Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [341]
Well, Best wanted to admit him to the hospital, but Gibbs again said no. Instead, he left with a pain prescription for codeine, and one for Oral Varidase to break up the blood clots. Plus a cast. "You better hope," said Dr. Best, "that phlebitis doesn't set in." This was Gibbs's Christmas Day.
After the second suicide attempt, Campbell said to Gilmore, "Look, if you want to talk about the firing squad, I'll be your sounding board."
Gilmore said, "Aw, hell, we don't want to talk about that. We're just going to shoot this old half-drunk thief, you know," They would joke about it.
Once in a while, Gilmore would ask him what the other prisoners were thinking, but Cline did not tell him that more than a few were fed up with Gary Gilmore. It was because everything he did affected the affairs of other prisoners in Maximum. What with needing three guards for him, it even hurt the classroom schedule. Chow got delayed not once, but several times. When it was anything very big, like a suicide attempt, the place got locked up. The convicts were tired of all those hassles.
On the other hand, they never said Gary was crazy. He'd been in prison eighteen years. Everybody empathized with that.
Of course with Gary on death watch, that is not only on Death Row, but with a date to be executed, he had a whole three-cell section to himself. A suite. His own cell, the middle one, had solid walls on three sides and regular cell bars on the door. They let it stay open, however, and allowed him access to the short corridor facing the three cells. Of course, there was always a guard present. Gary could even walk up to the cellblock gate and look out on the main corridor and talk to any officer or prisoner walking by. Sometimes, in the late hours of the night, Father Meersman would visit, and Gilmore would bring a stool or sometimes just sit on the floor, his back against the bars, while Meersman would camp on a chair out in the main corridor.
They would converse through the bars. Everything around them was painted in a light, pastel green.
Whereas when Gary would be brought out to the visiting room to meet his lawyer or uncle, they would take him down the long main corridor of Maximum from which shorter corridors led off at right angles to the one-story cell blocks. At such times, as a precaution against escape, no other inmate would be in the main corridor. While Gary walked along, passing the barred gate to each cell block, the prisoners would see him coming, and call out, "Hey, Gary," or "Hang in there."
"Stay with it," they would yell.
Toward Christmas, Moody and Stanger went out to the prison every morning and then again every afternoon or evening. It got to the point where they had to assign the rest of their cases to other people in the office. They didn't mind that much Their feeling for Gary was definitely getting warmer. In fact, he soon had them on another mission.
There was a murderer named Belcher in the cell block next to Gary in Death Row, and he'd been described to Moody and Stanger often enough to have a clear picture. Belcher was a heavyset fellow, maybe six feet tall, barrel chested, short-cropped hair, dark complected, and he had a protruding forehead, an overhanging brow, big features, big arms, very muscular. Gary described how his head was always swiveling around, always suspicious. Often he wouldn't talk. Stanger heard from the guards that Belcher was an obsessive-compulsive and kept things in his cell like cans of soup, or any kind of trinket they let him retain, really one of those crazy recluses whose apartments were like junk shops. He was certainly property conscious.
Would throw fits if you tried to take his things away. A very territorial man. From what Ron could gather, he lived like a bear, as if his cell was a cave. Yet he and Gary, of all people, got along well.
From what Moody heard, Belcher also liked kids.
A few days before Christmas, at Gary's suggestion, Bob got one of his law clerks to take a picture of a large group of children, holding