The Executioner's Song

  "You're not fat," Nicole said.

  "You, Sissy," said April, "were skinny!" She confirmed this with a most definite nod of her head to Gary, and then added, "Sissy was most of my childhood." She said this in a strong voice as though that were the last matter ever to argue about. "Me, Mike, and Sissy would go for walks with Rikki down by the gulch. We picked snails out of mossy logs."

  She was remembering the moss and how it was slimy from everything that oozed out of the snarls—that was how she felt. You could rub slime between your fingers and never feel a thing but slipperiness. Like you were the center of slipperiness. Making love. "I miss Hampton," she said. She didn't want to talk about him. She was getting to the point where she wanted to be deaf and blind. Sometimes her thoughts came out so strong, April could hear them twenty seconds before they went into her head. Especially before a real strong thought. "I've gone cold turkey," she said. "I've said farewell to the idea of love."

  Gary's records were mostly Johnny Cash. Full of the love and sorrow of men at how cruel and sweet and full of grit life feels. It wasn't her trip. The men could love the men. Still, she went on a trip with Gary and was very much in his music, and Johnny Cash, wherever he was now, would be able to feel his song stirring in her. Like she had a magic spoon to stir his soup. People could get down without playing an instrument. It was in the way they put the record on.

  "I was crazy about Hampton," April said. "He had so much green in his eyes you knew right away he was going to tell a story."

  "He always bored me," said Nicole.

  "Good in bed," said April. She sighed. She was thinking of the day last week when Sissy had come over and said to Hampton, "You need a haircut." "You want to do it?" he had asked, and Sissy said, "Sure." She had done his hair all right. Like she owned his head. Each time Nicole's scissors cut a lock of his hair, April could feel Hampton's love for herself ending. She could hear it in the sound the hair made when it was cut. Good-bye. Now she could feel Gary hearing the same sound and hating Hampton. "Oh, I loved Hampton," April said to make it right. "He was very spacey."

  Nicole snorted. "You loved him 'cause he was spacey?"

  April felt truly fierce. "That was 'cause I could live in his spaces."

  Next day, the Bicentennial Fourth of July, they went to a carnival and April ran into a couple of boys she knew. Next thing, she was gone. Gary and Nicole turned around and she was gone. No great matter. April was that way.

  They got home just in time to pick up the telephone. It was Nicole's father. Charley Baker told Nicole he was up the road at her grandfather's, and Steinie was having a big birthday party for Verna. Would she come?

  It made Nicole mad. That big a family party and they couldn't get around to inviting her until it started. She could hear the noise over the phone. "Well," she said, "I'd like to come, but don't get mad when you see my boyfriend."

  Nicole would find out that the Fourth of July party being given by Nicole's grandfather, Thomas Sterling Baker (nicknamed Stein), for his wife, Verna, had been planned in December, back before Christmas, by all of his six sons and two daughters, all coming from different places to celebrate their mother's birthday on the centennial. Glade Christiansen and his wife, Bonny, came in from Lyman, Wyoming, where Glade was a mine foreman. Danny Joanne Baker, also from Lyman and the mines, were there. Shelly Baker. Wendell Baker drove in from Mount View, Wyoming. Charley Baker, with his brand-new young woman, Wendy, came over from Toelle, Utah, where Charley now worked at the Army depot, and Kenny, Vicki, and Robbie Baker, from Los Angeles, came in. Boyd, Sterling Baker's father, and his wife, also named Verna, were back from Alaska where they'd been working for some years. Many of the children of all these sons and daughters were present. Some of the grandchildren, in fact, were also grown and married, attending with husbands and wives and kids.

  Some began to arrive as early as ten in the morning on the Fourth of July, and the party lasted till eleven that night. Good sunny weather with nearly everybody sitting out in the front yard which was screened from the canyon road by high bushes. The cars went whipping by outside and sometimes would touch the shoulder and throw up gobbets spat-spat against the bushes. That was a sound they knew from childhood.

  It was a big yard which wrapped around the front and side of the house, and Stein had gotten the place kind of cleaned up with the lawn swing and lawn chairs in place and all the food set out in the carport on big tables, the barbecued beef, potato salad and baked beans, the potato chips and various jello salads, the soda pop for the kids and the beer, but you still couldn't help but see into the backyard that was to the rear of the side yard, and that was never going to get cleaned up. It had a huge stack of piled-up grass and other cuttings, and a big old rusting billboard laid on top to keep the cuttings from being scattered by the wind, and Stein's old camper that you lifted onto a pickup truck was next to it, and coils of old hose that had gotten half uncoiled, plus the water-soaked swing hanging from the old tackle pulleys in the tree, the overturned wooden dory that needed painting, and a stove-in old red barrel by the rusted sign. There were gardening tools in a leaning shed and a bunch of old damn black ratty tires strewn around an old car body. The farther back you got in Stein's yard, the more you saw a lifetime of living.

  Inside the house, Verna must have put every color God gave the World to the furniture—one color for each of her kids was the family joke: yellow, green, blue, purple, red, orange, black, brown, and white in that living room. There was a hi-fi set for the Country-and-Western, a TV console, couches with different cushions, framed pictures of animals, a BarcaLounger for Stein, and a black leatherette stool with chromium legs for whoever. It probably came out of the bathroom which was white and pink and yellow with big flat rubber flowers pasted to the wallpaper.

  It was so large a family, you could hardly count all the members, but nothing compared to the ancestors. On his mother's side, Stein's Mormon grandfather from Kanab, Utah, had been old-style polygamist with six wives and fifty-four children. But you didn't have to go back to Kanab. Stein and Verna had been married since 1929, and there were plenty of memories right here.

  It still grated on Stein that starting out as a day laborer and working his way up to be superintendent of the Provo City Water Department, which took 37 years, he still had to quit because the mayor decided to put in an engineering graduate over him. Even had the gall to ask Stein to teach the new boy all about the water business. That was a memory to curdle your good feelings when you give a party to look back over it all.

  Charley Baker was in charge of the pit barbecue, and he might as well have planned the goddamned party because he had the major share of the job. He'd bought the beef, a big hindquarter, and marinated it three days in a sauce he prepared himself. Then, that morning he'd carried the beef leg over to Spanish Fork, a trip from Toelle, after first wrapping it in cheesecloth to keep moisture in, then wrapped the hell out of it in brown paper, and in burlap. Of course, he kept it wet all the while he was digging big goddamn hole in Stein's yard, bigger than a slit trench, packed it with rocks he had to dig up himself, then got a fire and watched it burn for hours to get those rocks hot all the way through. You had to get rocks hotter than hell for a pit barbecue to work. The idea was to put the leg in all wrapped up and two theories on this—either pack dirt on top, or, as Charley, use a lid so you can get in and spray the burlap every once in a while. That really made for a more juicy tender barbecue.

  Now Charley had been planning to stay up all the night before to watch the fire so he planned to take a little nap in the late afternoon of July 3. Went to ask his mother for a room. She had three bedrooms available for company and he'd had the pressure of buying that leg, marinating it, worrying it, trucking it, digging the trench, hefting the rocks—all he wanted was go to bed and take a little nap so he'd be fresh through the night, and his mother said, "You can't go down there and lay on Kenny's bed—you'll sweat on it, and make it stink." Real friendly. It pissed Charley off something terrible.
There was his new bride-to-be, Wendy, with him, young as an angel, and Charley was feeling funny enough already because it was the first time he would be seeing all these brothers and sisters without Kathryne—why, if they'd been married a couple more years, everybody would have been coming to Kathryne and his 25th anniversary—but now they were divorced. He was here with Wendy, half his age. And had to sleep in a tent out on the lawn at his mother's suggestion.

  His feelings were building. It was too much to ask a man to watch a fire when he was tired and sleepy and had a lot of unhappy memories—nothing to bring out unhappy memories like a fire. Darned if he didn't fall asleep out there. In the early hours of the morning when he woke up, the fire had gone out and the rocks were cold. Well, he kept working to build that fire back, but it was a lost cause. All next day during the party, there was a lot of irritation building because they finally had to hurry the barbecue up on a spit, and that didn't compare in flavor. There was a lot of smoke you couldn't control and soot, and the marinade got charred, instead of there being a juicy tender really deep old-fashioned pit barbecue. Charley couldn't even excuse himself for letting the fire go out. He wasn't about to tell anybody how bad some of those memories had been. Only thing a man could do when memories got too bad, was sleep.

  It started off because his father mentioned that Nicole was living down the road with a fellow. Of course all through the night Charley Was thinking off and on about Nicole. Which got him onto Kathryne and that gave him terrible recollections. Before he got back from Vietnam, Kathryne used to write loving letters. Things were better between them. He hadn't been home a week before there was a terrible fight, and Kathryne said, "I wish they'd shipped you back a box." Hell of a homecoming. It was like the fights they had in Germany about him drinking beer, the best goddamn beer in world for 18 cents, a big stein. How could you keep from getting loaded every night on beer? Then have to come home and face carping. He was supposed to be a Sergeant. At home, she had downgraded him to fool. He'd still get mad to think of that. Did him no good at all. He could feel that kind of thing getting into his organs and roiling them up.

  Then, of course, he would never get over that business of Lee and Nicole. Hell, it was true. They told him as much at the when he visited Nicole. The fact of the matter was that he and Nicole were never comfortable with one another.

  Watching the flames, deeper woe was coming to him from the fire. April getting raped by three niggers in Hawaii, and nobody to tell him. Going back from Hawaii to Midway, Kathryne had said, April a real bad case of gas and has to go to the bathroom. Maybe they should wait a day to fly. He told her, We're going to on that plane. What's a few farts? Made his decision in ignorance and there was April hurting so bad that he thought he'd have to ask the pilot to turn around and get her to a doctor. When they landed at Midway, Kathryne still kept the news from him. It wasn't until was out of the Seabees that she admitted being afraid to tell because there were all those black sailors on the Base. She'd been afraid he'd run amok. It hurt his feelings that she considered him that unstable to go out shooting black people at random. And all the while on Midway, April had been acting unmanageable, and he didn't know why. Had no idea what she'd been through. So he got hard on her.

  April would say she wanted to go out. He'd say, "Did you clean your room?" "Yes." "Okay, go ahead." But when he got around looking, she hadn't done a thing. So when she came back, he'd tell her, "I'm going to knock the shit out of you." She'd say, "Lay a hand on me and I'll go to the Chaplain." You didn't have to be hot-tempered to kick somebody in the butt for talking back like that. In fact, one time he bumped her pretty hard. She went straight to the Chaplain. Two of them, Catholic and Protestant, both came to the house.

  "Well, I understand what you think about me beating her all the time," he said, "and if you want to try socking it to me for child abuse, go ahead. But I haven't been abusing her. I only kicked her, because she threatened me with you." Sad thing was, he had thought she was lying when all the time she was going right out of her head. Told him she'd cleaned her bedroom and thought she did, you know. Didn't know the difference.

  Sitting by that big barbecue, watching those rocks heat, these kinds of things were heating up in him. Mike, the sweetest of the kids, also began to go off half-cocked on Midway. He and a little buddy got into the house of the Senior Chief when the man was off the Base on vacation, and dumped all the goddamn food Senior Chief had left for his pet fish into the tank at once. That killed the fish. A real good kid, never been in trouble before, but on Midway he began to go wild.

  Then he remembered Sissy living with Barrett up above a bar in Lehi. Kathryne had him half crazy with the idea this fellow Barrett was nothing but a low, dirty heroin pusher who had Sissy strung out. Used to imagine Nicole tied to a bed while Barrett poked needles in her. So he got himself fired up by drinking down in the bar below, figuring his daughter was right above him with a junkie who could be carrying any kind of weapon. Finally, he just walked up the stairs, stepped over a wino or two, and knocked on the door. There was this sweet, pleasant-looking squirt, liked him on sight, but he said all the same, "Barrett, I'm gonna cut your goddamn balls off." Instead the kid just looked at him, smart kid, a lot of potential, cute, with small features, looked just like Sissy, and the kid said, "Well, uh, I know things haven't been going right." Before he got done running himself down, Charley got to feeling sorry for him. Something positive about the boy. Maybe it was the way Barrett looked at him when told there was gonna be a castration party, and said, "If it's going to make you feel better, here I am." Anyway, Charley had to admit once he got a full look at Nicole, "Boy, you don't look bad to me," he had said. "Haven't lost any weight, you know." In fact, Nicole looked terrific. Charley mumbled something about "Your mom said you was here on heroin. Shoot, you're all right." He talked just a little bit then walked down the stairs and left. Felt foolish. Felt double foolish because he turned around at the last and said to Nicole, "Sissy, will you ever forgive me for what I did?" Said that in front of Barrett—he must have been out of his head. But he was brooding over what Lee had told him, and somehow took it personally.

  That was when he fell asleep. Woke up in the dawn with the fire out. After that, it was all catch up and lots of smoke in your nostrils.

  During the morning, tension kept building. Charley finally put the beef on a spit. Everybody was disappointed. Everybody kept telling him how good it was. "Not too burnt?" "No, not too burnt." "Not sooty?" "Hell, no."

  Around this point, his dad mentioned that Sissy was living down the road. Why didn't they invite her? Charley didn't want to, exactly; but he gave a phone call. It took something. He just had never stopped by to see her.

  Then he was wondering what kind of hippie she had now. Leave it to Sissy to locate the undesirables. Or should he say the dogs? Some down-and-out jerk or rotten bastard.

  He was getting ready to picture a truly pimply long-haired son of a bitch when Sissy came in with her new guy. Charley thought he looked a little old, but regular enough. In fact, Charley thought they might hit it off if they met in the Army or something.

  Right away the Gilmore fellow said he wanted to have a talk, so they went to the backyard. Even while Charley was standing there, the boy friend lay down, on the grass, put his hands behind his head, and started to talk. First thing he said was real funny. Charley didn't like it. Gilmore said, "You ever feel like killing somebody?"

  Charley tried to pass it off as a joke. "Yeah," he said, "I feel killing my boss all the time, the ignorant son of a bitch." But Gilmore didn't crack a smile. In the silence, Charley felt himself stepping in. "I mean, you're not serious, are you?" he asked. The boy friend said, "Nah, I was just wondering."

  It was only when the conversation was over, that Charley started wondering if the remark about wanting to kill somebody had been aimed at him.

  This was one evening that just refused to get comfortable. After Sissy came in, damned if one of Charley's brothers didn't point to Wendy and s
ay, "Nicole, meet your new stepmother." Wendy looked embarrassed half to death and Nicole finally said, "You are my stepmother?" Wendy said, "I guess so." Nicole looked at her real strange.

  Then, Nicole started necking with Gilmore on the grass in front of everybody. Charley saw Verna getting plenty annoyed, she came by pretending to laugh, but said, "Knock it off, you two." It was the way you'd shoo fornicating dogs. Gilmore got up like he'd been shot.

  A little later, Charley heard he almost picked a fight with Glade Christiansen who had been sitting under a lilac bush giving a bottle to his youngest boy, a year old. Gilmore came along with a football, asked if he'd like to play catch. Glade said, "I'm trying to get the kid fed." Gary sat down on a stool and started asking questions about what Glade did, but ran out of inquiries. So he looked at Glade and said, "Want to know more about me?" Glade really wanted to be alone feeding the kid. He said, "Not really." Then Gilmore began to act like he was cruising for a bruising. Said to Glade, "You give me the impression you're quite a man." Glade wasn't looking for trouble, and answered, "How do you figure that?" Gilmore said, "Well, you just look like you're a real man." Kept looking him over. Glade didn't see any reason to say anything and Gilmore just walked away.

  Then the fellow must have had words with Nicole. He took off suddenly. Charley could hardly blame him. Understood the feeling. Like when you went to church once in five years, and the pewholders looked you over. Enough to make you buy a pew.

  Afterward, Charley heard that Gary went in the house, knocked over a stool, fell down in the bathroom and Stein finally had to say "Your friend looks pretty intoxicated." To which Nicole, just a dreamboat, said, "He'll probably be all right." Anyway, Gary took off. Nicole looked like she didn't care. She was talking away to her relatives for once.