The Green Mile

9

I rode up in the cab with Harry going back, and was damned glad to be there. The heater was broken, but we were out of the open air, at least. We had gone about ten miles when Harry spotted a little turnout and veered the truck into it.

‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘Is it a bearing?’ To my mind, the problem could have been that or anything; every component of the Farmall’s engine and transmission sounded on the verge of going cataclysmically wrong or giving up the ghost entirely.

‘Nope,’ Harry said, sounding apologetic. ‘I got to take a leak, is all. My back teeth are floatin.’

It turned out that we all did, except for John. When Brutal asked if he wouldn’t like to step down and help us water the bushes, he just shook his head without looking up. He was leaning against the back of the cab and wearing one of the Army blankets over his shoulders like a serape. I couldn’t get any kind of read on his complexion, but I could hear his breathing – dry and raspy, like wind blowing through straw. I didn’t like it.

I walked into a clump of willows, unbuttoned, and let go. I was still close enough to my urinary infection so that the body’s amnesia had not taken full hold, and I could be grateful simply to be able to pee without needing to scream. I stood there, emptying out and looking up at the moon; I was hardly aware of Brutal standing next to me and doing the same thing until he said in a low voice, ‘He’ll never sit in Old Sparky.’

I looked around at him, surprised and a little frightened by the low certainty in his tone. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean he swallered that stuff instead of spitting out like he done before for a reason. It might take a week – he’s awful big and strong – but I bet it’s quicker. One of us’ll do a check-tour and there he’ll be, lying dead as stone on his bunk.’

I’d thought I was done peeing, but at that a little shiver twisted up my back and a little more squirted out. As I rebuttoned my fly, I thought that what Brutal was saying made perfect sense. And I hoped, all in all, that he was right. John Coffey didn’t deserve to die at all, if I was right in my reasoning about the Detterick girls, but if he did die, I didn’t want it to be by my hand. I wasn’t sure I could lift my hand to do it, if it came to that.

‘Come on,’ Harry murmured out of the dark. ‘It’s gettin late. Let’s get this done.’

As we walked back to the truck, I realized we had left John entirely alone – stupidity on the Percy Wetmore level. I thought that he would be gone; that he’d spat out the bugs as soon as he saw he was unguarded, and had then just lit out for the territories, like Huck and Jim on the Big Muddy. All we would find was the blanket he had been wearing around his shoulders.

But he was there, still sitting with his back against the cab and his forearms propped on his knees. He looked up at the sound of our approach and tried to give us a smile. It hung there for a moment on his haggard face and then slipped off.

‘How you doing, Big John?’ Brutal asked, climbing into the back of the truck again and retrieving his own blanket.

‘Fine, boss,’ John said listlessly. ‘I’s fine.’

Brutal patted his knee. ‘We’ll be back soon. And when we get squared away, you know what? I’m going to see you get a great big cup of hot coffee. Sugar and cream, too.’

You bet, I thought, going around to the passenger side of the cab and climbing in. If we don’t get arrested and thrown in jail ourselves first.

But I’d been living with that idea ever since we’d thrown Percy into the restraint room, and it didn’t worry me enough to keep me awake. I dozed off and dreamed of Calvary Hill. Thunder in the west and a smell that might have been juniper berries. Brutal and Harry and Dean and I were standing around in robes and tin hats like in a Cecil B. DeMille movie. We were Centurions, I guess. There were three crosses, Percy Wetmore and Eduard Delacroix flanking John Coffey. I looked down at my hand and saw I was holding a bloody hammer.

We got to get him down from there, Paul! Brutal screamed. We got to get him down!

Except we couldn’t, they’d taken away the stepladder. I started to tell Brutal this, and then an extra-hard jounce of the truck woke me up. We were backing into the place where Harry had hidden the truck earlier on a day that already seemed to stretch back to the beginning of time.

The two of us got out and went around to the back. Brutal hopped down all right, but John Coffey’s knees buckled and he almost fell. It took all three of us to catch him, and he was no more than set solid on his feet again before he went off into another of those coughing fits, this one the worst yet. He bent over, the coughing sounds muffled by the heels of his palms, which he held pressed against his mouth.

When his coughing eased, we covered the front of the Farmall with the pine boughs again and walked back the way we had come. The worst part of that whole surreal furlough was – for me, at least – the last two hundred yards, with us scurrying back south along the shoulder of the highway. I could see (or thought I could) the first faint lightening of the sky in the east, and felt sure some early farmer, out to harvest his pumpkins or dig his last few rows of yams, would come along and see us. And even if that didn’t happen, we would hear someone (in my imagination it sounded like Curtis Anderson) shout ‘Hold it right there!’ as I used the Aladdin key to unlock the enclosure around the bulkhead leading to the tunnel. Then two dozen carbine-toting guards would step out of the woods and our little adventure would be over.

By the time we actually got to the enclosure, my heart was whamming so hard that I could see little white dots exploding in front of my eyes with each pulse it made. My hands felt cold and numb and faraway, and for the longest time I couldn’t get the key to go into the lock.

‘Oh Christ, headlights!’ Harry moaned.

I looked up and saw brightening fans of light on the road. My keyring almost fell out of my hand; I managed to clutch it at the last second.

‘Give them to me,’ Brutal said. ‘I’ll do it.’

‘No, I’ve got it,’ I said. The key at last slipped into its slot and turned. A moment later we were in. We crouched behind the bulkhead and watched as a Sunshine Bread truck went pottering past the prison. Beside me I could hear John Coffey’s tortured breathing. He sounded like an engine which has almost run out of oil. He had held the bulkhead door up effortlessly for us on our way out, but we didn’t even ask him to help this time; it would have been out of the question. Brutal and I got the door up, and Harry led John down the steps. The big man tottered as he went, but he got down. Brutal and I followed him as fast as we could, then lowered the bulkhead behind us and locked it again.

‘Christ, I think we’re gonna –’ Brutal began, but I cut him off with a sharp elbow to the ribs.

‘Don’t say it,’ I said. ‘Don’t even think it, until he’s safe back in his cell.’

‘And there’s Percy to think about,’ Harry said. Our voices had a flat, echoey quality in the brick tunnel. ‘The evening ain’t over as long as we got him to contend with.’

As it turned out, our evening was far from over.