The Green Mile

5

Old Toot-Toot made his last trip of the night down to E Block with his cart at about quarter to nine. We bought enough of his crap to make him smile with avarice.

‘Say, you boys seen that mouse?’ he asked.

We shook our heads.

‘Maybe Pretty Boy has,’ Toot said, and gestured with his head in the direction of the storage room, where Percy was either washing the floor, writing his report, or picking his ass.

‘What do you care? It’s none of your affair, either way,’ Brutal said. ‘Roll wheels, Toot. You’re stinkin the place up.’

Toot smiled his peculiarly unpleasant smile, toothless and sunken, and made a business of sniffing the air. ‘That ain’t me you smell,’ he said. ‘That be Del, sayin so-long.’

Cackling, he rolled his cart out the door and into the exercise yard. And he went on rolling it for another ten years, long after I was gone – hell, long after Cold Mountain was gone – selling Moon Pies and pops to the guards and prisoners who could afford them. Sometimes even now I hear him in my dreams, yelling that he’s fryin, he’s fryin, he’s a done torn turkey.

The time stretched out after Toot was gone, the clock seeming to crawl. We had the radio for an hour and a half, Wharton braying laughter at Fred Allen and Allen’s Alley, even though I doubt like hell he understood many of the jokes. John Coffey sat on the end of his bunk, hands clasped, eyes rarely leaving whoever was at the duty desk. I have seen men waiting that way in bus stations for their buses to be called.

Percy came in from the storage room around quarter to eleven and handed me a report which had been laboriously written in pencil. Eraser-crumbs lay over the sheet of paper in gritty smears. He saw me run my thumb over one of these, and said hastily: ‘That’s just a first pass, like. I’m going to copy it over. What do you think?’

What I thought was that it was the most outrageous goddam whitewash I’d read in all my born days. What I told him was that it was fine, and he went away, satisfied.

Dean and Harry played cribbage, talking too loud, squabbling over the count too often, and looking at the crawling hands of the clock every five seconds or so. On at least one of their games that night, they appeared to go around the board three times instead of twice. There was so much tension in the air that I felt I could almost have carved it like clay, and the only people who didn’t seem to feel it were Percy and Wild Bill.

When it got to be ten of twelve, I could stand it no longer and gave Dean a little nod. He went into my office with a bottle of R.C. Cola bought off Toot’s cart, and came back out a minute or two later. The cola was now in a tin cup, which a prisoner can’t break and then slash with.

I took it and glanced around. Harry, Dean, and Brutal were all watching me. So, for that matter, was John Coffey. Not Percy, though. Percy had returned to the storage room, where he probably felt more at ease on this particular night. I gave the tin cup a quick sniff and got no odor except for the R.C., which had an odd but pleasant cinnamon smell back in those days.

I took it down to Wharton’s cell. He was lying on his bunk. He wasn’t masturbating – yet, anyway – but had raised quite a boner inside his shorts and was giving it a good healthy twang every now and again, like a dopey bass-fiddler hammering an extra-thick E-string.

‘Kid,’ I said.

‘Don’t bother me,’ he said.

‘Okay,’ I agreed. ‘I brought you a pop for behaving like a human being all night – damn near a record for you – but I’ll just drink it myself.’

I made as if to do just that, raising the tin cup (battered all up and down the sides from many angry hangings on many sets of cell bars) to my lips. Wharton was off the bunk in a flash, which didn’t surprise me. It wasn’t a high-risk bluff; most deep cons – lifers, rapists, and the men slated for Old Sparky – are pigs for their sweets, and this one was no exception.

‘Gimme that, you clunk,’ Wharton said. He spoke as if he were the foreman and I was just another lowly peon. ‘Give it to the Kid.’

I held it just outside the bars, letting him be the one to reach through. Doing it the other way around is a recipe for disaster, as any long-time prison screw will tell you. That was the kind of stuff we thought of without even knowing we were thinking of it – the way we knew not to let the cons call us by our first names, the way we knew that the sound of rapidly jingling keys meant trouble on the block, because it was the sound of a prison guard running and prison guards never run unless there’s trouble in the valley. Stuff Percy Wetmore was never going to get wise to.

Tonight, however, Wharton had no interest in grabbing or choking. He snatched the tin cup, downed the pop in three long swallows, then voiced a resounding belch. ‘Excellent!’ he said.

I held my hand out. ‘Cup.’

He held it for a moment, teasing with his eyes. ‘Suppose I keep it?’

I shrugged. ‘We’ll come in and take it back. You’ll go down to the little room. And you will have drunk your last R.C. Unless they serve it down in hell, that is.’

His smile faded. ‘I don’t like jokes about hell, screw-tip.’ He thrust the cup out through the bars. ‘Here. Take it.’

I took it. From behind me, Percy said: ‘Why in God’s name did you want to give a lugoon like him a soda-pop?’

Because it was loaded with enough infirmary dope to put him on his back for forty-eight hours, and he never tasted a thing, I thought.

‘With Paul,’ Brutal said, ‘the quality of mercy is not strained; it droppeth like the gentle rain from heaven.’

‘Huh?’ Percy asked, frowning.

‘Means he’s a soft touch. Always has been, always will be. Want to play a game of Crazy Eights, Percy?’

Percy snorted. ‘Except for Go Fish and Old Maid, that’s the stupidest card-game ever made.’

‘That’s why I thought you might like a few hands,’ Brutal said, smiling sweetly.

‘Everybody’s a wisenheimer,’ Percy said, and sulked off into my office. I didn’t care much for the little rat parking his ass behind my desk, but I kept my mouth shut.

The clock crawled. Twelve-twenty; twelve-thirty. At twelve-forty, John Coffey got up off his bunk and stood at his cell door, hands grasping the bars loosely. Brutal and I walked down to Wharton’s cell and looked in. He lay there on his bunk, smiling up at the ceiling. His eyes were open, but they looked like big glass balls. One hand lay on his chest; the other dangled limply off the side of his bunk, knuckles brushing the floor.

‘Gosh,’ Brutal said, ‘from Billy the Kid to Willie the Weeper in less than an hour. I wonder how many of those morphine pills Dean put in that tonic’.

‘Enough,’ I said. There was a little tremble in my voice. I didn’t know if Brutal heard it, but I sure did. ‘Come on. We’re going to do it.’

‘You don’t want to wait for beautiful there to pass out?’

‘He’s passed out now, Brute. He’s just too buzzed to close his eyes.’

‘You’re the boss.’ He looked around for Harry, but Harry was already there. Dean was sitting bolt-upright at the duty desk, shuffling the cards so hard and fast it was a wonder they didn’t catch fire, throwing a little glance to his left, at my office, with every flutter-shuffle. Keeping an eye out for Percy.

‘Is it time?’ Harry asked. His long, horsey face was very pale above his blue uniform blouse, but he looked determined.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘If we’re going through with it, it’s time.’

Harry crossed himself and kissed his thumb. Then he went down to the restraint room, unlocked it, and came back with the straitjacket. He handed it to Brutal. The three of us walked up the Green Mile. Coffey stood at his cell door, watching us go, and said not a word. When we reached the duty desk, Brutal put the straitjacket behind his back, which was broad enough to conceal it easily.

‘Luck,’ Dean said. He was as pale as Harry, and looked just as determined.

Percy was behind my desk, all right, sitting in my chair and frowning over the book he’d been toting around with him the last few nights – not Argosy or Stag but Caring for the Mental Patient in Institutions. You would have thought, from the guilty, worried glance he threw our way when we walked in, that it had been The Last Days of Sodom and Gomorrah.

‘What?’ he asked, closing the book in a hurry. ‘What do you want?’

‘To talk to you, Percy,’ I said, ‘that’s all.’

But he read a hell of a lot more than a desire to talk on our faces, and was up like a shot, hurrying – not quite running, but almost – toward the open door to the storeroom. He thought we had come to give him a ragging at the very least, and more likely a good roughing up.

Harry cut around behind him and blocked the doorway, arms folded on his chest.

‘Saaay!’ Percy turned to me, alarmed but trying not to show it. ‘What is this?’

‘Don’t ask, Percy,’ I said. I had thought I’d be okay – back to normal, anyway – once we actually got rolling on this crazy business, but it wasn’t working out that way. I couldn’t believe what I was doing. It was like a bad dream. I kept expecting my wife to shake me awake and tell me I’d been moaning in my sleep. ‘It’ll be easier if you just go along with it.’

‘What’s Howell got behind his back?’ Percy asked in a ragged voice, turning to get a better look at Brutal.

‘Nothing,’ Brutal said. ‘Well ... this, I suppose –’

He whipped the straitjacket out and shook it beside one hip, like a matador shaking his cape to make the bull charge.

Percy’s eyes widened, and he lunged. He meant to run, but Harry grabbed his arms and a lunge was all he was able to manage.

‘Let go of me!’ Percy shouted, trying to jerk out of Harry’s grasp. It wasn’t going to happen, Harry outweighed him by almost a hundred pounds and had the muscles of a man who spent most of his spare time plowing and chopping, but Percy gave it a good enough effort to drag Harry halfway across the room and to rough up the unpleasant green carpet I kept meaning to replace. For a moment I thought he was even going to get one arm free – panic can be one hell of a motivator.

‘Settle down, Percy,’ I said. ‘It’ll go easier if –’

‘Don’t you tell me to settle down, you ignoramus!’ Percy yelled, jerking his shoulders and trying to free his arms. ‘Just get away from me! All of you! I know people! Big people! If you don’t quit this, you’ll have to go all the way to South Carolina just to get a meal in a soup kitchen!’

He gave another forward lunge and ran his upper thighs into my desk. The book he’d been reading, Caring for the Mental Patient in Institutions, gave a jump, and the smaller, pamphlet-sized book which had been hidden inside it popped out. No wonder Percy had looked guilty when we came in. It wasn’t The Last Days of Sodom and Gomorrah, but it was the one we sometimes gave to inmates who were feeling especially horny and who had been well-behaved enough to deserve a treat. I’ve mentioned it, I think – the little cartoon book where Olive Oyl does everybody except Sweet Pea, the kid.

I found it sad that Percy had been in my office and pursuing such pallid porn, and Harry – what I could see of him from over Percy’s straining shoulder – looked mildly disgusted, but Brutal hooted with laughter, and that took the fight out of Percy, at least for the time being.

‘Oh Poicy,’ he said. ‘What would your mother say? For that matter, what would the governor say?’

Percy was blushing a dark red. ‘Just shut up. And leave my mother out of it.’

Brutal tossed me the straitjacket and pushed his face up into Percy’s. ‘Sure thing. Just stick out your arms like a good boy.’

Percy’s lips were trembling, and his eyes were too bright. He was, I realized, on the verge of tears. ‘I won’t,’ he said in a childish, trembling voice, ‘and you can’t make me.’ Then he raised his voice and began to scream for help. Harry winced and so did I. If we ever came close to just dropping the whole thing, it was then. We might have, except for Brutal. He never hesitated. He stepped behind Percy so he was shoulder to shoulder with Harry, who still had Percy’s hands pinned behind him. Brutal reached up and took Percy’s ears in his hands.

‘Stop that yelling,’ Brutal said. ‘Unless you want to have a pair of the world’s most unique teabag caddies.’

Percy quit yelling for help and just stood there, trembling and looking down at the cover of the crude cartoon book, which showed Popeye and Olive doing it in a creative way I had heard of but never tried. ‘Oooh, Popeye!’ read the balloon over Olive’s head. ‘Uck-uck-uck-uck!’ read the one over Popeye’s. He was still smoking his pipe.

‘Hold out your arms,’ Brutal said, ‘and let’s have no more foolishness about it. Do it now.’

‘I won’t,’ Percy said. ‘I won’t, and you can’t make me.’

‘You’re dead wrong about that, you know,’ Brutal said, then clamped down on Percy’s ears and twisted them the way you might twist the dials on an oven. An oven that wasn’t cooking the way you wanted. Percy let out a miserable shriek of pain and surprise that I would have given a great deal not to have heard. It wasn’t just pain and surprise, you see; it was understanding. For the first time in his life, Percy was realizing that awful things didn’t just happen to other people, those not fortunate enough to be related to the governor. I wanted to tell Brutal to stop, but of course I couldn’t. Things had gone much too far for that. All I could do was to remind myself that Percy had put Delacroix through God knew what agonies simply because Delacroix had laughed at him. The reminder didn’t go very far toward soothing the way I felt. Perhaps it might have, if I’d been built more along the lines of Percy.

‘Stick those arms out there, honey,’ Brutal said, ‘or you get another.’

Harry had already let go of young Mr Wetmore. Sobbing like a little kid, the tears which had been standing in his eyes now spilling down his cheeks, Percy shot his hands out straight in front of him, like a sleepwalker in a movie comedy. I had the sleeves of the straitjacket up his arms in a trice. I hardly had it over his shoulders before Brutal had let go of Percy’s ears and grabbed the straps hanging down from the jacket’s cuffs. He yanked Percy’s hands around to his sides, so that his arms were crossed tightly on his chest. Harry, meanwhile, did up the back and snapped the cross-straps. Once Percy gave in and stuck out his arms, the whole thing took less than ten seconds.

‘Okay, hon,’ Brutal said. ‘Forward harch.’

But he wouldn’t. He looked at Brutal, then turned his terrified, streaming eyes on me. Nothing about his connections now, or how we’d have to go all the way to South Carolina just to get a free meal; he was far past that.

‘Please,’ he whispered in a hoarse, wet voice. ‘Don’t put me in with him, Paul.’

Then I understood why he had panicked, why he’d fought us so hard. He thought we were going to put him in with Wild Bill Wharton; that his punishment for the dry sponge was to be a dry cornholing from the resident psychopath. Instead of feeling sympathy for Percy at this realization, I felt disgusted and a hardening of my resolve. He was, after all, judging us by the way he would have behaved, had our positions been reversed.

‘Not Wharton,’ I said. ‘The restraint room, Percy. You’re going to spend three or four hours in there, all by yourself in the dark, thinking about what you did to Del. It’s probably too late for you to learn any new lessons about how people are supposed to behave – Brute thinks so, anyway – but I’m an optimist. Now move.’

He did, muttering under his breath that we’d be sorry for this, plenty sorry, just wait and see, but on the whole he seemed relieved and reassured.

When we herded him out into the hall, Dean gave us a look of such wide-eyed surprise and dewy innocence that I could have laughed, if the business hadn’t been so serious. I’ve seen better acting in backwoods Grange revues.

‘Say, don’t you think the joke’s gone far enough?’ Dean asked.

‘You just shut up, if you know what’s good for you,’ Brutal growled. These were lines we’d scripted at lunch, and that was just what they sounded like to me, scripted lines, but if Percy was scared enough and confused enough, they still might save Dean Stanton’s job in a pinch. I myself didn’t think so, but anything was possible. Any time I’ve doubted that, then or since, I just think about John Coffey, and Delacroix’s mouse.

We ran Percy down the Green Mile, him stumbling and gasping for us to slow down, he was going to go flat on his face if we didn’t slow down. Wharton was on his bunk, but we went by too fast for me to see if he was awake or asleep. John Coffey was standing at his cell door and watching. ‘You’re a bad man and you deserve to go in that dark place,’ he said, but I don’t think Percy heard him.

Into the restraint room we went, Percy’s cheeks red and wet with tears, his eyes rolling into their sockets, his pampered locks all flopping down on his forehead. Harry pulled Percy’s gun with one hand and his treasured hickory head-knocker with the other. ‘You’ll get em back, don’t worry,’ Harry said. He sounded a trifle embarrassed.

‘I wish I could say the same about your job,’ Percy replied. ‘All your jobs. You can’t do this to me! You can’t!’

He was obviously prepared to go on in that vein for quite awhile, but we didn’t have time to listen to his sermon. In my pocket was a roll of friction-tape, the thirties ancestor of the strapping-tape folks use today. Percy saw it and started to back away. Brutal grabbed him from behind and hugged him until I had slapped the tape over his mouth, winding the roll around to the back of his head, just to be sure. He was going to have a few less swatches of hair when the tape came off, and a pair of seriously chapped lips into the bargain, but I no longer much cared. I’d had a gutful of Percy Wetmore.

We backed away from him. He stood in the middle of the room, under the caged light, wearing the straitjacket, breathing through flared nostrils, and making muffled mmmph! mmmph! sounds from behind the tape. All in all, he looked as crazy as any other prisoner we’d ever jugged in that room.

‘The quieter you are, the sooner you get out,’ I said. ‘Try to remember that, Percy.’

‘And if you get lonely, think about Olive Oyl,’ Harry advised. ‘Uck-uck-uck-uck.’

Then we went out. I closed the door and Brutal locked it. Dean was standing a little way up the Mile, just outside of Coffey’s cell. He had already put the master key in the top lock. The four of us looked at each other, no one saying anything. There was no need to. We had started the machinery; all we could do now was hope that it ran the course we had laid out instead of jumping the tracks somewhere along the line.

‘You still want to go for that ride, John?’ Brutal asked.

‘Yes, sir,’ Coffey said. ‘I reckon.’

‘Good,’ Dean said. He turned the first lock, removed the key, and seated it in the second.

‘Do we need to chain you up, John?’ I asked.

Coffey appeared to think about this. ‘Can if you want to,’ he said at last. ‘Don’t need to.’

I nodded at Brutal, who opened the cell door, then turned to Harry, who was more or less pointing Percy’s .45 at Coffey as Coffey emerged from his cell.

‘Give those to Dean,’ I said.

Harry blinked like someone awakening from a momentary doze, saw Percy’s gun and stick still in his hands, and passed them over to Dean. Coffey, meanwhile, hulked in the corridor with his bald skull almost brushing one of the caged overhead lights. Standing there with his hands in front of him and his shoulders sloped forward to either side of his barrel chest, he made me think again, as I had the first time I saw him, of a huge captured bear.

‘Lock Percy’s toys in the duty desk until we get back,’ I said.

‘If we get back,’ Harry added.

‘I will,’ Dean said to me, taking no notice of Harry.

‘And if someone shows up – probably no one will, but if someone does – what do you say?’

‘That Coffey got upset around midnight,’ Dean said. He looked as studious as a college student taking a big exam. ‘We had to give him the jacket and put him in the restraint room. If there’s noise, whoever hears it’ll just think it’s him.’ He raised his chin at John Coffey.

‘And what about us?’ Brutal asked.

‘Paul’s over in Admin, pulling Del’s file and going over the witnesses,’ Dean said. ‘It’s especially important this time, because the execution was such a balls-up. He said he’d probably be there the rest of the shift. You and Harry and Percy are over in the laundry, washing your clothes.’

Well, that was what folks said, anyway. There was a crap-game in the laundry supply room some nights; on others it was blackjack or poker or acey-deucey. Whatever it was, the guards who participated were said to be washing their clothes. There was usually moonshine at these get-togethers, and on occasion a joystick would go around the circle. It’s been the same in prisons since prisons were invented, I suppose. When you spend your life taking care of mud-men, you can’t help getting a little dirty yourself. In any case, we weren’t likely to be checked up on. ‘Clothes washing’ was treated with great discretion at Cold Mountain.

‘Right with Eversharp,’ I said, turning Coffey around and putting him in motion. ‘And if it all falls down, Dean, you don’t know nothing about nothing.’

‘That’s easy to say, but –’

At that moment, a skinny arm shot out from between the bars of Wharton’s cell and grabbed Coffey’s slab of a bicep. We all gasped. Wharton should have been dead to the world, all but comatose, yet here he stood, swaying back and forth on his feet like a hard-tagged fighter, grinning blearily.

Coffey’s reaction was remarkable. He didn’t pull away, but he also gasped, pulling air in over his teeth like someone who has touched something cold and unpleasant. His eyes widened, and for a moment he looked as if he and dumb had never even met, let alone got up together every morning and lain down together every night. He had looked alive – there – when he had wanted me to come into his cell so he could touch me. Help me, in Coffeyspeak. He had looked that way again when he’d been holding his hands out for the mouse. Now, for the third time, his face had lit up, as if a spotlight had suddenly been turned on inside his brain. Except it was different this time. It was colder this time, and for the first time I wondered what might happen if John Coffey were suddenly to run amok. We had our guns, we could shoot him, but actually taking him down might not be easy to do.

I saw similar thoughts on Brutal’s face, but Wharton just went on grinning his stoned, loose-lipped grin. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ he asked. It came out something like Wherra fink yerr gone?

Coffey stood still, looking first at Wharton, then at Wharton’s hand, then back into Wharton’s face. I could not read that expression. I mean I could see the intelligence in it, but I couldn’t read it. As for Wharton, I wasn’t worried about him at all. He wouldn’t remember any of this later; he was like a drunk walking in a blackout.

‘You’re a bad man,’ Coffey whispered, and I couldn’t tell what I heard in his voice – pain or anger or fear. Maybe all three. Coffey looked down at the hand on his arm again, the way you might look at a bug which could give you a really nasty bite, had it a mind.

‘That’s right, nigger,’ Wharton said with a bleary, cocky smile. ‘Bad as you’d want.’

I was suddenly positive that something awful was going to happen, something that would change the planned course of this early morning as completely as a cataclysmic earthquake can change the course of a river. It was going to happen, and nothing I or any of us did would stop it.

Then Brutal reached down, plucked Wharton’s hand off John Coffey’s arm, and that feeling stopped. It was as if some potentially dangerous circuit had been broken. I told you that in my time in E Block, the governor’s line never rang. That was true, but I imagine that if it ever had, I would have felt the same relief that washed over me when Brutal removed Wharton’s hand from the big man towering beside me. Coffey’s eyes dulled over at once; it was as if the searchlight inside his head had been turned off.

‘Lie down, Billy,’ Brutal said. ‘Take you some rest.’ That was my usual line of patter, but under the circumstances, I didn’t mind Brutal using it.

‘Maybe I will,’ Wharton agreed. He stepped back, swayed, almost went over, and caught his balance at the last second. ‘Whoo, daddy. Whole room’s spinnin around. Like bein drunk.’

He backed toward his bunk, keeping his bleary regard on Coffey as he went. ‘Niggers ought to have they own ’lectric chair,’ he opined. Then the backs of his knees struck his bunk and he swooped down onto it. He was snoring before his head touched his thin prison pillow, deep blue shadows brushed under the hollows of his eyes and the tip of his tongue lolling out.

‘Christ, how’d he get up with so much dope in him?’ Dean whispered.

‘It doesn’t matter, he’s out now,’ I said. ‘If he starts to come around, give him another pill dissolved in a glass of water. No more than one, though. We don’t want to kill him.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ Brutal rumbled, and gave Wharton a contemptuous look. ‘You can’t kill a monkey like him with dope, anyway. They thrive on it.’

‘He’s a bad man,’ Coffey said, but in a lower voice this time, as if he was not quite sure of what he was saying, or what it meant.

‘That’s right,’ Brutal said. ‘Most wicked. But that’s not a problem now, because we ain’t going to tango with him anymore.’ We started walking again, the four of us surrounding Coffey like worshippers circling an idol that’s come to some stumbling kind of half life. ‘Tell me something, John – do you know where we’re taking you?’

‘To help,’ he said. ‘I think ... to help ... a lady?’ He looked at Brutal with hopeful anxiety.

Brutal nodded. ‘That’s right. But how do you know that? How do you know?’

John Coffey considered the question carefully, then shook his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he told Brutal. ‘To tell you the truth, boss, I don’t know much of anything. Never have.’

And with that we had to be content.