“I don’t think I slept two minutes that night, after seeing him. I knew I wasn’t going back anymore. I couldn’t watch him suffer, and I couldn’t watch him die. I sat here in the park that day and I thought: ‘I don’t want to see him again. I’m going to try to keep him in my heart and mind as that boy I used to play with here—the little brother that I loved, before he got ruined.’ The only thing that bothers me about my decision is, I don’t think Gary knew that I actually liked him. I don’t think he ever knew in his life that I actually did care about him, that I really felt for him. But there was nothing more that could be done for him. It was all over for Gary. He had no chance. And I think that’s what he was trying to tell you.”
THE MORNING AFTER I HAD RUN INTO FRANK on the street, I phoned Schiller in Orem. I told him of the remarks I heard Moody make and expressed my disappointment in having any portion of what I’d understood to be a confidential conversation relayed to others.
“I didn’t tell Moody or Stanger of our conversation,” he replied.
“Who did?”
“Well, I told your Uncle Vernon a couple of things, but just because I assumed he was your main contact here and you would want to stay in touch with him. Now he may have passed some of that along to Moody or Stanger, but anything else you heard was projection on their part.” He apologized if he had violated my trust and then offered me some final advice: “Don’t call the prison before going out. Information gets passed out of there pretty easily, and a lot of people, including myself, know the minute you enter that maximum-security compound.”
After making a couple of calls, though, I learned that visits had to be authorized in advance. I made arrangements for a late-afternoon visit, then sat down and wrote Gary a long letter. It was easy to forget what I wanted to say to him when I was face to face with him and his anger. I wrote him that whatever choice I made, it was a matter of love, an issue between him and me, and not the courts or the newspapers. I told him that I thought redemption was more possible in the choice of life over death, and confessed that for years he’d frightened and confused me because of his violent whims. If time enough existed, I wanted to lift that barrier.
That afternoon at the prison was the first day Gary was officially authorized to have visitors, which meant, ironically, I had to talk to him over the phone. After looking through my letter, a guard gave it to Gary. He read it quietly, pensively. When he was finished he managed a smile. “Well put,” he said. “Are you familiar with Nietzsche? He once wrote that a time comes when a man should rise to meet the occasion. That’s what I’m trying to do, Mikal… Look,” he said, suddenly changing the subject. “I was thinking about what I said yesterday, about ‘where were you.’ I realized that was unfair. I wasn’t around much when you were a kid. I don’t hate you, although I’ve tried to act that way lately. You’re my brother. I know what that means. I’ve been angry with you, but I’ve never hated you.”
I forced myself to ask the question I’d been building up to for the last few days: “What would you do if I tried to stop this?”
He winced. “I don’t want you to do that,” he said evenly.
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“Please don’t.”
“Gary, what would you do? All you’ve said is that you wanted the sentence of the court carried out. What if that sentence were commuted?”
“I’d kill myself. Look, I’m not watched that closely in this place, no matter what you hear. I could’ve killed myself any time in the last two weeks, but I don’t want to do that. You see, I want some good to come from all this. If I commit suicide, then I can’t be a donor—to people who have more right to life than I do—and my whole will could become suspect … Besides, if a person’s dumb enough to murder and get caught, then, he shouldn’t snivel about what he gets.”
From there, Gary talked about prison reality, telling me some of the brutality he had witnessed and some that he had fostered. He was terrified of a life in prison, he said. “Maybe you could have my sentence commuted, but you wouldn’t have to live that sentence or be around when I killed myself.” The fear in his eyes was always most discernible when he spoke about prison, far more than when he spoke about his own impending death. Maybe because one was an ever-present concrete reality and the other an abstraction. “I don’t think death will be anything new or frightening for me. I think I’ve been there before.”
We talked for hours, or rather Gary talked. I’d already missed a flight back home and had forgotten about the person waiting out in the parking lot for me. This was the first real communication we’d shared in years; neither of us wanted to let go. Gary asked me to return the next day and, in turn, I asked if he would be willing to meet with Bill Moyers, for the purpose of a conversation, not an interview. Gary readily agreed, as long as it was off the record, because of his deal with Schiller.
Later that night Schiller himself called Moyers and indicated that any communication with Gary was unlikely. I didn’t bring up the subject the next day, Friday, but Gary did. “Schiller won’t let me see your friend. He wants to guard his ‘exclusivity.’ Sometimes that son of a bitch acts like he owns me, like he can run my life. He did this to me once before, when I asked him to recover some of my private letters to Nicole. I didn’t like seeing that shit in print; the drawings didn’t bother me so much, but the letters were nobody’s business. And, contrary to my wishes, Schiller read them. I felt like firing him right then, and I probably still should, but it’s too late to find anybody else. What I should do, though, is revoke his invitation to the execution.” I didn’t offer any opinion. I didn’t want to get caught up in a feud between Gary and Schiller.
I told Gary that I should leave that night, to go back home and spend the rest of the weekend with Mother.
“Can’t you stay one more day?” he asked. “I’d like to see you again, and I have this book Johnny Cash sent me; I want you to give it to Mom.”
I agreed to return the next day—Saturday—but before I left he wanted to tell me one more thing. “You know I’ve said a lot of stuff about how I don’t care what people think about me, but that’s not completely true. I don’t like it when they say I’m jittery and stuff. I’ve never told anybody this before, but I don’t know what Monday’s going to be like. Maybe that’s why I need Schiller there, so I’ll keep cool… I know you don’t believe this, but I didn’t mean for this to become such a big thing. I never expected the books or movies, maybe a few articles.”
We pressed our hands against the glass between us and said good-bye.
IMAGINE THE IMPOSSIBLE LEAPS AND BORDERS your heart must cross when you’re arguing with a man about his own death. There was a logic, a congruity to Gary’s choice, I had to admit, but none of that changed my desire for him to stay alive. But just as you try to convince the lover who no longer loves you to love you nonetheless—because you cannot imagine going on in your life, living it, without the presence or thing that you need and love most—in the same moment that you make your argument, and try to convince the person to stay and love you all over again, you also know that your argument is already lost, and along with it, a version of your future.
When you are arguing with somebody who is hell-bent on dying, you realize that if you lose the argument, there is no more chance for further argument, that you will have seen that person for the last time. I could not believe that I was in that place in my life, that I could possibly be caught up in such an argument. Death is one thing we almost never get to argue with. You can’t argue with the disease that takes your loved one or yourself, or the car accident or the killer that snuffs out a life without warning. But a man who wants to die … When I argued with Gary, I was arguing with death itself—he was death, wanting itself as its only possible fulfillment—and I learned that you cannot win, that this thing which will ruin your heart the most cannot be resisted or stopped, that you will lose this person, and you will have to live with that loss forever. And you will not have lost them to
cancer or to the cruelty of another’s actions; you will have lost them to the abyss of their own soul, and you will be afraid that maybe their surrender to that abyss is, after all, the only act that makes sense. But mainly, you know that you will never see them again—that you pleaded with them to stay and that there was nothing you could do—it was too late to do anything that would make a difference. Maybe in that moment, you will want to go where they’re going, because it can’t possibly hurt so much or look so goddamn fucking eternal as the prospect of spending the rest of your life accommodating a loss that no sane heart could ever possibly afford or hope to accommodate without letting ruin so deep inside that it becomes an ineradicable part of your deepest self.
I SPOKE WITH GIAUQUE THE SAME DAY and informed him that I had decided not to intervene. Telling him was almost as hard as making the decision. I could have sought a stay, signed the necessary documents and returned home feeling that I had made the right decision, the moral choice. But I didn’t have to bear the weight of that decision. Gary did. Had he chosen suicide, I could rightfully claim that I was not responsible for his choice, only my own. If I could have chosen for Gary to live, I would have.
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 the airport?”
He nodded.
“Where would you have gone had you made it to the airport?”
“Um, Portland.”
“But certainly you knew that was the first place they would have looked for you. Why would you want to go there?”
Gary studied the shelf top in front of him for a few seconds. “I don’t really want to talk about that night anymore,” he said. “There’s no point in talking about it.”
“Please, Gary, I’d like to know: What would you have done in Portland?”
“Mikal, don’t.”
“Please. I have to know. What would you have done? Would you have come to see me?”
Again, he nodded.
“And … ?”
He sighed and looked straight at me, and for a moment his eyes flashed an old anger. “And what would you have done if I had come to you?” he asked. “If I had come and said I was in trouble and needed help, needed a place to stay? Would you have taken me in? Would you have hidden me?”
I couldn’t reply. The question had been turned back on me, and suddenly I could not stand the awfulness of my own answers. Gary sat there for long moments, holding me with his eyes, then said steadily: “I think I was coming to kill you. I think that’s what would have happened. There simply may have been no choice for you, and no choice for me.” His eyes softened and he gave me a tender smile. It was filled with the sad brokenness of our common history. “Do you understand why?” he asked.
I nodded back. Of course I understood why. I had escaped the family, or at least thought I had. Gary had not.
At that moment, I felt a certain terror. I knew that what Gary had said was true. I knew that death could have been my past, which would mean I would now have no present. In fact, it felt like it had come close to happening, just for the conception of that possibility. And so I felt not just some terror, but also some relief. Jensen’s and Bushnell’s death, and Gary’s own impending death, had added up to my own safety, and as soon as I realized that, my relief was shot through with guilt. And remorse. I thought of all the other things that might have happened in our home or in our love that maybe could have changed this moment, so we would not be sitting here, in this awful place, at this awful time.
Oddly, though, I also felt closer to Gary in that moment than I’d ever felt before. For just that second, I understood completely why he wanted to die.
At that point, Warden Samuel Smith entered Gary’s room. They discussed whether Gary would have to wear a hood on Monday morning. I put down the phone. Minutes passed. When I picked up the phone again, Smith was telling Gary that Schiller wouldn’t be allowed to visit with Gary in the final hours before the execution.
I rapped on the glass. I would have to leave soon and I asked if the warden would allow us a final handshake. At first Smith refused, but he assented after Gary explained it was our final visit, on the condition I agree to a skin search. I agreed. After the search, conducted by two guards, two other guards brought Gary in. They said I would have to roll up my sleeve past my elbow, and that we could not touch beyond a handshake. Gary grasped my hand, squeezed tight, and said, “Well, I guess this is it.” He leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “See you in the darkness beyond.”
I pulled my eyes away from his. I knew I couldn’t stop cryi
ng at this point, and I didn’t want him to see it. “Are you okay?” he asked. I bit my lip and nodded. A guard handed me the book and the picture of Nicole and started to walk with me to the rolling-bar doors. Gary watched me pass through them. “Give my love to Mom,” he called. “And put on some weight. You’re still too skinny.”
The guard walked with me through the two fence gates and patted me on the back as I left. “Take it easy, fella,” he said.
I WENT BACK HOME, AND LEFT GARY TO HIS FATE. I hated myself. I felt like I had inadvertently taken sides with the death penalty—a brutal social ethos that I despised. At the same time, I guess I decided that Gary was better off dead. I had little doubt that if he was kept alive, he would kill himself, and perhaps others as well. I didn’t want to live with having taken an action that might have resulted in such consequences. I hated living with any of these choices—I hated finding myself in a place where any action or non-action would result in the certainty of death.
The night before Gary’s execution, I visited my mother and Frank. I had called the prison earlier in the day and arranged for us all to have a last brief conversation with him on the phone. His last words to my mother were: “Don’t cry, Mom. I love you. I want you to go on with your life.” And her last words were: “Gary, I’m going to stay brave for you until tomorrow, but I know I’ll never stop crying. I’ll cry every day for the rest of my life.”
Shot in the Heart Page 42