Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [137]
She said, "Well, there has to be a mistake. Gary did not do this. No matter what else, he is not a killer." She hung up, and the phone rang again, and it was Ida to tell her that the blood kept spurting out of Mr. Bushnell and she and Vern had seen it. Bess felt she would never get over that description. Then Vern got on the phone and said, "They have a death penalty here. They're going to kill Gary." It was all Bess could take. Execution had always been a phobia to her. She couldn't go near the thought. When she was a little girl growing up in Utah, she would hide if she heard they were having an execution.
After Vern's message, she kept the news to herself. She told Frank Jr., when he came into town, but not Mikal, her youngest son. One morning he called, and said, You sound like you've been crying, and Bess said, I have a cold. He said, I'm going to come out and spend the day with you. She said, You read about Gary, and he said, Yes, he had heard about it.
She kept thinking of the time in the fall of '72 when they let Gary out of OSP to study in art school. He was going to live in a halfway house up at Eugene, and be given furloughs. The first day, right out, Gary dropped in on Bess for the afternoon, and spent the evening. The next morning he went to the store to get eggs for breakfast, and asked her if it was all right to bring back a six-pack. She said sure. So he sat there and talked through the morning while drinking the beer. They felt very close. She fixed his breakfast and said, "That's the first time we spent the night under the same roof for a long time, Gary." He said, "Sure is." In fact, it was close to ten years. He drank his beer and said he had to leave. Had to get to the art school in Eugene.
After he was gone, she remembered that last time ten years ago in 1962 when they had been alone together. She and Gary were Johnny Cash fans, and so he brought all his records down from upstairs and they listened all day long. Now the records made her too sad, and she would turn off the radio when a song by Johnny Cash came on.
A few nights later in that same fall of '72, Gary pulled in with a car, and said he'd like to take her to dinner. She told him she was not dressed and it was pretty late, so he stayed and talked a long time. A couple of nights later, she noticed the police were sitting outside her trailer, and wouldn't say anything to her. That was when she knew a lot had gone wrong.
Next morning, a neighbor gave a buzz and asked, "Was that your son they picked up for armed robbery?" "No," Bessie replied, "but what paper was it in?" The woman told her and Bess said, "I'll look it up." When she found the story, she cried till she was sick. One more river in the million tears she had cried over Gary.
Now, in the summer of '76, it was a nightmare. She kept thinking that if she had been able to get to Provo, Gary would never have killed those men. That first night in April when he called from Ida's house he had said, "I'm going to get a car, Mom, and get up to Portland, and bring you back." Bess had laughed, "Oh, Gary," she had said, "by now, I'm such a decrepit piece of work that they play the band when I get out to the street."
A few months before, while Gary was still in Marion, she had been sitting one night with her son Frank Jr., and started to cough up blood. They came for her in an ambulance and took her to surgery. Half of her stomach was removed. The aspirin she took to relieve her arthritis had perforated her ulcer. "The faster I fixed one end," she told a friend, "the more I was scraping on the other." Now she never passed through her door unless it was to walk the few steps to her landlady's trailer and pick up the mail. Still, she let Gary speak of how nice it would be to keep house in Provo, and she dreamed of it, until he wrote her about living with Nicole.
It had all been, she decided, part of the pleasures of thought, no more. She couldn't even keep the trailer in order. It looked as old and moldering