The Green Mile (34 page)

Well, that was the big question, wasn't it? I took in a deep breath and told them what I wanted to do. They listened, dumbfounded. Even Brutal, who liked to read those magazines with the stories about little green men from space, looked dumbfounded. There was a longer silence when I finished this time, and no one chewing any sandwiches.

At last, in a gentle and reasonable voice, Brutus Howell said: “We'd lose our jobs if we were caught, Paul, and we'd be very goddam lucky if that was all that happened. We'd probably end up over in A Block as guests of the state, making wallets and showering in pairs.”

“Yes,” I said. “That could happen.”

“I can understand how you feel, a little,” he went on. “You know Moores better than us—he's your friend as well as the big boss—and I know you think a lot of his wife . . .”

“She's the sweetest woman you could ever hope to meet,” I said, “and she means the world to him.”

“But we don't know her the way you and Janice do,” Brutal said. “Do we, Paul?”

“You'd like her if you did,” I said. “At least, you'd like her if you'd met her before this thing got its claws into her. She does a lot of community things, she's a good friend, and she's religious. More than that, she's funny. Used to be, anyway. She could tell you things that'd make you laugh until the tears rolled down your cheeks. But none of those things are the reason I want to help save her, if she can be saved. What's happening to her is an
offense,
goddammit, an
offense
. To the eyes and the ears and the heart.”

“Very noble, but I doubt like hell if that's what put this bee in your bonnet,” Brutal said. “I think it's what happened to Del. You want to balance it off somehow.”

And he was right. Of course he was. I knew Melinda Moores better than the others did, but maybe not, in the end, well enough to ask them to risk their jobs for her . . . and possibly their freedom, as well. Or my own job and freedom, for that matter. I had two children, and the last thing on God's earth that I wanted my wife to have to do was to write them the news that their father was going on trial for . . . well, what would it be? I didn't know for sure. Aiding and abetting an escape attempt seemed the most likely.

But the death of Eduard Delacroix had been the ugliest, foulest thing I had ever seen in my life—not just my working life but my whole, entire life—and I had been a party to it. We had
all
been a party to it, because we had allowed Percy Wetmore to stay even after we knew he was horribly unfit to work in a place like E Block. We had played the game. Even Warden Moores had been a party to it. “His nuts are going to cook whether Wetmore's on the team or not,” he had said, and maybe that was well enough, considering what the little Frenchman had done, but in the end Percy had done a lot more than
cook Del's nuts; he had blown the little man's eyeballs right out of their sockets and set his damned face on fire. And why? Because Del was a murderer half a dozen times over? No. Because Percy had wet his pants and the little Cajun had had the temerity to laugh at him. We'd been part of a monstrous act, and Percy was going to get away with it. Off to Briar Ridge he would go, happy as a clam at high tide, and there he would have a whole asylum filled with lunatics to practice his cruelties upon. There was nothing we could do about that, but perhaps it was not too late to wash some of the muck off our own hands.

“In my church they call it atonement instead of balancing,” I said, “but I guess it comes to the same thing.”

“Do you really think Coffey
could
save her?” Dean asked in a soft, awed voice. “Just . . . what? . . . suck that brain tumor out of her head? Like it was a . . . a peach-pit?”

“I think he could. It's not for sure, of course, but after what he did to me . . . and to Mr. Jingles . . .”

“That mouse was seriously busted up, all right,” Brutal said.

“But
would
he do it?” Harry mused. “
Would
he?”

“If he can, he will,” I said.

“Why? Coffey doesn't even know her!”

“Because it's what he does. It's what God made him for.”

Brutal made a show of looking around, reminding us all that someone was missing. “What about Percy? You think he's just gonna let this go down?” he asked, and so I told them what I had in mind for Percy. By the time I finished, Harry and Dean were looking at me in amazement, and a reluctant grin of admiration had dawned on Brutal's face.

“Pretty audacious, Brother Paul!” he said. “Fair takes my breath away!”

“But wouldn't it be the bee's knees!” Dean almost whispered, then laughed aloud and clapped his hands like a child. “I mean, voh-dohdee-oh-doh and twenty-three-skidoo!” You want to remember that Dean had a special interest in the part of my plan that involved Percy—Percy could have gotten Dean killed, after all, freezing up the way he had.

“Yeah, but what about after?” Harry said. He sounded gloomy, but
his eyes gave him away; they were sparkling, the eyes of a man who wants to be convinced. “What then?”

“They say dead men tell no tales,” Brutal rumbled, and I took a quick look at him to make sure he was joking.

“I think he'll keep his mouth shut,” I said.

“Really?” Dean looked skeptical. He took off his glasses and began to polish them. “Convince me.”

“First, he won't know what really happened—he's going to judge us by himself and think it was just a prank. Second—and more important—
he'll be afraid to say anything
. That's what I'm really counting on. We tell him that if he starts writing letters and making phone calls,
we
start writing letters and making phone calls.”

“About the execution,” Harry said.

“And about the way he froze when Wharton attacked Dean,” Brutal said. “I think people finding out about that is what Percy Wetmore's really afraid of.” He nodded slowly and thoughtfully. “It could work. But Paul . . . wouldn't it make more sense to bring Mrs. Moores to Coffey than Coffey to Mrs. Moores? We could take care of Percy pretty much the way you laid it out, then bring her in through the tunnel instead of taking Coffey out that way.”

I shook my head. “Never happen. Not in a million years.”

“Because of Warden Moores?”

“That's right. He's so hardheaded he makes old Doubting Thomas look like Joan of Arc. If we bring Coffey to his house, I think we can surprise him into at least letting Coffey make the try. Otherwise . . .”

“What were you thinking about using for a vehicle?” Brutal asked.

“My first thought was the stagecoach,” I said, “but we'd never get it out of the yard without being noticed, and everyone within a twenty-mile radius knows what it looks like, anyway. I guess maybe we can use my Ford.”

“Guess again,” Dean said, popping his specs back onto his nose. “You couldn't get John Coffey into your car if you stripped him naked, covered him with lard, and used a shoehorn. You're so used to looking at him that you've forgotten how big he is.”

I had no reply to that. Most of my attention that morning had been
focused on the problem of Percy—and the lesser but not inconsiderable problem of Wild Bill Wharton. Now I realized that transportation wasn't going to be as simple as I had hoped.

Harry Terwilliger picked up the remains of his second sandwich, looked at it for a second, then put it down again. “If we was to actually do this crazy thing,” he said, “I guess we could use my pickup truck. Sit him in the back of that. Wouldn't be nobody much on the roads at that hour. We're talking about well after midnight, ain't we?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You guys're forgetting one thing,” Dean said. “I know Coffey's been pretty quiet ever since he came on the block, doesn't do much but lay there on his bunk and leak from the eyes, but he's a
murderer
. Also, he's
huge
. If he decided he wanted to escape out of the back of Harry's truck, the only way we could stop him would be to shoot him dead. And a guy like that would take a lot of killing, even with a .45. Suppose we weren't able to put him down? And suppose he killed someone else? I'd hate losing my job, and I'd hate going to jail—I got a wife and kids depending on me to put bread in their mouths—but I don't think I'd hate either of those things near as much as having another dead little girl on my conscience.”

“That won't happen,” I said.

“How in God's name can you be so sure of that?”

I didn't answer. I didn't know just how to begin. I had known this would come up, of course I did, but I still didn't know how to start telling them what I knew. Brutal helped me.

“You don't think he did it, do you, Paul?” He looked incredulous. “You think that big lug is innocent.”

“I'm positive he's innocent,” I said.

“How in the name of Jesus
can
you be?”

“There are two things,” I said. “One of them is my shoe.” I leaned forward over the table and began talking.

M
R
. H. G. W
ELLS
once wrote a story about a man who invented a time machine, and I have discovered that, in the writing of these memoirs, I have created my own time machine. Unlike Wells's, it can only travel into the past—back to 1932, as a matter of fact, when I was the bull-goose screw in E Block of Cold Mountain State Penitentiary—but it's eerily efficient, for all that. Still, this time machine reminds me of the old Ford I had in those days: you could be sure that it would start eventually, but you never knew if a turn of the key would be enough to fire the motor, or if you were going to have to get out and crank until your arm practically fell off.

I've had a lot of easy starts since I started telling the story of John Coffey, but yesterday I had to crank. I think it was because I'd gotten to Delacroix's execution, and part of my mind didn't want to have to relive that. It was a bad death, a
terrible
death, and it happened the way it did because of Percy Wetmore, a young man who loved to comb his hair but couldn't stand to be laughed at—not even by a half-bald little Frenchman who was never going to see another Christmas.

As with most dirty jobs, however, the hardest part is just getting started. It doesn't matter to an engine whether you use the key or have to crank; once you get it going, it'll usually run just as sweet either way. That's how it worked for me yesterday. At first the words came in little bursts of phrasing, then in whole sentences, then in a torrent. Writing is a special and rather terrifying form of remembrance, I've discovered—there is a totality to it that seems almost like rape. Perhaps I only
feel that way because I've become a very old man (a thing that happened behind my own back, I sometimes feel), but I don't think so. I believe that the combination of pencil and memory creates a kind of practical magic, and magic is dangerous. As a man who knew John Coffey and saw what he could do—to mice and to men—I feel very qualified to say that.

Magic is dangerous.

In any case, I wrote all day yesterday, the words simply flooding out of me, the sunroom of this glorified old folks' home gone, replaced by the storage room at the end of the Green Mile where so many of my problem children took their last sit-me-downs, and the bottom of the stairs which led to the tunnel under the road. That was where Dean and Harry and Brutal and I confronted Percy Wetmore over Eduard Delacroix's smoking body and made Percy renew his promise to put in for transfer to the Briar Ridge state mental facility.

There are always fresh flowers in the sunroom, but by noon yesterday all I could smell was the noxious aroma of the dead man's cooked flesh. The sound of the power mower on the lawn down below had been replaced by the hollow plink of dripping water as it seeped slowly through the tunnel's curved roof. The trip was on. I had travelled back to 1932, in soul and mind, if not body.