Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [442]
So loud it was terrifying. A muscle contracted from Ron's shoulder down to his lower back. Some entire school of muscles in a spasm.
Schiller heard three shots, expecting four. Gary's body did not jerk nor the chair move, and Schiller waited for the fourth shot and found out later that two must have come out simultaneously. Noall Wootton tried to look at Gary at that point, but couldn't see anything from the rear of the crowd and went out the door before anyone else, and straight to his car which was up by Minimum Security, got in it, drove out. There were reporters interviewing people and photographers, but he didn't stop. He didn't want to talk to anybody.
Vern just heard a great big WHAM! When it happened, Gary never raised a finger. Didn't quiver at all. His left hand never moved, and then, after he was shot, his head went forward, but the strap held his head up, and then the right hand slowly rose in the air and slowly went down as if to say, "That did it, gentlemen." Schiller thought the movement was as delicate as the fingers of a pianist raising his hand before he puts it down on the keys. The blood started to flow through the black shirt and came out onto the white pants and started to drop on the floor between Gary's legs, and the smell of gunpowder was everywhere. Then, the lights went down, and Schiller listened to the blood drip. He was not certain he could hear it drip, but he felt it, and with that blood, the life in Gilmore's body seemed to lift off him like smoke. Ron Stanger, feeling dizzy, said to himself, "You're the only one that's going to pass out, and it will be embarrassing to end on the ground with all these people here," and he staggered backward from the force of the contraction in his back, put his arms out, grabbed hold of somebody to steady himself, and turned back to get another look at the body. That was when he saw Gilmore's right hand lift.
Ron closed his eyes and when he opened them again, the blood was a pool in Gary's lap, running to his feet and covering his tennis shoes, those crazy red, white and blue tennis shoes he always wore in Maximum. The shoelaces were now blooded over.
A doctor came along with a stethoscope and shook his head. Gilmore wasn't dead yet.
Ron thought of the day when Gary was in Fagan's office for a moment, and in that ten seconds Gary was all over his desk like a butterfly. He opened the desk drawer and took out a spoon, and shoelaces, went through everything like a guy leading an orchestra.
It was beautiful. Gilmore was a talented thief, after all, and finished just as Fagan said, "Yeah, okay, Joe." By the time the Lieutenant turned around, old Gary was sitting there calm as a nodding owl, and Stanger on the other side of the glass had his eyes wide open.
Gary made jokes about the shoelaces after that. They were good enough to hang himself by, he would tell Ron, and now the hand that had done the stealing moved up in the air and came down. It could have been pointing at the blood on the shoelaces.
They waited about twenty seconds. Then the doctor went up again, and Father Meersman came up, and Sam Smith, and the doctor put the stethoscope to Gary's arm once more, turned to Sam, and nodded. Sam Smith unloosened the waist strap, slid Gilmore out from underneath the head strap, and looked behind the body at the shot pattern where the holes came through.
Stanger was furious. The moment Gilmore was shot, everybody should have been walked out, and not served for a party to all this.
Even as Sam was examining the body, Gary fell over into Meersman's hands. The padre had to hold the head while Sam went fishing all over Gilmore's back to locate the exit wounds. Blood started coming onto Meersman's hands, and dripped through his fingers, and Vern began to weep. Then Father Meersman wept. An officer finally came around and said to the people standing behind the line,