The Green Mile Read online

  "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.

  "And what about us?" Brutal asked.

  "Paul's over in Admin, pulling Del's file and going over the witnesses," Dean said. "It's especially important this time, because the execution was such a balls-up. He said he'd probably be there the res
t of the shift. You and Harry and Percy are over in the laundry, washing your clothes."

  Well, that was what folks said, anyway. There was a crap-game in the laundry supply room some nights; on others it was blackjack or poker or acey-deucey. Whatever it was, the guards who participated were said to be washing their clothes. There was usually moonshine at these gettogethers, and on occasion a joystick would go around the circle. It's been the same in prisons since prisons were invented, I suppose. When you spend your life taking care of mud-men, you can't help getting a little dirty yourself. In any case, we weren't likely to be checked up on. "Clothes washing" was treated with great discretion at Cold Mountain.

  "Right with Eversharp," I said, turning Coffey around and putting him in motion. "And if it all falls down, Dean, you don't know nothing about nothing."

  "That's easy to say, but--"

  At that moment, a skinny arm shot out from between the bars of Wharton's cell and grabbed Coffey's slab of a bicep. We all gasped. Wharton should have been dead to the world, all but comatose, yet here he stood, swaying back and forth on his feet like a hard-tagged fighter, grinning blearily.

  Coffey's reaction was remarkable. He didn't pull away, but he also gasped, pulling air in over his teeth like someone who has touched something cold and unpleasant. His eyes widened, and for a moment he looked as if he and dumb had never even met, let alone got up together every morning and lain down together every night. He had looked alive--there--when he had wanted me to come into his cell so he could touch me. Help me, in Coffeyspeak. He had looked that way again when he'd been holding his hands out for the mouse. Now, for the third time, his face had lit up, as if a spotlight had suddenly been turned on inside his brain. Except it was different this time. It was colder this time, and for the first time I wondered what might happen if John Coffey were suddenly to run amok. We had our guns, we could shoot him, but actually taking him down might not be easy to do.

  I saw similar thoughts on Brutal's face, but Wharton just went on grinning his stoned, loose-lipped grin. "Where do you think you're going?" he asked. It came out something like Wherra fink yerr gone?

  Coffey stood still, looking first at Wharton, then at Wharton's hand, then back into Wharton's face. I could not read that expression. I mean I could see the intelligence in it, but I couldn't read it. As for Wharton, I wasn't worried about him at all. He wouldn't remember any of this later; he was like a drunk walking in a blackout.

  "You're a bad man," Coffey whispered, and I couldn't tell what I heard in his voice--pain or anger or fear. Maybe all three. Coffey looked down at the hand on his arm again, the way you might look at a bug which could give you a really nasty bite, had it a mind.

  "That's right, nigger," Wharton said with a bleary, cocky smile. "Bad as you'd want."

  I was suddenly positive that something awful was going to happen, something that would change the planned course of this early morning as completely as a cataclysmic earthquake can change the course of a river. It was going to happen, and nothing I or any of us did would stop it.

  Then Brutal reached down, plucked Wharton's hand off John Coffey's arm, and that feeling stopped. It was as if some potentially dangerous circuit had been broken. I told you that in my time in E Block, the governor's line never rang. That was true, but I imagine that if it ever had, I would have felt the same relief that washed over me when Brutal removed Wharton's hand from the big man towering beside me. Coffey's eyes dulled over at once; it was as if the searchlight inside his head had been turned off.

  "Lie down, Billy," Brutal said. "Take you some rest." That was my usual line of patter, but under the circumstances, I didn't mind Brutal using it.

  "Maybe I will," Wharton agreed. He stepped back, swayed, almost went over, and caught his balance at the last second. "Whoo, daddy. Whole room's spinnin around. Like bein drunk."

  He backed toward his bunk, keeping his bleary regard on Coffey as he went. "Niggers ought to have they own 'lectric chair," he opined. Then the backs of his knees struck his bunk and he swooped down onto it. He was snoring before his head touched his thin prison pillow, deep blue shadows brushed under the hollows of his eyes and the tip of his tongue lolling out.

  "Christ, how'd he get up with so much dope in him?" Dean whispered.

  "It doesn't matter, he's out now," I said. "If he starts to come around, give him another pill dissolved in a glass of water. No more than one, though. We don't want to kill him."

  "Speak for yourself," Brutal rumbled, and gave Wharton a contemptuous look. "You can't kill a monkey like him with dope, anyway. They thrive on it."

  "He's a bad man," Coffey said, but in a lower voice this time, as if he was not quite sure of what he was saying, or what it meant.

  "That's right," Brutal said. "Most wicked. But that's not a problem now, because we ain't going to tango with him anymore." We started walking again, the four of us surrounding Coffey like worshippers circling an idol that's come to some stumbling kind of half life. "Tell me something, John--do you know where we're taking you?"

  "To help," he said. "I think . . . to help . . . a lady?" He looked at Brutal with hopeful anxiety.

  Brutal nodded. "That's right. But how do you know that? How do you know?"

  John Coffey considered the question carefully, then shook his head. "I don't know," he told Brutal. "To tell you the truth, boss, I don't know much of anything. Never have."

  And with that we had to be content.

  6

  I HAD KNOWN the little door between the office and the steps down to the storage room hadn't been built with the likes of Coffey in mind, but I hadn't realized how great the disparity was until he stood before it, looking at it thoughtfully.

  Harry laughed, but John himself seemed to see no humor in the big man standing in front of the little door. He wouldn't have, of course; even if he'd been quite a few degrees brighter than he was, he wouldn't have. He'd been that big man for most of his life, and this door was just a scrap littler than most.

  He sat down, scooted through it that way, stood up again, and went down the stairs to where Brutal was waiting for him. There he stopped, looking across the empty room at the platform where Old Sparky waited, as silent--and as eerie--as the throne in the castle of a dead king. The cap hung with hollow jauntiness from one of the back-posts, looking less like a king's crown than a jester's cap, however, something a fool would wear, or shake to make his high-born audience laugh harder at his jokes. The chair's shadow, elongated and spidery, climbed one wall like a threat. And yes, I thought I could still smell burned flesh in the air. It was faint, but I thought it was more than just my imagination.

  Harry ducked through the door, then me. I didn't like the frozen, wide-eyed way John was looking at Old Sparky. Even less did I like what I saw on his arms when I got close to him: goosebumps.

  "Come on, big boy," I said. I took his wrist and attempted to pull him in the direction of the door leading down to the tunnel. At first he wouldn't go, and I might as well have been trying to pull a boulder out of the ground with my bare hands.

  "Come on, John, we gotta go, 'less you want the coach-and-four to turn back into a pumpkin," Harry said, giving his nervous laugh again. He took John's other arm and tugged, but John still wouldn't come. And then he said something in a low and dreaming voice. It wasn't me he was speaking to, it wasn't any of us, but I have still never forgotten it.

  "They're still in there. Pieces of them, still in there. I hear them screaming."

  Harry's nervous chuckles ceased, leaving him with a smile that hung on his mouth like a crooked shutter hangs on an empty house. Brutal gave me a look that was almost terrified, and stepped away from John Coffey. For the second time in less than five minutes, I sensed the whole enterprise on the verge of collapse. This time I was the one who stepped in; when disaster threatened a third time, a little later on, it would be Harry. We all got our chance that night, believe me.

  I slid in between John and his view of the chair, standing on my tiptoes t
o make sure I was completely blocking his sight-line. Then I snapped my fingers in front of his eyes, twice, sharply.

  "Come on!" I said. "Walk! You said you didn't need to be chained, now prove it! Walk, big boy! Walk, John Coffey! Over there! That door!"

  His eyes cleared. "Yes, boss." And praise God, he began to walk.

  "Look at the door, John Coffey, just at the door and nowhere else."

  "Yes, boss." John fixed his eyes obediently on the door.

  "Brutal," I said, and pointed.

  He hurried in advance, shaking out his keyring, finding the right one. John kept his gaze fixed on the door to the tunnel and I kept my gaze fixed on John, but from the corner of one eye I could see Harry throwing nervous glances at the chair, as if he had never seen it before in his life.

  There are pieces of them still in there . . . I hear them screaming.

  If that was true, then Eduard Delacroix had to be screaming longest and loudest of all, and I was glad I couldn't hear what John Coffey did.

  Brutal opened the door. We went down the stairs with Coffey in the lead. At the bottom, he looked glumly down the tunnel, with its low brick ceiling. He was going to have a crick in his back by the time we got to the other end, unless--

  I pulled the gurney over. The sheet upon which we'd laid Del had been stripped (and probably incinerated), so the gurney's black leather pads were visible. "Get on," I told John. He looked at me doubtfully, and I nodded encouragement. "It'll be easier for you and no harder for us."

  "Okay, Boss Edgecombe." He sat down, then lay back, looking up at us with worried brown eyes. His feet, clad in cheap prison slippers, dangled almost all the way to the floor. Brutal got in between them and pushed John Coffey along the dank corridor as he had pushed so many others. The only difference was that the current rider was still breathing. About halfway along--under the highway, we would have been, and able to hear the muffled drone of passing cars, had there been any at that hour--John began to smile. "Say," he said, "this is fun." He wouldn't think so the next time he rode the gurney; that was the thought which crossed my mind. In fact, the next time he rode the gurney, he wouldn't think or feel anything. Or would he? There are pieces of them still in there, he had said; he could hear them screaming.