The Green Mile Read online

  Brutal reached into the desk drawer above the kneehole and brought out the big leather-bound book with the word VISITORS stamped on the front in gold leaf. Ordinarily, that book stayed in the drawer from one month to the next. When a prisoner had visitors--unless it was a lawyer or a minister--he went over to the room off the messhall that was kept special for that purpose. The Arcade, we called it. I don't know why.

  "Just what in the Gorry do you think you're doing?" Dean Stanton asked, peering over the tops of his spectacles as Brutal opened the book and paged grandly past years of visitors to men now dead.

  "Obeyin Regulation 19," Brutal said, finding the current page. He took the pencil and licked the tip--a disagreeable habit of which he could not be broken--and prepared to write. Regulation 19 stated simply: "Each visitor to E Block shall show a yellow Administration pass and shall be recorded without fail."

  "He's gone nuts," Dean said to me.

  "He didn't show us his pass, but I'm gonna let it go this time," Brutal said. He gave the tip of his pencil an extra lick for good luck, then filled in 9:49 p.m. under the column headed TIME ON BLOCK.

  "Sure, why not, the big bosses probably make exceptions for mice," I said.

  "Course they do," Brutal agreed. "Lack of pockets." He turned to look at the wall-clock behind the desk, then printed 10:01 in the column headed TIME OFF BLOCK. The longer space between these two numbers was headed NAME OF VISITOR. After a moment's hard thought--probably to muster his limited spelling skills, as I'm sure the idea was in his head already--Brutus Howell carefully wrote STEAMBOAT WILLY, which was what most people called Mickey Mouse back in those days. It was because of that first talkie cartoon, where he rolled his eyes and bumped his hips around and pulled the whistle cord in the pilothouse of the steamboat.

  "There," Brutal said, slamming the book closed and returning it to its drawer, "all done and buttoned up."

  I laughed, but Dean, who couldn't help being serious about things even when he saw the joke, was frowning and polishing his glasses furiously. "You'll be in trouble if someone sees that." He hesitated and added, "The wrong someone." He hesitated again, looking nearsightedly around almost as if he expected to see that the walls had grown ears, before finishing: "Someone like Percy Kiss-My-Ass-and-Go-to-Heaven Wetmore."

  "Huh," Brutal said. "The day Percy Wetmore sits his narrow shanks down here at this desk will be the day I resign."

  "You won't have to," Dean said. "They'll fire you for making jokes in the visitors' book if Percy puts the right word in the right ear. And he can. You know he can."

  Brutal glowered but said nothing. I reckoned that later on that night he would erase what he had written. And if he didn't, I would.

  The next night, after getting first Bitterbuck and then The President over to D Block, where we showered our group after the regular cons were locked down, Brutal asked me if we shouldn't have a look for Steamboat Willy down there in the restraint room.

  "I guess we ought to," I said. We'd had a good laugh over that mouse the night before, but I knew that if Brutal and I found it down there in the restraint room--particularly if we found it had gnawed itself the beginnings of a nest in one of the padded walls--we would kill it. Better to kill the scout, no matter how amusing it might be, than have to live with the pilgrims. And, I shouldn't have to tell you, neither of us was very squeamish about a little mouse-murder. Killing rats was what the state paid us for, after all.

  But we didn't find Steamboat Willy--later to be known as Mr. Jingles--that night, not nested in the soft walls, or behind any of the collected junk we hauled out into the corridor. There was a great deal of junk, too, more than I would have expected, because we hadn't had to use the restraint room in a long time. That would change with the advent of William Wharton, but of course we didn't know that at the time. Lucky us.

  "Where'd it go?" Brutal asked at last, wiping sweat off the back of his neck with a big blue bandanna. "No hole, no crack . . . there's that, but--" He pointed to the drain in the floor. Below the grate, which the mouse could have gotten through, was a fine steel mesh that not even a fly would have passed. "How'd it get in? How'd it get out?"

  "I don't know," I said.

  "He did come in here, didn't he? I mean, the three of us saw him."

  "Yep, right under the door. He had to squeeze a little, but he made it."

  "Gosh," Brutal said--a word that sounded strange, coming from a man that big. "It's a good thing the cons can't make themselves small like that, isn't it?"

  "You bet," I said, running my eye over the canvas walls one last time, looking for a hole, a crack, anything. There was nothing. "Come on. Let's go."

  Steamboat Willy showed up again three nights later, when Harry Terwilliger was on the duty desk. Percy was also on, and chased the mouse back down the Green Mile with the same mop Dean had been thinking of using. The rodent avoided Percy easily, slipping through the crack beneath the restraint-room door a hands-down winner. Cursing at the top of his voice, Percy unlocked the door and hauled all that shit out again. It was funny and scary at the same time, Harry said. Percy was vowing he'd catch the goddam mouse and tear its diseased little head right off, but he didn't, of course. Sweaty and disheveled, the shirttail of his uniform hanging out in the back, he returned to the duty desk half an hour later, brushing his hair out of his eyes and telling Harry (who had sat serenely reading through most of the ruckus) that he was going to put a strip of insulation on the bottom of the door down there; that would solve the vermin problem, he declared.

  "Whatever you think is best, Percy," Harry said, turning a page of the oat opera he was reading. He thought Percy would forget about blocking the crack at the bottom of that door, and he was right.

  8

  LATE THAT WINTER, long after these events were over, Brutal came to me one night when it was just the two of us, E Block temporarily empty and all the other guards temporarily reassigned. Percy had gone on to Briar Ridge.

  "Come here," Brutal said in a funny, squeezed voice that made me look around at him sharply. I had just come in out of a cold and sleety night, and had been brushing off the shoulders of my coat prior to hanging it up.

  "Is something wrong?" I asked.

  "No," he said, "but I found out where Mr. Jingles was staying. When he first came, I mean, before Delacroix took him over. Do you want to see?"

  Of course I did. I followed him down the Green Mile to the restraint room. All the stuff we kept stored there was out in the hall; Brutal had apparently taken advantage of the lull in customer traffic to do some cleaning up. The door was open, and I saw our mop-bucket inside. The floor, that same sick lime shade as the Green Mile itself, was drying in streaks. Standing in the middle of the floor was a stepladder, the one that was usually kept in the storage room, which also happened to serve as the final stop for the state's condemned. There was a shelf jutting out from the back of the ladder near the top, the sort of thing a workman would use to hold his toolkit or a painter the bucket he was working out of. There was a flashlight on it. Brutal handed it to me.

  "Get on up there. You're shorter than me, so you'll have to go pretty near all the way, but I'll hold your legs."

  "I'm ticklish down there," I said, starting up. "Especially my knees."

  "I'll mind that."

  "Good," I said, "because a broken hip's too high a price to pay in order to discover the origins of a single mouse."

  "Huh?"

  "Never mind." My head was up by the caged light in the center of the ceiling by then, and I could feel the ladder wiggling a little under my weight. Outside, I could hear the winter wind moaning. "Just hold on to me."

  "I got you, don't worry." He gripped my calves firmly, and I went up one more step. Now the top of my head was less than a foot from the ceiling, and I could see the cobwebs a few enterprising spiders had spun in the crotches where the roof beams came together. I shone the light around but didn't see anything worth the risk of being up here.

  "No," Brutal said. "
You're looking too far away, Paul. Look to your left, where those two beams come together. You see them? One's a little discolored."

  "I see."

  "Shine the light on the join."

  I did, and saw what he wanted me to see almost right away. The beams had been pegged together with dowels, half a dozen of them, and one was gone, leaving a black, circular hole the size of a quarter. I looked at it, then looked doubtfully back over my shoulder at Brutal. "It was a small mouse," I said, "but that small? Man, I don't think so."

  "But that's where he went," Brutal said. "I'm just as sure as houses."

  "I don't see how you can be."

  "Lean closer--don't worry, I got you--and take a whiff."

  I did as he asked, groping with my left hand for one of the other beams, and feeling a little better when I had hold of it. The wind outside gusted again; air puffed out of that hole and into my face. I could smell the keen breath of a winter night in the border South . . . and something else, as well.

  The smell of peppermint.

  Don't let nothing happen to Mr. Jingles, I could hear Delacroix saying in a voice that wouldn't stay steady. I could hear that, and I could feel the warmth of Mr. Jingles as the Frenchman handed it to me, just a mouse, smarter than most of the species, no doubt, but still just a mouse for a' that and a' that. Don't let that bad 'un hurt my mouse, he'd said, and I had promised, as I always promised them at the end, when walking the Green Mile was no longer a myth or a hypothesis but something they really had to do. Mail this letter to my brother, who I haven't seen for twenty years? I promise. Say fifteen Hail Marys for my soul? I promise. Let me die under my spirit-name and see that it goes on my tombstone? I promise. It was the way you got them to go and be good about it, the way you saw them into the chair sitting at the end of the Green Mile with their sanity intact. I couldn't keep all of those promises, of course, but I kept the one I made to Delacroix. As for the Frenchman himself, there had been hell to pay. The bad 'un had hurt Delacroix, hurt him plenty. Oh, I know what he did, all right, but no one deserved what happened to Eduard Delacroix when he fell into Old Sparky's savage embrace.

  A smell of peppermint.

  And something else. Something back inside that hole.

  I took a pen out of my breast pocket with my right hand, still holding onto the beam with my left, not worried anymore about Brutal inadvertently tickling my sensitive knees. I unscrewed the pen's cap one-handed, then poked the nib in and teased something out. It was a tiny splinter of wood which had been tinted a bright yellow, and I heard Delacroix's voice again, so clearly this time that his ghost might have been lurking in that room with us--the one where William Wharton spent so much of his time.

  Hey, you guys! the voice said this time--the laughing, amazed voice of a man who has forgotten, at least for a little while, where he is and what awaits him. Come and see what Mr. Jingles can do!

  "Christ," I whispered. I felt as if the wind had been knocked out of me.

  "You found another one, didn't you?" Brutal asked. "I found three or four."

  I came down and shone the light on his big, outstretched palm. Several splinters of wood were scattered there, like jackstraws for elves. Two were yellow, like the one I had found. One was green and one was red. They hadn't been painted but colored, with wax Crayola crayons.

  "Oh, boy," I said in a low, shaky voice. "Oh, hey. It's pieces of that spool, isn't it? But why? Why up there?"

  "When I was a kid I wasn't big like I am now," Brutal said. "I got most of my growth between fifteen and seventeen. Until then I was a shrimp. And when I went off to school the first time, I felt as small as . . . why, as small as a mouse, I guess you'd say. I was scared to death. So you know what I did?"

  I shook my head. Outside, the wind gusted again. In the angles formed by the beams, cobwebs shook in feathery drafts, like rotted lace. Never had I been in a place that felt so nakedly haunted, and it was right then, as we stood there looking down at the splintered remains of the spool which had caused so much trouble, that my head began to know what my heart had understood ever since John Coffey had walked the Green Mile: I couldn't do this job much longer. Depression or no Depression, I couldn't watch many more men walk through my office to their deaths. Even one more might be too many.

  "I asked my mother for one of her hankies," Brutal said. "So when I felt weepy and small, I could sneak it out and smell her perfume and not feel so bad."

  "You think--what?--that mouse chewed off some of that colored spool to remember Delacroix by? That a mouse--"

  He looked up. I thought for a moment I saw tears in his eyes, but I guess I was probably wrong about that. "I ain't saying nothing, Paul. But I found them up there, and I smelled peppermint, same as you--you know you did. And I can't do this no more. I won't do this no more. Seeing one more man in that chair'd just about kill me. I'm going to put in for a transfer to Boys' Correctional on Monday. If I get it before the next one, that's fine. If I don't, I'll resign and go back to farming."

  "What did you ever farm, besides rocks?"

  "It don't matter."

  "I know it doesn't," I said. "I think I'll put in with you."

  He looked at me close, making sure I wasn't just having some sport with him, then nodded as if it was a settled thing. The wind gusted again, strong enough this time to make the beams creak and settle, and we both looked around uneasily at the padded walls. I think for a moment we could hear William Wharton--not Billy the Kid, not him, he had been "Wild Bill" to us from his first day on the block--screaming and laughing, telling us we were going to be damned glad to be rid of him, telling us we would never forget him. About those things he was right.

  As for what Brutal and I agreed on that night in the restraint room, it turned out just that way. It was almost as if we had taken a solemn oath on those tiny bits of colored wood. Neither of us ever took part in another execution. John Coffey was the last.

  PART TWO

  THE MOUSE

  ON THE MILE

  1

  THE NURSING HOME where I am crossing my last bunch of t's and dotting my last mess of i's is called Georgia Pines. It's about sixty miles from Atlanta and about two hundred light-years from life as most people--people under the age of eighty, let's say--live it. You who are reading this want to be careful that there isn't a place like it waiting in your future. It's not a cruel place, not for the most part; there's cable TV, the food's good (although there's damned little a man can chew), but in its way, it's as much of a killing bottle as E Block at Cold Mountain ever was.

  There's even a fellow here who reminds me a little of Percy Wetmore, who got his job on the Green Mile because he was related to the governor of the state. I doubt if this fellow is related to anyone important, even though he acts that way. Brad Dolan, his name is. He's always combing his hair, like Percy was, and he's always got something to read stuffed into his back pocket. With Percy it was magazines like Argosy and Men's Adventure; with Brad it's these little paperbacks called Gross Jokes and Sick Jokes. He's always asking people why the Frenchman crossed the road or how many Polacks it takes to screw in a lightbulb or how many pallbearers there are at a Harlem funeral. Like Percy, Brad is a dimwit who thinks nothing is funny unless it's mean.

  Something Brad said the other day struck me as actually smart, but I don't give him a lot of credit for it; even a stopped clock is right twice a day, the proverb has it. "You're just lucky you don't have that Alzheimer's disease, Paulie," was what he said. I hate him calling me that, Paulie, but he goes on doing it, anyway; I've given up asking him to quit. There are other sayings--not quite proverbs--that apply to Brad Dolan: "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink" is one; "You can dress him up but you can't take him out" is another. In his thickheadedness he is also like Percy.

  When he made his comment about Alzheimer's, he was mopping the floor of the solarium, where I had been going over the pages I have already written. There's a great lot of them, and I think there's apt to be a great l
ot more before I am through. "That Alzheimer's, do you know what it really is?"

  "No," I said, "but I'm sure you'll tell me, Brad."

  "It's AIDS for old people," he said, and then burst out laughing, hucka-hucka-hucka-huck!, just like he does over those idiotic jokes of his.

  I didn't laugh, though, because what he said struck a nerve somewhere. Not that I have Alzheimer's; although there's plenty of it on view here at beautiful Georgia Pines, I myself just suffer the standard old-guy memory problems. Those problems seem to have more to do with when than what. Looking over what I have written so far, it occurs to me that I remember everything that happened back in '32; it's the order of events that sometimes gets confused in my head. Yet, if I'm careful, I think I can keep even that sorted out. More or less.

  John Coffey came to E Block and the Green Mile in October of that year, condemned for the murder of the nine-year-old Detterick twins. That's my major landmark, and if I keep it in view, I should do just fine. William "Wild Bill" Wharton came after Coffey; Delacroix came before. So did the mouse, the one Brutus Howell--Brutal, to his friends--called Steamboat Willy and Delacroix ended up calling Mr. Jingles.