Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [447]
She couldn't handle it. The night of Toni's birthday, she had one phone call with Gary and knew it was the last time she was ever going to hear his voice. To add to it, she couldn't sleep. They brought her a Seconal capsule. It didn't do a lot of good. Two hours later, the nurse was in with a flashlight to see if Brenda was asleep. "How can you sleep with that light in your eyes," Brenda grumbled, so the doctor ordered another.
Every two hours, they gave her Seconal, but she couldn't fail asleep until four in the morning when they came in with a shot.
Then, she woke up at seven-thirty, half-crocked from the drugs, but had to find out if they were going to kill him or not, Switched on the TV and drove everybody in her room crazy until she heard he had been granted a Stay, first news she picked up that morning, and Brenda went completely bananas, so hysterical she didn't know if she was happy or sad. Then, in a few minutes, reversed. By then, she didn't know if it was her adrenalin or her heart that was flaming up and down. In just a few more seconds it flashed across the screen: GARY GILMORE IS DEAD! The surgeon came to see her a minute or two after this, and stood patiently waiting for an end to her hysterics, said, "How do you feel today?" She thought, "Oh, you simple son of a bitch, get away from me."
She didn't want anybody near. The doctor asked again how she felt and the nurse explained what had just happened. The doctor said, "Oh, that's really too bad, but they should have wasted him a long time ago." Brenda said, "You can give me my release papers. I want a prescription for pain, and get your ass out of my room." She picked up her pillow and threw it at him. He said, "If you want to get hard about it, I'll suggest you not be released today." She said, "What in the hell do you care for? I don't like you anyway. If I had known you were cutting me, I wouldn't have come in." That was one man she could say she detested by now.
After he signed the release, she called Johnny. By eleven o'clock she was out. They had to sneak her the back way, so she could get home without a lot of reporters bugging her. Brenda didn't remember a whole lot from that event until three days later.
6
At the hour of Gilmore's execution, Colleen Jensen was at home in Clearfield getting ready for school. She was now a substitute teacher, and had begun the job just two weeks before. Today, she was having her first class with a new group of students, and while she got dressed that morning thinking the execution was stayed, for that was what she heard on the first news, by the time she reached school, it was over. Kids in the class were talking about it as she came through the door. She could hear their whispers about her involvement in it.
So, she gave a little speech to the class.
She did not tell them that in the evenings when she sat downstairs, nursing Monica, and rocking her to sleep, she would show the baby pictures of her daddy, and tell Monica who he was. At such times, Colleen would try to speak to Monica out of the stillness of herself, and thereby tell the one-year-old that Max was dead, her daddy was dead. For now, talking to the class, she merely said that for those who did not know, she would tell them who she was, and what her part in it all had been. She added that it was not something they would need to discuss again. She also said she was ready, if they were, to get on with the teaching and the class.
7
Phil Hansen woke up and watched in bed that morning, just shaking his head and uppercutting himself. As he looked at the TV, he thought, "If I'd had one inkling they were going to bring off that midnight ride, I would have prepared papers and had Ritter sign another Stay."