The Green Mile (39 page)

“And what about us?” Brutal asked.

“Paul's over in Admin, pulling Del's file and going over the witnesses,” Dean said. “It's especially important this time, because the
execution was such a balls-up. He said he'd probably be there the rest of the shift. You and Harry and Percy are over in the laundry, washing your clothes.”

Well, that was what folks said, anyway. There was a crap-game in the laundry supply room some nights; on others it was blackjack or poker or acey-deucey. Whatever it was, the guards who participated were said to be washing their clothes. There was usually moonshine at these gettogethers, and on occasion a joystick would go around the circle. It's been the same in prisons since prisons were invented, I suppose. When you spend your life taking care of mud-men, you can't help getting a little dirty yourself. In any case, we weren't likely to be checked up on. “Clothes washing” was treated with great discretion at Cold Mountain.

“Right with Eversharp,” I said, turning Coffey around and putting him in motion. “And if it all falls down, Dean, you don't know nothing about nothing.”

“That's easy to say, but—”

At that moment, a skinny arm shot out from between the bars of Wharton's cell and grabbed Coffey's slab of a bicep. We all gasped. Wharton should have been dead to the world, all but comatose, yet here he stood, swaying back and forth on his feet like a hard-tagged fighter, grinning blearily.

Coffey's reaction was remarkable. He didn't pull away, but he also gasped, pulling air in over his teeth like someone who has touched something cold and unpleasant. His eyes widened, and for a moment he looked as if he and dumb had never even met, let alone got up together every morning and lain down together every night. He had looked alive—
there
—when he had wanted me to come into his cell so he could touch me. Help me, in Coffeyspeak. He had looked that way again when he'd been holding his hands out for the mouse. Now, for the third time, his face had lit up, as if a spotlight had suddenly been turned on inside his brain. Except it was different this time. It was
colder
this time, and for the first time I wondered what might happen if John Coffey were suddenly to run amok. We had our guns, we could shoot him, but actually taking him down might not be easy to do.

I saw similar thoughts on Brutal's face, but Wharton just went on
grinning his stoned, loose-lipped grin. “Where do you think you're going?” he asked. It came out something like
Wherra fink yerr gone?

Coffey stood still, looking first at Wharton, then at Wharton's hand, then back into Wharton's face. I could not read that expression. I mean I could see the intelligence in it, but I couldn't
read
it. As for Wharton, I wasn't worried about him at all. He wouldn't remember any of this later; he was like a drunk walking in a blackout.

“You're a bad man,” Coffey whispered, and I couldn't tell what I heard in his voice—pain or anger or fear. Maybe all three. Coffey looked down at the hand on his arm again, the way you might look at a bug which could give you a really nasty bite, had it a mind.

“That's right, nigger,” Wharton said with a bleary, cocky smile. “Bad as you'd want.”

I was suddenly positive that something awful was going to happen, something that would change the planned course of this early morning as completely as a cataclysmic earthquake can change the course of a river. It was going to happen, and nothing I or any of us did would stop it.

Then Brutal reached down, plucked Wharton's hand off John Coffey's arm, and that feeling stopped. It was as if some potentially dangerous circuit had been broken. I told you that in my time in E Block, the governor's line never rang. That was true, but I imagine that if it ever had, I would have felt the same relief that washed over me when Brutal removed Wharton's hand from the big man towering beside me. Coffey's eyes dulled over at once; it was as if the searchlight inside his head had been turned off.

“Lie down, Billy,” Brutal said. “Take you some rest.” That was my usual line of patter, but under the circumstances, I didn't mind Brutal using it.

“Maybe I will,” Wharton agreed. He stepped back, swayed, almost went over, and caught his balance at the last second. “Whoo, daddy. Whole room's spinnin around. Like bein drunk.”

He backed toward his bunk, keeping his bleary regard on Coffey as he went. “Niggers ought to have they own 'lectric chair,” he opined. Then the backs of his knees struck his bunk and he swooped down onto
it. He was snoring before his head touched his thin prison pillow, deep blue shadows brushed under the hollows of his eyes and the tip of his tongue lolling out.

“Christ, how'd he get up with so much dope in him?” Dean whispered.

“It doesn't matter, he's out now,” I said. “If he starts to come around, give him another pill dissolved in a glass of water. No more than one, though. We don't want to kill him.”

“Speak for yourself,” Brutal rumbled, and gave Wharton a contemptuous look. “You can't kill a monkey like him with dope, anyway. They thrive on it.”

“He's a bad man,” Coffey said, but in a lower voice this time, as if he was not quite sure of what he was saying, or what it meant.

“That's right,” Brutal said. “Most wicked. But that's not a problem now, because we ain't going to tango with him anymore.” We started walking again, the four of us surrounding Coffey like worshippers circling an idol that's come to some stumbling kind of half life. “Tell me something, John—do you know where we're taking you?”

“To help,” he said. “I think . . . to help . . . a lady?” He looked at Brutal with hopeful anxiety.

Brutal nodded. “That's right. But how do you know that? How do you
know
?”

John Coffey considered the question carefully, then shook his head. “I don't know,” he told Brutal. “To tell you the truth, boss, I don't know much of anything. Never have.”

And with that we had to be content.

I
HAD KNOWN
the little door between the office and the steps down to the storage room hadn't been built with the likes of Coffey in mind, but I hadn't realized how great the disparity was until he stood before it, looking at it thoughtfully.

Harry laughed, but John himself seemed to see no humor in the big man standing in front of the little door. He wouldn't have, of course; even if he'd been quite a few degrees brighter than he was, he wouldn't have. He'd been that big man for most of his life, and this door was just a scrap littler than most.

He sat down, scooted through it that way, stood up again, and went down the stairs to where Brutal was waiting for him. There he stopped, looking across the empty room at the platform where Old Sparky waited, as silent—and as eerie—as the throne in the castle of a dead king. The cap hung with hollow jauntiness from one of the back-posts, looking less like a king's crown than a jester's cap, however, something a fool would wear, or shake to make his high-born audience laugh harder at his jokes. The chair's shadow, elongated and spidery, climbed one wall like a threat. And yes, I thought I could still smell burned flesh in the air. It was faint, but I thought it was more than just my imagination.

Harry ducked through the door, then me. I didn't like the frozen, wide-eyed way John was looking at Old Sparky. Even less did I like what I saw on his arms when I got close to him: goosebumps.

“Come on, big boy,” I said. I took his wrist and attempted to pull him in the direction of the door leading down to the tunnel. At first he
wouldn't go, and I might as well have been trying to pull a boulder out of the ground with my bare hands.

“Come on, John, we gotta go, 'less you want the coach-and-four to turn back into a pumpkin,” Harry said, giving his nervous laugh again. He took John's other arm and tugged, but John still wouldn't come. And then he said something in a low and dreaming voice. It wasn't me he was speaking to, it wasn't any of us, but I have still never forgotten it.

“They're still in there. Pieces of them, still in there. I hear them screaming.”

Harry's nervous chuckles ceased, leaving him with a smile that hung on his mouth like a crooked shutter hangs on an empty house. Brutal gave me a look that was almost terrified, and stepped away from John Coffey. For the second time in less than five minutes, I sensed the whole enterprise on the verge of collapse. This time I was the one who stepped in; when disaster threatened a third time, a little later on, it would be Harry. We all got our chance that night, believe me.

I slid in between John and his view of the chair, standing on my tiptoes to make sure I was completely blocking his sight-line. Then I snapped my fingers in front of his eyes, twice, sharply.

“Come on!” I said. “Walk! You said you didn't need to be chained, now prove it! Walk, big boy! Walk, John Coffey! Over there! That door!”

His eyes cleared. “Yes, boss.” And praise God, he began to walk.

“Look at the door, John Coffey, just at the door and nowhere else.”

“Yes, boss.” John fixed his eyes obediently on the door.

“Brutal,” I said, and pointed.

He hurried in advance, shaking out his keyring, finding the right one. John kept his gaze fixed on the door to the tunnel and I kept my gaze fixed on John, but from the corner of one eye I could see Harry throwing nervous glances at the chair, as if he had never seen it before in his life.

There are pieces of them still in there . . . I hear them screaming.

If that was true, then Eduard Delacroix had to be screaming longest and loudest of all, and I was glad I couldn't hear what John Coffey did.

Brutal opened the door. We went down the stairs with Coffey in the
lead. At the bottom, he looked glumly down the tunnel, with its low brick ceiling. He was going to have a crick in his back by the time we got to the other end, unless—

I pulled the gurney over. The sheet upon which we'd laid Del had been stripped (and probably incinerated), so the gurney's black leather pads were visible. “Get on,” I told John. He looked at me doubtfully, and I nodded encouragement. “It'll be easier for you and no harder for us.”

“Okay, Boss Edgecombe.” He sat down, then lay back, looking up at us with worried brown eyes. His feet, clad in cheap prison slippers, dangled almost all the way to the floor. Brutal got in between them and pushed John Coffey along the dank corridor as he had pushed so many others. The only difference was that the current rider was still breathing. About halfway along—under the highway, we would have been, and able to hear the muffled drone of passing cars, had there been any at that hour—John began to smile. “Say,” he said, “this is fun.” He wouldn't think so the next time he rode the gurney; that was the thought which crossed my mind. In fact, the next time he rode the gurney, he wouldn't think or feel anything. Or would he? There are pieces of them still in there, he had said; he could hear them screaming.

Walking behind the others and unseen by them, I shivered.

“I hope you remembered Aladdin, Boss Edgecombe,” Brutal said as we reached the far end of the tunnel.

“Don't worry,” I said. Aladdin looked no different from the other keys I carried in those days—and I had a bunch that must have weighed four pounds—but it was the master key of master keys, the one that opened everything. There was one Aladdin key for each of the five cellblocks in those days, each the property of the block super. Other guards could borrow it, but only the bull-goose screw didn't have to sign it out.

There was a steel-barred gate at the far end of the tunnel. It always reminded me of pictures I'd seen of old castles; you know, in days of old when knights were bold and chivalry was in flower. Only Cold Mountain was a long way from Camelot. Beyond the gate, a flight of stairs led up to an unobtrusive bulkhead-style door with signs reading
NO TRESPASSING
and
STATE PROPERTY
and
ELECTRIFIED WIRE
on the outside.

I opened the gate and Harry swung it back. We went up, John Coffey once more in the lead, shoulders slumped and head bent. At the top, Harry got around him (not without some difficulty, either, although he was the smallest of the three of us) and unlocked the bulkhead. It was heavy. He could move it, but wasn't able to flip it up.

“Here, boss,” John said. He pushed to the front again—bumping Harry into the wall with one hip as he did so—and raised the bulkhead with one hand. You would have thought it was painted cardboard instead of sheet steel.

Cold night air, moving with the ridge-running wind we would now get most of the time until March or April, blew down into our faces. A swirl of dead leaves came with it, and John Coffey caught one of them with his free hand. I will never forget the way he looked at it, or how he crumpled it beneath his broad, handsome nose so it would release its smell.

“Come on,” Brutal said. “Let's go, forward harch.”

We climbed out. John lowered the bulkhead and Brutal locked it—no need for the Aladdin key on this door, but it was needed to unlock the gate in the pole-and-wire cage which surrounded the bulkhead.

“Hands to your sides while you go through, big fella,” Harry murmured. “Don't touch the wire, if you don't want a nasty burn.”

Then we were clear, standing on the shoulder of the road in a little cluster (three foothills around a mountain is what I imagine we looked like), staring across at the walls and lights and guard-towers of Cold Mountain Penitentiary. I could actually see the vague shape of a guard inside one of those towers, blowing on his hands, but only for a moment; the road-facing windows in the towers were small and unimportant. Still, we would have to be very, very quiet. And if a car
did
come along now, we could be in deep trouble.