The Mouse on the Mile 4 page

I did. It made me feel sick and scared, but I did.

"He may want to stay for Coffey, but if we're lucky, he'll get all he needs from Delacroix. You just make

sure you put him out for that one."

I had planned to stick Percy in the switch-room again, then down in the tunnel, riding shotgun on the

gurney that would take Delacroix to the meatwagon parked across the road from the prison, but I tossed

all those plans back over my shoulder without so much as a second look. I nodded. I had the sense to

know it was a gamble I was taking, but I didn't care. If it would get rid of Percy Wetmore, I'd tweak the

devil's nose. He could take part in his execution, clamp on the cap, and then look through the grille and

tell Van Hay to roll on two; he could watch the little Frenchman ride the lightning that he, Percy

Wetmore, had let out of the bottle. Let him have his nasty little thrill, if that's what state-sanctioned

murder was to him. Let him go on to Briar Ridge, where he would have his own office and a fan to cool

it. And if his uncle by marriage was voted out of office in the next election and he had to find out what

work was like in the tough old sunbaked world where not all the bad guys were locked behind bars and

sometimes you got your own head whipped, so much the better.

"All right," I said, standing up. "I'll put him out front for Delacroix. And in the meantime, I'll keep the

peace."

"Good," he said, and stood up himself. "By the way, how's that problem of yours?" He pointed delicately

in the direction of my groin.

"Seems a little better."

'Well, that's fine." He saw me to the door. "What about Coffey, by the way? Is he going to be a

problem?"

"I don't think so," I said. "So far he's been as quiet as a dead rooster. He's strange - strange eyes - but

quiet. We'll keep tabs on him, though. Don't worry about that!"

"You know what he did, of course."

"Sure."

He was seeing me through to the outer office by then, where old Miss Hannah sat bashing away at her

Underwood as she had ever since the last ice age had ended, it seemed. I was happy to go. All in all, I felt

as if I'd gotten off easy. And it was nice to know there was a chance of surviving Percy, after all.

"You send Melinda a whole basket of my love," I said. "And don't go buying you an extra crate of

trouble, either. It'll probably turn out to be nothing but migraine, after all."

"You bet," he said, and below his sick eyes, his lips smiled. The combination was damned near ghoulish.

As for me, I went back to E Block to start another day. There was paperwork to be read and written, there

were floors to be mopped, there were meals to be served, a duty roster to be made out for the following

week, there were a hundred details to be seen to. But mostly there was waiting - in prison there's always

plenty of that, so much it never gets done. Waiting for Eduard Delacroix to walk the Green Mile, waiting

for William Wharton to arrive with his curled lip and Billy the Kid tattoo, and, most of all, waiting for

Percy Wetmore to be gone out of my life.

7.

Delacroix's mouse was one of God's mysteries. I never saw one in E Block before that summer, and

never saw one after that fall, when Delacroix passed from our company on a hot and thundery night in

October - passed from it in a manner so unspeakable I can barely bring myself to recall it. Delacroix

claimed that he trained that mouse, which started its life among us as Steamboat Willy, but I really think

it was the other way around. Dean Stanton felt the same way, and so did Brutal. Both of them were there

the night the mouse put in its first appearance, and as Brutal said, "The thing 'us half-tame already, and

twice as smart as that Cajun what thought he owned it."

Dean and I were in my office, going over the record-box for the last year, getting ready to write

follow-up letters to witnesses of five executions, and to write follow-ups to follow-ups in another six

stretching all the way back to '29. Basically, we wanted to know just one thing: were they pleased with

the service? I know it sounds grotesque, but it was an important consideration. As taxpayers they were

our customers, but very special ones. A man or a woman who will turn out at midnight to watch a man

die has got a special, pressing reason to be there, a special need, and if execution is a proper punishment,

then that need ought to be satisfied. They've had a nightmare. The purpose of the execution is to show

them that the nightmare is over. Maybe it even works that way. Sometimes.

"Hey!" Brutal called from outside the door, where he was manning the desk at the head of the hall. "Hey,

you two! Get out here!"

Dean and I gazed at each other with identical expressions of alarm, thinking that something had

happened to either the Indian from Oklahoma (his name was Arlen Bitterbuck, but we called him The

Chief ... or, in Harry Terwilliger's case, Chief Coat Cheese, because that was what Harry claimed

Bitterbuck smelled like), or the fellow we called The President. But then Brutal started to laugh, and we

hurried to see what was happening. Laughing in E Block sounded almost as wrong as laughing in church.

Old Toot-Toot, the trusty who ran the food-wagon in those days, had been by with his holy-rolling

cartful of goodies, and Brutal had stocked up for a long night - three sandwiches, two pops, and a couple

of moon pies. Also a side of potato salad Toot had undoubtedly filched from the prison kitchen, which

was supposed to be off-limits to him. Brutal had the logbook open in front of him, and for a wonder he

hadn't spilled anything on it yet. Of course, he was just getting started.

'What?" Dean asked. "What is it?"

"State legislature must have opened the pursestrings enough to hire another screw this year after all,"

Brutal said, still laughing. "Lookie yonder."

He pointed and we saw the mouse. I started to laugh, too, and Dean joined in. You really couldn't help it,

because a guard doing quarter-hour check rounds was just like that mouse looked like: a tiny, furry guard

making sure no one was trying to escape or commit suicide. It would trot a little way toward us along the

Green Mile, then turn its head from side to side, as if checking the cells. Then it would make another

forward spurt. The fact that we could hear both of our current inmates snoring away in spite of the

yelling and the laughter somehow made it even funnier.

It was a perfectly ordinary brown mouse, except for the way it seemed to be checking into the cells. It

even went into one or two of them, skipping nimbly in between the lower bars in a way I imagine many

of our inmates, past and present, would envy. Except it was out that the cons would always be wanting to

skip, of course.

The mouse didn't go into either of the occupied cells; only the empties. And finally it had worked its way

almost up to where we were. I kept expecting it to turn back, but it didn't. It showed no fear of us at all.

"It ain't normal for a mouse to come up on people that way," Dean said, a little nervously. "Maybe it's

rabid."

"Oh, my Christ," Brutal said through a mouthful of corned-beef sandwich. "The big mouse expert. The

Mouse Man. You see it foamin at the mouth, Mouse Man?"

"I can't see its mouth at all," Dean said, and that made us all laugh again. I couldn't see its mouth, either,

but I could see the dark little drops that were its eyes, and they didn't look crazy or rabid to me. They

looked interested and intelligent. I've put men to death - men with supposedly immortal souls - that

looked dumber than that mouse.

It scurried up the Green Mile to a spot that was less than three feet from the duty desk ... which wasn't

something fancy, like you might be imagining, but only the sort of desk the teachers used to sit behind up

at the district high school. And there it did stop, curling its tail around its paws as prim as an old lady

settling her skirts.

I stopped laughing all at once, suddenly feeling cold through my flesh all the way to the bones. I want to

say I don't know why I felt that way - no one likes to come out with something that's going to make them

look or sound ridiculous - but of course I do, and if I can tell the truth about the rest, I guess I can tell the

truth about this. For a moment I imagined myself to be that mouse, not a guard at all but just another

convicted criminal there on the Green Mile, convicted and condemned but still managing to look bravely

up at a desk that must have seemed miles high to it (as the judgment seat of God will no doubt someday

seem to us), and at the heavy-voiced, blue-coated giants who sat behind it. Giants that shot its kind with

BB guns, or swatted them with brooms, or set traps on them, traps that broke their backs while they crept

cautiously over the word VICTOR to nibble at the cheese on the little copper plate.

There was no broom by the duty desk, but there was a rolling mop-bucket with the mop still in the

wringer; I'd taken my turn at swabbing the green lino and all six of the cells shortly before sitting down

to the record-box with Dean. I saw that Dean meant to grab the mop- and take a swing with it. I touched

his wrist just as his fingers touched the slender wooden handle. "Leave it be," I said.

He shrugged and drew his hand back. I had a feeling he didn't want to swat it any more than I did.

Brutal tore a corner off his corned-beef sandwich and held it out over the front of the desk, tweezed

delicately between two fingers. The mouse seemed to look up with an even livelier interest, as if it knew

exactly what it was. Probably did; I could see its whiskers twitch as its nose wriggled.

"Aw, Brutal, no!" Dean exclaimed, then looked at me. "Don't let him do that, Paul! If he's gonna feed the

damn thing, we might as well put out the welcome mat for anything on four legs.-"

"I just want to see what he'll do," Brutal said. "In the interests of science, like." He looked at me - I was

the boss, even in such minor detours from routine as this. I thought about it and shrugged like it didn't

matter much, one way or another. The truth was, I kind of wanted to see what he'd do, too.

Well, he ate it - of course. There was a Depression on, after all. But the way he ate it fascinated us all. He

approached the fragment of sandwich, sniffed his way around it, and then he sat up in front of it like a

dog doing a trick, grabbed it, and pulled the bread apart to get at the meat. He did it as deliberately and

knowingly as a man tucking into a good roast-beef dinner in his favorite restaurant. I never saw an

animal eat like that, not even a well-trained house dog. And all the while he was eating, his eyes never

left us.

"Either one smart mouse or hungry as hell," a new voice said. It was Bitterbuck. He had awakened and

now stood at the bars of his cell, naked except for a pair of saggy-seated boxer shorts. A home-rolled

cigarette poked out from between the second and third knuckles of his right hand, and his iron-gray hair

lay over his shoulders - once probably muscular but now beginning to soften - in a pair of braids.

"You got any Injun wisdom about micies, Chief?" Brutal asked, watching the mouse eat. We were all

pretty fetched by the neat way it held the bit of corned beef in its forepaws, occasionally turning it or

glancing at it, as if in admiration and appreciation.

"Naw," Bitterbuck said. "Knowed a brave once had a pair of what he claimed were mouse-skin gloves,

but I didn't believe it!" Then he laughed, as if the whole thing was a joke, and left the bars. We heard the

bunk creak as he lay down again.

That seemed to be the mouse's signal to go. It finished up what it was holding, sniffed at what was left

(mostly bread with yellow mustard soaking into it), and then looked back at us, as if it wanted to

remember our faces if we met again. Then it turned and scurried off the way it had come, not pausing to

do any cell-checks this time. Its hurry made me think of the White Rabbit in Alice's Adventures in

Wonderland, and I smiled. It didn't pause at the door to the restraint room, but disappeared beneath it.

The restraint room had soft walls, for people whose brains had softened a little. We kept cleaning

equipment stored in there when we didn't need the room for its created purpose, and a few books (most

were westerns by Clarence Mulford, but one-loaned out only on special occasions - featured a profusely

illustrated tale in which Popeye, Bluto, and even Wimpy the hamburger fiend took turns shtupping Olive

Oyl). There were craft items as well, including the crayons Delacroix later put to some good use. Not that

he was our problem yet; this was earlier, remember. Also in the restraint room was the jacket no one

wanted to wear - white, made of double-sewn canvas, and with the buttons and snaps and buckles going

up the back. We all knew how to zip a problem child into that jacket lickety-larrup. They didn't get

violent often, our lost boys, but when they did, brother, you didn't wait around for the situation to

improve on its own.

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 onto

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

onehanded, 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."

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 871