Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [387]
GILMORE He lived. (sigh) Kind of altered his life, though.
MOODY Don't you find shooting pretty damn grotesque?
GILMORE What's grotesque is the fact that you have to be strapped in the chair with the hood, and all that horseshit.
MOODY Doesn't the blood and guts of a shooting appeal to you?
GILMORE (laughs) Fuck you, Larry . . . the blood and guts . . . Yeah, man, that really appeals to me. I'm gonna take a spoon.
The questions went on. No breakthrough.
From the two executions Father Meersman had previously attended, he had learned things could go badly wrong. The person to be executed might become so upset he would lose his own particular kind of calmness. Father Meersman always tried to keep a man in such a state ahead of the execution, tried to let him know what was going to be done. He figured if the man more or less knew you went to this place, point A, and from point A you were moved to point B, and then, at a certain time, you would go to point C, and so forth, he wouldn't have to say, "Where are we going now?" and maybe get upset over it. Some little thing like that could bother a man much too much.
Whereas, if they knew ahead, so they could go through it sort of smoothly, and if everybody leading them was calm, then that could prove a contributing factor to their own calmness, just knowing more or less how the mechanics were going to be. You didn't want anything of a surprise to happen. Everybody was very tense when an execution was taking place, and you didn't want anything to get out of step or make the man balk.
Meersman always felt he was the one who succeeded in explaining to Gary why they put the hood on. It wasn't personal, he told him, just that you wanted to be very still, so the target didn't move the slightest bit. Any slight movement could throw the bullets off. If Gary wanted to die with dignity, then he had to respect that very, very simple thing about the hood. It was there for practicality to allow the thing to run very dignified, and no movement. Gary listened in silence.
On Saturday afternoon, Gil Athay came out of Judge Lewis's chambers in the Federal Building and faced the press in the corridor.
The reporters were frantic. Judge Lewis's regular courtroom was in the Tenth Circuit Court, Denver, and his chambers here, while commodious, had simply not been large enough. Many had not been able to jam in for the proceedings.
So now there was chaos, and cameras flashing, and the call letters of microphones from foreign and domestic radio stations in his eyes. Athay felt as if he were marching into one of the rings of the circus.
If was hard not to resent such an atmosphere. For days he had been fighting his way down corridors made narrow by the bodies of reporters. It had gotten out of hand. He was a dapper man with eyeglasses and a brush mustache, and he was not tall enough to avoid getting swarmed over in crowds. So at this point he said, "I'll be happy to make a statement, but it has to be downstairs." There remained a complete pandemonium. In his ears, he could still hear Judge Lewis saying, "You make it very difficult for me, Mr. Athay, to place it all on my shoulders, you know. If you'd given us time, there could have been three Judges to hear this." But Athay by then had been sufficiently keyed up to answer, "Well, I think, Your Honor, that's true, but we have to make the decision, and can't hide behind the committee." Had he really said that? The case of Dale Pierre must have tightened his temper.
He had come to believe that his client, Dale Pierre on Death Row, was innocent. That was an extraordinary belief to most. The public was convinced Dale Pierre was one of the hi-fi killers who had poured Drano down people's throats and stuck ball-point pens in their ears. The wife of a prominent gynecologist had been killed in that record store, and her son's brain had been permanently damaged. Stove-in by the killers. A horror of a case, but Athay had come slowly to the conclusion that Dale Pierre was innocent and had been convicted by the Jury because he was black, a condition