Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [427]
On the jump seat, sitting literally on a padded cushion over the john, Judge Lewis was having his own rough trip, and after he banged his head, decided to bum a cigarette. In his job, traveling the six-state Circuit, he had flown a million miles, but hadn't been in a prop plane for a long time. Whether it was the noise, or the way neither he nor Mrs. Lewis had gotten any sleep since Saturday afternoon, the phone going constantly after that Athay hearing, calls ringing in at ungodly hours-newspapers had a right to know what was going on in a Federal Court-he found himself looking for the solace of a cigarette. Hadn't wanted one this bad in a year.
Judge Lewis broke down. Maybe the bump on the head did it.
That roller-coastering through typhoon gulch. He called forward for a cigarette, and the pilot replied that he had a whole carton, why not take a pack? The Judge did, lit his first cigarette in a year, and knew before he lit his second that he was smoking again, and would be for quite a while. Lighting that cigarette was like going home.
Judge Lewis's father had been a Judge and his older brother a lawyer, and he had grown up with never a question in his mind that he, too, would be a lawyer, and possibly a Judge. In his family, the law was equal to a feeling for one's own land. It gave roots. So Lewis always felt he understood Ritter to some degree. Lewis had even studied under Ritter at the University of Utah Law School. He could comprehend Ritter's ruling tonight. You wouldn't find Lewis highly critical of a Judge who thought any execution was outrageous. Why, working against the clock in a capital case had to be the most traumatic thing a Judge could get into. You always needed time to feel free and clear of any sentiment that the examination had not been sufficiently thorough.
This morning, however, they would have to come to grips with the other possibility. Maybe it was cruel to put Gilmore through his execution again and again. Lewis lit his third cigarette. That shifted his thoughts.
Now he was worrying whether an execution today, the first in many, many years, would be an encouragement to return to the old bloodbath. Would this start a new bang, bang, bang and get rid of a lot of men on Death Row in a hurry? That could hardly aid any world image of the United States. Lewis was glad two of his brothers would be sitting in Denver with him for this one.
Then, he had had to wake Breitenstein in Denver at 2 A.M. this night to tell him they must be in Court at dawn, and listen to Breitenstein use a few words you couldn't call judicial. It was no news with which to wake a colleague. Still, something had to be done about Gilmore. These Stays were beginning to come under the head of cruel and unusual punishment.
The plane arrived just ten minutes late, and Judy decided the only way to hold up proceedings now was to fall down while disembarking and break her leg. Then they'd have to stop. Of course, they might not. Anyway, she was too big a coward. Before she'd break her own leg, she'd have to be her own client.
They taxied to a halt at the Beechcraft-Texaco Small Plane Airport. At the parking area, some extremely bright spotlights were on, and as they stopped, more lights came up, and the atmosphere, Dave Schwendiman noted, became surrealistic. They had departed out of such a scene in Salt Lake, and now they were back in the same scene. Had crossed through a dark sky in a terrible storm only to return to incandescence on the ground. The door to the plane came open, bright as the lights in a dream of spotlights. Media-men everywhere. Blinded, the lawyers headed toward taxicabs waiting with their motors running.
At the courthouse, other media-men swarmed over the plaza with movie cameras and microphones.