The Green Mile (31 page)

“May God have mercy on your soul,” he told the panting, terrified figure in the electric chair, then looked past him at the mesh-covered rectangle where Harry and Jack were standing, Jack with his hand on the switch marked
MABEL'S HAIR DRIER
. The doctor was standing to the right of that window, eyes fixed on the black bag between his feet, as silent and self-effacing as ever. “Roll on two!”

At first it was the same as always—the humming that was a little
louder than the original cycle-up, but not much, and the mindless forward surge of Del's body as his muscles spasmed.

Then things started going wrong.

The humming lost its steadiness and began to waver. It was joined by a crackling sound, like cellophane being crinkled. I could smell something horrible that I didn't identify as a mixture of burning hair and organic sponge until I saw blue tendrils of smoke curling out from beneath the edges of the cap. More smoke was streaming out of the hole in the top of the cap that the wire came in through; it looked like smoke coming out of the hole in an Indian's teepee.

Delacroix began to jitter and twist in the chair, his mask-covered face snapping from side to side as if in some vehement refusal. His legs began to piston up and down in short strokes that were hampered by the clamps on his ankles. Thunder banged overhead, and now the rain began to pour down harder.

I looked at Dean Stanton; he stared wildly back. There was a muffled pop from under the cap, like a pine knot exploding in a hot fire, and now I could see smoke coming through the mask, as well, seeping out in little curls.

I lunged toward the mesh between us and the switch room, but before I could open my mouth, Brutus Howell seized my elbow. His grip was hard enough to make the nerves in there tingle. He was as white as tallow but not in a panic—not even close to being in a panic. “Don't you tell Jack to stop,” he said in a low voice. “Whatever you do, don't tell him that. It's too late to stop.”

At first, when Del began to scream, the witnesses didn't hear him. The rain on the tin roof had swelled to a roar, and the thunder was damned near continuous. But those of us on the platform heard him, all right—choked howls of pain from beneath the smoking mask, sounds an animal caught and mangled in a hay-baler might make.

The hum from the cap was ragged and wild now, broken by bursts of what sounded like radio static. Delacroix began to slam back and forth in the chair like a kid doing a tantrum. The platform shook, and he hit the leather restraining belt almost hard enough to pop it. The current was also twisting him from side to side, and I heard the crunching snap
as his right shoulder either broke or dislocated. It went with a sound like someone hitting a wooden crate with a sledgehammer. The crotch of his pants, no more than a blur because of the short pistoning strokes of his legs, darkened. Then he began to squeal, horrible sounds, high-pitched and ratlike, that were audible even over the rushing downpour.

“What the hell's happening to him?” someone cried.

“Are those clamps going to hold?”

“Christ, the
smell
! Phew!”

Then, one of the two women: “Is this normal?”

Delacroix snapped forward, dropped back, snapped forward, fell back. Percy was staring at him with slack-jawed horror. He had expected
something,
sure, but not this.

The mask burst into flame on Delacroix's face. The smell of cooking hair and sponge was now joined by the smell of cooking flesh. Brutal grabbed the bucket the sponge had been in—it was empty now, of course—and charged for the extra-deep janitor's sink in the corner.

“Shouldn't I kill the juice, Paul?” Van Hay called through the mesh. He sounded completely rattled. “Shouldn't I—”

“No!” I shouted back. Brutal had understood it first, but I hadn't been far behind: we had to finish it. Whatever else we might do in all the rest of our lives was secondary to that one thing: we had to finish with Delacroix. “Roll, for Christ's sake! Roll, roll, roll!”

I turned to Brutal, hardly aware of the people talking behind us now, some on their feet, a couple screaming.
“Quit that!”
I yelled at Brutal.
“No water! No water! Are you nuts?”

Brutal turned toward me, a kind of dazed understanding on his face. Throw water on a man who was getting the juice. Oh yes. That would be very smart. He looked around, saw the chemical fire extinguisher hanging on the wall, and got that instead. Good boy.

The mask had peeled away from Delacroix's face enough to reveal features that had gone blacker than John Coffey's. His eyes, now nothing but misshapen globs of white, filmy jelly, had been blown out of their sockets and lay on his cheeks. His eyelashes were gone, and as I looked, the lids themselves caught fire and began to burn. Smoke puffed from the open V of his shirt. And still the humming of the electricity
went on and on, filling my head, vibrating in there. I think it's the sound mad people must hear, that or something like it.

Dean started forward, thinking in some dazed way that he could beat the fire out of Del's shirt with his hands, and I yanked him away almost hard enough to pull him off his feet. Touching Delacroix at that point would have been like Brer Rabbit punching into the Tar-Baby. An electrified Tar-Baby, in this case.

I still didn't turn around to see what was going on behind us, but it sounded like pandemonium, chairs falling over, people bellowing, a woman crying
“Stop it, stop it, oh can't you see he's had enough?”
at the top of her lungs. Curtis Anderson grabbed my shoulder and asked what was happening, for Christ's sake, what was happening, and why didn't I order Jack to shut down?

“Because I can't,” I said. “We've gone too far to turn back, can't you see that? It'll be over in a few more seconds, anyway.”

But it was at least two minutes before it was over, the longest two minutes of my whole life, and through most of it I think Delacroix was conscious. He screamed and jittered and rocked from side to side. Smoke poured from his nostrils and from a mouth that had gone the purple-black of ripe plums. Smoke drifted up from his tongue the way smoke rises from a hot griddle. All the buttons on his shirt either burst or melted. His undershirt did not quite catch fire, but it charred and smoke poured through it and we could smell his chest-hair roasting. Behind us, people were heading for the door like cattle in a stampede. They couldn't get out through it, of course—we were in a damn prison, after all—so they simply clustered around it while Delacroix fried (
Now I'm fryin,
Old Toot had said when we were rehearsing for Arlen Bitterbuck,
I'm a done tom turkey
) and the thunder rolled and the rain ran down out of the sky in a perfect fury.

At some point I thought of the doc and looked around for him. He was still there, but crumpled on the floor beside his black bag. He'd fainted.

Brutal came up and stood beside me, holding the fire extinguisher.

“Not yet,” I said.

“I know.”

We looked around for Percy and saw him standing almost behind Sparky now, frozen, eyes huge, one knuckle crammed into his mouth.

Then, at last, Delacroix slumped back in the chair, his bulging, misshapen face lying over on one shoulder. He was still jittering, but we'd seen this before; it was the current running through him. The cap had come askew on his head, but when we took it off a little later, most of his scalp and his remaining fringe of hair came with it, bonded to the metal as if by some powerful adhesive.

“Kill it!” I called to Jack when thirty seconds had gone by with nothing but electric jitters coming from the smoking, man-shaped lump of charcoal lolling in the electric chair. The hum died immediately, and I nodded to Brutal.

He turned and slammed the fire extinguisher into Percy's arms so hard that Percy staggered backward and almost fell off the platform. “You do it,” Brutal said. “You're running the show, after all, ain't you?”

Percy gave him a look that was both sick and murderous, then armed the extinguisher, pumped it, cocked it, and shot a huge cloud of white foam over the man in the chair. I saw Del's foot twitch once as the spray hit his face and thought
Oh no, we might have to go again,
but there was only that single twitch.

Anderson had turned around and was bawling at the panicky witnesses, telling them everything was all right, everything was under control, just a power-surge from the electrical storm, nothing to worry about. Next thing, he'd be telling them that what they smelled—a devil's mixture of burned hair, fried meat, and fresh-baked shit—was Chanel No. 5.

“Get doc's stethoscope,” I told Dean as the extinguisher ran dry. Delacroix was coated with white now, and the worst of the stench was being overlaid by a thin and bitter chemical smell.

“Doc . . . should I . . .”

“Never mind doc, just get his stethoscope,” I said. “Let's get this over . . . get him out of here.”

Dean nodded.
Over
and
out of here
were two concepts that appealed to him just then. They appealed to both of us. He went over to doc's bag and began rummaging in it. Doc was beginning to move again, so at
least he hadn't had a stroke or a heart-storm. That was good. But the way Brutal was looking at Percy wasn't.

“Get down in the tunnel and wait by the gurney,” I said.

Percy swallowed. “Paul, listen. I didn't know—”

“Shut up. Get down in the tunnel and wait by the gurney. Now.”

He swallowed, grimaced as if it hurt, and then walked toward the door which led to the stairs and the tunnel. He carried the empty fire extinguisher in his arms, as if it were a baby. Dean passed him, coming back to me with the stethoscope. I snatched it and set the earpieces. I'd done this before, in the army, and it's sort of like riding a bike—you don't forget.

I wiped at the foam on Delacroix's chest, then had to gag back vomit as a large, hot section of his skin simply slid away from the flesh beneath, the way the skin will slide off a . . . well, you know. A done tom turkey.

“Oh my God!” a voice I didn't recognize almost sobbed behind me. “Is it always this way? Why didn't somebody tell me? I never would have come!”

Too late now, friend,
I thought. “Get that man out of here,” I said to Dean or Brutal or whoever might be listening—I said it when I was sure I could speak without puking into Delacroix's smoking lap. “Get them all back by the door.”

I steeled myself as best I could, then put the disc of the stethoscope on the red-black patch of raw flesh I'd made on Del's chest. I listened, praying I would hear nothing, and that's just what I did hear.

“He's dead,” I told Brutal.

“Thank Christ.”

“Yes. Thank Christ. You and Dean get the stretcher. Let's unbuckle him and get him out of here, fast.”

W
E GOT HIS BODY
down the twelve stairs and onto the gurney all right. My nightmare was that his cooked flesh might slough right off his bones as we lugged him—it was Old Toot's done tom turkey that had gotten into my head—but of course that didn't happen.

Curtis Anderson was upstairs soothing the spectators—trying to, anyway—and that was good for Brutal, because Anderson wasn't there to see when Brutal took a step toward the head of the gurney and pulled his arm back to slug Percy, who was standing there looking stunned. I caught his arm, and that was good for both of them. It was good for Percy because Brutal meant to deliver a blow of near-decapitory force, and good for Brutal because he would have lost his job if the blow had connected, and maybe ended up in prison himself.

“No,” I said.

“What do you mean, no?” he asked me furiously. “How can you say no? You saw what he did! What are you telling me? That you're still going to let his
connections
protect him? After what he
did
?”

“Yes.”

Brutal stared at me, mouth agape, eyes so angry they were watering.

“Listen to me, Brutus—you take a poke at him, and most likely we all go. You, me, Dean, Harry, maybe even Jack Van Hay. Everyone else moves a rung or two up the ladder, starting with Bill Dodge, and the Prison Commission hires three or four Breadline Barneys to fill the spots at the bottom. Maybe you can live with that, but—” I cocked my thumb at Dean, who was staring down the dripping, brick-lined tunnel.
He was holding his specs in one hand, and looked almost as dazed as Percy. “But what about Dean? He's got two kids, one in high school and one just about to go.”

“So what's it come down to?” Brutal asked. “We let him get away with it?”

“I didn't know the sponge was supposed to be wet,” Percy said in a faint, mechanical voice. This was the story he had rehearsed beforehand, of course, when he was expecting a painful prank instead of the cataclysm we had just witnessed. “It was never wet when we rehearsed.”

“Aw, you sucker—” Brutal began, and started for Percy. I grabbed him again and yanked him back. Footsteps clacked on the steps. I looked up, desperately afraid of seeing Curtis Anderson, but it was Harry Terwilliger. His cheeks were paper-white and his lips were purplish, as if he'd been eating blackberry cobbler.

I switched my attention back to Brutal. “For God's sake, Brutal, Delacroix's
dead,
nothing can change that, and Percy's not worth it.” Was the plan, or the beginnings of it, in my head even then? I've wondered about that since, let me tell you. I've wondered over the course of a lot of years, and have never been able to come up with a satisfactory answer. I suppose it doesn't matter much. A lot of things don't matter, but it doesn't keep a man from wondering about them, I've noticed.

“You guys talk about me like I was a chump,” Percy said. He still sounded dazed and winded—as if someone had punched him deep in the gut—but he was coming back a little.