The Green Mile (38 page)

“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-uckuck!” 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. “Uckuck-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.