The Green Mile Read online

  10

  AT FIRST it seemed like it was going to be a pretty good night in spite of the heat--John Coffey was being his usual quiet self, Wild Bill was making out to be Mild Bill, and Delacroix was in good spirits for a man who had a date with Old Sparky in a little more than twenty-four hours.

  He did understand what was going to happen to him, at least on the most basic level; he had ordered chili for his last meal and gave me special instructions for the kitchen. "Tell em to lay on dat hot-sauce," he said. "Tell em the kind dat really jump up your t'roat an' say howdy--the green stuff, none of dat mild. Dat stuff gripe me like a motherfucker, I can't get off the toilet the nex' day, but I don't think I gonna have a problem this time, n'est-ce pas?"

  Most of them worry about their immortal souls with a kind of moronic ferocity, but Delacroix pretty much dismissed my questions about what he wanted for spiritual comfort in his last hours. If "dat fella" Schuster had been good enough for Big Chief Bitterbuck, Del reckoned, Schuster would be good enough for him. No, what he cared about--you've guessed already, I'm sure--was what was going to happen to Mr. Jingles after he, Delacroix, passed on. I was used to spending long hours with the condemned on the night before their last march, but this was the first time I'd spent those long hours pondering the fate of a mouse.

  Del considered scenario after scenario, patiently working the possibilities through his dim mind. And while he thought aloud, wanting to provide for his pet mouse's future as if it were a child that had to be put through college, he threw that colored spool against the wall. Each time he did it, Mr. Jingles would spring after it, track it down, and then roll it back to Del's foot. It started to get on my nerves after awhile--first the clack of the spool against the stone wall, then the minute clitter of Mr. Jingles's paws. Although it was a cute trick, it palled after ninety minutes or so. And Mr. Jingles never seemed to get tired. He paused every now and then to refresh himself with a drink of water out of a coffee saucer Delacroix kept for just that purpose, or to munch a pink crumb of peppermint candy, and then back to it he went. Several times it was on the tip of my tongue to tell Delacroix to give it a rest, and each time I reminded myself that he had this night and tomorrow to play the spool-game with Mr. Jingles, and that was all. Near the end, though, it began to be really difficult to hold onto that thought--you know how it is, with a noise that's repeated over and over. After a while it shoots your nerve. I started to speak after all, then something made me look over my shoulder and out the cell door. John Coffey was standing at his cell door across the way, and he shook his head at me: right, left, back to center. As if he had read my mind and was telling me to think again.

  I would see that Mr. Jingles got to Delacroix's maiden aunt, I said, the one who had sent him the big bag of candy. His colored spool could go as well, even his "house"--we'd take up a collection and see that Toot gave up his claim on the Corona box. No, said Delacroix after some consideration (he had time to throw the spool against the wall at least five times, with Mr. Jingles either nosing it back or pushing it with his paws), that wouldn't do. Aunt Hermione was too old, she wouldn't understand Mr. Jingles's frisky ways, and suppose Mr. Jingles outlived her? What would happen to him then? No, no, Aunt Hermione just wouldn't do.

  Well, then, I asked, suppose one of us took it? One of us guards? We could keep him right here on E Block. No, Delacroix said, he thanked me kindly for the thought, certainement, but Mr. Jingles was a mouse that yearned to be free. He, Eduard Delacroix, knew this, because Mr. Jingles had--you guessed it--whispered the information in his ear.

  "All right," I said, "one of us will take him home, Del. Dean, maybe. He's got a little boy that would just love a pet mouse, I bet."

  Delacroix actually turned pale with horror at the thought. A little kid in charge of a rodent genius like Mr. Jingles? How in the name of le bon Dieu could a little kid be expected to keep up with his training, let alone teach him new tricks? And suppose the kid lost interest and forgot to feed him for two or three days at a stretch? Delacroix, who had roasted six human beings alive in an effort to cover up his original crime, shuddered with the delicate revulsion of an ardent anti-vivisectionist.

  All right, I said, I'd take him myself (promise them anything, remember; in their last forty-eight hours, promise them anything). How would that be?

  "No, sir, Boss Edgecombe," Del said apologetically. He threw the spool again. It hit the wall, bounced, spun; then Mr. Jingles was on it like white on rice and nosing it back to Delacroix. "Thank you kindly--merci beaucoup--but you live out in the woods, and Mr. Jingles, he be scared to live out dans la foret. I know, because--"

  "I think I can guess how you know, Del," I said.

  Delacroix nodded, smiling. "But we gonna figure this out. You bet!" He threw the spool. Mr. Jingles clittered after it. I tried not to wince.

  In the end it was Brutal who saved the day. He had been up by the duty desk, watching Dean and Harry play cribbage. Percy was there, too, and Brutal finally tired of trying to start a conversation with him and getting nothing but sullen grunts in response. He strolled down to where I sat on a stool outside of Delacroix's cell and stood there listening to us with his arms folded.

  "How about Mouseville?" Brutal asked into the considering silence which followed Del's rejection of my spooky old house out in the woods. He threw the comment out in a casual just-an-idea tone of voice.

  "Mouseville?" Delacroix asked, giving Brutal a look both startled and interested. "What Mouseville?"

  "It's this tourist attraction down in Florida," he said. "Tallahassee, I think. Is that right, Paul? Tallahassee?"

  "Yep," I said, speaking without a moment's hesitation, thinking God bless Brutus Howell. "Tallahassee. Right down the road apiece from the dog university." Brutal's mouth twitched at that, and I thought he was going to queer the pitch by laughing, but he got it under control and nodded. I'd hear about the dog university later, though, I imagined.

  This time Del didn't throw the spool, although Mr. Jingles stood on Del's slipper with his front paws raised, clearly lusting for another chance to chase. The Cajun looked from Brutal to me and back to Brutal again. "What dey do in Mouseville?" he asked.

  "You think they'd take Mr. Jingles?" Brutal asked me, simultaneously ignoring Del and drawing him on. "Think he's got the stuff, Paul?"

  I tried to appear considering. "You know," I said, "the more I think of it, the more it seems like a brilliant idea." From the corner of my eye I saw Percy come partway down the Green Mile (giving Wharton's cell a very wide berth). He stood with one shoulder leaning against an empty cell, listening with a small, contemptuous smile on his lips.

  "What dis Mouseville?" Del asked, now frantic to know.

  "A tourist attraction, like I told you," Brutal said. "There's, oh I dunno, a hundred or so mice there. Wouldn't you say, Paul?"

  "More like a hundred and fifty these days," I said. "It's a big success. I understand they're thinking of opening one out in California and calling it Mouseville West, that's how much business is booming. Trained mice are the coming thing with the smart set, I guess--I don't understand it, myself."

  Del sat with the colored spool in his hand, looking at us, his own situation forgotten for the time being.

  "They only take the smartest mice," Brutal cautioned, "the ones that can do tricks. And they can't be white mice, because those are pet-shop mice."

  "Pet-shop mice, yeah, you bet!" Delacroix said fiercely. "I hate dem pet-shop mice!"

  "And what they got," Brutal said, his eyes distant now as he imagined it, "is this tent you go into--"

  "Yeah, yeah, like inna cirque! Do you gotta pay to get in?"

  "You shittin me? Course you gotta pay to get in. A dime apiece, two cents for the kiddies. And there's, like, this whole city made out of Bakelite boxes and toilet-paper rolls, with windows made out of isinglass so you can see what they're up to in there--"

  "Yeah! Yeah!" Delacroix was in ecstasy now. Then he turned to me. "What ivy-glass?"


  "Like on the front of a stove, where you can see in," I said.

  "Oh sure! Dat shit!" He cranked his hand at Brutal, wanting him to go on, and Mr. Jingles's little oildrop eyes practically spun in their sockets, trying to keep that spool in view. It was pretty funny. Percy came a little closer, as if wanting to get a better look, and I saw John Coffey frowning at him, but I was too wrapped up in Brutal's fantasy to pay much attention. This took telling the condemned man what he wanted to hear to new heights, and I was all admiration, believe me.

  "Well," Brutal said, "there's the mouse city, but what the kids really like is the Mouseville All-Star Circus, where there's mice that swing on trapezes, and mice that roll these little barrels, and mice that stack coins--"

  "Yeah, dat's it! Dat's the place for Mr. Jingles!" Delacroix said. His eyes sparkled and his cheeks were high with color. It occurred to me that Brutus Howell was a kind of saint. "You gonna be a circus mouse after all, Mr. Jingles! Gonna live in a mouse city down Florida! All ivy-glass windows! Hurrah!"

  He threw the spool extra-hard. It hit low on the wall, took a crazy bounce, and squirted out between the bars of his cell door and onto the Mile. Mr. Jingles raced out after it, and Percy saw his chance.

  "No, you fool!" Brutal yelled, but Percy paid no attention. Just as Mr. Jingles reached the spool--too intent on it to realize his old enemy was at hand--Percy brought the sole of one hard black workshoe down on it. There was an audible snap as Mr. Jingles's back broke, and blood gushed from his mouth. His tiny dark eyes bulged in their sockets, and in them I read an expression of surprised agony that was all too human.

  Delacroix screamed with horror and grief. He threw himself at the door of his cell and thrust his arms out between the bars, reaching as far as he could, crying the mouse's name over and over.

  Percy turned toward him, smiling. Toward the three of us. "There," he said. "I knew I'd get him, sooner or later. Just a matter of time, really." He turned and walked back up the Green Mile, not hurrying, leaving Mr. Jingles lying on the linoleum in a spreading pool of his own blood.

  PART FOUR

  THE BAD DEATH

  OF EDUARD DELACROIX

  1

  ALL THIS OTHER WRITING ASIDE, I've kept a little diary since I took up residence at Georgia Pines--no big deal, just a couple of paragraphs a day, mostly about the weather--and I looked back through it last evening. I wanted to see just how long it has been since my grandchildren Christopher and Danielle more or less forced me into Georgia Pines. "For your own good, Gramps," they said. Of course they did. Isn't that what people mostly say when they have finally figured out how to get rid of a problem that walks and talks?

  It's been a little over two years. The eerie thing is that I don't know if it feels like two years, or longer than that, or shorter. My sense of time seems to be melting, like a kid's snowman in a January thaw. It's as if time as it always was--Eastern Standard Time, Daylight Saving Time, Working-Man Time--doesn't exist anymore. Here there is only Georgia Pines Time, which is Old Man Time, Old Lady Time, and Piss the Bed Time. The rest . . . all gone.

  This is a dangerous damned place. You don't realize it at first, at first you think it's only a boring place, about as dangerous as a nursery school at nap-time, but it's dangerous, all right. I've seen a lot of people slide into senility since I came here, and sometimes they do more than slide--sometimes they go down with the speed of a crash-diving submarine. They come here mostly all right--dim-eyed and welded to the cane, maybe a little loose in the bladder, but otherwise okay--and then something happens to them. A month later they're just sitting in the TV room, staring up at Oprah Winfrey on the TV with dull eyes, a slack jaw, and a forgotten glass of orange juice tilted and dribbling in one hand. A month after that, you have to tell them their kids' names when the kids come to visit. And a month after that, it's their own damned names you have to refresh them on. Something happens to them, all right: Georgia Pines Time happens to them. Time here is like a weak acid that erases first memory and then the desire to go on living.

  You have to fight it. That's what I tell Elaine Connelly, my special friend. It's gotten better for me since I started writing about what happened to me in 1932, the year John Coffey came on the Green Mile. Some of the memories are awful, but I can feel them sharpening my mind and my awareness the way a knife sharpens a pencil, and that makes the pain worthwhile. Writing and memory alone aren't enough, though. I also have a body, wasted and grotesque, though it may now be, and I exercise it as much as I can. It was hard at first--old fogies like me aren't much shakes when it comes to exercise just for the sake of exercise--but it's easier now that there's a purpose to my walks.

  I go out before breakfast--as soon as it's light, most days--for my first stroll. It was raining this morning, and the damp makes my joints ache, but I hooked a poncho from the rack by the kitchen door and went out, anyway. When a man has a chore, he has to do it, and if it hurts, too bad. Besides, there are compensations. The chief one is keeping that sense of Real Time, as opposed to Georgia Pines Time. And I like the rain, aches or no aches. Especially in the early morning, when the day is young and seems full of possibilities, even to a washed-up old boy like me.

  I went through the kitchen, stopping to beg two slices of toast from one of the sleepy-eyed cooks, and then went out. I crossed the croquet course, then the weedy little putting green. Beyond that is a small stand of woods, with a narrow path winding through it and a couple of sheds, no longer used and mouldering away quietly, along the way. I walked down this path slowly, listening to the sleek and secret patter of the rain in the pines, chewing away at a piece of toast with my few remaining teeth. My legs ached, but it was a low ache, manageable. Mostly I felt pretty well. I drew the moist gray air as deep as I could, taking it in like food.

  And when I got to the second of those old sheds, I went in for awhile, and I took care of my business there.

  When I walked back up the path twenty minutes later, I could feel a worm of hunger stirring in my belly, and thought I could eat something a little more substantial than toast. A dish of oatmeal, perhaps even a scrambled egg with a sausage on the side. I love sausage, always have, but if I eat more than one these days, I'm apt to get the squitters. One would be safe enough, though. Then, with my belly full and with the damp air still perking up my brain (or so I hoped), I would go up to the solarium and write about the execution of Eduard Delacroix. I would do it as fast as I could, so as not to lose my courage.

  It was Mr. Jingles I was thinking about as I crossed the croquet course to the kitchen door--how Percy Wetmore had stamped on him and broken his back, and how Delacroix had screamed when he realized what his enemy had done--and I didn't see Brad Dolan standing there, half-hidden by the Dumpster, until he reached out and grabbed my wrist.

  "Out for a little stroll, Paulie?" he asked.

  I jerked back from him, yanking my wrist out of his hand. Some of it was just being startled--anyone will jerk when they're startled--but that wasn't all of it. I'd been thinking about Percy Wetmore, remember, and it's Percy that Brad always reminds me of. Some of it's how Brad always goes around with a paperback stuffed into his pocket (with Percy it was always a men's adventure magazine; with Brad it's books of jokes that are only funny if you're stupid and mean-hearted), some of it's how he acts like he's King Shit of Turd Mountain, but mostly it's that he's sneaky, and he likes to hurt.

  He'd just gotten to work, I saw, hadn't even changed into his orderly's whites yet. He was wearing jeans and a cheesy-looking Western-style shirt. In one hand was the remains of a Danish he'd hooked out of the kitchen. He'd been standing under the eave, eating it where he wouldn't get wet. And where he could watch for me, I'm pretty sure of that now. I'm pretty sure of something else, as well: I'll have to watch out for Mr. Brad Dolan. He doesn't like me much. I don't know why, but I never knew why Percy Wetmore didn't like Delacroix, either. And dislike is really too weak a word. Percy hated Del's guts from the very first moment the little Frenchman came on
to the Green Mile.

  "What's with this poncho you got on, Paulie?" he asked, flicking the collar. "This isn't yours."

  "I got it in the hall outside the kitchen," I said. I hate it when he calls me Paulie, and I think he knows it, but I was damned if I'd give him the satisfaction of seeing it. "There's a whole row of them. I'm not hurting it any, would you say? Rain's what it's made for, after all."

  "But it wasn't made for you, Paulie," he said, giving it another little flick. "That's the thing. Those slickers're for the employees, not the residents."

  "I still don't see what harm it does."

  He gave me a thin little smile. "It's not about harm, it's about the rules. What would life be without rules? Paulie, Paulie, Paulie." He shook his head, as if just looking at me made him feel sorry to be alive. "You probably think an old fart like you doesn't have to mind about the rules anymore, but that's just not true. Paulie."

  Smiling at me. Disliking me. Maybe even hating me. And why? I don't know. Sometimes there is no why. That's the scary part.

  "Well, I'm sorry if I broke the rules," I said. It came out sounding whiney, a little shrill, and I hated myself for sounding that way, but I'm old, and old people whine easily. Old people scare easily.

  Brad nodded. "Apology accepted. Now go hang that back up. You got no business out walking in the rain, anyway. Specially not in those woods. What if you were to slip and fall and break your damned hip? Huh? Who do you think'd have to hoss your elderly freight back up the hill?"

  "I don't know," I said. I just wanted to get away from him. The more I listened to him, the more he sounded like Percy. William Wharton, the crazyman who came to the Green Mile in the fall of '32, once grabbed Percy and scared him so bad that Percy squirted in his pants. You talk about this to anyone, Percy told the rest of us afterward, and you'll all be on the breadlines in a week. Now, these many years later, I could almost hear Brad Dolan saying those same words, in that same tone of voice. It's as if, by writing about those old times, I have unlocked some unspeakable door that connects the past to the present--Percy Wetmore to Brad Dolan, Janice Edgecombe to Elaine Connelly, Cold Mountain Penitentiary to the Georgia Pines old folks' home. And if that thought doesn't keep me awake tonight, I guess nothing will.