Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [7]
When she and Gary went over to the house, however, Ida was thrilled. "Bessie was my special big sister, and I was always her favorite," Ida told him. She was getting a little plump, but with her red-brown hair and her bright-colored dress, Ida looked like an attractive gypsy lady.
She and Gary began talking right away about how when he was a little boy, he used to visit Grandma and Grandpa Brown. "I loved them days," Gary said to her. "I was as happy then as I've ever been in my life."
Together, Gary and Ida made a sight in that small living room. Although Vern's shoulders could fill a doorway, and any one of his fingers was as wide as anyone else's two fingers, he was not that tall, and Ida was short. They wouldn't be bothered by a low ceiling.
It was a living room with a lot of stuffed furniture in bright autumn colors and bright rugs and color-filled pictures in gold frames and there was a ceramic statue of a black stable boy with a red jacket standing by the fireplace. Chinese end tables and big colored hassocks took up space on the floor.
Having lived among steel bars, reinforced concrete, and cement-block walls, Gary would now be spending a lot of his time in this living room.
Back at her house, on the pretext of helping him pack, Brenda got a peek at the contents of his tote bag. It held a can of shaving cream, a razor, a toothbrush, a comb, some snapshots, his parole papers, a few letters, and no change of underwear.
Vern slipped him some underclothes, some tan slacks, a shirt, and twenty bucks.
Gary said, "I can't pay you back right now."
"I'm giving you the money," Vern said. "If you need more, see me. I don't have a lot, but I'll give you what I can."
Brenda would have understood her father's reasoning: a man without money in his pocket can get into trouble.
Sunday afternoon, Vern and Ida drove him over to Lehi, on the other side of Orem, for a visit with Toni and Howard.
Both of Toni's daughters, Annette and Angela, were excited about Gary. He was like a magnet with kids, Brenda and Toni agreed. On this Sunday, two days out of jail, he sat in a gold cloth-upholstered chair drawing chalk pictures on a blackboard for Angela.
He'd draw a beautiful picture and Angela, who was six, would erase it. He got the biggest kick out of that. He would take pains on the next one, draw it extra-beautiful, and she'd go, Yeah, uh-huh, and she'd erase it. So he could do another one.
After a while he sat down on the floor and played cards with her. The only game Angela knew was Fish, but she couldn't remember how to say each number. She would speak of 6 as an upper because the line went up, and 9 was a downer. A 7 was a hooker. That tickled Gary. Queens, Angela said firmly, were ladies. Kings were big boys. Jacks were little boys.
He called: "Toni, would you explain something? Am I playing some illicit game here with your daughter?" Gary thought it was very funny.
Later that Sunday, Howard Gurney and Gary tried to talk to each other. Howard had been a construction worker all his life, a union electrician. He'd never been in jail except for one night when he was a kid. It was difficult to find much common denominator. Gary knew a lot, and had a fantastic vocabulary, but he and Howard didn't seem to have any experiences in common.
Monday morning, Gary broke the twenty-dollar bill Vern had given him, and bought a pair of gym shoes. That week, he would wake up every day around six, and go out to run. He would take off from Vern's house in a fast long stride down to Fifth West, go around the park, and back-more than ten blocks in four minutes, good time. Vern, with his bad knee, thought Gary was a fantastic runner.
In the beginning, Gary didn't know exactly what he could do in the house. On his first evening alone with Vern and Ida, he asked if he could