The Two Dead Girls Read online

  I turned my attention to the giant.

  'If I let Harry take those chains off you, are you going to be nice?'

  He nodded. It was like his head-shake: down, up, back to center. His strange eyes looked at me. There was a kind of peace in them, but not a kind I was sure I could trust. I crooked a finger to Harry, who came in and unlocked the chains. He showed no fear now, even when he knelt between Coffey's treetrunk legs to unlock the ankle irons, and that eased me some. It was Percy who had made Harry nervous, and I trusted Harry's instincts. I trusted the instincts of all my day-to-day E Block men, except for Percy.

  I have a little set speech I make to men new on the block, but I hesitated with Coffey, because he seemed so abnormal, and not just in his size.

  When Harry stood back (Coffey had remained motionless during the entire unlocking ceremony, as placid as a Percheron), I looked up at my new charge, tapping on the clipboard with my thumb, and said: 'Can you talk, big boy?'

  'Yes, sir, boss, I can talk,' he said. His voice was a deep and quiet rumble. It made me think of a freshly tuned tractor engine. He had no real Southern drawl — he said I, not Ah — but there was a kind of Southern construction to his speech that I noticed later. As if he was from the South, but not of it. He didn't sound illiterate, but he didn't sound educated. In his speech as in so many other things, he was a mystery. Mostly it was his eyes that troubled me — a kind of peaceful absence in them, as if he were floating far, far away.

  'Your name is John Coffey.'

  'Yes, sir, boss, like the drink only not spelled the same way.'

  'So you can spell, can you? Read and write?'

  'Just my name, boss,' said he, serenely.

  I sighed, then gave him a short version of my set speech. I'd already decided he wasn't going to be any trouble. In that I was both right and wrong.

  'My name is Paul Edgecombe,' I said. 'I'm the E Block super — the head screw. You want something from me, ask for me by name. If I'm not here, ask this other, man — his name is Harry Terwilliger. Or you ask for Mr. Stanton or Mr. Howell. Do you understand that?'

  Coffey nodded.

  'Just don't expect to get what you want unless we decide it's what you need — this isn't a hotel. Still with me?'

  He nodded again.

  'This is a quiet place, big boy — not like the rest of the prison. It's just you and Delacroix over there. You won't work; mostly you'll just sit. Give you a chance to think things over.' Too much time for most of them, but I didn't say that. 'Sometimes we play the radio, if all's in order. You like the radio?'

  He nodded, but doubtfully, as if he wasn't sure what the radio was. I later found out that was true, in a way; Coffey knew things when he encountered them again, but in between he forgot. He knew the characters on Our Gal Sunday, but had only the haziest memory of what they'd been up to the last time.

  'If you behave, you'll eat on time, you'll never see the solitary cell down at the far end, or have to wear one of those canvas coats that buttons up the back. You'll have two hours in the yard afternoons from four until six, except on Saturdays when the rest of the prison population has their flag football games. You'll have your visitors on Sunday afternoons, if you have someone who wants to visit you. Do you, Coffey?'

  He shook his head. 'Got none, boss,' he said.

  'Well, your lawyer, then.'

  'I believe I've seen the back end of him,' he said. 'He was give to me on loan. Don't believe he could find his way up here in the mountains.'

  I looked at him closely to see if he might be trying a little joke, but he didn't seem to be. And I really hadn't expected any different. Appeals weren't for the likes of John Coffey, not back then; they had their day in court and then the world forgot them until they saw a squib in the paper saying a certain fellow had taken a little electricity along about midnight. But a man with a wife, children, or friends to look forward to on Sunday afternoons was easier to control, if control looked to be a problem. Here it didn't, and that was good. Because he was so damned big.

  I shifted a little on the bunk, then decided I might feel a little more comfortable in my nether parts if I stood up, and so I did. He backed away from me respectfully, and clasped his hands in front of him.

  'Your time here can be easy or hard, big boy, it all depends on you. I'm here to say you might as well make it easy on all of us, because it comes to the same in the end. We'll treat you as right as you deserve. Do you have any questions?'

  'Do you leave a light on after bedtime?' he asked right away, as if he had only been waiting for the chance.

  I blinked at him. I had been asked a lot of strange questions by newcomers to E Block — once about the size of my wife's tits — but never that one.

  Coffey was smiling a trifle uneasily, as if he knew we would think him foolish but couldn't help himself. 'Because I get a little scared in the dark sometimes,' he said. 'If it's a strange place.'

  I looked at him — the pure size of him — and felt strangely touched. They did touch you, you know; you didn't see them at their worst, hammering out their horrors like demons at a forge.

  'Yes, it's pretty bright in here all night long,' I said. 'Half the lights along the Mile burn from nine until five every morning.' Then I realized he wouldn't have any idea of what I was talking about — he didn't know the Green Mile from Mississippi mud — and so I pointed. 'In the corridor.'

  He nodded, relieved. I'm not sure he knew what a corridor was, either, but he could see the 200-watt bulbs in their wire cages.

  I did something I'd never done to a prisoner before, then — I offered him my hand. Even now I don't know why. Him asking about the lights, maybe. It made Harry Terwilliger blink, I can tell you that. Coffey took my hand with surprising gentleness, my hand all but disappearing into his, and that was all of it. I had another moth in my killing bottle. We were done.

  I stepped out of the cell. Harry pulled the door shut on its track and ran both locks. Coffey stood where he was a moment or two longer, as if he didn't know what to do next, and then he sat down on his bunk, clasped his giant's hands between his knees, and lowered his head like a man who grieves or prays. He said something then in his strange, almost Southern voice. I heard it with perfect clarity, and although I didn't know much about what he'd done then — you don't need to know about what a man's done in order to feed him and groom him until it's time for him to pay off what he owes — it still gave me a chill.

  'I couldn't help-it, boss,' he said. 'I tried to take it back, but it was too late.'

  3

  'You're going to have you some trouble with Percy,' Harry said as we walked back up the hall and into my office. Dean Stanton, sort of my third in command — we didn't actually have such things, a situation Percy Wetmore would have fixed up in a flash — was sitting behind my desk, updating the files, a job I never seemed to get around to. He barely looked up as we came in, just gave his little glasses a shove with the ball of his thumb and dived back into his paperwork.

  'I been having trouble with that peckerwood since the day he came here,' I said, gingerly, pulling my pants away from my crotch and wincing. 'Did you hear what he was shouting when he brought that big galoot down?'

  'Couldn't very well not,' Harry said. 'I was there, you know.'

  'I was in the john and heard it just fine,' Dean said. He drew a sheet of paper to him, held it up into the light so I could see there was a coffee-ring as well as typing on it, and then tossed it into the waste basket. 'Dead man walking.' Must have read that in one of those magazines he likes so much.'

  And he probably had. Percy Wetmore was a great reader of Argosy and Stag and Men's Adventure. There was a prison tale in every issue, it seemed, and Percy read them avidly, like a man doing research. It was like he was trying to find out how to act, and thought the information was in those magazines. He'd come just after we did Anthony Ray, the hatchet-killer — and he hadn't actually participated in an execution yet, although he'd witnessed one from the switch-room.
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br />   'He knows people,' Harry said. 'He's connected. You'll have to answer for sending him off the block, and you'll have to answer even harder for expecting him to do some real work.'

  'I don't expect it,' I said, and I didn't . . . but I had hopes. Bill Dodge wasn't the sort to let a man just stand around and do the heavy looking-on. 'I'm more interested in the big boy, for the time being. Are we going to have trouble with him?'

  Harry shook his head with decision.

  'He was quiet as a lamb at court down there in Trapingus County,' Dean said. He took his little rimless glasses off and began to polish them on his vest. 'Of course they had more chains on him than Scrooge saw on Marley's ghost, but he could have kicked up dickens if he'd wanted. That's a pun, son.'

  'I know,' I said, although I didn't. I just hate letting Dean Stanton get the better of me.

  'Big one, ain't he?' Dean said.

  'He is,' I agreed. 'Monstrous big.'

  'Probably have to crank Old Sparky up to Super Bake to fry his ass.'

  'Don't worry about Old Sparky,' I said absently. 'He makes the big 'uns little.'

  Dean pinched the sides of his nose, where there were a couple of angry red patches from his glasses, and nodded. 'Yep,' he said. 'Some truth to that, all right.'

  I asked, 'Do either of you know where he came from before he showed up in . . . Tefton? It was Tefton, wasn't it?'

  'Yep,' Dean said. 'Tefton, down in Trapingus County. Before he showed up there and did what he did, no one seems to know. He just drifted around, I guess. You might be able to find out a little more from the newspapers in the prison library, if you're really interested. They probably won't get around to moving those until next week.' He grinned. 'You might have to listen to your little buddy bitching and moaning upstairs, though.'

  'I might just go have a peek, anyway,' I said, and later on that afternoon I did.

  The prison library was in back of the building that was going to become the prison auto shop — at least that was the plan. More pork in someone's pocket was what I thought, but the Depression was on, and I kept my opinions to myself — the way I should have kept my mouth shut about Percy, but sometimes a man just can't keep it clapped tight. A man's mouth gets him in more trouble than his pecker ever could, most of the time. And the auto shop never happened, anyway — the next spring, the prison moved sixty miles down the road to Brighton. More backroom deals, I reckon. More barrels of pork. Wasn't nothing to me.

  Administration had gone to a new building on the east side of the yard; the infirmary was being moved (whose country-bumpkin idea it had been to put an infirmary on the second floor in the first place was just another of life's mysteries); the library was still partly stocked — not that it ever had much in it — and standing empty. The old building was a hot clapboard box kind of shouldered in between A and B Blocks. Their bathrooms backed up on it and the whole building was always swimming with this vague pissy smell, which was probably the only good reason for the move. The library was L-shaped, and not much bigger than my office. I looked for a fan, but they were all gone. It must have been a hundred degrees in there, and I could feel that hot throb in my groin when I sat down. Sort of like an infected tooth. I know that's absurd, considering the region we're talking about here, but it's the only thing I could compare it to. It got a lot worse during and just after taking a leak, which I had done just before walking over.

  There was one other fellow there after all — a scrawny old trusty named Gibbons dozing away in the corner with a Wild West novel in his lap and his hat pulled down over his eyes. The heat wasn't bothering him, nor were the grunts, thumps, and occasional curses from the infirmary upstairs (where it had to be at least ten degrees hotter, and I hoped Percy Wetmore was enjoying it). I didn't bother him, either, but went around to the short side of the L, where the newspapers were kept. I thought they might be gone along with the fans, in spite of what Dean had said. They weren't, though, and the business about the Detterick twins was easily enough looked out; it had been front-page news from the commission of the crime in June right through the trial in late August and September.

  Soon I had forgotten the heat and the thumps from upstairs and old Gibbons's wheezy snores. The thought of those little nine-year-old girls — their fluffy heads of blonde hair and their engaging Bobbsey Twins smiles — in connection with Coffey's hulking darkness was unpleasant but impossible to ignore. Given his size, it was easy to imagine him actually eating them, like a giant in a fairy tale. What he had done was even worse, and it was a lucky thing for him that he hadn't just been lynched right there on the riverbank. If, that was, you considered waiting to walk the Green Mile and sit in Old Sparky's lap lucky.

  4

  King Cotton had been deposed in the South seventy years before all these things happened and would never be king again, but in those years of the thirties it had a little revival. There were no more cotton plantations, but there were forty or fifty prosperous cotton farms in the southern part of our state. Klaus Detterick owned one of them. By the standards of the nineteen-fifties he would have been considered only a rung above shirttail poor, but by those of the thirties he was considered well-to-do because he actually paid his store bill in cash at the end of most months, and he could meet the bank president's eyes if they happened to pass on the street. The farmhouse was clean and commodious. In addition to the cotton, there were the other two c's: chickens and a few cows. He and his wife had three children: Howard. who was twelve or thereabouts, and the twin girls. Cora and Kathe.

  On a warm night in June of that year, the girls asked for and were given permission to sleep on the screen-enclosed side porch, which ran the length of the house. This was a great treat for them. Their mother kissed them goodnight just shy of nine, when the last light had gone out of the sky. It was the final time she saw either of them until they were in their coffins and the undertaker had repaired the worst of the damage.

  Country families went to bed early in those days — "soon as 'twas dark under the table," my own mother sometimes said — and slept soundly. Certainly Klaus, Marjorie, and Howie Detterick did on the night the twins were taken. Klaus would almost certainly have been wakened by Bowser, the family's big old half-breed collie, if he had barked, but Bowser didn't. Not that night, not ever again.

  Klaus was up at first light to do the milking. The porch was on the side of the house away from the barn, and Klaus never thought to look in on the girls. Bowser's failure to join him was no cause for alarm, either. The dog held the cows and the chickens alike in great disdain, and usually hid in his doghouse behind the barn when the chores were being performed, unless called . . . and called energetically, at that.

  Marjorie came downstairs fifteen minutes or so after her husband had pulled on his boots in the mudroom and tromped out to the barn. She started the coffee, then put bacon on to fry. The combined smells brought Howie down from his room under the eaves, but not the girls from the porch. She sent Howie out to fetch them as she cracked eggs into the bacon grease. Klaus would want the girls out to get fresh ones as soon as breakfast was over. Except no breakfast was eaten in the Detterick house that morning. Howie came back from the porch, white around the gills and with his formerly sleep-puffy eyes now wide open.

  'They're gone,' he said.

  Marjorie went out onto the porch, at first more annoyed than alarmed. She said later that she had supposed, if she had supposed anything, that the girls had decided to take a walk and pick flowers by the dawn's early light. That or some similar green-girl foolishness. One look, and she understood why Howie had been white.

  She screamed for Klaus — shrieked for him — and Klaus came on the dead run, his workboots whitened by the half-full pail of milk he had spilled on them. What he found on the porch would have jellied the legs of the most courageous parent. The blankets in which the girls would have bundled themselves as the night drew on and grew colder had been cast into one comer. The screen door had been yanked off its upper hinge and hung drunkenly o
ut into the dooryard. And on the boards of both the porch and the steps beyond the mutilated screen door, there were spatters of blood.

  Marjorie begged her husband not to go hunting after the girls alone, and not to take their son if he felt he had to go after them, but she could have saved her breath. He took the shotgun he kept mounted in the mudroom high out of the reach of little hands, and gave Howie the .22 they had been saving for his birthday in July. Then they went, neither of them paying the slightest attention to the shrieking, weeping woman who wanted to know what they would do if they met a gang of wandering hobos or a bunch of bad niggers escaped from the county farm over in Laduc. In this I think the men were right, you know. The blood was no longer runny, but it was only tacky yet, and still closer to true red than the maroon that comes when blood has well dried. The abduction hadn't happened too long ago. Klaus must have reasoned that there was still a chance for his girls, and he meant to take it.

  Neither one of them could track worth a damn — they were gatherers, not hunters, men who went into the woods after coon and deer in their seasons not because they much wanted to, but because it was an expected thing. And the dooryard around the house was a blighted patch of dirt with tracks all overlaid in a meaningless tangle. They went around the barn, and saw almost at once why Bowser, a bad biter but a good barker, hadn't sounded the alarm. He lay half in and half out of a doghouse which had been built of leftover barnboards (there was a signboard with the word Bowser neatly printed on it over the curved hole in the front — I saw a photograph of it in one of the papers), his head turned most of the way around on his neck. It would have taken a man of enormous power to have done that to such a big animal, the prosecutor later told John Coffey's jury . . . and then he had looked long and meaningfully at the hulking defendant, sitting behind the defense table with his eyes cast down and wearing a brand-new pair of state-bought bib overalls that looked like damnation in and of themselves. Beside the dog, Klaus and Howie found a scrap of cooked link sausage. The theory — a sound one, I have no doubt — was that Coffey had first charmed the dog with treats, and then, as Bowser began to eat the last one, had reached out his hands and broken its neck with one mighty snap of his wrists.