The Executioner's Song Read Online Free Page A

he usually came out and said what he thought. That could be abrasive.
                    Yet when Gary met Vern, Brenda decided she had prepared him too much. He was a little nervous when he said hello, and looked around, and acted surprised at the size of the shoe shop, as if he hadn't expected a big cave of a place. Vern commented that it was a lot of room to walk around in when customers weren't there, and they got on from that to his osteoarthritis. Vern had a powerfully painful accumulation in his knee that had frozen the joint. Just hearing about it seemed to get Gary concerned. It didn't seem phony, Brenda thought. She could almost feel the pain of Vern's knee pass right into Gary's scrotum.
                    Vern thought Gary ought to move in with Ida and himself right away, but shouldn't plan to go to work for a few days. A fellow needed time to get acquainted with his freedom, Vern observed. After all, Gary had come into a strange town, didn't know where the library was, didn't know where to buy a cup of coffee. So he talked to Gary real slow. Brenda was accustomed to men taking quite a while to say anything to each other, but if you were impatient, it could drive you crazy.
                    When she and Gary went over to the house, however, Ida was thrilled. "Bessie was my special big sister, and I was always her favorite," Ida told him. She was getting a little plump, but with her red-brown hair and her bright-colored dress, Ida looked like an attractive gypsy lady.
                    She and Gary began talking right away about how when he was a little boy, he used to visit Grandma and Grandpa Brown. "I loved them days," Gary said to her. "I was as happy then as I've ever been in my life."
                    Together, Gary and Ida made a sight in that small living room. Although Vern's shoulders could fill a doorway, and any one of his fingers was as wide as anyone else's two fingers, he was not that tall, and Ida was short. They wouldn't be bothered by a low ceiling.
                    It was a living room with a lot of stuffed furniture in bright autumn colors and bright rugs and color-filled pictures in gold frames and there was a ceramic statue of a black stable boy with a red jacket standing by the fireplace. Chinese end tables and big colored hassocks took up space on the floor.
                    Having lived among steel bars, reinforced concrete, and cement-block walls, Gary would now be spending a lot of his time in this living room.
                    Back at her house, on the pretext of helping him pack, Brenda got a peek at the contents of his tote bag. It held a can of shaving cream, a razor, a toothbrush, a comb, some snapshots, his parole papers, a few letters, and no change of underwear.
                    Vern slipped him some underclothes, some tan slacks, a shirt, and twenty bucks.
                    Gary said, "I can't pay you back right now."
                    "I'm giving you the money," Vern said. "If you need more, see me. I don't have a lot, but I'll give you what I can."
                    Brenda would have understood her father's reasoning: a man without money in his pocket can get into trouble.
                    Sunday afternoon, Vern and Ida drove him over to Lehi, on the other side of Orem, for a visit with Toni and Howard.
                    Both of Toni's daughters, Annette and Angela, were excited about Gary. He was like a magnet with kids, Brenda and Toni agreed. On this Sunday, two days out of jail, he sat in a gold cloth-upholstered chair drawing chalk pictures on a blackboard for Angela.
                    He'd draw a beautiful picture and Angela, who was six, would erase it. He got the biggest kick out of that. He would take pains on the next one, draw it extra-beautiful, and she'd