The Mouse on the Mile Read online

  But I got The Chief at a good time. He told me about his first wife, and how they had built a lodge together up in Montana. Those had been the happiest days of his life, he said. The water was so pure and so cold that it felt like your mouth was cut every time you drank.

  'Hey, Mr. Edgecombe,' he said. 'You think, if a man he sincerely repent of what he done wrong, he might get to go back to the time that was happiest for him and live there forever? Could that be what heaven is like?'

  'I've just about believed that very thing,' I said, which was a he I didn't regret in the least. I had learned of matters eternal at my mother's pretty knee, and what I believed is what the Good Book says about murderers: that there is no eternal life in them. I think they go straight to hell, where they burn in torment until God finally gives Gabriel the nod to blow the Judgment Trump. When he does, they'll wink out . . . and probably glad to go they will be. But I never gave a hint of such beliefs to Bitterbuck, or to any of them. I think in their hearts they knew it. Where is your brother, his blood crieth to me from the ground, God said to Cain, and I doubt if the words were much of a surprise to that particular problem-child; I bet he heard Abel's blood whining out of the earth at him with each step he took.

  The Chief was smiling when I left, perhaps thinking about his lodge in Montana and his wife lying bare-breasted in the light of the fire. He would be walking in a warmer fire soon, I had no doubt.

  I went back up the corridor, and Dean told me about his set-to with Percy the previous night. I think he'd waited around just so he could, and I listened carefully. I always listened carefully when the subject was Percy, because I agreed with Dean a hundred per cent — I thought Percy was the sort of man who could cause a lot of trouble, as much for the rest of us as for himself.

  As Dean was finishing, old Toot-Toot came by with his red snack-wagon, which was covered with handlettered Bible quotes ("REPENT for the LORD shall judge his people," Deut. 32:36, "And surely your BLOOD of your lives will I require," Gen. 9:5, and similar cheery, uplifting sentiments), and sold us some sandwiches and pops. Dean was hunting for change in his pocket and saying that we wouldn't see Steamboat Willy anymore, that goddam Percy Wetmore had scared him off for good, when old Toot-Toot said, 'What's that'ere, then?'

  We looked, and here came the mouse of the hour his ownself, hopping up the middle of the Green Mile. He'd come a little way; then stop, look around with his bright little oildrop eyes, then come on again.

  'Hey, mouse!' The Chief said, and the mouse stopped and looked at him, whiskers twitching. I tell you, it was exactly as if the damned thing knew it had been called. 'You some kind of spirit guide?' Bitterbuck tossed the mouse a little morsel of cheese from his supper. It landed right in front of the mouse, but Steamboat Willy hardly even glanced at it, just came on his way again, up the Green Mile, looking in empty cells.

  'Boss Edgecombe!' The. President called. 'Do you think that little bastard knows Wetmore isn't here? I do, by God!'

  I felt about the same . . . but I wasn't going to say so out loud.

  Harry came out into the hall, hitching up his pants the way he always did after he'd spent a refreshing few minutes in the can, and stood there with his eyes wide. Toot-Toot was also staring, a sunken grin doing unpleasant things to the soft and toothless lower half of his face.

  The mouse stopped in what was becoming its usual spot, curled its tail around its paws, and looked at us. Again I was reminded of pictures I had seen of judges passing sentence on hapless prisoners . . . yet, had there ever been a prisoner as small and unafraid as this one? Not that it really was a prisoner, of course; it could come and go pretty much as it pleased. Yet the idea would not leave my mind, and it again occurred to me that most of us would feel that small when approaching God's judgment seat after our lives were over, but very few of us would be able to look so unafraid.

  'Well, I swear,' Old Toot-Toot said. 'There he sits, big as Billy-Be-Frigged.'

  'You ain't seen nothing yet, Toot,' Harry said. 'Watch this.' He reached into his breast pocket and came out with a slice of cinnamon apple wrapped in waxed paper. He broke off the end and tossed it on the floor. It was dry and hard and I thought it would bounce right past the mouse, but it reached out one paw, as carelessly as a man swatting at a fly to pass the time, and batted it flat. We all laughed in admiration and surprise, an outburst of sound that should have sent the mouse skittering, but it barely twitched. It picked up the piece of dried apple in its paws, gave it a couple of licks, then dropped it and looked up at us as if to say, Not bad, what else do you have?

  Toot-Toot opened his cart, took out a sandwich, unwrapped it, and tore off a scrap of bologna.

  'Don't bother,' Dean said.

  'What do you mean?' Toot-Toot asked. 'Ain't a mouse alive'd pass up bologna if he could get it. You a crazy guy!'

  But I knew Dean was right, and I could see by Harry's face that he knew it, too. There were floaters and there were regulars. Somehow, that mouse seemed to know the difference. Nuts, but true.

  Old Toot-Toot tossed the scrap of bologna down, and sure enough, the mouse wouldn't have a thing to do with it; sniffed it once and then backed off a pace.

  'I'll be a goddamned son of a bitch,' Old Toot-Toot said, sounding offended.

  I held out my hand. 'Give it to me.'

  'What — same sammitch?'

  'Same one. I'll pay for it.'

  Toot-Toot handed it over. I lifted the top slice of bread, tore off another sliver of meat, and dropped it over the front of the duty desk. The mouse came forward at once. picked it up in its paws, and began to eat. The bologna was gone before you could say Jack Robinson.

  'I'll be goddamned!' Toot-Toot cried. 'Bloody hell! Gimme dat!'

  He snatched back the sandwich, tore off a much larger piece of meat — not a scrap this time but a flap — and dropped it so close to the mouse that Steamboat Willy almost ended up wearing it for a hat. It drew back again, sniffed (surely no mouse ever hit such a jackpot during the Depression — not in our state, at least), and then looked up at us.

  'Go on, eat it!' Toot-Toot said, sounding more offended than ever. 'What's wrong witchoo?'

  Dean took the sandwich and dropped a piece of meat — by then it was like some strange communion service. The mouse picked it up at once and bolted it down. Then it turned and went back down the corridor to the restraint room, pausing along the way to peer into a couple of empty cells and to take a brief investigatory tour of a third. Once again the idea that it was looking for someone occurred to me, and this time I dismissed the thought more slowly.

  'I'm not going to talk about this,' Harry said. He sounded as if he was half-joking, half-not. 'First of all, nobody'd care. Second, they wouldn't believe me if they did.'

  'He only ate from you fellas,' Toot-Toot said. He shook his head in disbelief, then bent laboriously over, picked up what the mouse had disdained, and popped it into his own toothless maw, where he be gan the job of gumming it into submission. 'Now why he do dat?'

  'I've got a better one,' Harry said. 'How'd he know Percy was off?'

  'He didn't,' I said. 'It was just coincidence, that mouse showing up tonight.'

  Except that got harder and harder to believe as the days went by and the mouse showed up only when Percy was off, on another shift, or in another part of the prison. We — Harry, Dean, Brutal, and me — decided that it must know Percy's voice, or his smell. We carefully avoided too much discussion about the mouse itself — himself. That, we seemed to have decided without saying a word, might go a long way toward spoiling something that was special, and beautiful, by virtue of its strangeness and delicacy. Willy had chosen us, after all, in some way I do not understand, even now. Maybe Harry came closest when he said it would do no good to tell other people, not just because they wouldn't believe but because they wouldn't care.

  4

  Then it was time for the execution of Arlen Bitterbuck, in reality no chief but first elder of his tribe on the Washita Reservation, and a me
mber of the Cherokee Council as well. He had killed a man while drunk — while both of them were drunk, in fact. The Chief had crushed the man's head with a cement block. At issue had been a pair of boots. So, on July seventeenth of that rainy summer, my council of elders intended for his life to end.

  Visiting hours for most Cold Mountain prisoners were as rigid as steel beams, but that didn't hold for our boys on E Block. So, on the sixteenth, Bitterbuck was allowed over to the long room adjacent to the cafeteria — the Arcade. It was divided straight down the middle by mesh interwoven with strands of barbed wire. Here The Chief would visit with his second wife and those of his children who would still treat with him. It was time for the good-byes.

  He was taken over there by Bill Dodge and two other floaters. The rest of us had work to do — one hour to cram in at least two rehearsals. Three, if we could manage it.

  Percy didn't make much protest over being put in the switch room with Jack Van Hay for the Bitterbuck electrocution; he was too green to know if he was being given a good spot or a bad one. What he did know was that he had a rectangular mesh window to look through, and although he probably didn't care to be looking at the back of the chair instead of the front, he would still be close enough to see the sparks flying.

  Right outside that window was a black wall telephone with no crank or dial on it. That phone could only ring in, and only from one place: the governor's office. I've seen lots of jailhouse movies over the years where the official phone rings just as they're getting ready to pull the switch on some poor innocent sap, but ours never rang during all my years on E Block, never once. In the movies, salvation is cheap. So is innocence. You pay a quarter, and a quarter's worth is just what you get. Real life costs more, and most of the answers are different.

  We had a tailor's dummy down in the tunnel for the run to the meatwagon, and we had Old Toot-Toot for the rest. Over the years, Toot had somehow become the traditional stand-in for the condemned, as time-honored in his way as the goose you sit down to on Christmas, whether you like goose or not. Most of the other screws liked him, were amused by his funny accent — also French, but Canadian rather than Cajun, and softened into its own thing by his years of incarceration in the South. Even Brutal got a kick out of Old Toot. Not me, though. I thought he was, in his way, an older and dimmer version of Percy Wetmore, a man too squeamish to kill and cook his own meat but who did, all the same, just love the smell of a barbecue.

  We were all there for the rehearsal, just as we would all be there for the main event. Brutus Howell had been "put out," as we said, which meant that he would place the cap, monitor the governor's phoneline, summon the doctor from his place by the wall if he was needed, and give the actual order to roll on two when the time came. If it went well, there would be no credit for anyone. If it didn't go well, Brutal would be blamed by the witnesses and I would be blamed by the warden. Neither of us complained about this; it wouldn't have done any good. The world turns, that's all. You can hold on and turn with it, or stand up to protest and be spun right off.

  Dean, Harry Terwilliger, and I walked down to The Chief's cell for the first rehearsal not three minutes after Bill and his troops had escorted Bitterbuck off the block and over to the Arcade. The cell door was open, and Old Toot-Toot sat on The Chief's bunk, his wispy white hair flying.

  'There come-stains all over dis sheet,' Toot-Toot remarked. 'He mus' be tryin to get rid of it before you fellas boil it off.' And he cackled.

  'Shut up, Toot,' Dean said. 'Let's play this serious.'

  'Okay,' Toot-Toot said, immediately composing his face into an expression of thunderous gravity. But his eyes twinkled. Old Toot never looked so alive as when he was playing dead.

  I stepped forward. 'Arlen Bitterbuck, as an officer of the court and of the state of blah-blah, I have a warrant for blah-blah, such execution to be carried out at twelve-oh-one on blah-blah, will you step forward?'

  Toot got off the bunk. 'I'm steppin forward, I'm steppin forward, I'm steppin forward,' he said.

  'Turn around,' Dean said, and when Toot-Toot turned, Dean examined the dandruffy top of his head. The crown of The Chief's head would be shaved tomorrow night, and Dean's check then would be to make sure he didn't need a touch-up. Stubble could impede conduction, make things harder. Everything we were doing today was about making things easier.

  'All right, Arlen, let's go,' I said to Toot-Toot, and away we went.

  'I'm walkin down the corridor, I'm walkin down the corridor, I'm walkin down the corridor,' Toot said. I flanked him on the left, Dean on the right. Harry was directly behind him. At the head of the corridor we turned right, away from life as it was lived in the exercise yard and toward death as it was died in the storage room. We went into my office, and Toot dropped to his knees without having to be asked. He knew the script, all right, probably better than any of us. God knew he'd been there longer than any of us.

  'I'm prayin, I'm prayin, I'm prayin,' Toot-Toot said, holding his gnarled hands up. They looked like that famous engraving, you probably know the one I mean. 'The Lord is my shepherd, so on 'n so forth.'

  'Who's Bitterbuck got?' Harry asked. 'We're not going to have some Cherokee medicine man in here shaking his dick, are we?'

  'Actually — '

  'Still prayin, still prayin, still gettin right with Jesus,' Toot overrode me.

  'Shut up, you old gink,' Dean said.

  'I'm prayin!'

  'Then pray to yourself.'

  'What's keepin you guys?' Brutal hollered in from the storage room. That had also been emptied for our use. We were in the killing zone again, all right; it was a thing you could almost smell.

  'Hold your friggin water!' Harry yelled back. 'Don't be so goddam impatient!'

  'Prayin,' Toot said, grinning his unpleasant sunken grin. 'Prayin for patience, just a little goddam patience.'

  'Actually, Bitterbuck's a Christian — he says,' I told them, 'and he's perfectly happy with the Baptist guy who came for Tillman Clark. Schuster, his name is. I like him, too. He's fast, and he doesn't get them all worked up. On your feet, Toot. You prayed enough for one day.'

  'Walkin,' Toot said. 'Walkin again, walkin again, yes sir, walkin on the Green Mile.'

  Short as he was, he still had to duck a little to get through the door on the far side of the office. The rest of us had to duck even more. This was a vulnerable time with a real prisoner, and when I looked across to the platform where Old Sparky stood and saw Brutal with his gun drawn, I nodded with satisfaction. Just right.

  Toot-Toot went down the steps and stopped. The folding wooden chairs, about forty of them, were already in place. Bitterbuck would cross to the platform on an angle that would keep him safely away from the seated spectators, and half a dozen guards would be added for insurance. Bill Dodge would be in charge of those. We had never had a witness menaced by a condemned prisoner in spite of what was, admittedly, a raw set-up, and that was how I meant to keep it.

  'Ready, boys?' Toot asked when we were back in our original formation at the foot of the stairs leading down from my office. I nodded, and we walked to the platform. What we looked like more than anything, I often thought, was a color-guard that had forgotten its flag.

  'What am I supposed to do?' Percy called from behind the wire mesh between the storage room and the switch room.

  'Watch and learn,' I called back.

  'And keep yer hands off yer wiener,' Harry muttered. Toot-Toot heard him, though, and cackled.

  We escorted him up onto the platform and Toot turned around on his own — the old vet in action. 'Sittin down,' he said, 'sittin down. sittin down, takin a seat in Old Sparky's lap.'

  I dropped to my right knee before his right leg. Dean dropped to his left knee before his left leg. It was at this point we ourselves would be most vulnerable to physical attack, should the condemned man go berserk . . . which, every now and then, they did. We both turned the cocked knee slightly inward, to protect the crotch area. We dropped our chins to protect our thr
oats. And, of course, we moved to secure the ankles and neutralize the danger as fast as we could. The Chief would be wearing slippers when he took his final promenade, but 'it could have been worse' isn't much comfort to a man with a ruptured larynx. Or writhing on the floor with his balls swelling up to the size of Mason jars, for that matter, while forty or so spectators — many of them gentlemen of the press — sit in those Grange-hall chairs, watching the whole thing.

  We clamped Toot-Toot's ankles. The clamp on Dean's side was slightly bigger, because it carried the juice. When Bitterbuck sat down tomorrow night, he would do so with a shaved left calf. Indians have very little body-hair as a rule, but we would take no chances.

  While we were clamping Toot-Toots ankles, Brutal secured his right wrist. Harry stepped smoothly forward and clamped the left. When they were done, Harry nodded to Brutal, and Brutal called back to Van Hay: 'Roll on one!'

  I heard Percy asking Jack Van Hay what that meant (it was hard to believe how little he knew, how little he'd picked up during his time on E Block) and Van Hay's murmur of explanation. Today Roll on one meant nothing, but when he heard Brutal say it tomorrow night, Van Hay would turn the knob that goosed the prison generator behind B Block. The witnesses would hear the genny as a steady low humming, and the lights all over the prison would brighten. In the other cellblocks, prisoners would observe those overbright lights and think it had happened, the execution was over, when in fact it was just beginning.