The Executioner's Song (3 page)

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.

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 mamed to such a big tail dude.”

Later, Toni would tell Brenda how good and wise Howard had been for saying, “Go over and meet Gary without The.” 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

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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 25o pounds.

Gary tried and reached x2o. He went crazy and squeezed the

scales until he was shaking. The needle went to I5o. “Yeah,” said Johnny, “you’re improving.” “What’s the highest you’ve gone?” asked Gary,

“Oh,” said Johnny, “the scale stops at 28o, but I’ve taken it past there. I suppose 3o0.”

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.

THE FIRST WEEK ] 19

“It sure has changed,” said Gary.

Overhead was the immense blue of the strong sky of the Amer ican 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

o I THE EXECUTIONER’S SON

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 obse.rved. 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.

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THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG

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 permis sion.”

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.”

“Ľeah,” 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 re verberation. All day Gary worked, cracking the curbing with overhead blows, then prying chunks out, inch by inch, with the crowbar. Be fore 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 table cloth, 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. Con sidering 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. Vem 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 blis ters on his hand as large as Vern’s fingernails. Ida insisted on ban daging his palms, but Gary was acting like a kid — a man don’t wear bandages-and took them off real quick.