Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [147]
It certainly wasn't like sex had been with Gary. The moment something good happened with him, when it did, why it traveled to her heart and started to build, as if she was some goof-ass bird making a nest. When she went to visit Gary, therefore, she never thought of Tom or Cliff, or Barrett, or any incidental party. One life on Earth, another on Mars.
It wouldn't have been the worst way to live if not for those horrible depressions. Sometimes it would get real what she had done to Gary, and what he had done. Whenever she let herself think of the death penalty, everything started to get unreal.
Death would sit in her thoughts. Except it was more as if she was sitting in death, and it was a big armchair. She could sit back. The chair would begin to go upside-down, but slowly, until she felt the kind of nausea you get on one of those twisty carnival rides where you can't tell if you're excited or ready to throw up. Even when the thoughts stopped, she still felt as if she was spinning.
Sure I miss the sunlite and the air! I'm already losing my tan. Before long I'll be paler than a ghost. In fact, before long, I may be a ghost.
4
After a couple of weeks, they began to move Gary back and forth from the jail to the mental hospital. It was a two-mile transfer. He would be taken from the west end of town up Center Street past the hardware stores and clothing stores, and ice-cream parlors, to the east end, where you got nearer to the mountain, and the road came to an end in those foothills in which Nicole had run naked in the grass. Now he was at her old nuthouse, Utah State Hospital. A different ward, of course.
One thing was better there. They could have contact visits. Not the way it was at the jail, where he was taken to a little room and she stood on the other side, trying to see him through a thick mesh tough enough to keep minks and raccoons from breaking out. Their fingertips could hardly touch through the tough mean little holes. All the while they were talking, every noise of the jail was going on behind her. She would stand right out in the dirty old entrance with guards and trustees and delivery men and what-all yelling back and forth, straining to hear Gary's voice, a loud radio or TV always on. One prisoner or another was usually shouting in the main tank. It was like you had to fight for what you could hear.
At the hospital, it was different. They were in a little room together. She would sit on his lap and he would grip her, and they would kiss for five minutes, far out on the other side of sex, as if it was her soul taking the trip rather than any juice starting to flow. They were kissing from one heart to the other-not sex, but love. Right on the wing.
Then they would land. They were in a bare room, cement-brick walls painted yellow, four inmates looking at them. Trying not to look at them. That was the posse, Gary would explain. He would say it in a clear voice, his snottiest voice, clear enough for the inmates to hear, say that they had put him among a flock of sheep who were hell-bent on policing each other. "A herd mentality," he would say. "The posse can't even talk to you unless there's two of them around. One to snitch on what the other just said."
The four fellows in the posse took it different ways. One might grin like an asshole, another would look as if he was measuring Gary for some lumps, the third was depressed, and the fourth real eager, like he wanted to explain to Nicole how the patient program worked in this hospital.
She picked