Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [324]
God, they could draw maps on how to be an asshole. If you left a pack of cigarettes sitting around and somebody stole a couple, that started tension. Who did it? Can I trust you? So they would vote that you couldn't carry your own cigarettes any more. Somebody else had to dish them out. Like you could only get one on the hour, every hour.
Nicole developed this ability to sit through a meeting and not hear a word. She had to. When she took a bath, three girls stayed in the room to watch her.
Must have been afraid she'd go down the drain. When she talked to Woods, she tried to run a line on him about all the nice things she was going to do when she got out. Some of it was real, some was made-up, but she would talk about getting away from Utah or going to school. She wanted, she told him, to take real care of Sunny and Jeremy. She put on such a good act, that after a while, it wasn't that she wanted to live exactly, it was that she wasn't so sure she wanted to die. You couldn't keep being enthusiastic about all these groovy things you were going to do when you got out, and not begin to wonder a little. Way inside, the enthusiasm didn't always feel completely phony.
She tried to make Woods believe she was ready to live without Gary. She never once said it without also saying to herself, "I'm putting the man on." Yet, she could also hear herself saying, "Keep it up. You'll believe it, too."
They had this rule you couldn't sleep without a nightgown. She hated that. Always liked to sleep with nothing on. One night, she slipped her nightgown off under the covers. Damn if three girls didn't come down on her to put it back. All through the night, there'd be a girl taking her turn in a chair to keep a watch on Nicole.
She felt as if slowly, real slow, but real sure, they were smothering her soul. Sometimes it would come over her right in a meeting.
She would be sitting in a line of girls, listening to them bitch and holler and would put her head on her knees and never even look up, once, never react to anything going on. Just sit through a meeting with her head on her knees crying away. Nobody paid any attention. There was always one girl or another off like that, Goddamnedest government she ever saw, half the kids crying, and the others half passing laws or standing up to make speeches full of bullshit. A lot of them wouldn't even remember what they started to say. They'd argue about how you got the floor in the first place, when, in fact, they were sitting on the floor already. And they'd rat on each other. One girl would say, "You were having eye language with Billy," and the other would say, "I wasn't." "Fuck you, you were."
Nicole wanted to say, "You goddamned idiots, I don't care what any of you do. You're all so dumb you think I'm sick. It doesn't matter. Even if you think I'm crazy, this is the way I want to be. I don't want to change." Then, she would realize she was never going to hear Gary's voice again.
Chapter 17
I AM THE LAND LORD HERE
Gibbs wrote to Gary and said he was coming up for trial around the twentieth of December. He figured he'd be released, and wanted to know if there was anything Gary wanted done before he left the state, because he wouldn't be hanging around. He was going, he wrote, to show Utah what Mae West had showed Tennessee. Her ass, as she was leaving.
On December 11th, Big Jake brought Gibbs out to the front desk where an older fellow with a mustache was waiting. He walked with a cane and carried a briefcase. This gentleman introduced himself as Gary's uncle, Vern Damico, and said Gary had asked him to deliver a token of his friendship. Then he opened his briefcase and handed over a check made out by a local law firm for two thousand bucks.
Gibbs asked if Gary's mother was financially taken care of, and when Mr. Damico said she was, they shook hands. Gibbs introduced Mr. Damico to Big Jake, and said here was the only jailer Gary had any respect for. Mr. Damico replied, "Yes, Gary has