The Executioner's Song (53 page)

Can’t say, ‘Go back to your bunk ‘cause I’m tired of looking at your face’? They don’t play around, do they?” He nodded at Gilmore and Gibbs. “All right, I’ll move you to the hole, Powers. Gary, here, has two murder charges. He don’t need no more.”

“Just get me out,” said Powers. “Just put me in the hole.”

After the transfer, Big Jake said, “I’d like to bring him here some night, and have you guys work on ‘him. We can’t do it, and he could

sure use it.”

Gibbs knew Gary didn’t want to say no. It wOuld hurt future ne gotiations for getting Nicole into his cell. Still, Gary said, “I won’t, Jake. Powers is a prisoner like me. I can’t work for you guys.”

“Well,” sai Big Jake, “that’s cool.”

Next morning, they took Gary over to the nuthouse for a psychia tric, and he came back late for lunch. Big Jake gave him a Ding-Dong extra from the kitchen consisting of a double sandwich and a couple of pickles, plus a piece of fresh fruit. Gary said, “Hey, I really appreciate that.”

Big Jake said, “Don’t bother, Gary, it’s not mine to do you a real favor.”

They got playful that afternoon. A nothing-to-lose kind of mood. Some pats of butter were left from Gibbs’s midday meal, and they decided to flip the stuff through the bars. The idea was to see who could make the biggest splotch on the corridor wall.

Luis came back to investigate the laughter. “Geelmore and Geebs,” he said, “you mees meal!” He got two trustees to clean up, and Geelmore and Geebs laughed so hard they got stomach cramps. “Luis,” said Gary, “is a tad bit retarded.”

No dinner was served that evening. Around eight-thirty Luis came back with a pot of coffee looking like he felt a little sorry for them.

Gary asked, “Luis, are you married?”

The guard nodded.

“Do you have any naked pictures of your wife?”

Luis was shocked. “No,” he answered.

“Well,” said Gary, “do you want to buy some?”

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It took a couple of seconds. Then Luis shouted, “Geelmore, Geebs, I tired of your chit!” He slammed the door in the corridor.

Goddamn, thought Gibbs, that wetback is the only toy we got.

INSANITY

Would he, at least, testify for Gary in the Mitigation Hearing, Snyder and Esplin asked.

Yes, said Woods, he could find his way clear to doing that. But, he warned, with the best will in the world, what could he offer in good professional conscience that the District Attorney would not be able to reduce?

They did not ask him if he liked Gary, and if they had, he might not have replied, but the answer he could have given was, Yes, I think I do like Gary. I may even like him a little more than I want to.

Woods felt he understood a few of Gilmore’s obsessions. Getting up in the middle of the trestle and racing the train or standing on the railing of the top tier in prison were impulses familiar to Woods. He sometimes believed he had gone into psychiatry so one hand could keep a grip on the other.

Hell, if Gilmore were a free man, Woods might have taken him on a reck climb. That is, he might have, if he were still doing it. Woods felt again the swoop of his last long fall on an ice face. That had ended climbing. The guy with him had almost been killed in a cre vasse. So Woods knew the depression that came when you ceased making crazy bets. He also knew the logic to making them in the first place. No psychic reward might be so powerful as winning a dare with yourself.

If you were really scared, and went threugh it, and came out on the other side intact, then it was hard not to believe for a little while that you were on the side of the gods. It felt as if you could do no wrong. Time slowed. You were no longer doing it. For good or ill, it was doing it. You had entered the logic of that other scheme where death and life had as many relations as Yin and Yang.

That was the identification Woods felt. Gilmore had also felt compelled to take a chance with his life. Gilmore had been keeping in touch with something it was indispensable to be in touch with. Woods knew all about that, and it depressed him. Looking back on the times he had seen Gilmore at the hospital, he felt uneasy at the reserve he had maintained between them, even felt shame that he had never had a real conversation with the man.

After a while, he did get Gilmore to talk a little about the mur ders, but it was no ,help. Gilmore seemed genuinely perplexed over his behavior. Kept going back to his feeling of being under water. “Lot of strange things,” he would say. “You know, it was inevitable.”

This vagueness impressed Woods as pretty straight, h convict trying to convince you he was insane would give more of a picture show. Instead, Gilmore gave the impression of a man who was quiet, thoughtful, cornered, and living simultaneously in many phces.

On the other hand, Gilmore had been in seclusion all the way. That had been altogether against Woods’s ideas of treatment, for it cut off interaction with the other patients. They had a new brand of therapy to offer at this hospital and he was all for giving Gilmore some of it. The prison authorities, however, had only agreed to transfer Gilmore from County Jail for these two-and three-day visits if he were kept in lockup all the way. So there you were. A man who had spent nearly all of his last twelve years locked up every night in a cell the size of a bathroom, was still being locked up.

In addition, they had all been concerned, himself included, that no error be made with the guy, so they kept seeing him in pairs. Later, he heard Gilmore had said, “One thing I have against Woods

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is that he never talks to me alone.” Yes, Woods thought, I really kept my distance.

Of course, he knew why. Becoming a psychiatrist had left Woods in a funny place, philosophically speaking. He did not like to stir his doubts. His own contradictions, once set moving, had a lot of mo mentum. Woods hadn’t had, after all, the kind of upbringing that tended to land you in the psychiatric establishment.

Woods’s father had been a hell of a football player in college, and tried to raise his son to be more of the same. Woods grew up on a ranch, but his father made sure there was a football around, and he was one son who spent his boyhood running out for passes. As soon as his hands were large enough, he was pulling them in over his shoulder. When he got through high school, there was an athletic scholarship at the University of Wyoming.

At Wyoming, the real talent seemed to be imported from the East. Woods got the idea that just as the greatest potatoes grew in digenously in Idaho, so football players came naturally from Pennsyl vania and Ohio. Woods had always thought he was pretty good and pretty big and pretty crazy until those eastern football players came in from the mill towns. Six of those Polacks, Bohunks, and Italians shared the same gift all freshman year. It wasn’t that they couldn’t have others, it was that they liked keeping it in the family. It was bet ter that way. One of those monsters, right out of the middle of defen sive line, got so tired one night of being turned down by a new date that he proceeded to urinate on her.

Another night, with a lot of snow on the ground, a group of them took off in two cars for a ride through the mountains. A bottle of booze for each car. On the way back, in a snowstorm, the lead vehicle came around a curve, went into a skid, and smashed into a snow bound Chewy by the side of the road. There were only two football players in the first collision, and they jumped out into the middle of the highway. Woods, in the second car, following at high speed, came around the same turn and went into the ditch to avoid hitting

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them. The two from the first car and the three in the second got together and lifted Woods’s car onto the read again. That felt so good that the fellows from the first car now ripped their license plates off, and pushed the vehicle over the mountain and into the ravine. It struck on rocks with the great noise of thunder, and made soft deep sounds like the wind when it plowed through deep snow. They watched with the awe attending large events.

Of course the car they had smacked into was a mess. So they decided to roll it down the highway. Woods tried to talk them out of that. Right in the middle, he could not. get over the fact that he, with his own big reputation to maintain, was being the peacemaker.

He failed. They set that wreck rolling. A police car coming up the grade just avoided a head-on collision. Some rich alumnus settled the cost. One did not lose five talented sophomores for too little.

Woods never starred. After a while he was too scared. You could get maimed out there. The coach he liked moved on, and the new coach disapproved of the hours Woods had to give to pre-med labs. Told him to switch to Phys. Ed. Woods didn’t. He never starred.

Nonetheless, he didn’t have any illusions about the scope of the problem. There were two kinds of human beings on earth and maybe he had been placed to know both kinds. The civilized had their small self-destructive habits and their controlled paranoia, but they could live in a civilized world. You could tinker with them on the couch. It was the uncivilized who caused the discomfort in psychiatric circles.

Woods had long suspected the best-kept secret in psychiatric circles was that nobody understood psychopaths, and few had any notion of psychotics. “Look,” he would sometimes be tempted to tell a colleague, “the psychotic thinks he’s in contact with spirits from other worlds. He believes he is prey to the spirits of the dead. He’s in terror. By his understanding, he lives in a field of evil forces.

“The psychopath,” Woods would tell them, “inhabits the same place. It is just that he feels stronger. The psychopath sees himself as a potent force in that field of forces. Sometimes he even believes he can go to war against them, and win. So ff he really loses, he is close to collapse, and can be as ghost ridden as a psychotic.”

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For a moment, Woods wondered if that was the way to build a bridge from the psychopathic to the insane.

But he always came back to the difficulty. The speech was of no legal use to Snyder and Esplin. You could not appear in court with spirits from other worlds.

There did remain one legitimate possibility. In the record from Oregon State Penitentiary was Dr. Wesley Weissart’s psychiatric entry for November 1974:

IT IS MY IMPRESSION THAT AT THIS TIME GILMORE IS IN A PARANOID STATE, SO THAT HE IS UNABLE TO DETERMINE WHAT HIS BEST INTERESTS ARE. HE IS TOTALLY UNABLE TO CONTROL HIS HOSTILE AND AGGRESSIVE IMPULSES… . I FEEL COMPLETELY JUSTIFIED IN GIVING GILMORE MEDICATION AGAINST HIS WISHES AS HE CREATES A SERIOUS PROBLEM TO THE PATIENTS AND TO THE ENTIRE INSTITUTION.

That was the unclean report to which Dr. Kiger referred when the staff interviewed Gilmore. “Why,” asked Woods, of Snyder and Esplin, “don’t you get that doctor down here to testify.

Gary didn’t want him, that was why. Gary had said: Of all the dirty, mean, rotten sons of bitches. He did not want to be evaluated by that man.

Woods said even if they had to go to Oregon and rope the fellow, they ought to get him for the trial.

It was very hard, they replied, to get a person to respond to a subpoena if he lived out of the state. Woods said, “Man, that seems critical to me.”

Snyder and Esplin called Weissart, but he told them he did not wish to be involved. They received the impression that, if he had to get on the stand, he would say that Gilmore might be four-plus para noiac, but was not, in the legal sense, psychotic. Another dead end.

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Woods had seen the difference between experienced trial lawyers and young attorneys. It was a hell of a difference. He said to them as diplomatically as he could, Why don’t you get somebody else in on this who can pull some shots? He couldn’t get across. They kept on trying to get some evaluation of Gary as a victim of mental illness.

Actually, Woods did hate Prolixin. He saw it as incarceration within the incarceration. One morning he even woke up exhausted from the ardors of a dream thai had him conducting a cross-examination:

QUESTION What was his dosage?

ANSWER Fifty milligrams a week, that’s pretty much an average, standard dose.

QUESTION But he swelled up under it, didn’t he?

ANSW.R Well, they get side effects from all these antipsychotic drugs. The more potent the drug, the more apt they are to develop side effects. Prolixin causes many more side effects than Thorazine.

QUESTION What would be the advantage then of using Prolixin?

ANSWER You’d only have to give him medicine one time a week,

rather than try to give it to him every day.

QUESTION It’s really a matter of administering it.

ANSWER That’s right.

QUESTION If yOU have a saddle a bad horse, you want to be able to

do it once a week, not twice a day,

ANSWER That’s right. Prolixin is the only drug out now that we can give at infrequent intervals. Everything else has to be given hourly, two or three times a day, or daily.

QUESTION What were Gilmore’s side effects?

ANSWER He had a real severe reaction. Oh, as I recall, he had swell ing in his feet and it was difficult to get his shoes on, he had trouble walking and his hands swelled, he really had a severe reaction.

QUESTION How long did it last?

ANSWER Well, let me put it this way, that’s a long-acting drug, Prolixin, you give a shot today, probably there will be some of that same shot in his system maybe six or eight weeks from now. That’s why, if

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