The Mouse on the Mile 3 page

It wasn't but ten minutes later when the men stopped, realizing they could hear more than just the dogs. It

was a howling rather than a baying, and a sound no dog had ever made, not even in its dying extremities.

It was a sound none of them had ever heard anything make, but they knew right away, all of them, that it

was a man. So they said, and I believed them. I think I would have recognized it, too. I have heard men

scream just that way, I think, on their way to the electric chair. Not a lot - most button themselves up and

go either quiet or joking, like it was the class picnic - but a few. Usually the ones who believe in hell as a

real place, and know it is waiting for them at the end of the Green Mile.

Bobo shortleashed his dogs again. They were valuable, and he had no intention of losing them to the

psychopath howling and gibbering just down yonder. The other men reloaded their guns and snapped

them closed. That howling had chilled them all, and made the sweat under their arms and running down

their backs feel like icewater. When men take a chill like that, they need a leader if they are to go on, and

Deputy McGee led them. He got out in front and walked briskly (I bet he didn't feel very brisk right then,

though) to a stand of alders that jutted out of the woods on the right, with the rest of them trundling along

nervously about five paces behind. He paused just once, and that was to motion the biggest man among

them - Sam Hollis - to keep near Klaus Detterick.

On the other side of the alders there was more open ground stretching back to the woods on the right. On

the left was the long, gentle slope of the riverbank. They all stopped where they were, thunderstruck. I

think they would have given a good deal to unsee what was before them, and none of them would ever

forget it - it was the sort of nightmare, bald and almost smoking in the sun, that lies beyond the drapes

and furnishings of good and ordinary lives - church suppers, walks along country lanes, honest work,

love-kisses in bed. There is a skull in every man, and I tell you there is a skull in the lives of all men.

They saw it that day, those men - they saw what sometimes grins behind the smile.

Sitting on the riverbank in a faded, bloodstained jumper was the biggest man any of them had ever seen -

John Coffey. His enormous, splay-toed feet were bare. On his head he wore a faded red bandanna, the

way a country woman would wear a kerchief into church. Gnats circled him in a black cloud. Curled in

each arm was the body of a naked girl. Their blonde hair, once curly and light as milkweed fluff, was

now matted to their heads and streaked red. The man holding them sat bawling up at the sky like a

moonstruck calf, his dark brown cheeks slicked with tears, his face twisted in a monstrous cramp of grief

He drew breath in hitches, his chest rising until the snaps holding the straps of his jumper were strained,

and then let that vast catch of air out in another of those howls. So often you read in the paper that "the

killer showed no remorse," but that wasn't the case here. John Coffey was torn open by what he had done

... but he would live. The girls would not. They had been torn open in a more fundamental way.

No one seemed to know how long they stood there, looking at the howling man who was, in his turn,

looking across the great still plate of the river at a train on the other side, storming down the tracks

toward the trestle that crossed the river. It seemed they looked for an hour or for forever, and yet the train

got no farther along, it seemed to storm only in one place, like a child doing a tantrum, and the sun did

not go behind a cloud, and the sight was not blotted from their eyes. It was there before them, as real as a

dogbite. The black man rocked back and forth; Cora and Kathe rocked with him like dolls in the arms of

a giant. The bloodstained muscles in the man's huge, bare arms flexed and relaxed, flexed and relaxed,

flexed and relaxed.

It was Klaus Detterick who broke the tableau. Screaming, he flung himself at the monster who had raped

and killed his daughters. Sam Hollis knew his job and tried to do it, but couldn't. He was six inches taller

than Klaus and outweighed him by at least seventy pounds, but Klaus seemed to almost shrug his

encircling arms off. Klaus flew across the intervening open ground and launched a flying kick at Coffey's

head. His workboot, caked with spilled milk that had already soured in the heat, scored a direct hit on

Coffey's left temple, but Coffey seemed not to feel it at all. He only sat there, keening and rocking and

looking out across the river; the way I imagine it, he could almost have been a picture out of some piney

woods Pentecostal sermon, the faithful follower of the Cross looking out toward Goshen Land ... if not

for the corpses, that was.

It took four men to haul the hysterical farmer off John Coffey, and he fetched Coffey I don't know how

many good licks before they finally did. It didn't seem to matter to Coffey, one way or the other; he just

went on looking out across the river and keening. As for Detterick, all the fight went out of him when he

was finally pulled off - as if some strange galvanizing current had been running through the huge black

man (I still have a tendency to think in electrical metaphors; you'll have to pardon me), and when

Detterick's contact with that power source was finally broken, he went as limp as a man flung back from

a live wire. He knelt wide-legged on the riverbank with his hands to his face, sobbing. Howie joined him

and they hugged each other forehead to forehead.

Two men watched them while the rest formed a rifle-toting ring around the rocking, wailing black man.

He still seemed not to realize that anyone but him was there. McGee stepped forward, shifted uncertainly

from foot to foot for a bit, then hunkered.

"Mister," he said in a quiet voice, and Coffey hushed at once. McGee looked at eyes that were bloodshot

from crying. And still they streamed, as if someone had left a faucet on inside him. Those eyes wept, and

yet were somehow untouched ... distant and serene. I thought them the strangest eyes I had ever seen in

my life, and McGee felt much the same. "Like the eyes of an animal that never saw a man before," he

told a reporter named Hammersmith just before the trial.

"Mister, do you hear me?" McGee asked.

Slowly, Coffey nodded his head. Still he curled his arms around his unspeakable dolls, their chins down

on their chests so their faces could not be clearly seen, one of the few mercies God saw fit to bestow that

day.

"Do you have a name?" MeGee asked.

"John Coffey," he said in a thick and tear-clotted voice. "Coffey like the drink, only not spelled the same

way."

McGee nodded, then pointed a thumb at the chest pocket of Coffey's jumper, which was bulging. It

looked to McGee like it might have been a gun - not that a man Coffey's size would need a gun to do

some major damage, if he decided to go off. "What's that in there, John Coffey? Is that maybe a heater?

A pistol?"

"Nosir," Coffey said in his thick voice, and those strange eyes - welling tears and agonized on top, distant

and weirdly serene underneath, as if the true John Coffey was somewhere else, looking out on some

other landscape where murdered little girls were nothing to get all worked up about -never left Deputy

McGee's. "That's just a little lunch I have."

"Oh, now, a little lunch, is that right?" McGee asked, and Coffey nodded and said yessir with his eyes

running and dear snot-runners hanging out of his nose. "And where did the likes of you get a little lunch,

John Coffey?" Forcing himself to be calm, although he could smell the girls by then, and could see the

flies lighting and sampling the places on them that were wet. It was their hair that was the worst, he said

later ... and this wasn't in any newspaper story; it was considered too grisly for family reading. No, this I

got from the reporter who wrote the story, Mr. Hammersmith. I looked him up later on, because later on

John Coffey became sort of an obsession with me. McGee told this Hammersmith that their blonde hair

wasn't blonde anymore. It was auburn. Blood had run down their cheeks out of it like it was a bad

dye-job, and you didn't have to be a doctor to see that their fragile skulls had been dashed together with

the force of those mighty arms. Probably they had been crying. Probably he had wanted to make them

stop. If the girls had been lucky, this had happened before the rapes.

Looking at that made it hard for a man to think, even a man as determined to do his job as Deputy

McGee was. Bad thinking could cause mistakes, maybe more bloodshed. McGee drew him in a deep

breath and calmed himself. Tried, anyway.

'Wellsir, I don't exactly remember, be dog if I do," Coffey said in his tear-choked voice, "but it's a little

lunch, all right, sammidges and I think a swee' pickle."

I might just have a look for myself, it's all the same to you," McGee said. "Don't you move now, John

Coffey. Don't do it, boy, because there are enough guns aimed at you to make you disappear from the

waist up should you so much as twitch a finger."

Coffey looked out across the river and didn't move as McGee gently reached into the chest pocket of

those biballs and pulled out something wrapped in newspaper and tied with a hank of butcher's twine.

MeGee snapped the string and opened the paper, although he was pretty sure it was just what Coffey said

it was, a little lunch. There was a bacon-tomato sandwich and a jelly fold-over. There was also a pickle,

wrapped in its own piece of a funny page John Coffey would never be able to puzzle out. There were no

sausages. Bowser had gotten the sausages out of John Coffey's little lunch.

McGee handed the lunch back over his shoulder to one of the other men without taking his eyes off

Coffey. Hunkered down like that, he was too close to want to let his attention stray for even a second.

The lunch, wrapped up again and tied for good measure, finally ended up with Bobo Marchant, who put

it in his knapsack, where he kept treats for his dogs (and a few fishing lures, I shouldn't wonder). It

wasn't introduced into evidence at the trial - justice in this part of the world is swift, but not as swift as a

bacon-tomato sandwich goes over - though photographs of it were.

'What happened here, John Coffey?" McGee asked in his low, earnest voice. "You want to tell me that?"

And Coffey said to McGee and the others almost exactly the same thing he said to me; they were also the

last words the prosecutor said to the jury at Coffey's trial. "I couldn't help it," John Coffey said, holding

the murdered, violated girls naked in his arms. The tears began to pour down his cheeks again. "I tried to

take it back, but it was too late!'

"Boy, you are under arrest for murder," McGee said, and then he spit in John Coffey's face.

The jury was out forty-five minutes. Just about time enough to eat a little lunch of their own. I wonder

they had any stomach for it.

5.

I think you know I didn't find all that out during one hot October afternoon in the soon-to-be-defunct

prison library, from one set of old newspapers stacked in a pair of Pomona orange crates, but I learned

enough to make it hard for me to sleep that night. When my wife got up at two in the morning and found

me sitting in the kitchen, drinking buttermilk and smoking home-rolled Bugler, she asked me what was

wrong and I lied to her for one of the few times in the long course of our marriage. I said I'd had another

run-in with Percy Wetmore. I had, of course, but that wasn't the reason she'd found me sitting up late. I

was usually able to leave Percy at the office.

'Well, forget that rotten apple and come on back to bed," she said. "I've got something that'll help you

sleep, and you can have all you want."

"That sounds good, but I think we'd better not," I said. "I've got a little something wrong with my

waterworks, and wouldn't want to pass it on to you."

She raised an eyebrow. "Waterworks, huh," she said. "I guess you must have taken up with the wrong

streetcorner girl the last time you were in Baton Rouge." I've never been in Baton Rouge and never so

much as touched a streetcorner girl, and we both knew it.

"It's just a plain old urinary infection," I said. "My mother used to say boys got them from taking a leak

when the north wind was blowing."

"Your mother also used to stay in all day if she spilled the salt," my wife said. "Dr Sadler-"

"No, sir," I said, raising my hand. "He'll want me to take sulfa, and I'll be throwing up in every comer of

my office by the end of the week. It'll run its course, but in the meantime, I guess we best stay out of the

playground."

She kissed my forehead right over my left eyebrow, which always gives me the prickles ... as Janice well

knew. "Poor baby. As if that awful Percy Wetmore wasn't enough. Come to bed soon!'

I did, but before I did, I stepped out onto the back porch to empty out (and checked the wind direction

with a wet thumb before I did - what our parents tell us when we are small seldom goes ignored, no

matter how foolish it may be). Peeing outdoors is one joy of country living the poets never quite got

around to, but it was no joy that night; the water coming out of me burned like a line of lit coal-oil. Yet I

thought it had been a little worse that afternoon, and knew it had been worse the two or three days before.

I had hopes that maybe I had started to mend. Never was a hope more ill-founded. No one had told me

that sometimes a bug that gets up inside there, where it's warm and wet, can take a day or two off to rest

before coming on strong again. I would have been surprised to know it. I would have been even more

surprised to know that, in another fifteen or twenty years, there would be pills you could take that would

smack that sort of infection out of your system in record time ... and while those pills might make you

feel a little sick at your stomach or loose in your bowels, they almost never made you vomit the way Dr.

Sadler's sulfa pills did. Back in '32, there wasn't much you could do but wait, and try to ignore that

feeling that someone had spilled coal-oil inside your works and then touched a match to it.

I finished my butt, went into the bedroom, and finally got to sleep. I dreamed of girls with shy smiles and

blood in their hair.

6.

The next morning there was a pink memo slip on my desk, asking me to stop by the warden's office as

soon as I could. I knew what that was about - there were unwritten but very important rules to the game,

and I had stopped playing by them for awhile yesterday - and so I put it off as long as possible. Like

going to the doctor about my waterworks problem, I suppose. I've always thought this "get-it-over-with"

business was overrated.

Anyway, I didn't hurry to Warden Moores's office. I stripped off my wool uniform coat instead, hung it

over the back of my chair, and turned on the fan in the corner - it was another hot one. Then I sat down

and went over Brutus Howell's night-sheet. There was nothing there to get alarmed about. Delacroix had

wept briefly after turning in - he did most nights, and more for himself than for the folks he had roasted

alive, I am quite sure - and then had take Mr. Jingles, the mouse, out of the cigar box he slept in. That

had calmed Del, and he had slept like a baby the rest of the night. Mr. Jingles had most likely spent it on

Delacroix's stomach, with his tail curled over his paws, eyes unblinking. It was as if God had decided

Delacroix needed a guardian angel, but had decreed in His wisdom that only a mouse would do for a rat

like our homicidal friend from Louisiana. Not all that was in Brutal's report, of course, but I had done

enough night watches myself to fill in the stuff between the lines. There was a brief note about Coffey:

"Laid awake, mostly quiet, may have cried some. I tried to get some talk started, but after a few grunted

replies from Coffey, gave up. Paul or Harry may have better luck."

"Getting the talk started" was at the center of our job, really. I didn't know it then, but looking back from

the vantage point of this strange old age (I think all old ages seem strange to the folk who must endure

them), I understand that it was, and why I didn't see it then - it was too big, as central to our work as our

respiration was to our lives. It wasn't important that the floaters be good at "getting the talk started," but

it was vital for me and Harry and Brutal and Dean... and it was one reason why Percy Wetmore was such

a disaster. The inmates hated him, the guards hated him ... everyone hated him, presumably, except for

his political connections, Percy himself, and maybe (but only maybe) his mother. He was like a dose of

white arsenic sprinkled into a wedding cake, and I think I knew he spelled disaster the start. He was an

accident waiting to happen. As for the rest of us, we would have scoffed at the idea that we functioned

most usefully not as the guards of the condemned but as their psychiatrists part of me still wants to scoff

at that idea today - but we knew about getting the talk started . . . and without the talk, men facing Old

Sparky had a nasty habit of going insane.

I made a note at the bottom of Brutal's report to talk to John Coffey - to try, at least - and then passed on

to a note from Curtis Anderson, the warden's chief assistant. It said that he, Anderson, expected a DOE

order for Edward Delacrois (Anderson's misspelling; the man's name was actually Eduard Delacroix)

very soon. DOE stood for date of execution, and according to the note, Curtis had been told on good

authority that the little Frenchman would take the walk shortly before Halloween - October 27th was his

best guess, and Curtis Anderson's guesses were very informed. But before then we could expect a new

resident, name of William Wharton. "He's what you like to call 'a problem child,' " Curtis had written ' in

his backslanting and somehow prissy script. "Crazy-wild and proud of it. Has rambled all over the state

for the last year or so, and has hit the big time at last. Killed three people in a holdup, one a pregnant

woman, killed a fourth in the getaway. State Patrolman. All he missed was a nun and a blind man!' I

smiled a little at that. "Wharton is 19 years old, has Billy the Kid tattooed on upper l. forearm. You will

have to slap his nose a time or two, I guarantee you that, but be careful when you do it. This man just

doesn't care." He had underlined this last sentiment twice, then finished: "Also, he may be a

hang-arounder. He's working appeals, and there's the fact that he is a minor."

A crazy kid, working appeals, apt to be around for awhile. Oh, that all sounded just fine. Suddenly the

day seemed hotter than ever, and I could no longer put off seeing Warden Moores.

I worked for three wardens during my years as a Cold Mountain guard; Hal Moores was the last and best

of them. In a walk. Honest, straightforward, lacking even Curtis Anderson's rudimentary wit, but

equipped with just enough political savvy to keep his job during those grim years ... and enough integrity

to keep from getting seduced by the game. He would not rise any higher, but that seemed all right with

him. He was fifty-eight or -nine back then, with a deeply lined bloodhound face that Bobo Marchant

probably would have felt right at home with. He had white hair and his hands shook with some sort of

palsy, but he was strong. The year before, when a prisoner had rushed him in the exercise yard with a

shank whittled out of a crate-slat, Moores had stood his ground, grabbed the skatehound's wrist, and had

twisted it so hard that the snapping bones had sounded like dry twigs burning in a hot fire. The

skatehound, all his grievances forgotten, had gone down on his knees in the dirt and begun screaming for

his mother. "I'm not her," Moores said in his cultured Southern voice, "But if I was, I'd raise up my skirts

and piss on you from the loins that gave you birth."

When I came into his office, he started to get up and I waved him back down. I took the seat across the

desk from him, and began by asking about his wife ... except in our part of the world, that's not how you

do it. "How's that pretty gal of yours" is what I asked, as if Melinda had seen only seventeen summers

instead of sixty-two or -three. My concern was genuine he was a woman I could have loved and married

myself, if the lines of our lives had coincided - but I didn't mind diverting him a little from his main

business, either.

He sighed deeply. "Not so well, Paul. Not so well at all."

"More headaches?"

"Only one this week, but it was the worst yet - put her flat on her back for most of the day before

yesterday. And now she's developed this weakness in her right hand-" He raised his own liverspotted

right hand. We both watched it tremble above his blotter for a moment or two, and then he lowered it

again. I could tell he would have given just about anything not to be telling me what he was telling me,

and I would have given just about anything not to be hearing it. Melinda's headaches had started in the

spring, and all that summer her doctor had been saying they were "nervous-tension migraines," perhaps

caused by the stress of Hal's coming retirement. Except that neither of them could wait for his retirement,

and my own wife had told me that migraine is not a disease of the old but the young; by the time its

sufferers reached Melinda Moores's age, they were usually getting better, not worse. And now this

weakness of the hand. It didn't sound like nervous tension to me; it sounded like a damned stroke.

"Dr. Haverstrom wants her to go in hospital up to Indianola," Moores said. "Have some tests. Head

X-rays, he means. Who knows what else. She is scared to death!' He paused, then added, "Truth to tell,

so am I."

"Yeah, but you see she does it," I said. "Don't wait. If it turns out to be something they can see with an

X-ray, it may turn out to be something they can fix."

"Yes," he agreed, and then, for just a moment - the only one during that part of our interview, as I recall -

our eyes met and locked. There was the sort of nakedly perfect understanding between us that needs no

words. It could be a stroke, yes. It could also be a cancer growing in her brain, and if it was that, the

chances that the doctors at Indianola could do anything about it were slim going on none. This was '32,

remember, when even something as relatively simple as a urinary infection was either sulfa and stink or

suffer and wait.

"I thank you for your concern, Paul. Now let's talk about Percy Wetmore!'

I groaned and covered my eyes.

"I had a call from the state capital this morning," the warden said evenly. "It was quite an angry call, as

I'm sure you can imagine. Paul, the governor is so married he's almost not there, if you take my meaning.

And his wife has a brother who has one child. That child is Percy Wetmore. Percy called his dad last

night, and Percy's dad called Percy's aunt. Do I have to trace the rest of this out for you?"

'No," I said. "Percy squealed. Just like the schoolroom sissy telling teacher he saw Jack and Jill

smooching in the cloakroom."

"Yep," Moores agreed, "that's about the size of it."

"You know what happened between Percy and Delacroix when Delacroix came in?" I asked. "Percy and

his damned hickory billy-club?"

"Yes, but - "

"And you know how he runs it along the bars sometimes, just for the pure hell of it. He's mean, and he's

stupid, and I don't know how much longer I can take him. That's the truth."

We'd known each other five years. That can be a long time for men who get on well, especially when part

of the job is trading life for death. What I'm saying is that he understood what I meant. Not that I would

quit; not with the Depression walking around outside the prison walls like a dangerous criminal, one that

couldn't be caged as our charges were. Better men than me were out on the roads or riding the rods. I was

lucky and knew it - children grown and the mortgage, that two-hundred-pound block of marble, had been

off my chest for the last two years. But a man's got to eat, and his wife has to eat, too. Also, we were

used to sending our daughter and son-in-law twenty bucks whenever we could afford it (and sometimes

when we couldn't, if Jane's letters sounded particularly desperate). He was an out-of-work high-school

teacher, and if that didn't qualify for desperate back in those days, then the word had no meaning. So no,

you didn't walk off a steady paycheck job like mine ... not in cold blood, that was. But my blood wasn't

cold that fall. The temperatures outside were unseasonable, and the infection crawling around inside me

had turned the thermostat up even more. And when a man's in that kind of situation, why, sometimes his

fist flies out pretty much of its own accord. And if you slug a connected man like Percy Wetmore once,

you might as well just go right on slugging, because there's no going back.

"Stick with it," Moores said quietly. "That's what I called you in here to say. I have it on good authority -

the person who called me this morning, in fact - that Percy has an application in at Briar, and that his

application will be accepted."

"Briar," I said. That was Briar Ridge, one of two state-run hospitals. 'What's this kid doing? Touring state

facilities?"

"It's an administration job. Better pay, and papers to push instead of hospital beds in the heat of the day."

He gave me a slanted grin. "You know, Paul, you might be shed of him already if you hadn't put him in

the switch-room with Van Hay when The Chief walked."

For a moment what he said seemed so peculiar I didn't have a clue what he was getting at. Maybe I didn't

want to have a clue.

"Where else would I put him?" I asked. "Christ, he hardly knows what he's doing on the block! To make

him part of the active execution team - " I didn't finish. Couldn't finish. The potential for screw-ups

seemed endless.

"Nevertheless, you'd do well to put him out for Delacroix. If you want to get rid of him, that is."

I looked at him with my jaw hung. At last I was able to get it up where it belonged so I could talk. "What

are you saying? That he wants to experience one right up close where he can smell the guy's nuts

cooking?"

Moores shrugged. His eyes, so soft when he had been speaking about his wife, now looked flinty.

"Delacroix's nuts are going to cook whether Wetmore's on the team or not," he said. "Correct?"

"Yes, but he could screw up. In fact, Hal, he's almost bound to screw up. And in front of thirty or so

witnesses ... reporters all the way up from Louisiana . . ."

"You and Brutus Howell will make sure he doesn't," Moores said. "And if he does anyway, it goes on his

record, and it'll still be there long after his statehouse connections are gone. You understand?"

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 713