The Executioner's Song (138 page)

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he decided, to a true description of everything that was not good be tween Gary and herself as to everything that had been good, until Schiller began to wonder if she had gone through hell and come back with one simple message, “Nothing is worse in all the world than the taste of bullshit in your mouth.”

Of course, sometimes the interviews went slowly. She would admit the most amazing matters, told him about Uncle Lee almost as soon as they started, but little admissions would bother her a lot and she would be embarrassed by the oddest things. Sometimes Schiller would have to wrestle with her most astonishing reluctance to pro vide a detail he considered trivial.

SCHILLER Now open the crack in the door a little bit, (long pause) NICOLE I Can’t, Larry.

SCHILLER You can talk about murder, you can talk about Gary chok ing you, you can talk about Uncle Lee molesting you, and you can’t talk about Barrett fucking around with your head?

NICOLE Yeah, I could probably. But I can’t just say specific things that he said.

SCHILLER Why not? (long pause) Is Barrett holier than thou?

NICOLE (laughs) Fuck you, Larry. I’m not going to talk about it. I’m not going to say what I don’t want to say.

SCHILLER You’re just doing that to prove that you’re stronger than me, that’s all.

NICOLE No, I’m not doing that to prove anything.

SCHILLER Yes, you are.

NICOLE I’m doing it because it embarrasses me.

SCHILLER How can you be embarrassed with me? Now come on. Do you want me to turn off the fucking tape recorder? Is that what’s embarrassing you? I don’t understand how you can be embarrassed with me. I really don’t.

NiCOLE Good. You never will. (pause)

SCHILLER Come on, I’ve got to understand this. I’ve got to have an example of it. Because it comes up all the time. Come on, don’t play games with me. Come on.

NICOLE (laughs) Oh, God. (whispers)

SCHILLER “Oh, God,” come on.

NICOLE Larry, I’m trying. I can’t say it, all right? I’m really trying. I

can’t. Forget it.

SCHILLER I’m not going to forget it. I’m not going to forget it. NICOLE Okay. Another time.

SCHILLER I need to know it this time. Not another time. Give me one example. I meanl you’re off there in Midway because of what Barrett did with your goddamned head.

NICOLE (laughs) I didn’t say Barrett was the cause of anything that happened on Midway.

SCHILLER No, you didn’t say he was the cause. You said he made you feel a certain way. By things he said to you.

NICOLE Yes.

SCHILLER Don’t give me that smile. (laughs) Don’t give me that smile. You’re looking out there, you know. And then you turn around and give me that little smile.

NICOLE (laughs) I’m laughing at you.

SCHILLER What?

NICOLE I’m laughing at you.

SCHILLER ‘Cause I’m so naive?

NICOLE No.

SCHILLER ‘Cause I don’t have the experience to fantasize or im agine?

NICOLE NO, it has nothing to do with that. It’s that you don’t give up

and you keep sneaking back. sCmLLER I’m a little sneak, right? NICOLE Yes, sometimes. (long pause)

SCHILLER YOU were fucking around. What got you fucking around

on Midway?

NICOLE (long sigh; longer pause; another sigh; still more pause—chuckling to herself) Whatever got me fucking around I don’t know, but there’s one thing I know, I’ve always known it and I just haven’t even thought about it for quite a while. (pause) 1 got into this cycle or something of picking up guys that either had never had a piece of ass or guys that were … you know, that hadn’t had

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SCHILLER Good lay?

NICOLE Yeah.

SCHILLER Right.

NICOLE Just there staying away from good-looking guys, guys that looked like they could get just about any sweet piece of ass they wanted.

SCHILLER Right. And you went after the guy that looked like he

hadn’t gotten laid or never had a good piece.

NICOLE Right.

SCHILLER And what was the motive?

NICOLE (long sigh) Goddammit, you’re the shrink. No, you’re not,

right, I know it, I know it.

SCHILLER What was the motive?

NICOLE You just ask me so I’ll tell you. It’s really obvious to you,

though, isn’t it?

SCHILLER No, so help me GOd, it’s not.

NICOLE I can’t believe that.

SCHILLER It’s the truth, kid. So help me.

NICOLE Aw, that innocent voice.

SCHILLER ‘Cause if I knew … (laughs) Now just listen to me, Nicole. If I knew, I’d say it, and I’d ask you to confirm it. You stop and think the way I work with you. It’s the truth.

NICOLE (little laugh; long pause) Well, okay, it was because Barrett had me convinced I wasn’t any good and so the, the only thing I could do was.., go with somebody that didn’t know what good was. SCHILLER You’re saying that Barrett had you convinced you were a lousy lay?

NICOLE Yeah.

When it came to interviewing, Schiller knew he had met his match. Maybe there wasn’t a disclosure he had gotten in his twenty years of media that hadn’t been built on some part of Bullshit Moun tain, but with Nicole he got along. He didn’t have to use tricks that often and it moved him profoundly. He took a vow that when and if his turn came to be interviewed on Gilmore, he would also tell the truth and not protect himself.

TO KISS AND TELL [ Io43

Now Schiller was certainly back with Stephie. He was in love. He was going to marry his princess. He saw it as belonging to the best vein of his luck. But he couldn’t believe the other side of his luck. It was that he was friends with a girl for the first time in his life. Something like affection for himself began to come into Schiller when he realized that the monumental gamble he had taken that Nicole would not commit suicide was probably going to win out. One of the reasons he could trust her not to take her life for too little over the weeks and months and years to come, was because of her friend ship for him. She wouldn’t do it to him for too little. So he went on with the interviews and at times was ready to cry in his sleep that he was a writer without hands.

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April joined the Baker family out on Malibu after a hard time in the hospital. The patients and staff, she announced, had really laid it on her, and banged her head on the wall. Books and newspapers kept coming in. It was horrible. She,kept reading all about Gary.

Now, at Malibu, she was still panicky. Out of her sleep she would cry, “Mama, are you all right? Are you sure you’re all right?” The night would go on.

In the daytime, April and Nicole would squabble. They had never gotten along. Things might get better, things might get worse, but certain things Kathryne could count on. One of them was that April and Nicole would spit like cats before the day was out.

Later that winter, Noall Wootton was having martinis with a couple of attorneys in the Sheriff’s Office of Salt Lake County, and one remarked, “These fellows still want me to prosecute Nicole for smug° gling pills in to Gilmore.” Noall Wootton said, “Bill, for hell’s sake, what’s that going to accomplish? Forget it.”

“Well,” said Bill, “I already have. I told them I declined it. I am

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not interested.” Under it all, Wootton would have loved to question Nicote to find out how she did get the pills in.

Sam Smith called Veto one day and wanted to know how they smuggled the liquor into the prison.

“You must be dreaming,” Vern told him. “I don’t know how.”

Sam called again. Tried to get him to open up. For some reason, it remained a mystery to Vern.

After the month in Malibu, Nicole decided she liked living in Los Angeles, with her kids, and so she took a house out in the San Fero nando Valley that didn’t cost too much. Just a shabby little ranch bungalow, five blocks from the very end of town. She could almost have been in Spanish Fork. The desert began down the street, and the mountain rose not a mile away. Nicole tried to keep the kids in day school, hold a job, and go to school herself, but it was a dull stretch. There was no man. There was nothing in her life.

She bought a camper with some of the money Gary had left her, and got a driving license, and went out to Utah and came back. She had not had sex since that night in October with the Sundowner in the middle of Gary’s trial, but late in April, returning from Utah, she picked up a hitchhiker. It had been a long, difficult stretch with all kinds of guys trying to make out, and Nicole had been wondering if she could go for the rest of her life without it. Being faithful left her feeling choked up and dull and bored and itchy and intense.

After she made love to the hitchhiker, she no longer felt Gary’s presence near. She didn’t feel it after that for a long time. Felt as if he had gone away. That left her depressed and close to dead. Still, she kept on having sex. It didn’t solve anything, but not having sex also solved nothing. Either way, she was not going to fall in love.

Still, sex left her feeling ugly. She tried to figure it out. She was the one who was living. If she had tension and could get rid of a little by making love to somebody, and then, once they were gone, even

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the memory of them was gone, and had nothing more to do with her, or her body, or her heart, or her memories, so where then was the treachery to GaiT?

Still, sex left her more and more out of touch with him. She was drifting in her heart. It was hard to get started on any program to improve herself. Larry told her she was smart enough to walk right out of the swamp by herself, but the truth was she felt lazy and was tempted to say, “Oh, fuck it, I’m in a swamp. I’ll stay here.”

The thought Nicole really wanted to lose was that there was no more Gary. It was a possibility she did not like to consider. It was too depressing to believe he might not be on the other side.

Several times that year, when friends would get to talking about Gilmore, Barry Farrell, in the course of the evening might volunteer a tape. People were curious to hear Gilmore’s voice. So Barry would play one of the cassettes, but listening to Gary’s voice would totally chill him out. The tapes were so interesting to other people that they never wanted him to turn them off.

Larry was now doing interviews with various people in Provo who had known Gary, and Lucinda kept typing the transcripts. After a couple of months when that job began to peter out, she went to work for David Frost who was doing a series of television interviews with Richard Nixon.

Lucinda did the work in Los Angeles, transcribing Frost’s tapes in an office building in Century City from four o’clock in the afternoon until about eight o’clock in the morning three days a week. There she was, locked in this empty skyscraper with Richard Nixon’s voice coming out of a tape recorder, and it was not nearly so interesting as Gary Gilmore. She kept hearing Gilmore’s voice, and in her

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mind, he sounded like a cowboy. Mean, gravelly, twangy, economical, boyish, vulnerable, full of love squeezed into tight little pellets.

A year after the execution, Kathryne Baker wrote to Schiller:

You know, Larry, I used to feel sorry for Gary, but what he’s done to my girls, what he’s still doing to them, well I could kill him a hundred times over-I live with Gary every day, the .fear of him in April, is driving us all trazy! when night comes for her, its a nightmare for ell of us. She is scared to death of the dark because “he’s out there with a gun killing people.” She doesn’t say Gary … only “He”—and she’s truely haunted—at 4 AM last week, hysterical, “He’s out there killing people, now he’s gone to kill more people —hurry, we got to get up there before He kills more!” this is hou, it is all the time—even in Her sleep—when She sleeps. It makes no difference if we are all here, She must be reassured all night that He can’t get in & kill us, no one sleeps the whole night because April wakes us every hour with “Are you allright mama — what are we going to do??!” I tell you Larry I hate Gilmore so bad I wish he was here so I could kill him! April … from the things she say’ s in her sleep & her panic at the sight of blood, I guess Gary’s shoes and pant-legs must have been covered with blood & brains, I guess so if the wall’s were splattered, I don’t know what to do anymore, I can’t talk to Sissy about her feelings towards Gary, she hides them, but will relate to music and cry long for Gary, it’s in poems —I can’t talk to April about Gary, because she don’t & won’t mention his name hardly ever—night before last in her sleep she said, “there he is with blood on him & that crazy look in his eyes.” nou, who, other than Gary would be tormenting her dreams! I know that crazy look in his eyes—it was there when he came after his gun, when he took April with him —sounds like I need a shrink too huh?? ha ha Well I don’t, I’m O.K. just need help infighting the ghost of Gilmore.

Nicole was sitting in her kitchen one morning in the small apartment she now rented in a small town in Oregon which was where she had wandered after L.A., and she was having coffee with the guy

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who had been with her the night before. She was reaching out for something on the table when all of a sudden her hand looked strange. She saw the ring of Osiris that Gary had given her, and it was broken. The setting had cracked.

She had built up a lot of control over all these months, but suddenly it just hurt so bad that she bawled right there at the table, two seconds after she saw the broken ring. It was the first real big cry she’d had about Gary in a long time, a month or so.