The Green Mile

9

I got Brutal and Dean right away, because both of them were on the exchange. Harry wasn’t, not then, at least, but I had the number of his closest neighbor who was. Harry called me back about twenty minutes later, highly embarrassed at having to reverse the charges and sputtering promises to ‘pay his share’ when our next bill came. I told him we’d count those chickens when they hatched; in the meantime, could he come over to my place for lunch? Brutal and Dean would be here, and Janice had promised to put out some of her famous slaw ... not to mention her even more famous apple pie.

‘Lunch just for the hell of it?’ Harry sounded skeptical.

I admitted I had something I wanted to talk to them about, but it was best not gone into, even lightly, over the phone. Harry agreed to come. I dropped the receiver onto the prongs, went to the window, and looked out thoughtfully. Although we’d had the late shift, I hadn’t wakened either Brutal or Dean, and Harry hadn’t sounded like a fellow freshly turned out of dreamland, either. It seemed that I wasn’t the only one having problems with what had happened last night, and considering the craziness I had in mind, that was probably good.

Brutal, who lived closest to me, arrived at quarter past eleven. Dean showed up fifteen minutes later, and Harry – already dressed for work – about fifteen minutes after Dean. Janice served us cold beef sandwiches, slaw, and iced tea in the kitchen. Only a day before, we would have had it out on the side porch and been glad of a breeze, but the temperature had dropped a good fifteen degrees since the thunderstorm, and a keen-edged wind was snuffling down from the ridges.

‘You’re welcome to sit down with us,’ I told my wife.

She shook her head. ‘I don’t think I want to know what you’re up to – I’ll worry less if I’m in the dark. I’ll have a bite in the parlor. I’m visiting with Miss Jane Austen this week, and she’s very good company.’

‘Who’s Jane Austen?’ Harry asked when she had left. ‘Your side or Janice’s, Paul? A cousin? Is she pretty?’

‘She’s a writer, you nit,’ Brutal told him. ‘Been dead practically since Betsy Ross basted the stars on the first flag.’

‘Oh.’ Harry looked embarrassed. ‘I’m not much of a reader. Radio manuals, mostly.’

‘What’s on your mind, Paul?’ Dean asked.

‘John Coffey and Mr Jingles, to start with.’ They looked surprised, which I had expected – they’d been thinking I wanted to discuss either Delacroix or Percy. Maybe both. I looked at Dean and Harry. ‘The thing with Mr Jingles – what Coffey did – happened pretty fast. I don’t know if you got there in time to see how broken up the mouse was or not.’

Dean shook his head. ‘I saw the blood on the floor, though.’

I turned to Brutal.

‘That son of a bitch Percy crushed it,’ he said simply. ‘It should have died, but it didn’t. Coffey did something to it. Healed it somehow. I know how that sounds, but I saw it with my own eyes.’

I said: ‘He healed me, as well, and I didn’t just see it, I felt it.’ I told them about my urinary infection – how it had come back, how bad it had been (I pointed through the window at the woodpile I’d had to hold onto the morning the pain drove me to my knees), and how it had gone away completely after Coffey touched me. And stayed away.

It didn’t take long to tell. When I was done, they sat and thought about it awhile, chewing on their sandwiches as they did. Then Dean said, ‘Black things came out of his mouth. Like bugs.’

‘That’s right,’ Harry agreed. ‘They were black to start with, anyway. Then they turned white and disappeared.’ He looked around, considering. ‘It’s like I damned near forgot the whole thing until you brought it up, Paul. Ain’t that funny?’

‘Nothing funny or strange about it,’ Brutal said. ‘I think that’s what people most always do with the stuff they can’t make out – just forget it. Doesn’t do a person much good to remember stuff that doesn’t make any sense. What about it, Paul? Were there bugs when he fixed you?’

‘Yes. I think they’re the sickness ... the pain ... the hurt. He takes it in, then lets it out into the open air again.’

‘Where it dies,’ Harry said.

I shrugged. I didn’t know if it died or not, wasn’t sure it even mattered.

‘Did he suck it out of you?’ Brutal asked. ‘He looked like he was sucking it right out of the mouse. The hurt. The ... you know. The death.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘He just touched me. And I felt it. A kind of jolt, like electricity only not painful. But I wasn’t dying, only hurting.’

Brutal nodded. ‘The touch and the breath. Just like you hear those backwoods gospel-shouters going on about.’

‘Praise Jesus, the Lord is mighty,’ I said.

‘I dunno if Jesus comes into it,’ Brutal said, ‘but it seems to me like John Coffey is one mighty man.’

‘All right,’ Dean said. ‘If you say all this happened, I guess I believe it. God works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform. But what’s it got to do with us?’

Well, that was the big question, wasn’t it? I took in a deep breath and told them what I wanted to do. They listened, dumbfounded. Even Brutal, who liked to read those magazines with the stories about little green men from space, looked dumbfounded. There was a longer silence when I finished this time, and no one chewing any sandwiches.

At last, in a gentle and reasonable voice, Brutus Howell said: ‘We’d lose our jobs if we were caught, Paul, and we’d be very goddam lucky if that was all that happened. We’d probably end up over in A Block as guests of the state, making wallets and showering in pairs.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That could happen.’

‘I can understand how you feel, a little,’ he went on. ‘You know Moores better than us – he’s your friend as well as the big boss – and I know you think a lot of his wife ...’

‘She’s the sweetest woman you could ever hope to meet,’ I said, ‘and she means the world to him.’

‘But we don’t know her the way you and Janice do,’ Brutal said. ‘Do we, Paul?’

‘You’d like her if you did,’ I said. ‘At least, you’d like her if you’d met her before this thing got its claws into her. She does a lot of community things, she’s a good friend, and she’s religious. More than that, she’s funny. Used to be, anyway. She could tell you things that’d make you laugh until the tears rolled down your cheeks. But none of those things are the reason I want to help save her, if she can be saved. What’s happening to her is an offense, goddammit, an offense. To the eyes and the ears and the heart.’

‘Very noble, but I doubt like hell if that’s what put this bee in your bonnet,’ Brutal said. ‘I think it’s what happened to Del. You want to balance it off somehow.’

And he was right. Of course he was. I knew Melinda Moores better than the others did, but maybe not, in the end, well enough to ask them to risk their jobs for her ... and possibly their freedom, as well. Or my own job and freedom, for that matter. I had two children, and the last thing on God’s earth that I wanted my wife to have to do was to write them the news that their father was going on trial for ... well, what would it be? I didn’t know for sure. Aiding and abetting an escape attempt seemed the most likely.

But the death of Eduard Delacroix had been the ugliest, foulest thing I had ever seen in my life – not just my working life but my whole, entire life – and I had been a party to it. We had all been a party to it, because we had allowed Percy Wetmore to stay even after we knew he was horribly unfit to work in a place like E Block. We had played the game. Even Warden Moores had been a party to it. ‘His nuts are going to cook whether Wetmore’s on the team or not,’ he had said, and maybe that was well enough, considering what the little Frenchman had done, but in the end Percy had done a lot more than cook Del’s nuts; he had blown the little man’s eyeballs right out of their sockets and set his damned face on fire. And why? Because Del was a murderer half a dozen times over? No. Because Percy had wet his pants and the little Cajun had had the temerity to laugh at him. We’d been part of a monstrous act, and Percy was going to get away with it. Off to Briar Ridge he would go, happy as a clam at high tide, and there he would have a whole asylum filled with lunatics to practice his cruelties upon. There was nothing we could do about that, but perhaps it was not too late to wash some of the muck off our own hands.

‘In my church they call it atonement instead of balancing,’ I said, ‘but I guess it comes to the same thing.’

‘Do you really think Coffey could save her?’ Dean asked in a soft, awed voice. ‘Just ... what? ... suck that brain tumor out of her head? Like it was a ... a peach-pit?’

‘I think he could. It’s not for sure, of course, but after what he did to me ... and to Mr Jingles ...’

‘That mouse was seriously busted up, all right,’ Brutal said.

‘But would he do it?’ Harry mused. ‘Would he?’

‘If he can, he will,’ I said.

‘Why? Coffey doesn’t even know her!’

‘Because it’s what he does. It’s what God made him for.’

Brutal made a show of looking around, reminding us all that someone was missing. ‘What about Percy? You think he’s just gonna let this go down?’ he asked, and so I told them what I had in mind for Percy. By the time I finished, Harry and Dean were looking at me in amazement, and a reluctant grin of admiration had dawned on Brutal’s face.

‘Pretty audacious, Brother Paul!’ he said. ‘Fair takes my breath away!’

‘But wouldn’t it be the bee’s knees!’ Dean almost whispered, then laughed aloud and clapped his hands like a child. ‘I mean, voh-doh-dee-oh-doh and twenty-three-skidoo!’ You want to remember that Dean had a special interest in the part of my plan that involved Percy – Percy could have gotten Dean killed, after all, freezing up the way he had.

‘Yeah, but what about after?’ Harry said. He sounded gloomy, but his eyes gave him away; they were sparkling, the eyes of a man who wants to be convinced. ‘What then?’

‘They say dead men tell no tales,’ Brutal rumbled, and I took a quick look at him to make sure he was joking.

‘I think he’ll keep his mouth shut,’ I said.

‘Really?’ Dean looked skeptical. He took off his glasses and began to polish them. ‘Convince me.’

‘First, he won’t know what really happened – he’s going to judge us by himself and think it was just a prank. Second – and more important – he’ll be afraid to say anything. That’s what I’m really counting on. We tell him that if he starts writing letters and making phone calls, we start writing letters and making phone calls.’

‘About the execution,’ Harry said.

‘And about the way he froze when Wharton attacked Dean,’ Brutal said. ‘I think people finding out about that is what Percy Wetmore’s really afraid of.’ He nodded slowly and thoughtfully. ‘It could work. But Paul ... wouldn’t it make more sense to bring Mrs Moores to Coffey than Coffey to Mrs Moores? We could take care of Percy pretty much the way you laid it out, then bring her in through the tunnel instead of taking Coffey out that way.’

I shook my head. ‘Never happen. Not in a million years.’

‘Because of Warden Moores?’

‘That’s right. He’s so hardheaded he makes old Doubting Thomas look like Joan of Arc. If we bring Coffey to his house, I think we can surprise him into at least letting Coffey make the try. Otherwise ...’

‘What were you thinking about using for a vehicle?’ Brutal asked.

‘My first thought was the stagecoach,’ I said, ‘but we’d never get it out of the yard without being noticed, and everyone within a twenty-mile radius knows what it looks like, anyway. I guess maybe we can use my Ford.’

‘Guess again,’ Dean said, popping his specs back onto his nose. ‘You couldn’t get John Coffey into your car if you stripped him naked, covered him with lard, and used a shoehorn. You’re so used to looking at him that you’ve forgotten how big he is.’

I had no reply to that. Most of my attention that morning had been focused on the problem of Percy – and the lesser but not inconsiderable problem of Wild Bill Wharton. Now I realized that transportation wasn’t going to be as simple as I had hoped.

Harry Terwilliger picked up the remains of his second sandwich, looked at it for a second, then put it down again. ‘If we was to actually do this crazy thing,’ he said, ‘I guess we could use my pickup truck. Sit him in the back of that. Wouldn’t be nobody much on the roads at that hour. We’re talking about well after midnight, ain’t we?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You guys’re forgetting one thing,’ Dean said. ‘I know Coffey’s been pretty quiet ever since he came on the block, doesn’t do much but lay there on his bunk and leak from the eyes, but he’s a murderer. Also, he’s huge. If he decided he wanted to escape out of the back of Harry’s truck, the only way we could stop him would be to shoot him dead. And a guy like that would take a lot of killing, even with a .45. Suppose we weren’t able to put him down? And suppose he killed someone else? I’d hate losing my job, and I’d hate going to jail – I got a wife and kids depending on me to put bread in their mouths – but I don’t think I’d hate either of those things near as much as having another dead little girl on my conscience.’

‘That won’t happen,’ I said.

‘How in God’s name can you be so sure of that?’

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know just how to begin. I had known this would come up, of course I did, but I still didn’t know how to start telling them what I knew. Brutal helped me.

‘You don’t think he did it, do you, Paul?’ He looked incredulous. ‘You think that big lug is innocent.’

‘I’m positive he’s innocent,’ I said.

‘How in the name of Jesus can you be?’

‘There are two things,’ I said. ‘One of them is my shoe.’ I leaned forward over the table and began talking.