The Green Mile

1

The nursing home where I am crossing my last bunch of t’s and dotting my last mess of i’s is called Georgia Pines. It’s about sixty miles from Atlanta and about two hundred light-years from life as most people – people under the age of eighty, let’s say – live it. You who are reading this want to be careful that there isn’t a place like it waiting in your future. It’s not a cruel place, not for the most part; there’s cable TV, the food’s good (although there’s damned little a man can chew), but in its way, it’s as much of a killing bottle as E Block at Cold Mountain ever was.

There’s even a fellow here who reminds me a little of Percy Wetmore, who got his job on the Green Mile because he was related to the governor of the state. I doubt if this fellow is related to anyone important, even though he acts that way. Brad Dolan, his name is. He’s always combing his hair, like Percy was, and he’s always got something to read stuffed into his back pocket. With Percy it was magazines like Argosy and Men’s Adventure; with Brad it’s these little paperbacks called Gross Jokes and Sick Jokes. He’s always asking people why the Frenchman crossed the road or how many Polacks it takes to screw in a lightbulb or how many pallbearers there are at a Harlem funeral. Like Percy, Brad is a dimwit who thinks nothing is funny unless it’s mean.

Something Brad said the other day struck me as actually smart, but I don’t give him a lot of credit for it; even a stopped clock is right twice a day, the proverb has it. ‘You’re just lucky you don’t have that Alzheimer’s disease, Paulie,’ was what he said. I hate him calling me that, Paulie, but he goes on doing it, anyway; I’ve given up asking him to quit. There are other sayings – not quite proverbs – that apply to Brad Dolan: ‘You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink’ is one; ‘You can dress him up but you can’t take him out’ is another. In his thickheadedness he is also like Percy.

When he made his comment about Alzheimer’s, he was mopping the floor of the solarium, where I had been going over the pages I have already written. There’s a great lot of them, and I think there’s apt to be a great lot more before I am through. ‘That Alzheimer’s, do you know what it really is?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘but I’m sure you’ll tell me, Brad.’

‘It’s AIDS for old people,’ he said, and then burst out laughing, hucka-hucka-hucka-huck!, just like he does over those idiotic jokes of his.

I didn’t laugh, though, because what he said struck a nerve somewhere. Not that I have Alzheimer’s; although there’s plenty of it on view here at beautiful Georgia Pines, I myself just suffer the standard old-guy memory problems. Those problems seem to have more to do with when than what. Looking over what I have written so far, it occurs to me that I remember everything that happened back in ’32; it’s the order of events that sometimes gets confused in my head. Yet, if I’m careful, I think I can keep even that sorted out. More or less.

John Coffey came to E Block and the Green Mile in October of that year, condemned for the murder of the nine-year-old Detterick twins. That’s my major landmark, and if I keep it in view, I should do just fine. William ‘Wild Bill’ Wharton came after Coffey; Delacroix came before. So did the mouse, the one Brutus Howell – Brutal, to his friends – called Steamboat Willy and Delacroix ended up calling Mr Jingles.

Whatever you called him, the mouse came first, even before Del – it was still summer when he showed up, and we had two other prisoners on the Green Mile: The Chief, Arlen Bitterbuck; and The Pres, Arthur Flanders.

That mouse. That goddam mouse. Delacroix loved it, but Percy Wetmore sure didn’t.

Percy hated it from the first.