Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [138]
Just a week ahead of the murders, she had written a letter to Gary He must have received it just a day or two before those Mormon boys were killed. She had mentioned the house on Crystal Springs Boulevard that he liked living in when he was nine years old. That was the year he kept saying he wanted to be a priest. In the letter, she told him that they had torn down the house and put up an apartment building. One more memory you would not find.
Still, it was in the house on Crystal Springs Boulevard that Gary developed his fear of being beheaded. He was a daring kid, but he had this fear. There was a bedroom in that house he shared with Frank Jr., and the previous occupants must have put luminous paint on the wall because something would shine out pale green at night. Gary would holler, "Mom, I see that thing again." She would try to explain that it was paint and all right but they finally had to do the walls over. Then his dreams of being executed had begun. They had caused such fear. "He's been a frightened man," Bessie said to herself, "all his life."
Yes, Gary was a sad and lonely man, one of the most sad and one of the most lonely. "Oh, God," thought Bessie, "he was in prison so long, he didn't know how to work for a living or pay a bill. All the while he should have been learning, he was locked up."
It was hot in the trailer. Living with her news at the end of July, she felt she was breathing in a steam bath. One could sit still in Portland and lose weight. "When it's real hot in my trailer," she said aloud, "I can lose five pounds an hour." Of course, she only weighed 110. This shouldn't be Portland, she told the walls, but Africa. She felt like Portland would soon overgrow itself and wipe it all out. The heat was strong and terrible, a jungle. "I always knew it was too green when I first came here," she said to the walls.
There was a suction-type feeling inside the trailer. If anybody made the wrong move, it would all disintegrate.
2
One day when Gary was 22, in the year after his father had died, in that brief half-year of freedom and liberty when he was out of Oregon State Correctional Institute but not yet in Oregon State Prison to serve the twelve and a half years he would be sentenced for armed robbery, in that same brief half-year when they had spent a day listening to Johnny Cash, Bess came back to the house one afternoon, the house on Oakhill Road with the small circle driveway that Frank had bought when their life was prosperous and settled, and there was Gary rooting in her desk. "I want to show you something," he said. He had found his birth certificate. His mother's name was on it, and his own birth date, but he and his father were there in plain sight as Fay Robert Coffman and Walt Coffman.
It was ironic because Frank had given the name to Gary. Fay for Frank's mother and Robert for Frank's son by an earlier marriage. Coffman came from not being born in Frank Gilmore territory, but rather in Walt Coffman land, which in this case was Texas, McCamey, Texas. Crossing certain state lines, Frank used to change his name. Bessie never knew if that was to get rid of an old trail or pick up a new one.
Of course, Bessie didn't allow Fay Robert for long. The people in the hotel suggested they rename him Doyle. Bess liked that, but Gary was better. She loved Gary Cooper. She and Frank had arguments over it. Gary was a name to remind him of Grady, and Grady was an ex-brother-in-law who had cheated him once.
Now, she and Gary didn't even raise their voices, but when he started to get unpleasant, Bessie said, "Don't you dare! You were in my desk without permission."
Gary said, "I never would have gotten this news with permission, would I?" When he said next, "No wonder the old man never liked me," Bessie replied, "Don't you ever, ever intimate that you are illegitimate."
It was only years later that Bessie found out Gary had known about his birth certificate for a year and a half before she found him sitting at the desk in her green leather chair. His institutional counselor at Oregon State Correctional