The Green Mile

5

I think you know I didn’t find all that out during one hot October afternoon in the soon-to-be-defunct prison library, from one set of old newspapers stacked in a pair of Pomona orange crates, but I learned enough to make it hard for me to sleep that night. When my wife got up at two in the morning and found me sitting in the kitchen, drinking buttermilk and smoking home-rolled Bugler, she asked me what was wrong and I lied to her for one of the few times in the long course of our marriage. I said I’d had another run-in with Percy Wetmore. I had, of course, but that wasn’t the reason she’d found me sitting up late. I was usually able to leave Percy at the office.

‘Well, forget that rotten apple and come on back to bed,’ she said. ‘I’ve got something that’ll help you sleep, and you can have all you want.’

‘That sounds good, but I think we’d better not,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a little something wrong with my waterworks, and wouldn’t want to pass it on to you.’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘Waterworks, huh,’ she said. ‘I guess you must have taken up with the wrong street-corner girl the last time you were in Baton Rouge.’ I’ve never been in Baton Rouge and never so much as touched a streetcorner girl, and we both knew it.

‘It’s just a plain old urinary infection,’ I said. ‘My mother used to say boys got them from taking a leak when the north wind was blowing.’

‘Your mother also used to stay in all day if she spilled the salt,’ my wife said. ‘Dr Sadler –’

‘No, sir,’ I said, raising my hand. ‘He’ll want me to take sulfa, and I’ll be throwing up in every corner of my office by the end of the week. It’ll run its course, but in the meantime, I guess we best stay out of the playground.’

She kissed my forehead right over my left eyebrow, which always gives me the prickles ... as Janice well knew. ‘Poor baby. As if that awful Percy Wetmore wasn’t enough. Come to bed soon.’

I did, but before I did, I stepped out onto the back porch to empty out (and checked the wind direction with a wet thumb before I did – what our parents tell us when we are small seldom goes ignored, no matter how foolish it may be). Peeing outdoors is one joy of country living the poets never quite got around to, but it was no joy that night; the water coming out of me burned like a line of lit coal-oil. Yet I thought it had been a little worse that afternoon, and knew it had been worse the two or three days before. I had hopes that maybe I had started to mend. Never was a hope more ill-founded. No one had told me that sometimes a bug that gets up inside there, where it’s warm and wet, can take a day or two off to rest before coming on strong again. I would have been surprised to know it. I would have been even more surprised to know that, in another fifteen or twenty years, there would be pills you could take that would smack that sort of infection out of your system in record time ... and while those pills might make you feel a little sick at your stomach or loose in your bowels, they almost never made you vomit the way Dr Sadler’s sulfa pills did. Back in ’32, there wasn’t much you could do but wait, and try to ignore that feeling that someone had spilled coal-oil inside your works and then touched a match to it.

I finished my butt, went into the bedroom, and finally got to sleep. I dreamed of girls with shy smiles and blood in their hair.