The Executioner's Song

by Norman Mailer

Moody had the feeling that the riflemen behind the blind were purposely not looking at Gary, but keeping their backs to him, chatting away in a group, and would only turn around at the last minute when given the order. Ron Stanger, situated next to Bob Moody, wanted to get up and say to all, "Here, bless your heart, you wouldn't give this man a piece of pizza before you blow his guts out." That's what he wanted to say, but he didn't dare. It would have been too hysterical. Couldn't let the man, he would have shouted, have his pizza and a six-pack of beer. Rather have it wind up in a correctional belly, wouldn't you?

  Cline Campbell's first thought when he walked into the room was, my goodness, do they sell tickets to this? All the same, Campbell could feel how everybody was scared to death. It hung over the execution.

  The good old bureaucratic fear that somebody in an official place was going to forget something. Then there'd be all political or legal hell to pay. Campbell just contented himself with saying to Gary, "How are you doing?" and then he stood to one side of the chair and Father Meersman to the other, and Father Meersman got a cup of water and Gilmore took a sip of it as the priest held it to his mouth.

  An official came up to Vern and said Gary wanted to speak to him. Vern walked over into the light that was on Gary, and his nephew looked up at him with those baby-blue eyes of his, and Vern felt he'd like to pull him out of that chair, just pull him out of that chair and make him free again. Vern was feeling a great deal of emotion. He didn't want him in that chair, really.

  Gary said, "Look, take this watch. I don't want anybody to have it but Nicole." He had broken it and taped it with the hands set at 7:49.

  Now, he handed it to Vern. Must have been holding it all this while.

  Then Gary. said, "I want you to promise you'll see to it that Nicole is taken care of." How in the world Gary figured he could take care of her, Vern didn't know, but Gary had to ask somebody. They shook hands and Gary started to squeeze his hand, right there in the chair as if he could crush Vern's knuckles. He said to Vern, "Come on, I'll give you a go," and Vern said, "Gary, I could pull you right out of that chair if I wanted to."

  Gary said, "Would you?" Vern went back to his place behind the line and thought of the conversation he'd had weeks before when Gary asked him and Ida to be witnesses, and Vern had said, "I don't want Ida to see it," and Gary said, "but I want you there, Vern."

  "I don't know whether I can take it or not," Vern had said, "I don't think I can." Gary had said, "Well, I want you there"

  "Why?" Vern asked "Why do you want me?"

  Well Vern, Gary said, "I want to show you. I've already shown you how I live"—he gave his most mocking smile—"and I'd like to show you how I can die." Vern thought all this now must be part of what he had said then because, back behind the line, feeling Gary's hands on his, Vern wanted to tell him, "That was so good, Gary, what you just did."

  Bob Moody came next, and he shook hands. Gary had a smaller hand than Bob had expected, but neither cold nor feverishly warm, just a shock, for it was a warm, living hand like any other. Gary looked at him and said, "Well, Moody, I'm going to leave you my hair. You need it worse than I do."

  Schiller was next. As he walked up, he kept worrying about right things to say. But when he got there, he was dazed by the immensity of it all. It was as if he was saying good-bye to a man who was going to step into a cannon and be fired to the moon, or in an iron chamber to the bottom of the sea, a veritable Houdini. He grasped both of Gilmore's hands and it didn't matter if the man was a murderer, he could just as well have been a saint, for either at this moment seemed equally beyond Schiller's way of measure—and he said, he heard it come out of him, "I don't know what I'm here for."

  Gilmore replied, "You're going to help me escape." Schiller looked at him sitting in the chair and said, "I'll do it the best that's humanly possible," and was thinking by that, he would treat it all in the most honest way, and Gilmore smiled back at him with that funny tight grin of his, just a little expression in the upper lip, as he alone knew the meaning of what had just been said, and then the grin broadened into that thin-lipped smile he showed on occasion, evil as a jackal, subtly jeering, the last facial expression Schiller would have to remember of Gilmore. They shook hands, Gilmore's grip kind of weak, and Schiller walked away not knowing whether he had handled the moment the way he should. Didn't even know if it was a moment to be handled. He felt like he had no real relationship to Gilmore.

  Vern had gone first because he was the patriarch, then Bob Moody, but Schiller had tried to be last. Stanger had thought, "You've got to be kidding, you're even doing it now," and won the maneuvering.

  Larry went ahead. When it came Stanger's turn, he couldn't think of anything to say. Just murmured, "Hang in there. Stick with it." Gary didn't look very tough. Wan, in fact. His eye showed the effect of all those drugs wearing off. He was trying to be brave, but just said, "Cool," like it wasn't that easy anymore to get the words out, and they shook hands. Gary squeezed real hard, and Stanger put his arm around his shoulder, and Gary moved the hand that was loose in the straps to touch Ron's arm. Stanger kept thinking that Gilmore's hands were skinnier than you'd think they'd be. And they looked in each other's eyes, kind of a final embrace.

  As soon as Ron returned to his position behind the line, a prison official came up to ask if he wanted cotton for his ears. Then Ron noticed that everybody was taking cotton, so he stuffed some into his head, and watched Sam Smith walk over to the back of the room where a red telephone was on a chair. Then Sam Smith made a phone call, and walked back and came up to Gary and started to read a declaration.

  Schiller, trying to listen, decided it was some official document. Not the sort, by the sound of it, that he would listen to normally but, through the cotton he could hear Sam Smith going blah, blah, blah.

  All the while, Gary was not looking at the Warden, but rather, leaning in his chair from side to side in order to stare around the large body of Sam Smith, practically tipping that chair over trying to see the faces behind the executioner's blind, catch a glint of their expression.

  Then the Warden said, "Do you have anything you'd like to say?" and Gary looked up at the ceiling and hesitated, then said, "Let's do it." That was it. The most pronounced amount of courage, Vern decided, he'd ever seen, no quaver, no throatiness, right down the line.

  Gary had looked at Vern as he spoke.

  The way Stanger heard it, it came out like Gary wanted to say something good and dignified and clever, but couldn't think of anything profound. The drugs had left him too dead. Rather than say nothing, he did his best to say it very clear, "Let's do it."

  That was about what you'd expect of a man who'd been up for more than twenty-four hours and had taken everything and now was hung over, and coming down, and looking older than Ron had ever seen him. Ah, he was drained out. Ron could see deep lines in his face for the first time. Gilmore looked as white as the day the lawyers first met him after the suicide attempt.

  Father Meersman walked up to give the last rites, and Noall Wootton braced himself and took a peep between the shoulders some of the big men in front of him, and remembered Gary when had come to the Board of Pardons Hearing, very confident that like he was holding all the cards, the ace and everything else you might need. Now, in Wooton's opinion, he didn't have it.

  And Schiller, looking at the same man, thought he was resigned in his appearance, but with presence, and what you could call a certain authority.

  Father Meersman finished giving Gary Gilmore the last rites. As they came forward with the hood, Gilmore said to him, "Dominus vobiscum." Father Meersman didn't know how to describe his emotion. Gary couldn't have said anything that brought back more of an automatic response. This was the greeting Father Meersman had given to the people again and again over the ten years and twenty and thirty since he had become a priest. "Dominus vobiscum," he would say at Mass and the response would come back, "Et cum spiritu tuo."

  So now, when Gilmore said Dominus vobiscum, Father Meersm
an answered like an altar boy, "Et cum spiritu tuo," and as the words came out of his mouth, Gary kind of grinned and said, "There'll always be a Meersman."

  "He wants to say," said Father Meersman to himself, 'that there will always be a priest present at a time like this."

  Three or four men in red coats came up and put the hood on Gilmore's head. Nothing was said after that. Absolutely nothing said. They put a waist strap on Gilmore, and a head strap, and Father Meersman began to think of how when they were first strapping him in the chair, Gilmore had wanted water and Father Meersman had given him water for the throat that was too dry. Then he had wanted another drink.

  Now, the doctor was beside him, pinning a white circle on Gilmore's black shirt, and the doctor stepped back. Father Meersman traced the big sign of the cross, the last act he had to perform. Then, he, too, stepped over the line, and turned around, and looked back at the hooded figure in the chair. The phone began to ring.

  Noall Wooton's first reaction was, God, it's just like in the movies, it isn't going to happen. Schiller was taking notes on the checks he'd been careful to remove from the checkbook holder, and he noted that the hood came down loosely like a square carton over Gary's head. Not form fitting in any way. You could not have a sense of his features beneath the sack.

  Stanger, listening to the phone, thought, "It is a final confirmation of some kind." Then Sam Smith hung up, and walked back to his place behind the line, and it happened to be next to Schiller. He handed Larry more cotton and they looked into each other's eyes.

  Then, Schiller didn't know if Sam Smith made a movement with his arm, or didn't, but he felt as if he saw something in the Warden's shoulder move, and Ron and Bob Moody and Cline Campbell heard a countdown begin, and Noall Wootton put his fingers in his ears on top of the cotton, and Gary's body looked calm to Campbell. Cline could not believe the calm he saw in that man. Gilmore was so strong in his desire to die right, that he didn't clench his fist as the count began.

  Stanger said to himself, "I hope I don't fall down." He had his hand up to protect his head somehow. Right through the cotton, he heard the sound of heavy breathing and saw the barrels of the rifles projecting from the slits of the blind. He was shocked at how close those muzzles were to the victim. They sure didn't want to miss.

  Then it all got so quiet your attention was called to it. Right through the cotton, Ron heard these whispers, "One," and "Two," and they never got to say, "Three" before the guns went, "Bam. Bam. Bam."

  So loud it was terrifying. A muscle contracted from Ron's shoulder down to his lower back. Some entire school of muscles in a spasm.

  Schiller heard three shots, expecting four. Gary's body did not jerk nor the chair move, and Schiller waited for the fourth shot and found out later that two must have come out simultaneously. Noall Wootton tried to look at Gary at that point, but couldn't see anything from the rear of the crowd and went out the door before anyone else, and straight to his car which was up by Minimum Security, got in it, drove out. There were reporters interviewing people and photographers, but he didn't stop. He didn't want to talk to anybody.

  Vern just heard a great big WHAM! When it happened, Gary never raised a finger. Didn't quiver at all. His left hand never moved, and then, after he was shot, his head went forward, but the strap held his head up, and then the right hand slowly rose in the air and slowly went down as if to say, "That did it, gentlemen." Schiller thought the movement was as delicate as the fingers of a pianist raising his hand before he puts it down on the keys. The blood started to flow through the black shirt and came out onto the white pants and started to drop on the floor between Gary's legs, and the smell of gunpowder was everywhere. Then, the lights went down, and Schiller listened to the blood drip. He was not certain he could hear it drip, but he felt it, and with that blood, the life in Gilmore's body seemed to lift off him like smoke. Ron Stanger, feeling dizzy, said to himself, "You're the only one that's going to pass out, and it will be embarrassing to end on the ground with all these people here," and he staggered backward from the force of the contraction in his back, put his arms out, grabbed hold of somebody to steady himself, and turned back to get another look at the body. That was when he saw Gilmore's right hand lift.

  Ron closed his eyes and when he opened them again, the blood was a pool in Gary's lap, running to his feet and covering his tennis shoes, those crazy red, white and blue tennis shoes he always wore in Maximum. The shoelaces were now blooded over.

  A doctor came along with a stethoscope and shook his head. Gilmore wasn't dead yet.

  Ron thought of the day when Gary was in Fagan's office for a moment, and in that ten seconds Gary was all over his desk like a butterfly. He opened the desk drawer and took out a spoon, and shoelaces, went through everything like a guy leading an orchestra.

  It was beautiful. Gilmore was a talented thief, after all, and finished just as Fagan said, "Yeah, okay, Joe." By the time the Lieutenant turned around, old Gary was sitting there calm as a nodding owl, and Stanger on the other side of the glass had his eyes wide open.

  Gary made jokes about the shoelaces after that. They were good enough to hang himself by, he would tell Ron, and now the hand that had done the stealing moved up in the air and came down. It could have been pointing at the blood on the shoelaces.

  They waited about twenty seconds. Then the doctor went up again, and Father Meersman came up, and Sam Smith, and the doctor put the stethoscope to Gary's arm once more, turned to Sam, and nodded. Sam Smith unloosened the waist strap, slid Gilmore out from underneath the head strap, and looked behind the body at the shot pattern where the holes came through.

  Stanger was furious. The moment Gilmore was shot, everybody should have been walked out, and not served for a party to all this.

  Even as Sam was examining the body, Gary fell over into Meersman's hands. The padre had to hold the head while Sam went fishing all over Gilmore's back to locate the exit wounds. Blood started coming onto Meersman's hands, and dripped through his fingers, and Vern began to weep. Then Father Meersman wept. An officer finally came around and said to the people standing behind the line, "Time for you to leave." Schiller walked out saying to himself, "What have we accomplished? There aren't going to be less murders."

  All the while Father Meersman and Cline Campbell were unbuckling Gilmore's arms and legs. Campbell kept thinking of the importance of the eyes. He said to himself, "Why doesn't somebody move? We've got to save the eyes."

  Over at the Warden's office, just a few minutes earlier, Gordon Richards had received a phone call from an Assistant Clerk in the U.S. Supreme Court, who was saying that the full Court—with Justice Brennan not participating—had just acted on the application for a Stay from the ACLU and had denied it. Richards got a little upset.

  This Clerk who was named Peter Beck had been told nothing about "Mickey from Wheeling, West Virginia." Well, did Mr. Beck know, Richards asked, where Mr. Rodak was born and what his nickname was? "Is it Mike?" said Beck. Richards then asked if Mr. Rodak could call him. Before he knew it, he got put on hold. "Hurry, please," Richards called out to Beck, "it's crucial." There he was sitting with unconfirmed information from the Supreme Court. So he called out to the prison officials there with him in the Warden's office, "Tell them to hold at the cannery." The officials shook their heads, however.

  The execution had just been carried out.

  Three minutes later, Rodak came on the line. Richards asked for his nickname and his birthplace. The nickname was Mickey, he said, but he had been born in Smock, Pennsylvania.

  "What about West Virginia?" asked Richards. "I was born in Smock," said Rodak, "but I went to West Virginia. I'm a member of the West Virginia Bar."

  Had he offered this information to Earl Dorius? asked Richards.

  Didn't think so, said Rodak. Finally, he remembered. "Oh, yes, the fellow wanted to make sure that he didn't get any false calls." Right. "Is," asked Rodak, "the execution over yet?"

  "Wouldn't it have been horrible
," said Richards to one of the officials, as he hung up, "if that had been simultaneous calls?"

  Vern, Bob Moody, Ron Stanger, and Larry Schiller got into a car and drove over to the Administration Building. During that minute, they discussed whether or not to issue a press statement ahead of the Warden.

  Stanger said, "I think we ought to. What do you say, Larry?" Schiller replied, "We have no obligation. The first person who gets there is the first person the press will talk to," and Stanger said, "Let's beat the Warden to the punch."

  Vern said, "Can you answer questions about the execution, Larry? I don't want to talk about that."

  The press conference was being held on the second floor of the Administration Building in a large conference chamber that looked like a courtroom. It was already as crowded as the Board of Pardons Hearing, same bedlam of media, cameras and crazy white light, people pushing to get in, close to 100 degrees inside. No room to breathe.

  Trying to get upstairs, they were buffeted every way. Some TV guy was working with a couple of electric cables in front of Bob Moody, and got so rude about letting Moody pass that Bob just grabbed a male-female connection crossing his path and yanked it apart. The TV man cried out, "My God, I've lost power, lost power," as Moody went by.

  When they reached the stage, Schiller said to Vern, "Why don't you talk first?" and Vern sat on a chair to rest his aching leg.

  He did not speak long. "It was very upsetting to me," Vern said, "but he got his wish, he did die . . . and he died in dignity. That's all I have to say."

  Bob Moody told them, "I think it's a very brutal, cruel kind of a thing, that I would only hope that we could take a good and better look at ourselves, our society and our systems. Thank you."

  Ron said, "He was always trying to keep the spirit light because he made the statement he had received a gift, and that gift was he knew he was going to die, and he could make the arrangements and, therefore, he was indeed fortunate. He always said that he looked forward to the time when he could have quiet, when he could meditate, and today, Gary Gilmore has quiet, and he has quiet through eternity."