Monday, when he got into the shop, he told Spencer that the Drivers' Bureau said he would have to take a training course unless he had a previous driver's license. Gary told them he had one in Oregon, and they were going to send for it. In the meantime he would wait on the car.
Wednesday, however, he picked up the Mustang after work. That night, to celebrate, he had an arm-wrestling contest with Rikki Baker at Sterling's house. Rikki tried pretty hard but Gary won and kept bragging it up through the poker game.
Rikki felt embarrassed at losing and stayed away. When, a few days later, he dropped in again, it was to hear that his sister Nicole had gone to visit Sterling one evening, and Gary had been there. Nicole and Gary ended up with each other that night. Now, they were staying out in Spanish Fork. His sister Nicole, who always had to go her own way, was living with Gary Gilmore.
Rikki didn't like the news one bit. Nicole was the best thing in his family as far as he was concerned. He told Sterling that if Gary did anything to hurt her, he would kill him.
Yet when Rikki saw them together, he realized that Nicole liked the guy a lot. Gary came over to Rikki and said, "Man, you've got the most beautiful sister in the world. She's just the best person I ever met." Gary and Nicole held hands like they were locked together at the wrist. It was all different from what Rikki had expected.
Sunday morning, Gary brought Nicole over to meet Spencer and Marie McGrath. Spencer saw a very good-looking girl, hell of a figure, not too tall, with a full mouth, a small nose and nice long brown hair, She must have been 19 or 20 and looked full of her own thoughts. She was wearing Levi's that had been cut off at the thigh, a T-shirt, and no shoes. It sounded like a baby was crying in her car, but she made no move to go back.
Gary was immensely proud of her. He acted as if he had just walked in with Marilyn Monroe. They were sure getting along in supergood shape. "Look at my girl!" Gary was all but saying, "Isn't she fabulous."
When they left, Spencer said to Marie, "That's just about what Gary needs. A girl friend with a baby to feed. It doesn't look like she'll be too much of an asset to him."
He squinted after their car. "My God, did he paint his Mustang blue? I thought it was white." "Maybe it's her car." "Same year and model?"
"Wouldn't surprise me a bit," said Marie.
Since Spencer lived next door to the work shed in Lindon, Marie could look out the window and see when Gary was there half an hour ahead of time. Some mornings, she would ask him in for a cup of coffee.
While sipping it, Gary would put his feet on the table. Marie would walk over and slap him across the ankles.
"Now, there," Gary said to Brenda, "is a lady who knows her own mind. She's not wishy-washy." He grinned. "I put my feet up just to annoy her."
"If she's such a nice woman, why do you want to annoy her?"
"I guess," he said, "I like an ankle slap."
Brenda didn't want to hope too hard, but, God willing, Gary might come around the bend.
She wasn't too happy, therefore, when he brought Nicole to her house. Oh, God, Brenda said to herself, Gary would end up with a space cadet.
Nicole just sat there and looked at her. She had a little girl by the arm and didn't seem to know the arm was there. The child, a tough-looking 4-year-old, looked to be living in one world and Nicole in another.
Brenda asked, "Where are you staying?"
Nicole mused herself. "Yeah." She mused herself again. "Down the road," she said in a soft and somewhat muffled voice.
Brenda must have been on radar. "Springville?" she asked. "Spanish Fork?"
Nicole gave an angelic smile. "Hey, Spanish Fork, she got it," she said to Gary as if little wonders grew like flowers on the highway of life.
"Don't you love her looks?" Gary said.
"Yeah," said Brenda, "you got yourself a looker."
Yeah, thought Brenda, another girl who pops a kid before she's 15 and lives on the government ever after. One more poverty-stricken welfare witch. Except she had to admit it. Nicole was a looker. Star quality for these parts.
My God, she and Gary were in a trance with each other. Could sit and google at one another for the entire day. Don't bother to visit. Brenda was ready to ask the fire department to put out the burn.
"She's 19, you know," Gary said the moment Nicole stepped away.
"You don't say," said Brenda.
"Do you think she is too old for me?" he asked. At the look on his cousin's face, he began to laugh.
"No," said Brenda, "quite frankly I think you are both of the same intellectual and mental level of maturity. Good God, Gary, she's young enough to be your daughter. How can you mess around with a kid?"
"I feel 19," he told her.
"Why don't you try growing up before you get too old?"
"Hey, coz, you're blunt," said Gary.
"Don't you agree it's the truth?"
"Probably," he said. He muttered it.
They were sitting on the patio blinking their eyes in the sun when Nicole came back. Just as if nothing had been said in her absence. Gary pointed tenderly to the tattoo of a heart on his forearm.
When he had stepped out of Marion, a month ago, he said, it had been a blank heart. Now the space was filled with Nicole's name. He had tried to match the blue-black color of the old tattoo, but her name appeared in blue-green. "Like it?" he asked Brenda.
"Looks better than having a blank," she said.
"Well," said Gary, "I was just waiting to fill it in. But first I had to find me a lady like this."
Nicole also had a tattoo. On her ankle. GARY, it said. "How do you like it?" he asked. Johnny replied, "I don't."
Nicole was grinning from ear to ear. It was as if the best way to ring her bell was to tell the truth. Something about the sound set off chimes in her. "Oh," she said, extending her ankle for all the world to see the curve of her calf and the meat of her thigh, "I think it looks kinda nice."
"Well, it's done," said Brenda, "with a nice steady touch. But a tattoo on a woman's ankle looks like she stepped in shit."
"I dig it," said Gary.
"Okay," said Brenda, "I'll give you my good opinion. I like that tattoo about as much as I like that silly-ass hat you wear."
"Don't you like my lid?"
"Gary, when it comes to hats, you've got the rottenest taste I've ever seen." She was so mad she was ready to cry.
Less than a week ago, he had come over to apologize for how he had acted in the movie theatre, came over all decked out in beige slacks and a nice tan shirt, but wearing a white panama hat with a wide rainbow band. That hat wouldn't even have looked happy on a black pimp, and Gary wore it with the brim tilted down in front and up in back like the Godfather might wear it. He'd stood outside on her mat, his body slouched, his hands in his pockets, and kicked the base of the door.
"Why don't you just lift the latch?" Brenda had asked in greeting.
"I can't," he'd said, "my hands are in my pockets," and waited for her to applaud the effect.
"It's a pretty hat," Brenda said, "but it doesn't fit your personality. Not unless you've turned into a procurer."
"Brenda, you're rotten," he'd said, "you're really ignorant." His whole posture was gone.
She had done it to him again. It didn't strike him well that she didn't like Nicole's tattoo any more than his hats. He got up to leave then, and Brenda walked them to the door. Coming outside, she was also surprised by the sight of the pale blue Mustang.
That was enough to restore him. Didn't it have to be fantastic, he told her. He and Nicole had both bought exactly the identical model and year. It was a sign.
She was in all wrong sorts the rest of the day. Kept thinking of the tattoo on Nicole's ankle. Every time she did, her uneasiness returned.
The worst story Gary ever told came back to her now. One night in Brenda's living room, he couldn't stop laughing as he told about a tattoo he put once on a convict named Fungoo.
"He was strong and dumb," said Gary, "and he loved me. On
e time when we were in Isolation, Fungoo was on the cleaning detail, so he was able to walk past my cell. Damn if he didn't ask me to do a rosebud on the back of his neck. I took out my needle and my india ink, and instead of a rosebud, tattooed a real skinny little dick on him and peanut-sized balls.
"Well, his mother and dad was coming next day. When he found out what I'd done, he went crazy. He had to see his folks with a towel wrapped around his neck. It was over a hundred that morning. Told them he liked to wear a towel in the heat," said Gary. Now, he laughed so hard he almost fell off the couch.
"But Fungoo was so dumb he wouldn't get mad at me. Came back and said, 'Gary, I can't go around with a pecker on my neck.'
" 'Okay,' I told him, 'I'll make it into a snake.' Only I got inspired and made it into a big three-headed cock. It had the ugliest warts you ever laid eyes on. I couldn't hardly keep from laughing all the while I was doing it. 'Make sure it's a nice snake,' Fungoo kept saying." Gary was laughing uncontrollably. Right in their living room the memory was still living in his veins. " 'Oh,' I said, 'I believe this is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.'
"When Fungoo finally got to see it with a mirror, he went into shock. Couldn't even hit me. We'd had some hash smuggled into Isolation, and he decided I was bombed out of my head. He blamed the weed, not me. The last time I saw him, he had tattooed a giant rattlesnake all over his neck to cover the three pricks. He didn't trust anybody by then so he done it with soot and water." Brenda and Johnny's smiles had become as congealed as the grease on a cold steak.
"Guess that's an ugly story, huh," said Gary. "Yeah," he said, "a couple of times I got to feel bad about it. It sure fucked up Fungoo's world. I guess I must have racked up real bad karma on that one . . . but couldn't resist." He sighed.
It was exactly five weeks and two days since he had come to them from prison. Now she could believe the story. "God, how can he be so horrible?" she asked Johnny now. "How could he have done that to a man who trusted him?"
"I guess he was saying a man will do anything in prison to amuse himself. If you can't, you're gone."
She loved Johnny for saying that, loved her big strong whale-heart of a husband who could have compassion for possible rivals, which was more than she could say for herself. "Oh, Lord," said Brenda, "Gary loves Nicole."
PART TWO
Nicole
Chapter 4
THE HOUSE IN SPANISH FORK
Just before the time her mother and father split up, Nicole found a little house in Spanish Fork, and it looked like a change for the better. She wanted to live alone and the house made it easier.
It was very small, about ten miles from Provo, on a quiet street at the start of the foothills. Her little place was the oldest building on the block, and next to all those ranch bungalows lined up on each sidewalk like pictures in supermarket magazines, the house looked as funky as a drawing in a fairy tale. It was kind of pale lavender stucco on the outside with Hershey-brown window trim, and inside, just a living room, bedroom, kitchen and bathroom. The roof beam curved in the middle, and the front door was practically on the sidewalk—that's how long ago it had been built.
In the backyard was a groovy old apple tree with a couple of rusty wires to hold the branches together. She loved it. The tree looked like one of those stray mutts that doesn't get any attention and doesn't care—it's still beautiful.
Then, just as she was really settling in, getting to like herself for really taking care of her kids this once, and trying to put her head together so her thoughts wouldn't rattle when she was 'alone', why just then Kathryne and Charles chose to split, her poor mom and dad married before they were hardly in high school, married for more than twenty years, five kids, and they never did get, Nicole always thought, to like each other, although maybe they'd been in love from time to time. Anyway, they were split. That would have dislocated her if she hadn't had the house in Spanish Fork. The house was better than a man. Nicole amazed herself. She had not slept with anybody for weeks, didn't want to, just wanted to digest her life, her three marriages, her two kids, and more guys than you wanted to count.
Well, the groove continued. Nicole had a pretty good job as a waitress at the Grand View Cafe in Provo and then she got work sewing in a factory. It was only one step above being a waitress, but it made her feel good. They sent her to school for a week, and she learned how to use the power sewing machines, and was making better money than she had ever brought in before. Two-thirty an hour. Her take-home came to $80 a week.
Of course, the work was hard. Nicole didn't think of herself as being especially well coordinated, and certainly she was not fast—her head was too bombed-out for sure. She would get flustered. They would put her on one machine and just about the time she started getting the hang of it, and was near the hourly quota, they put her on another. Then the machine would fuck up when she least expected.
Still it wasn't bad. She had a nest of a hundred bucks from screwing welfare out of extra money they'd once given her in some mix-up of checks, and put another $75 together from working. So she was able to pay out in cash $175 for an old Mustang that she bought from her next-door neighbor's brother. He had wanted up to $300, but he liked her. She just got a little lucky.
On the night Nicole met Gary, she had taken Sunny and Jeremy for a drive—the kids loved the car. With her was her sister-in-law. While she and Sue Baker weren't tight exactly, they did spend a lot of time together, and Sue was in the dumps at this point, being pregnant and split up from Rikki.
On the drive, Nicole passed about a block from her cousin's house, and Sue suggested they drop in. Nicole agreed. She figured Sue liked Sterling and must have heard that he had also split up with his old lady, just this week, baby and all.
It was a cool dark night, one of those nights in May when the mountain air still had the feel of snow. Except not that cold because Sterling's door was open a little bit. The girls knocked and walked in. Nicole wasn't wearing anything but her Levi's and some kind of halter, and there was this strange-looking guy sitting on the couch. She thought he was just plain strange looking. Hadn't shaved in a couple of days, and was drinking a beer. What with saying hello to Nicole and Sue, Sterling didn't even introduce him.
Nicole made a pretense of ignoring the new fellow, but there was something about him. When their eyes met, he looked at her and said, "I know you." Nicole didn't say anything in reply. For a split second, something flashed in her mind but then she thought, No, I've never met him before, I know that. Maybe I know him from another time.
That started everything off. She hadn't been thinking in such a way for quite a while. Now that feeling was around her again. She knew what he meant.
His eyes looked very blue in a long triangular face and they stared at her and he said again, "Hey, I know you." Finally Nicole kind of laughed and said, "Yeah, maybe." She thought about it a moment more and looked at him again and said, "Maybe." They didn't talk anymore for a while.
She gave her attention to Sterling. In fact, both girls were clustered around Sterling, the easiest man in the world to get along with. Nicole always liked him for he was gentle and warm and very hospitable, and sure sexy. He soothed everything.
What with Sue liking him too, the night was sort of exciting. As they were talking, Nicole finally confessed to Sterling that she had a crush on him for years when she was a kid. He told her right back that he'd always been crazy about her. They just laughed. Cousins with a crush. This other fellow sat in his chair and kept looking at her.
After a while Nicole decided the new fellow was pretty good looking. He was much too old for her, looked like he could be near 40.
But he was tall and had beautiful eyes and a pretty good mouth. He looked intelligent and yet bad at the same time, like an older guy who could fit into a motorcycle gang. She was a little fascinated, even if she wasn't about to admit to much interest.
Sue wasn't saying anything to him either, in fact she pretended he wasn't there. In compensation, Sunn
y started being a real bad 4-year-old and carried on in front of the stranger, as ornery and bossy as she could. She began ordering Nicole to do this and do that. Soon Sunny got flushed and pretty looking, and now was flirting with the man. Just about then, he looked at Nicole and said, "You're going to have a lot of trouble with this little girl. She could end up in Reform School."
That gave a twinge. It was one remark to get under you. Maybe she had been the kind of mother who could do that to her kids. Nicole knew those words might stick in her like a hook over the next couple of years.
She began to think this guy had some kind of psychic power, and could really see what was going to happen. As if he were a hypnotist or something of that ilk. She hardly knew if she was about to like that.
Anyway, he seemed to think that was enough to start a conversation. Before long, he was talking to her in a very persistent way. He wanted to go to the store to get a six-pack of beer and kept bugging her to go with him. She kept shaking her head. Sue and she had been getting ready to leave and she didn't want to go to the store with this man now. He was too strange. There wasn't any sense to it any way since the store was just a little down the road.
What worked in his favor, however, was that Sue didn't look ready to leave yet. She was just beginning to get off on talking to Sterling, and obviously wouldn't mind being alone with the guy for a little while. So Nicole said, Okay, and took Jeremy for protection. Sunny was asleep by then.
When they got to the store, it was closed. They continued down town. Nicole didn't even get out of the car. She stayed while the tall dude went in and got a six-pack or two of beer, and brought back a banana for Jeremy. That was his idea.
It was odd, but he had a Mustang just like hers, same model, same year. Just the color was different. So she felt comfortable in it.
When he returned with the beer, she was leaning against the door, and he put the six-pack on her knee. She joked and said, Oh, that hurts. He started rubbing her knee. He did it decently; not too personal, but it felt pretty good in a nice simple way, and they went on home. When they got to the end of Sterling's driveway, before she got out of the car, he turned around and looked at her and asked if she would kiss him. She didn't say anything for a minute, then said, Yes. He reached across and gave her a kiss and it didn't do any harm at all to what she thought about him. In fact, to her surprise, she felt like crying. A long time later, she would remember that first kiss. Then they went back to the house.
The Executioner's Song Page 7