Free The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer Page A

heavy equipment parked all over a muddy yard.
     
    He was real quiet those first few days on the job. It was obvious he didn’t know what to do. If they gave him a board to plane, he just waited after he cleaned it off. They had to tell him to turn the plank over and plane the other side. One time the foreman, Craig Taylor, a medium-size fellow with big arms and shoulders, discovered that Gary had been working an electric drill for fifteen minutes with no results. Couldn’t get the hole started.
    Craig told him he had been running the drill on reverse. Gary shrugged, “I didn’t know these things had a reverse,” he said.
    THE FIRST MONTH 55p>
    So the word Spence McGrath got about him was that he was all right, but knew no more than a kid out of high school. Polygrinders and sanders and paint guns all had to be explained. He was also a loner. Brought his lunch in a brown paper bag and took it himself the first few days. Just sat on a piece of machinery off to the side and ate the food in all the presence of his own thoughts. Nobody knew what he was thinking.
     
    Night was different. Gary was out just about every night.
    Rikki was getting a little in awe of him. He knew be didn’t want to mess with Gary. At the poker game, Gary told them about the Idaho fellow he left in a hospital after a fight.
     
    Now, Gary also told everybody about this black dude he killed in jail who had been trying to make a nice white kid his punk. The kid asked Gary for help, so he and another buddy got ahold of some pipes. They had to. The convict they were taking on was a bad nigger, and had been a professional fighter, but they caught him on a stairway and beat him half to death with the pipes: Then they put him in his cell and stabbed him with a homemade knife 57 times.
     
    Rikki thought the story was talk. By telling it to everybody, Gary was just trying to make himself look big. Still, that didn’t leave Rikki feeling comfortable. Any fellow that wanted to live on such a story couldback. hardly back down if he started to lean on you, and you pushed
     
    There were times Gary seemed almost simple, however. Run ning after the girls in Rikki’s GTO, Gary sure hadn’t learned much. Rikki kept trying to explain how you talk to girls, soft and easy like Sterling Baker, instead of big and mean, but Gary said he wouldn’t play those games. It wasn’t no trick for Rikki to get a couple of girls to pull over and talk awhile, but Gary was sure to scare them off.
     
    One night, Rikki started idling next to a pickup with three girls. The truck was on Rikki’s left and he just talked through the open
     
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    THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG
     
    window until they could feel he was all right and good looking enough. Then the girls cut down a dark street, and he followed and parked behind. The girl driving came over to talk to Gary, and Rikki got out and walked up to their truck. He was talking nice to the other two girls about moving over to their place for a party, but not a couple of minutes gone, the driver came back looking scared. She said, “You ought to do something with that guy you’ve got along.” She got into her truck fast and took off.
     
    “What happened?”
    “Well, I came right out and asked her for it, said, ‘It’s been a long time and I’d like some right now!’” Gilmore shook his head. “I’ve had enough. Why don’t we just grab a couple of bitches and rape them?”
    Rikki chose his words carefully. “Gary, that’s something I just couldn’t go for.”
     
    They drove around until Gary said he knew a girl named Margie Quinn. “Real nice.” Now, he wanted to go to her place, only to her place. She lived on the second floor of a two-story building with sev eral apartments on each landing. Looked like a small motel.
     
    Gary pounded on her door for ten minutes. Finally, Marge’s sis ter came to answer. She opened just a crack, and whispered, “Marge has gone to bed.”
    “Tell her I’m here.”
    “She’s