Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [469]
Nicole was sitting in her kitchen one morning in the small apartment she now rented in a small town in Oregon which was where she had wandered after L.A., and she was having coffee with the guy who had been with her the night before. She was reaching out for something on the table when all of a sudden her hand looked strange. She saw the ring of Osiris that Gary had given her, and it was broken. The setting had cracked.
She had built up a lot of control over all these months, but suddenly it just hurt so bad that she bawled right there at the table, two seconds after she saw the broken ring. It was the first real big cry she'd had about Gary in a long time, a month or so.
She was not sure there was any such thing anymore as Gary. She didn't know if that was where her belief rested. He was a lot out of her mind. He might really be dead.
In Christmastime of 1977, Vern bought barbells and delivered them to Utah State Prison for the convicts. Gary had asked him to do that after the execution.
It had not been a good year and it did not get better. Vern's leg was so bad he needed another operation, but he had no money. Because he could not stand on his feet for a full day, he had to sell his store, and then there were the lawsuits against Gary's estate. The State of Utah sued him for Snyder and Esplin's legal fees, and the companies who had guaranteed the life insurance on Max Jensen were suing, and there was still a $1,000,000 suit from Debbie Bushnell.
Then Ida got a serious stroke, and Vern fed her three meals a day in the hospital for three weeks and tried to teach her to walk and talk again. Since her hospital bill would come to $20,000, he forgot about his own operation.
From the day Brenda told her that Gary committed the murders, one of Bessie's legs turned in at the ankle. Then, from the day Gary was killed, that leg would no longer allow her to walk. Up till then, she had been able to make it over to the office for mail. Now, although the office was only three trailers away, she did not try. The leg didn't want to walk.
Sitting in her chair, she would remember the haunted house in Salt Lake where the nice Jewish lady had been her neighbor. Bessie would think that whatever it was that lived in the house, whatever it was the nice Jewish lady had warned her against, must in those years have begun to live in Gary.
Now she heard that Ida had a stroke. Vern turned around one night in the house, and there was Ida with the stroke. Bessie could have told Vern. Whatever had attached itself to Gary long ago in that house in Salt Lake must recently have attached itself to Ida.
Bessie would not, however, tell Vern. When all was said, she did not know Vern well enough to inform him that the apparition was now sitting in his house.
She did, however, think of her motherin-law Fay and the old house in Sacramento where the furniture wouldn't stay in place. Bessie sat in her chair among the coffee cups and the saucers on the table of this trailer, sat in the faded nightgown that looked one hundred and two years old, and said to herself, "I have reached the point of no return from Hell."
Outside the trailer park, automobiles went by on McLaughlin Boulevard. Once in a while, a car would drive under the battered white wooden archway at the entrance, come up to her dark windows and stop. She could feel them looking. She had received letters that threatened her life and she ignored them. Letters could not hurt a woman whose son had taken four bullets through the heart.
She also received letters from people who wrote songs about Gary and wanted her permission to publish. She ignored such letters.
She would just sit there. If a car came at night, came into the trailer park, drove around and slowed up, if it stopped, she knew somebody out in that car was thinking that