Free The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer Page A

him off.
                    He then made telephone calls to Utah and was instructed by his cousin to thumb a ride back. Was able to secure such a ride with a man he met at a bar. En route, the man began to have convulsions and finally passed out. So Gary was obliged to get behind the wheel of the car and try to locate a hospital. At this point he was arrested for driving without a license and had Mr. Court contacted. He, Gary Gilmore, was now reporting in as instructed.
                    Mont Court didn't feel too happy with the story. Gilmore was sitting in his office, super-nice and very polite. But he wasn't explaining an awful lot. Just answering questions. It didn't give a good feeling. All the same, there were a lot of cases where you just had to keep living with them.
                    Court had about eighty people on parole or probation, and he got to see thirty or forty a week, each for five to fifteen minutes. It meant you had to take chances. He had taken one yesterday by gambling that Gilmore would come back on his own from Idaho.
                    On the other hand, if he had been kept in jail in Idaho, Court would have had to refer him to the Oregon authorities, which is where his parole originated. It would have been difficult in the extreme to find any members of the Oregon Parole Commission on Sunday afternoon. In fact, it might even take a few days before they could meet to decide on Gilmore's violation. Gary would be sitting in a Twin Falls jail all that time. Right there, a lawyer could spring him on a Writ of Habeas Corpus, and Gilmore could take off. The more he was really in trouble, the more he'd look to get himself lost real fast. Whereas, Gilmore, coming back on his own, would be fortifying the positive side of himself. He would know Court had been right to trust him. That would give a base on which to work. The idea was to get a man into some kind of positive relationship with authority. Then he might begin to change.
                    Court had been a Mormon missionary in New Zealand and he was a believer in the power of authority to be a change-agent, that is, be able to effect a few real changes in people's personalities. Of course, a person had to be willing to accept authority, whether it was Scripture, the Book of Mormon, or in his case, just accept the fact that he, Mont Court, a probation officer, was neither a hard-nose, nor superheat, but a man willing to talk openly and take a reasonable chance on you. He was there to help, not to rush a man back to an overcrowded prison for the first minor infraction.
                    Of course, he laid it out. Gilmore had certainly been in violation of his parole agreement. Any more violations would jeopardize his parole. Gilmore nodded, Gilmore listened politely. He was looking old. They were about the same age, but Gilmore, Court was thinking, looked much older. On the other hand, if you put up a profile of what an artist of 35 might look like, Gilmore could fit that physical profile.
                    Court had seen some of his artistic work. Before he met him, Brenda had shown Mont Court a couple of Gary's drawings and paintings. The prison information he was receiving from Oregon made it clear that Gilmore was a violent person, yet in these paintings Court was able to see a part of the man simply not reflected in the prison record. Mont Court saw tenderness. He thought, Gilmore can't be all evil, all bad. There's something that's salvageable.
                    After the session with Mont Court, Gary decided to talk to Spencer McGrath about a new job. Brenda took him out to Lindon for the meeting, and took a liking to McGrath. He was really okay, she thought, just a little guy with rough features, a dark mustache, and a down-to-earth manner, who you could think was a plumber when you first looked at him. The kind who would walk around and