The Green Mile

6

We were back on the block by one-fifteen or so (except for Percy, who had been ordered to clean up the storage room and was sulking his way through the job), me with a report to write. I decided to do it at the duty desk; if I sat in my more comfortable office chair, I’d likely doze off. That probably sounds peculiar to you, given what had happened only an hour before, but I felt as if I’d lived three lifetimes since eleven o’clock the previous night, all of them without sleep.

John Coffey was standing at his cell door, tears streaming from his strange, distant eyes – it was like watching blood run out of some unhealable but strangely painless wound. Closer to the desk, Wharton was sitting on his bunk, rocking from side to side, and singing a song apparently of his own invention, and not quite nonsense. As well as I can remember, it went something like this:

‘Bar-be-cue! Me and you!
Stinky, pinky, phew-phew-phew!
It wasn’t Billy or Philadelphia Philly,
it wasn’t Jackie or Roy!
It was a warm little number, a hot cucumber,
by the name of Delacroix!’

‘Shut up, you jerk,’ I said.

Wharton grinned, showing his mouthful of dingy teeth. He wasn’t dying, at least not yet; he was up, happy, practically tap-dancing. ‘Come on in here and make me, why don’t you?’ he said happily, and then began another verse of ‘The Barbecue Song,’ making up words not quite at random. There was something going on in there, all right. A kind of green and stinking intelligence that was, in its own way, almost brilliant.

I went down to John Coffey. He wiped away his tears with the heels of his hands. His eyes were red and sore-looking, and it came to me that he was exhausted, too. Why he should have been, a man who trudged around the exercise yard maybe two hours a day and either sat or laid down in his cell the rest of the time, I didn’t know, but I didn’t doubt what I was seeing. It was too clear.

‘Poor Del,’ he said in a low, hoarse voice. ‘Poor old Del.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Poor old Del. John, are you okay?’

‘He’s out of it,’ Coffey said. ‘Del’s out of it. Isn’t he, boss?’

‘Yes. Answer my question, John. Are you okay?’

‘Del’s out of it, he’s the lucky one. No matter how it happened, he’s the lucky one.’

I thought Delacroix might have given him an argument on that, but didn’t say so. I glanced around Coffey’s cell, instead. ‘Where’s Mr Jingles?’

‘Ran down there.’ He pointed through the bars, down the hall to the restraint-room door.

I nodded. ‘Well, he’ll be back.’

But he wasn’t; Mr Jingles’s days on the Green Mile were over. The only trace of him we ever happened on was what Brutal found that winter: a few brightly colored splinters of wood, and a smell of peppermint candy wafting out of a hole in a beam.

I meant to walk away then, but I didn’t. I looked at John Coffey, and he back at me as if he knew everything I was thinking. I told myself to get moving, to just call it a night and get moving, back to the duty desk and my report. Instead I said his name: ‘John Coffey.’

‘Yes, boss,’ he said at once.

Sometimes a man is cursed with needing to know a thing, and that was how it was with me right then. I dropped down on one knee and began taking off one of my shoes.