The Green Mile (24 page)

“You
are
ka-ka,” Brutal growled, “and I hope you got your bags packed, because you're going back down to your favorite toilet.”

Once again Wharton was bundled into the straitjacket, and once again we stowed him in the room with the soft walls. Two days, this time. Sometimes we could hear him raving in there, sometimes we could hear him promising that he'd be good, that he'd come to his senses and be good, and sometimes we could hear him screaming that he needed a doctor, that he was dying. Mostly, though, he was silent. And he was silent when we took him out again, too, walking back to his cell with his head down and his eyes dull, not responding when Harry said, “Remember, it's up to you.” He would be all right for a while, and
then he'd try something else. There was nothing he did that hadn't been tried before (well, except for the thing with the Moon Pie, maybe; even Brutal admitted that was pretty original), but his sheer persistence was scary. I was afraid that sooner or later someone's attention might lapse and there would be hell to pay. And the situation might continue for quite awhile, because somewhere he had a lawyer who was beating the bushes, telling folks how wrong it would be to kill this fellow upon whose brow the dew of youth had not yet dried . . . and who was, incidentally, as white as old Jeff Davis. There was no sense complaining about it, because keeping Wharton out of the chair was his lawyer's job. Keeping him safely jugged was ours. And in the end, Old Sparky would almost certainly have him, lawyer or no lawyer.

T
HAT WAS THE WEEK
Melinda Moores, the warden's wife, came home from Indianola. The doctors were done with her; they had their interesting, newfangled X-ray photographs of the tumor in her head; they had documented the weakness in her hand and the paralyzing pains that racked her almost constantly by then, and were done with her. They gave her husband a bunch of pills with morphine in them and sent Melinda home to die. Hal Moores had some sick-leave piled up—not a lot, they didn't give you a lot in those days, but he took what he had so he could help her do what she had to do.

My wife and I went to see her three days or so after she came home. I called ahead and Hal said yes, that would be fine, Melinda was having a pretty good day and would enjoy seeing us.

“I hate calls like this,” I said to Janice as we drove to the little house where the Mooreses had spent most of their marriage.

“So does everyone, honey,” she said, and patted my hand. “We'll bear up under it, and so will she.”

“I hope so.”

We found Melinda in the sitting room, planted in a bright slant of unseasonably warm October sun, and my first shocked thought was that she had lost ninety pounds. She hadn't, of course—if she'd lost that much weight, she hardly would have been there at all—but that was my brain's initial reaction to what my eyes were reporting. Her face had fallen away to show the shape of the underlying skull, and her skin was as white as parchment. There were dark circles under her eyes.
And it was the first time I ever saw her in her rocker when she didn't have a lapful of sewing or afghan squares or rags for braiding into a rug. She was just sitting there. Like a person in a train-station.

“Melinda,” my wife said warmly. I think she was as shocked as I was—more, perhaps—but she hid it splendidly, as some women seem able to do. She went to Melinda, dropped on one knee beside the rocking chair in which the warden's wife sat, and took one of her hands. As she did, my eye happened on the blue hearthrug by the fireplace. It occurred to me that it should have been the shade of tired old limes, because now this room was just another version of the Green Mile.

“I brought you some tea,” Jan said, “the kind I put up myself. It's a nice sleepy tea. I've left it in the kitchen.”

“Thank you so much, darlin,” Melinda said. Her voice sounded old and rusty.

“How you feeling, dear?” my wife asked.

“Better,” Melinda said in her rusty, grating voice. “Not so's I want to go out to a barn dance, but at least there's no pain today. They give me some pills for the headaches. Sometimes they even work.”

“That's good, isn't it?”

“But I can't grip so well. Something's happened . . . to my hand.” She raised it, looked at it as if she had never seen it before, then lowered it back into her lap. “Something's happened . . . all over me.” She began to cry in a soundless way that made me think of John Coffey. It started to chime in my head again, that thing he'd said:
I helped it, didn't I? I helped it, didn't I?
Like a rhyme you can't get rid of.

Hal came in then. He collared me, and you can believe me when I say I was glad to be collared. We went into the kitchen, and he poured me half a shot of white whiskey, hot stuff fresh out of some countryman's still. We clinked our glasses together and drank. The shine went down like coal-oil, but the bloom in the belly was heaven. Still, when Moores tipped the mason jar at me, wordlessly asking if I wanted the other half, I shook my head and waved it off. Wild Bill Wharton was out of restraints—for the time being, anyway—and it wouldn't be safe to go near where he was with a booze-clouded head. Not even with bars between us.

“I don't know how long I can take this, Paul,” he said in a low voice. “There's a girl who comes in mornings to help me with her, but the doctors say she may lose control of her bowels, and . . . and . . .” He stopped, his throat working, trying hard not to cry in front of me again.

“Go with it as best you can,” I said. I reached out across the table and briefly squeezed his palsied, liverspotted hand. “Do that day by day and give the rest over to God. There's nothing else you can do, is there?”

“I guess not. But it's hard, Paul. I pray you never have to find out how hard.”

He made an effort to collect himself.

“Now tell me the news. How are you doing with William Wharton? And how are you making out with Percy Wetmore?”

We talked shop for a while, and got through the visit. After, all the way home, with my wife sitting silent, for the most part—wet-eyed and thoughtful—in the passenger seat beside me, Coffey's words ran around in my head like Mr. Jingles running around in Delacroix's cell:
I helped it, didn't I?

“It's terrible,” my wife said dully at one point. “And there's nothing anyone can do to help her.”

I nodded agreement and thought,
I helped it, didn't I?
But that was crazy, and I tried as best I could to put it out of my mind.

As we turned into our dooryard, she finally spoke a second time—not about her old friend Melinda, but about my urinary infection. She wanted to know if it was really gone. Really gone, I told her.

“That's fine, then,” she said, and kissed me over the eyebrow, in that shivery place of mine. “Maybe we ought to, you know, get up to a little something. If you have the time and the inclination, that is.”

Having plenty of the latter and just enough of the former, I took her by the hand and led her into the back bedroom and took her clothes off as she stroked the part of me that swelled and throbbed but didn't hurt anymore. And as I moved in her sweetness, slipping through it in that slow way she liked—that we both liked—I thought of John Coffey, saying he'd helped it, he'd helped it, hadn't he? Like a snatch of song that won't leave your mind until it's damned good and ready.

Later, as I drove to the prison, I got to thinking that very soon we
would have to start rehearsing for Delacroix's execution. That thought led to how Percy was going to be out front this time, and I felt a shiver of dread. I told myself to just go with it, one execution and we'd very likely be shut of Percy Wetmore for good . . . but still I felt that shiver, as if the infection I'd been suffering with wasn't gone at all, but had only switched locations, from boiling my groin to freezing my backbone.

“C
OME ON,
” Brutal told Delacroix the following evening. “We're going for a little walk. You and me and Mr. Jingles.”

Delacroix looked at him distrustfully, then reached down into the cigar box for the mouse. He cupped it in the palm of one hand and looked at Brutal with narrowed eyes.

“Whatchoo talking about?” he asked.

“It's a big night for you and Mr. Jingles,” Dean said, as he and Harry joined Brutal. The chain of bruises around Dean's neck had gone an unpleasant yellow color, but at least he could talk again without sounding like a dog barking at a cat. He looked at Brutal. “Think we ought to put the shackles on him, Brute?”

Brutal appeared to consider. “Naw,” he said at last. “He's gonna be good, ain't you, Del? You and the mouse, both. After all, you're gonna be showin off for some high muck-a-mucks tonight.”

Percy and I were standing up by the duty desk, watching this, Percy with his arms folded and a small, contemptuous smile on his lips. After a bit, he took out his horn comb and went to work on his hair with it. John Coffey was watching, too, standing silently at the bars of his cell. Wharton was lying on his bunk, staring up at the ceiling and ignoring the whole show. He was still “being good,” although what he called
good
was what the docs at Briar Ridge called
catatonic.
And there was one other person there, as well. He was tucked out of sight in my office, but his skinny shadow fell out the door and onto the Green Mile.

“What dis about, you
gran' fou
?” Del asked querulously, drawing his
feet up on the bunk as Brutal undid the double locks on his cell door and ran it open. His eyes flicked back and forth among the three of them.

“Well, I tell you,” Brutal said. “Mr. Moores is gone for awhile—his wife is under the weather, as you may have heard. So Mr. Anderson is in charge, Mr. Curtis Anderson.”

“Yeah? What that got to do with me?”

“Well,” Harry said, “Boss Anderson's heard about your mouse, Del, and wants to see him perform. He and about six other fellows are over in Admin, just waiting for you to show up. Not just plain old bluesuit guards, either. These are pretty big bugs, just like Brute said. One of them, I believe, is a politician all the way from the state capital.”

Delacroix swelled visibly at this, and I saw not so much as a single shred of doubt on his face. Of
course
they wanted to see Mr. Jingles; who would not?

He scrummed around, first under his bunk and then under his pillow. He eventually found one of those big pink peppermints and the wildly colored spool. He looked at Brutal questioningly, and Brutal nodded.

“Yep. It's the spool trick they're really wild to see, I guess, but the way he eats those mints is pretty damned cute, too. And don't forget the cigar box. You'll want it to carry him in, right?”

Delacroix got the box and put Mr. Jingles's props in it, but the mouse he settled on the shoulder of his shirt. Then he stepped out of his cell, his puffed-out chest leading the way, and regarded Dean and Harry. “You boys coming?”

“Naw,” Dean said. “Got other fish to fry. But you knock em for a loop, Del—show em what happens when a Louisiana boy puts the hammer down and really goes to work.”

“You bet.” A smile shone out of his face, so sudden and so simple in its happiness that I felt my heart break for him a little, in spite of the terrible thing he had done. What a world we live in—what a world!

Delacroix turned to John Coffey, with whom he had struck up a diffident friendship not much different from a hundred other deathhouse acquaintances I'd seen.

“You knock em for a loop, Del,” Coffey said in a serious voice. “You show em all his tricks.”

Delacroix nodded and held his hand up by his shoulder. Mr. Jingles stepped onto it like it was a platform, and Delacroix held the hand out toward Coffey's cell. John Coffey stuck out a huge finger, and I'll be damned if that mouse didn't stretch out his neck and lick the end of it, just like a dog.

“Come on, Del, quit lingerin,” Brutal said. “These folks're settin back a hot dinner at home to watch your mouse cut his capers.” Not true, of course—Anderson would have been there until eight o'clock on any night, and the guards he'd dragged in to watch Delacroix's “show” would be there until eleven or twelve, depending on when their shifts were scheduled to end. The politician from the state capital would most likely turn out to be an office janitor in a borrowed tie. But Delacroix had no way of knowing any of that.

“I'm ready,” Delacroix said, speaking with the simplicity of a great star who has somehow managed to retain the common touch. “Let's go.” And as Brutal led him up the Green Mile with Mr. Jingles perched there on the little man's shoulder, Delacroix once more began to bugle,
“Messieurs et mesdames! Bienvenue au cirque de mousie!”
Yet, even lost as deeply in his own fantasy world as he was, he gave Percy a wide berth and a mistrustful glance.

Harry and Dean stopped in front of the empty cell across from Wharton's (that worthy had still not so much as stirred). They watched as Brutal unlocked the door to the exercise yard, where another two guards were waiting to join him, and led Delacroix out, bound for his command performance before the grand high poohbahs of Cold Mountain Penitentiary. We waited until the door was locked again, and then I looked toward my office. That shadow was still lying on the floor, thin as famine, and I was glad Delacroix had been too excited to see it.

“Come on out,” I said. “And let's move along brisk, folks. I want to get two run-throughs in, and we don't have much time.”

Old Toot-Toot, looking as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as ever, came out, walked to Delacroix's cell, and strolled in through the open
door. “Sittin down,” he said. “I'm sittin down, I'm sittin down, I'm sittin down.”

This is the real circus, I thought, closing my eyes for a second. This is the real circus right here, and we're all just a bunch of trained mice. Then I put the thought out of my mind, and we started to rehearse.