Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [193]
I had several helpful conversations with Bill Moyers during that week, and at one point he told me that if we are confronted with a choice between life and death and choose anything short of life, then we choose short of humanity. That made it all seem so clear-cut. I wrestled with the decision and finally realized that I couldn’t choose life for Gary, and he wouldn’t. He had worked out what he reasoned to be some sort of atonement. He wanted death, his final scenario of redemption, his final release from the law. To Gary the greatest irony was that the law—which in his eyes had always sought to break him—finally wanted to save him, when he no longer wanted salvation. In order to beat the law, he had to lose everything—everything except his own unswerving definition of dignity.
I couldn’t reason with that, I couldn’t change that. And in the end, I couldn’t take it away from him.
As a result, I now had a role in this story I had never wanted and had never bargained for: I had become a chooser. I had made decisions that would have consequences. Maybe these consequences wouldn’t stop here—maybe other men would now die because we had decided not to challenge history or justice at this point, or maybe there would be numerous other people whose lives would be affected, stopped or turned upside down as a result of these last few days. Maybe the spirit of the nation itself would now be different—bloodier, and more pitiless. The effects, I thought, were incalculable. They could ripple through our lives forever, and into the lives of our children.
What a difference a killing can make.
ON SATURDAY, JANUARY 15, I VISITED GARY FOR THE LAST TIME. By then, camera crews were camped all over the town of Draper, preparing for the finale.
During our previous meetings that week, Gary had always opened with some friendly remarks, a joke or even a handstand. This day, though, he seemed nervous, though he denied it. “Naw, the noise in this place gets to me sometimes, but I’m as cool as a cucumber,” he said, holding up a steady hand. The muscles in his wrists and arms, though, were taut and thick as rope.
Gary started to show me letters and pictures he’d received, mostly from children and teenage girls. He said he always tried to answer the ones from kids first, and then he read one from a boy who claimed to be eight years old: “I hope they put you someplace and make you live forever for what you did. You have no right to die. With all the malice in my heart, (name).”
“Man, that one shook me up for a long time,” he said.
I asked him if he’d replied to it. “Yeah. I wrote, ‘You’re too young to have malice in your heart. I had it in mine at a young age and look what it did for me.’ ”
He had a guard bring the book that Johnny Cash had sent. It was his autobiography, The Man in Black, which Gary wanted left with our mother.
“I’d really like to give you something or leave something for you. Why don’t you let me leave you some money? Everybody needs money.” I declined, suggesting that he give it to the Bushnell and Jensen families instead. “There’s no way money can buy back what I did to those people,” he said, shaking his head.
Gary’s eyes nervously scanned the letters and pictures in front of him, finally falling on one that made him smile. He held it up. A picture of Nicole. “She’s pretty, isn’t she?” I agreed. “I look at this picture every day. I took it myself. It’s the one I made the drawing from. Would you like to have it?”
I said I would be pleased to have it.
Finally I had a last question to ask: “Gary, remember the night you were arrested, when you were on your way to