Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [222]
He had, explained Bessie, his studies. After this reply, there was a crevasse of ice between the Bishop and herself.
She heard the voices talking of the financial situation. The home, if you included the expense of keeping it up, would not be worth what it would cost to buy back the arrears on the taxes. They told her again that the grounds to the house were ill kept, and choked with weeds, and her sons had not kept it up. She felt able to kill. She didn't like someone telling her what her sons ought to do. Nor those voices saying that the wise course was to find a mobile home she could live in and handle.
Of all the people, she said to herself, who ever hurt me, it's been only Mormons, nobody else ever could. She remembered the terrible hatred in Gary's face on the day she told him in the visiting room at Oregon State that the Church never helped her to save the house.
There was a look in his eyes then as if he had found an enemy worthy of his stature.
Now, she was in the trailer sitting in the dark, TV not on, radio not on, her legs in wrapping, and her nightgown looking like it was a hundred and two years old. She could hear the boy from the Mormon Church rapping on the door, breaking the silence, the boy who came over to help her. He would do the dirty dishes that were all over the table and all over the sink, pick up after the trail of the immediate past of the day before, and the five days before, all that record of living from day to day through the twisting of her limbs. Sometimes she would sit and not reply to the boy's knock, sit in the dark, and feel him looking through the panes of the door to see if he could find her shadow sitting there. Finally, she would say, "Go away."
"I love you, Bessie," the Mormon boy would tell her through the door, and leave on his rounds to help another old lady even as Benny Bushnell once had done.
"Gary cannot want to die," she would say to herself in the dark.
Nov. 2-76
Milw. Oregon
Gary Gilmore
No. 3871
Dear Gary:
I heard the news at noon, and Gary, my dear, I could hardly stand it. I love you & I want you to live.
Gary, Mikal loves you and he is your friend & you know I wouldn't lie to you. He took this real hard but he will try very hard to help you.
If you have 4 or 5 people who really love you, you are lucky. So please hold on.
Here is a picture of me and Mikal taken in Salt Lake City years ago.
I love you,
MOTHER
3
Mikal had never told Bessie how much rage Gary amused in him by his murders. It could've been me, was his thought back in July when he first heard the news.
Mikal worked in a record store. While he was the envy of his friends for being able to pick up new releases at 30 percent off, he also had to throw dope peddlers and ass peddlers out of the store. He wasn't necessarily ready for that. One time, a shoplifter pulled a knife on him. Another time he almost got wasted by a big drunk who was urinating in the doorway. The violence of Portland licked right up to the edge of the store and left a spew like that yellow foam on city beaches where old rubber dries out with jellyfish and whiskey bottles and the dead squid.
If Mikal's life was seen by some as the attempt of one Gilmore boy to get out from the family hex, that was not necessarily Mikal's attitude. He had a simpler view. He had just been afraid of Gary for years. Mikal, reading the headline on that one terrible July night, OREGON MAN HELD IN UTAH SLAYING, felt shame. "It could have been me." He could have been the same victim of the same mindless robbery. He hated his brother then. His brother had no respect for the horrors of waste. His brother did not know that when you robbed a house, you ruined it for the people who were living there.
Next day, Bessie had said to Mikal, "Can you imagine what it feels like to mother a son whom you love, when he has deprived two other mothers of their sons?" Mikal did not know how to tell her he was frightened of the violent and capricious impulses of