The Green Mile (37 page)

And she practically pushed me out the door.

I
CLOCKED IN
that night—in many ways the strangest night of my entire life—at twenty past six. I thought I could still smell the faint, lingering odor of burned flesh on the air. It had to be an illusion—the doors to the outside, both on the block and in the storage room, had been open most of the day, and the previous two shifts had spent hours scrubbing in there—but that didn't change what my nose was telling me, and I didn't think I could have eaten any dinner even if I hadn't been scared almost to death about the evening which lay ahead.

Brutal came on the block at quarter to seven, Dean at ten 'til. I asked Dean if he would go over to the infirmary and see if they had a heating pad for my back, which I seemed to have strained that early morning, helping to carry Delacroix's body down into the tunnel. Dean said he'd be happy to. I believe he wanted to tip me a wink, but restrained himself.

Harry clocked on at three minutes to seven.

“The truck?” I asked.

“Where we talked about.”

So far, so good. There followed a little passage of time when we stood by the duty desk, drinking coffee and studiously not mentioning what we were all thinking and hoping: that Percy was late, that maybe Percy wasn't going to show up at all. Considering the hostile reviews he'd gotten on the way he'd handled the electrocution, that seemed at least possible.

But Percy apparently subscribed to that old axiom about how you
should get right back on the horse that had thrown you, because here he came through the door at six minutes past seven, resplendent in his blue uniform, with his sidearm on one hip and his hickory stick in its ridiculous custom-made holster on the other. He punched his time-card, then looked around at us warily (except for Dean, who hadn't come back from the infirmary yet). “My starter busted,” he said. “I had to crank.”

“Aw,” Harry said, “po' baby.”

“Should have stayed home and got the cussed thing fixed,” Brutal said blandly. “We wouldn't want you straining your arm none, would we, boys?”

“Yeah, you'd like that, wouldn't you?” Percy sneered, but I thought he seemed reassured by the relative mildness of Brutal's response. That was good. For the next few hours we'd have to walk a line with him—not too hostile, but not too friendly, either. After last night, he'd find anything even approaching warmth suspect. We weren't going to get him with his guard down, we all knew that, but I thought we could catch him with it a long piece from all the way up if we played things just right. It was important that we move fast, but it was also important—to me, at least—that nobody be hurt. Not even Percy Wetmore.

Dean came back and gave me a little nod.

“Percy,” I said, “I want you to go on in the storeroom and mop down the floor. Stairs to the tunnel, too. Then you can write your report on last night.”

“
That
should be creative,” Brutal remarked, hooking his thumbs into his belt and looking up at the ceiling.

“You guys are funnier'n a fuck in church,” Percy said, but beyond that he didn't protest. Didn't even point out the obvious, which was that the floor in there had already been washed at least twice that day. My guess is that he was glad for the chance to be away from us.

I went over the previous shift report, saw nothing that concerned me, and then took a walk down to Wharton's cell. He was sitting there on his bunk with his knees drawn up and his arms clasped around his shins, looking at me with a bright, hostile smile.

“Well, if it ain't the big boss,” he said. “Big as life and twice as ugly.
You look happier'n a pig knee-deep in shit, Boss Edgecombe. Wife give your pecker a pull before you left home, did she?”

“How you doing, Kid?” I asked evenly, and at that he brightened for real. He let go of his legs, stood up, and stretched. His smile broadened, and some of the hostility went out of it.

“Well, damn!” he said. “You got my name right for once! What's the matter with you, Boss Edgecombe? You sick or sumpin?”

No, not sick. I'd
been
sick, but John Coffey had taken care of that. His hands no longer knew the trick of tying a shoe, if they ever had, but they knew other tricks. Yes indeed they did.

“My friend,” I told him, “if you want to be a Billy the Kid instead of a Wild Bill, it's all the same to me.”

He puffed visibly, like one of those loathsome fish that live in South American rivers and can sting you almost to death with the spines along their backs and sides. I dealt with a lot of dangerous men during my time on the Mile, but few if any so repellent as William Wharton, who considered himself a great outlaw, but whose jailhouse behavior rarely rose above pissing or spitting through the bars of his cell. So far we hadn't given him the awed respect he felt was his by right, but on that particular night I wanted him tractable. If that meant lathering on the soft-soap, I would gladly lather it on.

“I got a lot in common with the Kid, and you just better believe it,” Wharton said. “I didn't get here for stealing candy out of a dimestore.” As proud as a man who's been conscripted into the Heroes' Brigade of the French Foreign Legion instead of one whose ass has been slammed into a cell seventy long steps from the electric chair. “Where's my supper?”

“Come on, Kid, report says you had it at five-fifty. Meatloaf with gravy, mashed, peas. You don't con me that easy.”

He laughed expansively and sat down on his bunk again. “Put on the radio, then.” He said radio in the way people did back then when they were joking, so it rhymed with the fifties slang word “Daddy-O.” It's funny how much a person can remember about times when his nerves were tuned so tight they almost sang.

“Maybe later, big boy,” I said. I stepped away from his cell and looked down the corridor. Brutal had strolled down to the far end, where
he checked to make sure the restraint-room door was on the single lock instead of the double. I knew it was, because I'd already checked it myself. Later on, we'd want to be able to open that door as quickly as we could. There would be no time spent emptying out the attic-type rickrack that had accumulated in there over the years; we'd taken it out, sorted it, and stored it in other places not long after Wharton joined our happy band. It had seemed to us the room with the soft walls was apt to get a lot of use, at least until “Billy the Kid” strolled the Mile.

John Coffey, who would usually have been lying down at this time, long, thick legs dangling and face to the wall, was sitting on the end of his bunk with his hands clasped, watching Brutal with an alertness—a
thereness
—that wasn't typical of him. He wasn't leaking around the eyes, either.

Brutal tried the door to the restraint room, then came on back up the Mile. He glanced at Coffey as he passed Coffey's cell, and Coffey said a curious thing: “Sure. I'd
like
a ride.” As if responding to something Brutal had said.

Brutal's eyes met mine.
He knows,
I could almost hear him saying.
Somehow he knows.

I shrugged and spread my hands, as if to say
Of course he knows.

O
LD
T
OOT
-T
OOT
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 tom 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 bangings 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, screwtip.” 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.”