Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [445]
He had gotten the colors wrong. The black cloth of the blind was not black but blue, the line on the floor was not yellow but white, and the chair was not black, but dark green. He realized that during the execution something had altered in his perception of color.
He left the place of execution a second time with a memory of reporters swarming over the chair, the sandbags and the holes in the mattress, creatures of an identical species feeding, all feeding, in the same place. As he went out the door, one man was explaining to another that steel-jacketed bullets had been used so they would make no larger hole in the rear than in the front, which would avoid, thereby, the worst of the mess, and the body jumping from the impact.
PART SEVEN
The Fading of the Heart
Chapter 39
TELEVISION
While Earl stood in the corridor, one of the newsmen came running by and said, "Gary Gilmore is dead." Again, Earl looked out the window and saw other newsmen down in the plaza, and the sun shining in Denver, and people going to work. When he came downstairs to the main lobby, Sandy Gilmour of Channel 2 television in Salt Lake asked to interview him, and Earl said, "Yes," and Gilmour asked him how he felt to be the one to inform the prison that the execution could proceed, and Earl explained his only responsibility was to let them know the Tenth Circuit had overruled Judge Ritter. That was all, he said. He did not feel like discussing the intricacies of his emotion.
Then, Earl, Bob Hansen, and the rest of the staff moved out in a taxicab. Judy Wolbach, they heard, would be traveling home on another plane.
2
Toni was waiting in Minimum Security with Ida, Dick Gray, Evelyn Gray, and all the people who had not been invited to the cannery. A guard in a maroon jacket walked into the room, and said, "Anybody come to tell you?" Toni said, "No." The man was pale, and trembling terribly. He said, "It's over with. Gary's dead."
Ida started to cry. She had held up real well, but now it overflowed. The guards were wonderful then. Several came over to ask if there was anything they could do about transportation, and Toni told them she was waiting for her daddy to come back. In a while, one of them said her father was waiting by the tower where their trucks were parked. The prison officials were wonderful to her on the way out, and that reminded her how just before the execution, they had been very attentive, wanted to see if there was anything her mother needed, or did they want coffee? It was almost like being in a funeral home, and these were the attendants.
When they got to her truck, Vern wasn't there yet, and the parking area seemed massive with cars and people. Reporters clustered around like flies, interviewing her mother through one window, herself through the other, until Toni finally got foulmouthed. By then, she had really had it. She was smoking with the window open, and one of them came over and kept asking for an interview even though Toni was shaking her head. This TV man had no respect for her feeling that she didn't want to talk and he set his microphone in the window and said, "Can I put this here?" That was when she told him where he could put it. His hands flew all over. Later, a girl friend told her that on "Good Morning America" you could catch where they cut a few words.
Then she could see Vern, cane in hand, trying to walk up to them. His face was distraught. He was obviously in pain, and she had the feeling his knee was going to go on him. So, she jumped out of the truck to run over, and three reporters grabbed her arm. So help her, three. "Please give us a few words." She grabbed one of the microphones as if to say something, then threw it to the ground where it broke into a dozen little pieces, and shouted to Vern, "Get your truck out later. It's stuck behind the others now." Then she led him to her truck, and drove to her home in Lehi, gave him coffee,