop this?”

“Oh, you could have my sentence commuted,” Gary said, “but you wouldn’t have to live in prison. Do you know how strong you have to be, year after year, to keep yourself together in this place?” Gary asked.

Mikal would have been ready to concede then. Yet on his first day in Salt Lake, he had met Bill Moyers. He had spent hours with him ever since. Moyers, he felt, had to be one of the wisest and most compassionate men he had ever met, and Moyers had said, “If we are confronted with a choice between life and death, and choose any thing short of life, we’re choosing short of humanity.” Gary might lis ten to such an idea. It was so clear cut. Gary liked ideas that were logical propositions. Mikal did not really think it would make a dif ference. Yet before he left, he asked Gary to talk to Bill Moyers. “Not for an interview. Just for a meeting.”

“I’ll do it,” said Gary, “but it’s got to be off the record. We can’t forget my deal with Larry Schiller.”

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janvier I 3

jeudi

Bon maten mon Soul Mate

je Love vous. Oh! Je Love vous!

et avoir besoin de vous tant!

This morn i have only a few minutes to write as my should be here soon.

i have been having fun with an old french book. It is a beauti

language, i would like to learn it maybe even live in France one day. Away from here — oh well …

Sundberg informed me that all of the doctors involved in mess i am in are planning already to recommend that i be on January 22 0977 hopefully)

These long days are truly drawing nearer to your

date. i find that reality hard to grasp onto.

Not so much that soon you will die but that i cannot be with now while it is so near to that time. Why should it be so? be logic behind my destiny but i cannot see even a partical of it..

There are no longer words that ,can express the Love that is my soul and my heart for you mon Soul Mate

You have all my love. i believe that you know And i knowi have yours

if you die.., so soon … i will know and feel your soul around my thots and this soul who loves you so deeply.

CUTTING THE STRING

Goodbye now my love

Till then and forever

No matter where i walk

ill walk alone Till again im by your side

I Love you Ever Yours

NICOLE

Larry talked it over with Farrell and they agreed. When it came to talking about himself, Gilmore, no matter how frank he might seem in the interviews, still lived behind a psychic wall. If they were going to learn more, they would have to make a breach. The questions must turn critical of Gary’s poses, cut through the sham. So Farrell worked on a special set to we to Moody and Stanger. Schiller also instructed them that Gilmore was to read each question aloud, then answer it. They did not want either lawyer’s voice affecting his reaction.

Over the phone in Maximum, Ron Stanger said, “Our friend is thinking he would like to have some serious answers. Quote, unquote.”

“I’ve been playing serious all along,” said Gilmore. “As serious as

I’ve been playing anything.”

“Okay,” said Moody.

Gilmore began to read: “It seems to me now that in your situation with your sense of fate and destiny and karma, this conversation we’re struggling to have is really an important event in your life as well as mine.”

“Thanks, Larry,” said Gilmore to the introduction.

“I think,” Gary continued, “we both owe it to the importance of the situation to try hard to replace superficial speculative interpretations with deeper harder ones.”

“Right,” he said, answering his own reading voice.

“Sometimes you sound like you’re telling a story you’ve told many times before,” went the next question. “My reaction is-oh; Gary, do you tell that to all the girls, or all the shrinks, or all the peo-

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ple who see something of interest in you and want to know you bet ter? A number of stories told in the course of these interviews are stories that you also told Nicole in your letters oft accompanied by, let us say, sweetheart touches, little indications that you wanted to charm the reader, the lover, the observer in a very practiced, calculat ing way. That’s my honest reaction. Tell me where 1 might be wrong.”

“You’re wrong, Larry,” said Gary.

Then Gilmore laughed. “Shit, ain’t nothing calculating about that. I get lonely. I like language, but I tell the truth. In jail you rap a lot, you know, to pass the time. Damn near every convict has his little collection of reminiscences, anecdotes, stories, and a person can get sorta practiced at recollecting. You probably got a few yarns you spin on occasion yourself. You know, you gotta go to dinners and different things and, ah, talk to different people, Larry, so you’ve probably got your favorite little stories yourself. The fact that you tell something more than once to more than one person doesn’t make that thing a lie.” Gilmore paused. “Larry, I do emphasize things • • • I’ve spent a: lot of time in the hole, and in the hole you can’t see the guy you’re talking to, ‘cause he’s in the cell next door or down the line from you. So, it just becomes necessary to. , • make yourself clear and heard because there might be other conversations going on and .a lot of other noise, guards rattling keys and doors. Think about that, you know.”

“I am not so sure,” said the question, “that you remember truth of your early childhood.”

In a different voice Gilmore answered, “Do you remember truth of your early childhood, Larry?” “You’ve said,” continued the question, “that your mother’s was always strong, constant, and consistent, strange adjectives, the way, to describe a mother’s love.”

“I don’t think,” said Gilmore, “they’re strange. I don’t

your question.”

“I don’t think,” the question came back, “that I’ve ever ‘strong, constant, and consistent’ employed in such usage before.”

“You probably haven’t,” answered Gilmore, “but have you asked anybody about their mother before?”

“My impression, Gary, based on talking to others in your family, and based on listening to your voice on these tapes — is that you may have been treated rather cruelly when you were a small child. There are people in the family who say that efforts were made by your grandparents to assume custody of you. That you came at an awk ward moment in your mother’s life and that she seemed to resent you, when you were small. Is there any truth to any of this?”

“Not that I know of, Larry,” Gilmore replied.

“What kind of son is it, after all,” continued the question, “who does these things you do, and in so doing takes a very beautiful revenge against all those who have failed to love him enough. Maybe that’s psychoanalytical bullshit, and if so, I stand accused, but I am yearning to understand how this well-loved young boy grew up to reward his mama with the life you’ve lived. I think, Gary, that you have been exacting revenge against something that happened to you when you were too small to fight it off. Another reason I am tempted to believe this, is that when the conversation turns to any question where emotion is involved, a trace of a stutter appears in your voice.”

“Dat, dat, dat, dat,” Gilmore snickered.

“You begin,” the question continued, “talking like a reformed stutterer. I don’t think you’re a man without feelings. I think you’re a man who somehow can’t bear to admit what his feelings are.”

There was quite a pause before Gilmore replied. “Larry, I swear to God that I cannot recall, and I have a terrific memory, my morn ever hitting me. I don’t think she ever even so much as spanked me. She always loved and believed in me. Fuck what everybody in the family says. I have a beautiful mother. Fuck what everybody in the family says. I have a beautiful mother. I repeated that because of the background noise. I don’t know if you can hear it on the tape, but I can.”

Gary stopped reading for a moment. “Some feelings are per sonal,” he said to Moody. “Christ, the guy wants to x-ray me publicly. Shit.”

Moody said, “I think he’s just trying to find out the facts.”

“Dammit,” said Gilmore, “Larry’s probably trying to bring me a bit of anger here, so I might answer a little more spontaneously.”

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THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG

He went on with the interview, he read the rest of the questions, but nothing further developed. Gilmore did not get excited again.

Barry felt as if he had thrown his best punch and the man taken it. Maybe the mother was not the sore spot. He gave up hope of a breakthrough. The Playboy interview would have to be structed out of materials at hand plus whatever more came in on Moody-Stanger local.

After the interview, Sam Smith had a conversation with about a last-minute appeal. The Warden was worried that if changed his mind at the very end, there would be no mechanism stop the execution. Smith thought the lawyers ought to inform more of that.

Gary did not even care to discuss it. “There are no

take,” he told Moody and Stanger. Wouldn’t even authorize them have another conversation about it. The lawyers decided it unlikely Gary was going to change his mind and, ff he did, they didn’t see how the Warden could avoid contacting the Governor, matter what he said now.

Sam Smith also consulted Earl Dorius. Should Gilmore hooded? The man wanted, he said, to be able to stand ut executioners. However, Smith remarked, he had to think of what best for the firing squad. The hood was for their benefit just Who wanted to stare down his sights at a man staring back? Smith said, What if the fellow lost his nerve at the last minute started dodging bullets?

By his reading of the statute, Dorius said, the details

were up to the discretion of the Warden. If Sam wished, could be strapped in a chair with a hood over his head.

GILMORE Warden didn’t come right out and say it, but I believe concerned that my standing and looking at the firing squad will

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nerve them. I asked him for a good reason why I had to wear the hood, and he couldn’t give me one, but he seemed to be thinking about something. Listen, he did say right in front of Fagan, he said, usually they come to your cell, put the hood on you there, and you wear the hood from the tme you leave your cell till you’re dead. He said he would not do that to me, he said he wouldn’t put the hood on me until after I’m in the chair. Now I want the son of a bitch to keep his word on that at least.

Gilmore was certainly showing them how cool he could be. The only newspaper story that irritated him lately was the one that de scribed him as nervous. If Gary was anything, he was not that. Moody would query him all the time. “Aren’t you scared?” he would ask. “No,” Gilmore would say. Never once did he admit fear. Never once was there anything to suggest he wanted to change his mind. His lack of wavering became unbelievable to Moody. Gilmore seemed to be backing his intentions with every cell in his body. Not only was his emotional strength increasing, but his physical. “How

do you feel?” Bob Moody would ask. “Did you sleep? I slept good

last night.” “How’s exercise?” “I’m building myself.”