The Green Mile

7

So The Chief burned and The President walked – as far as C Block, anyway, which was home to most of Cold Mountain’s hundred and fifty lifers. Life for The Pres turned out to be twelve years. He was drowned in the prison laundry in 1944. Not the Cold Mountain prison laundry; Cold Mountain closed in 1933. I don’t suppose it mattered much to the inmates – walls is walls, as the cons say, and Old Sparky was every bit as lethal in his own little stone death chamber, I reckon, as he’d ever been in the storage room at Cold Mountain.

As for The Pres, someone shoved him face-first into a vat of dry-cleaning fluid and held him there. When the guards pulled him out again, his face was almost entirely gone. They had to ID him by his fingerprints. On the whole, he might have been better off with Old Sparky ... but then he never would have had those extra twelve years, would he? I doubt he thought much about them, though, in the last minute or so of his life, when his lungs were trying to learn how to breathe Hexlite and lye cleanser.

They never caught whoever did for him. By then I was out of the corrections line of work, but Harry Terwilliger wrote and told me. ‘He got commuted mostly because he was white,’ Harry wrote, ‘but he got it in the end, just the same. I just think of it as a long stay of execution that finally ran out.’

There was a quiet time for us in E Block, once The Pres was gone. Harry and Dean were temporarily reassigned, and it was just me, Brutal, and Percy on the Green Mile for a little bit. Which actually meant just me and Brutal, because Percy kept pretty much to himself. I tell you, that young man was a genius at finding things not to do. And every so often (but only when Percy wasn’t around), the other guys would show up to have what Harry liked to call ‘a good gab.’ On many of these occasions the mouse would also show up. We’d feed him and he’d sit there eating, just as solemn as Solomon, watching us with his bright little oilspot eyes.

That was a good few weeks, calm and easy even with Percy’s more than occasional carping. But all good things come to an end, and on a rainy Monday in late July – have I told you how rainy and dank that summer was? – I found myself sitting on the bunk of an open cell and waiting for Eduard Delacroix.

He came with an unexpected bang. The door leading into the exercise yard slammed open, letting in a flood of light, there was a confused rattle of chains, a frightened voice babbling away in a mixture of English and Cajun French (a patois the cons at Cold Mountain used to call da bayou), and Brutal hollering, ‘Hey! Quit it! For Chrissakes! Quit it, Percy!’

I had been half-dozing on what was to become Delacroix’s bunk, but I was up in a hurry, my heart slugging away hard in my chest. Noise of that kind on E Block almost never happened until Percy came; he brought it along with him like a bad smell.

‘Come on, you fuckin French-fried faggot!’ Percy yelled, ignoring Brutal completely. And here he came, dragging a guy not much bigger than a bowling pin by one arm. In his other hand, Percy had his baton. His teeth were bared in a strained grimace, and his face was bright red. Yet he did not look entirely unhappy. Delacroix was trying to keep up with him, but he had the legirons on, and no matter how fast he shuffled his feet, Percy pulled him along faster. I sprang out of the cell just in time to catch him as he fell, and that was how Del and I were introduced.

Percy rounded on him, baton raised, and I held him back with one arm. Brutal came puffing up to us, looking as shocked and nonplussed by all this as I felt.

‘Don’t let him hit me no mo, m’sieu,’ Delacroix babbled. ‘S’il vous plaît, s’il vous plaît!’

‘Let me at im, let me at im!’ Percy cried, lunging forward. He began to hit at Delacroix’s shoulders with his baton. Delacroix held his arms up, screaming, and the stick went whap-whap-whap against the sleeves of his blue prison shirt. I saw him that night with the shirt off, and that boy had bruises from Christmas to Easter. Seeing them made me feel bad. He was a murderer, and nobody’s darling, but that’s not the way we did things on E Block. Not until Percy came, anyhow.

‘Whoa! Whoa!’ I roared. ‘Quit that! What’s it all about, anyway?’ I was trying to get my body in between Delacroix’s and Percy’s, but it wasn’t working very well. Percy’s club continued to flail away, now on one side of me and now on the other. Sooner or later he was going to bring one down on me instead of on his intended target, and then there was going to be a brawl right here in this corridor, no matter who his relations were. I wouldn’t be able to help myself, and Brutal was apt to join in. In some ways, you know, I wish we’d done it. It might have changed some of the things that happened later on.

‘Fucking faggot! I’ll teach you to keep your hands off me, you lousy bum-puncher!’

Whap! Whap! Whap! And now Delacroix was bleeding from one ear and screaming. I gave up trying to shield him, grabbed him by one shoulder, and hurled him into his cell, where he went sprawling on the bunk. Percy darted around me and gave him a final hard whap on the butt – one to go on, you could say. Then Brutal grabbed him – Percy, I mean – by the shoulders and hauled him across the corridor.

I grabbed the cell door and ran it shut on its tracks. Then I turned to Percy, my shock and bewilderment at war with pure fury. Percy had been around about several months at that point, long enough for all of us to decide we didn’t like him very much, but that was the first time I fully understood how out of control he was.

He stood watching me, not entirely without fear – he was a coward at heart, I never had any doubt of that – but still confident that his connections would protect him. In that he was correct. I suspect there are people who wouldn’t understand why that was, even after all I’ve said, but they would be people who only know the phrase Great Depression from the history books. If you were there, it was a lot more than a phrase in a book, and if you had a steady job, brother, you’d do almost anything to keep it.

The color was fading out of Percy’s face a little by then, but his cheeks were still flushed, and his hair, which was usually swept back and gleaming with brilliantine, had tumbled over his forehead.

‘What in the Christ was that all about?’ I asked. ‘I have never – I have never! – had a prisoner beaten onto my block before!’

‘Little fag bastard tried to cop my joint when I pulled him out of the van,’ Percy said. ‘He had it coming, and I’d do it again.’

I looked at him, too flabbergasted for words. I couldn’t imagine the most predatory homosexual on God’s green earth doing what Percy had just described. Preparing to move into a crossbar apartment on the Green Mile did not, as a rule, put even the most deviant of prisoners in a sexy mood.

I looked back at Delacroix, cowering on his bunk with his arms still up to protect his face. There were cuffs on his wrists and a chain running between his ankles. Then I turned to Percy. ‘Get out of here,’ I said. ‘I’ll want to talk to you later.’

‘Is this going to be in your report?’ he demanded truculently. ‘Because if it is, I can make a report of my own, you know.’

I didn’t want to make a report; I only wanted him out of my sight. I told him so.

‘The matter’s closed,’ I finished. I saw Brutal looking at me disapprovingly, but ignored it. ‘Go on, get out of here. Go over to Admin and tell them you’re supposed to read letters and help in the package room.’

‘Sure.’ He had his composure back, or the crack-headed arrogance that served him as composure. He brushed his hair back from his forehead with his hands – soft and white and small, the hands of a girl in her early teens, you would have thought – and then approached the cell. Delacroix saw him, and he cringed back even farther on his bunk, gibbering in a mixture of English and stewpot French.

‘I ain’t done with you, Pierre,’ he said, then jumped as one of Brutal’s huge hands fell on his shoulder.

‘Yes you are,’ Brutal said. ‘Now go on. Get in the breeze.’

‘You don’t scare me, you know,’ Percy said. ‘Not a bit.’ His eyes shifted to me. ‘Either of you.’ But we did. You could see that in his eyes as clear as day, and it made him even more dangerous. A guy like Percy doesn’t even know himself what he means to do from minute to minute and second to second.

What he did right then was turn away from us and go walking up the corridor in long, arrogant strides. He had shown the world what happened when scrawny, half-bald little Frenchmen tried to cop his joint, by God, and he was leaving the field a victor.

I went through my set speech, all about how we had the radio – Make Believe Ballroom and Our Gal Sunday, and how we’d treat him jake if he did the same for us. That little homily was not what you’d call one of my great successes. He cried all the way through it, sitting huddled up at the foot of his bunk, as far from me as he could get without actually fading into the corner. He cringed every time I moved, and I don’t think he heard one word in six. Probably just as well. I don’t think that particular homily made a whole lot of sense, anyway.

Fifteen minutes later I was back at the desk, where a shaken-looking Brutus Howell was sitting and licking the tip of the pencil we kept with the visitors’ book. ‘Will you stop that before you poison yourself, for God’s sake?’ I asked.

‘Christ almighty Jesus,’ he said, putting the pencil down. ‘I never want to have another hooraw like that with a prisoner coming on the block.’

‘My Daddy always used to say things come in threes,’ I said.

‘Well, I hope your Daddy was full of shit on that subject,’ Brutal said, but of course he wasn’t. There was a squall when John Coffey came in, and a full-blown storm when ‘Wild Bill’ joined us – it’s funny, but things really do seem to come in threes. The story of our introduction to Wild Bill, how he came onto the Mile trying to commit murder, is something I’ll get to shortly; fair warning.

‘What’s this about Delacroix copping his joint?’ I asked.

Brutal snorted. ‘He was ankle-chained and ole Percy was just pulling him too fast, that’s all. He stumbled and started to fall as he got out of the stagecoach. He put his hands out same as anyone would when they start to fall, and one of them brushed the front of Percy’s pants. It was a complete accident.’

‘Did Percy know that, do you think?’ I asked. ‘Was he maybe using it as an excuse just because he felt like whaling on Delacroix a little bit? Showing him who bosses the shooting match around here?’

Brutal nodded slowly. ‘Yeah. I think that was probably it.’

‘We have to watch him, then,’ I said, and ran my hands through my hair. As if the job wasn’t hard enough. ‘God, I hate this. I hate him.’

‘Me, too. And you want to know something else, Paul? I don’t understand him. He’s got connections, I understand that, all right, but why would he use them to get a job on the Green fucking Mile? Anywhere in the state pen, for that matter? Why not as a page in the state senate, or the guy who makes the lieutenant governor’s appointments? Surely his people could’ve gotten him something better if he’d asked them, so why here?’

I shook my head. I didn’t know. There were a lot of things I didn’t know then. I suppose I was naive.