Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [240]
It was mind-blowing for Tamera. Her friends were always kidding her for being such an emotional person, and Tamera always thought she had to be one of the most divided people in existence. So active and true-believing a Mormon on the one hand, such crazy impulses on the other. Why, to anyone but herself, she would have been a mess. To grow up with the Doctrine of Covenants, and believe all of it to this day, yet go hog wild over the Rolling Stones. Her roommates at BYU used to say that if she didn't gush, she'd overflow-such lava inside. Now, to get handed this story. It was the biggest story she'd ever come near, yet at the same time she was worried stiff over Nicole.
Tamera hadn't planned on prying. But now she had to ask questions.
"What about the kids?" she wanted to know.
Nicole looked like she would cry. She didn't, she confessed, treat them nearly as good as she wanted to. Tamera asked if she and Gary talked a lot about this suicide, and Nicole said, "That's all we ever talk about."
Tamera was burning to do the story.
On the street, outside Nicole's little apartment building, they could see a van from a Salt Lake TV station. Sure enough, no sooner did they get on the stairs that led to the second floor, when a reporter rushed out of a waiting car. "You Nicole Barrett?" he asked. "I'm her sister," Nicole said. "No, you're Nicole," the reporter insisted. She looked back calmly. "I'm her sister. She's up at the prison." "I recognize you," the reporter said. "No, I'm the sister." She and Tamera walked away, strolled down the balcony and into her apartment. The moment the door was shut, they began to laugh. It emboldened Tamera to ask a little later if she could write the story after all.
The way it happened was that Nicole had gotten out some of Gary's drawings, and Tamera thought they were awfully talented.
She said people ought to know more about Gary's life. It was a good argument to use, and Tamera believed it. In fact, looking at the pictures, she felt he must have an intense inner life. Those drawings were so sorrowful and so controlled.
Sitting there, she told Nicole about the convict who had been her boy friend. Tamera had interviewed him at Provo City Jail while she was still at BYU. Had walked in and here was this guy in a cell, nice, warm and good looking. All he'd done was steal a bunch of credit cards and cameras and stuff. She had fallen in love right off the bat, and when they sent him to Kentucky, she got truly nailed. He wrote magnificent love letters. She corresponded with him for a year and a half. Sometimes she got as many as seven letters a day. It was the nearest thing to filling the space her father's death had left. Those letters kept saying, Wow, you're so beautiful, and I've never met anyone like you, your understanding and your patience has overcome me. Wow, wow, wow, went his letters.
She told Nicole how she'd even taken a bus to Kentucky after he sent her money, and for a week spent six hours a day visiting him.
Her family thought she was off her rocker, but that had been precious time.
It was a Minimum Security prison, and they sat on the lawn and read together out of books, and she had never felt as close to anybody in her life. Her roommates were agog when she got back. They fixed her up with a nice guy for her birthday, but after she returned to the apartment and said good night to the date, all seven of her roommates jumped out of the bedroom. They were all wearing T-shirts with her boy friend's prison number across them. They flashed water pistols, kidnapped her, and took her out to this restaurant. She guessed she was kind of a legend at BYU. Her roommates even took pride in the way they had learned how to handle it. "Never know what's going to happen next to Tammy's life," they learned to say smugly.
When her boy friend got out of prison, he came back to Provo and got a job as a carpenter. About three weeks later, he took Tamera's car, loaded it up with everything he could take out of her house and the