The Green Mile (32 page)

“You
are
a chump, Percy,” I said.

“Hey, you can't—”

I controlled my own urge to hit him only with the greatest effort. Water dripped hollowly from the bricks down in the tunnel; our shadows danced huge and misshapen on the walls, like shadows in that Poe story about the big ape in the Rue Morgue. Thunder bashed, but down here it was muffled.

“I only want to hear one thing from you, Percy, and that's you repeating your promise to put in for Briar Ridge tomorrow.”

“Don't worry about that,” he said sullenly. He looked at the sheeted
figure on the gurney, looked away, flicked his eyes up toward my face for a moment, then looked away again.

“That
would
be for the best,” Harry said. “Otherwise, you might get to know Wild Bill Wharton a whole lot better than you want to.” A slight pause. “We could see to it.”

Percy was afraid of us, and he was probably afraid of what we might do if he was still around when we found out he'd been talking to Jack Van Hay about what the sponge was for and why we always soaked it in brine, but Harry's mention of Wharton woke real terror in his eyes. I could see him remembering how Wharton had held him, ruffling his hair and crooning to him.

“You wouldn't dare,” Percy whispered.

“Yes I would,” Harry replied calmly. “And do you know what? I'd get away with it. Because you've already shown yourself to be careless as hell around the prisoners. Incompetent, too.”

Percy's fists bunched and his cheeks colored in a thin pink. “I am not—”

“Sure you are,” Dean said, joining us. We formed a rough semicircle around Percy at the foot of the stairs, and even a retreat up the tunnel was blocked; the gurney was behind him, with its load of smoking flesh hidden under an old sheet. “You just burned Delacroix alive. If that ain't incompetent, what is?”

Percy's eyes flickered. He had been planning to cover himself by pleading ignorance, and now he saw he was hoist by his own petard. I don't know what he might have said next, because Curtis Anderson came lunging down the stairs just then. We heard him and drew back from Percy a little, so as not to look quite so threatening.

“What in the blue fuck was
that
all about?” Anderson roared. “Jesus Christ, there's puke all over the floor up there! And the smell! I got Magnusson and Old Toot-Toot to open both doors, but that smell won't come out for five damn years, that's what I'm betting. And that asshole Wharton is
singing
about it! I can hear him!”

“Can he carry a tune, Curt?” Brutal asked. You know how you can burn off illuminating gas with a single spark and not be hurt if you do
it before the concentration gets too heavy? This was like that. We took an instant to gape at Brutus, and then we were all howling. Our high, hysterical laughter flapped up and down the gloomy tunnel like bats. Our shadows bobbed and flickered on the walls. Near the end, even Percy joined in. At last it died, and in its aftermath we all felt a little better. Felt
sane
again.

“Okay, boys,” Anderson said, mopping at his teary eyes with his handkerchief and still snorting out an occasional hiccup of laughter, “what the hell happened?”

“An execution,” Brutal said. I think his even tone surprised Anderson, but it didn't surprise me, at least not much; Brutal had always been good at turning down his dials in a hurry. “A successful one.”

“How in the name of Christ can you call a direct-current abortion like that a success? We've got witnesses that won't sleep for a month! Hell, that fat old broad probably won't sleep for a year!”

Brutal pointed at the gurney, and the shape under the sheet. “He's dead, ain't he? As for your witnesses, most of them will be telling their friends tomorrow night that it was poetic justice—Del there burned a bunch of people alive, so we turned around and burned
him
alive. Except they won't say it was us. They'll say it was the will of God, working
through
us. Maybe there's even some truth to that. And you want to know the best part? The absolute cat's pajamas? Most of their friends will wish they'd been here to see it.” He gave Percy a look both distasteful and sardonic as he said this last.

“And if their feathers are a little ruffled, so what?” Harry asked. “They volunteered for the damn job, nobody drafted them.”

“I didn't know the sponge was supposed to be wet,” Percy said in his robot's voice. “It's never wet in rehearsal.”

Dean looked at him with utter disgust. “How many years did you spend pissing on the toilet seat before someone told you to put it up before you start?” he snarled.

Percy opened his mouth to reply, but I told him to shut up. For a wonder, he did. I turned to Anderson.

“Percy fucked up, Curtis—that's what happened, pure and simple.”
I turned toward Percy, daring him to contradict me. He didn't, maybe because he read my eyes: better that Anderson hear
stupid mistake
than
on purpose
. And besides, whatever was said down here in the tunnel didn't matter. What mattered, what always matters to the Percy Wetmores of the world, is what gets written down or overheard by the big bugs—the people who matter. What matters to the Percys of the world is how it plays in the newspapers.

Anderson looked at the five of us uncertainly. He even looked at Del, but Del wasn't talking. “I guess it could be worse,” Anderson said.

“That's right,” I agreed. “He could still be alive.”

Curtis blinked—that possibility seemed not to have crossed his mind. “I want a complete report about this on my desk tomorrow,” he said. “And none of you are going to talk to Warden Moores about it until I've had my chance. Are you?”

We shook our heads vehemently. If Curtis Anderson wanted to tell the warden, why, that was fine by us.

“If none of those asshole scribblers put it in their papers—”

“They won't,” I said. “If they tried, their editors'd kill it. Too gruesome for a family audience. But they won't even try—they were all vets tonight. Sometimes things go wrong, that's all. They know it as well as we do.”

Anderson considered a moment longer, then nodded. He turned his attention to Percy, an expression of disgust on his usually pleasant face. “You're a little asshole,” he said, “and I don't like you a bit.” He nodded at Percy's look of flabbergasted surprise. “If you tell any of your candy-ass friends I said that, I'll deny it until Aunt Rhody's old gray goose comes back to life, and these men will back me up. You've got a problem, son.”

He turned and started up the stairs. I let him get four steps and then said: “Curtis?”

He turned back, eyebrows raised, saying nothing.

“You don't want to worry too much about Percy,” I said. “He's moving on to Briar Ridge soon. Bigger and better things. Isn't that right, Percy?”

“As soon as his transfer comes through,” Brutal added.

“And until it comes, he's going to call in sick every night,” Dean put in.

That roused Percy, who hadn't been working at the prison long enough to have accumulated any paid sick-time. He looked at Dean with bright distaste. “Don't you
wish,
” he said.

W
E 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 lay 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.

T
HE RAIN HAD QUIT
by the time I got home, and a late grin of moon had appeared over the ridges to the north. My sleepiness seemed to have gone with the clouds. I was wide awake, and I could smell Delacroix on me. I thought I might smell him on my skin—barbecue, me and you, stinky, pinky, phew-phew-phew—for a long time to come.

Janice was waiting up, as she always did on execution nights. I meant not to tell her the story, saw no sense in harrowing her with it, but she got a clear look at my face as I came in the kitchen door and would have it all. So I sat down, took her warm hands in my cold ones (the heater in my old Ford barely worked, and the weather had turned a hundred and eighty degrees since the storm), and told her what she thought she wanted to hear. About halfway through I broke down crying, which I hadn't expected. I was a little ashamed, but only a little; it was her, you see, and she never taxed me with the times that I slipped from the way I thought a man should be . . . the way I thought
I
should be, at any rate. A man with a good wife is the luckiest of God's creatures, and one without must be among the most miserable, I think, the only true blessing of their lives that they don't know how poorly off they are. I cried, and she held my head against her breast, and when my own storm passed, I felt better . . . a little, anyway. And I believe that was when I had the first conscious sight of my idea. Not the shoe; I don't mean that. The shoe was related, but different. All my
real
idea was right then, however, was an odd realization: that John Coffey and Melinda Moores, different as they might have been in size and sex and
skin color, had exactly the same eyes: woeful, sad, and distant. Dying eyes.

“Come to bed,” my wife said at last. “Come to bed with me, Paul.”

So I did, and we made love, and when it was over she went to sleep. As I lay there watching the moon grin and listening to the walls tick—they were at last pulling in, exchanging summer for fall—I thought about John Coffey saying he had helped it.
I helped Del's mouse. I helped Mr. Jingles. He's a circus mouse.
Sure. And maybe, I thought, we were all circus mice, running around with only the dimmest awareness that God and all His heavenly host were watching us in our Bakelite houses through our ivy-glass windows.

I slept a little as the day began to lighten—two hours, I guess, maybe three; and I slept the way I always sleep these days here in Georgia Pines and hardly ever did then, in thin little licks. What I went to sleep thinking about was the churches of my youth. The names changed, depending on the whims of my mother and her sisters, but they were all really the same, all The First Backwoods Church of Praise Jesus, The Lord Is Mighty. In the shadow of those blunt, square steeples, the concept of atonement came up as regularly as the toll of the bell which called the faithful to worship. Only God could forgive sins, could and did, washing them away in the agonal blood of His crucified Son, but that did not change the responsibility of His children to atone for those sins (and even their simple errors of judgement) whenever possible. Atonement was powerful; it was the lock on the door you closed against the past.

I fell asleep thinking of piney-woods atonement, and Eduard Delacroix on fire as he rode the lightning, and Melinda Moores, and my big boy with the endlessly weeping eyes. These thoughts twisted their way into a dream. In it, John Coffey was sitting on a riverbank and bawling his inarticulate mooncalf's grief up at the early-summer sky while on the other bank a freight-train stormed endlessly toward a rusty trestle spanning the Trapingus. In the crook of each arm the black man held the body of a naked, blonde-haired girlchild. His fists, huge brown rocks at the ends of those arms, were closed. All around him crickets chirred and noseeums flocked; the day hummed with
heat. In my dream I went to him, knelt before him, and took his hands. His fists relaxed and gave up their secrets. In one was a spool colored green and red and yellow. In the other was a prison guard's shoe.