“Not Mr. Jingles,” I said. “Not him but the force that—”
“Why, Paulie! And Elaine Connelly, too!” a voice cried from the open door. It was loaded with a kind of satiric horror. “As I live and breathe! What in the goodness can you two be doing here?”
I turned, not at all surprised to see Brad Dolan there in the doorway. He was grinning as a man only does when he feels he’s fooled you right good and proper. How far down the road had he driven after his shift was over? Maybe only as far as The Wrangler, for a beer or two and maybe a lap-dance before coming back.
“Get out,” Elaine said coldly. “Get out right now.”
“Don’t you tell me to get out, you wrinkledy old bitch,” he said, still smiling. “Maybe you can tell me that up the hill, but you ain’t up the hill now. This ain’t where you’re supposed to be. This is off-limits. Little love-nest, Paulie? Is that what you got here? Kind of a Playboy pad for the geriatric…” His eyes widened as he at last saw the shed’s tenant. “What the fuck?”
I didn’t turn to look. I knew what was there, for one thing; for another, the past had suddenly doubled over the present, making one terrible image, three-dimensional in its reality. It wasn’t Brad Dolan standing there in the doorway but Percy Wetmore. In another moment he would rush into the shed and crush Mr. Jingles (who no longer had a hope of outrunning him) under his shoe. And this time there was no John Coffey to bring him back from the edge of death. Any more than there had been a John Coffey when I needed him on that rainy day in Alabama.
I got to my feet, not feeling any ache in my joints or muscles this time, and rushed toward Dolan. “Leave him alone!” I yelled. “You leave him alone, Percy, or by God I’ll—”
“Who you callin Percy?” he asked, and pushed me back so hard I almost fell over. Elaine grabbed me, although it must have hurt her to do so, and steadied me. “Ain’t the first time you done it, either. And stop peein in your pants. I ain’t gonna touch im. Don’t need to. That’s one dead rodent.”
I turned, thinking that Mr. Jingles was only lying on his side to catch his breath, the way he sometimes did. He was on his side, all right, but that rippling motion through his fur had stopped. I tried to convince myself that I could still see it, and then Elaine burst into loud sobs. She bent painfully, and picked up the mouse I had first seen on the Green Mile, coming up to the duty desk as fearlessly as a man approaching his peers… or his friends. He lay limp on her hand. His eyes were dull and still. He was dead.
Dolan grinned unpleasantly, revealing teeth which had had very little acquaintance with a dentist. “Aw, sakes, now!” he said. “Did we just lose the family pet? Should we have a little funeral, with paper flowers and—”
“SHUT UP!” Elaine screamed at him, so loudly and so powerfully that he backed away a step, the smile slipping off his face. “GET OUT OF HERE! GET OUT OR YOU’LL NEVER WORK ANOTHER DAY HERE! NOT ANOTHER HOUR! I SWEAR IT!”
“You won’t be able to get so much as a slice of bread on a breadline,” I said, but so low neither of them heard me. I couldn’t take my eyes off Mr. Jingles, lying on Elaine’s palm like the world’s smallest bearskin rug.
Brad thought about coming back at her, calling her bluff—he was right, the shed wasn’t exactly approved territory for the Georgia Pines inmates, even I knew that much—and then didn’t. He was, at heart, a coward, just like Percy. And he might have checked on her claim that her grandson was Somebody Important and had discovered it was a true claim. Most of all, perhaps, his curiosity had been satisfied, his thirst to know slaked. And after all his wondering, the mystery had turned out not to be such of a much. An old man’s pet mouse had apparently been living in the shed. Now it had croaked, had a heart attack or something while pushing a colored spool.
“Don’t know why you’re getting so het up,” he said. “Either of you. You act like it was a dog, or something.”
“Get out,” she spat. “Get out, you ignorant man. What little mind you have is ugly and misdirected.”
He flushed dully, the spots where his high school pimples had been filling in a darker red. There had been a lot of them, by the look. “I’ll go,” he said, “but when you come down here tomorrow… Paulie… you’re going to find a new lock on this door. This place is off-limits to the residents, no matter what bad-tempered things old Mrs. My Shit Don’t Stink has to say about me. Look at the floor! Boards all warped and rotted! If you was to go through, your scrawny old leg’d be apt to snap like a piece of kindling. So just take that dead mouse, if you want it, and get gone. The Love Shack is hereby closed.”
He turned and strode away, looking like a man who believes he’s earned at least a draw. I waited until he was gone, and then gently took Mr. Jingles from Elaine. My eyes happened on the bag with the peppermint candies in it, and that did it—the tears began to come. I don’t know, I just cry easier somehow these days.
“Would you help me to bury an old friend?” I asked Elaine when Brad Dolan’s heavy footsteps had faded away.
“Yes, Paul.” She put her arm around my waist and laid her head against my shoulder. With one old and twisted finger, she stroked Mr. Jingles’s moveless side. “I would be happy to do that.”
And so we borrowed a trowel from the gardening shed and we buried Del’s pet mouse as the afternoon shadows drew long through the trees, and then we walked back to get our supper and take up what remained of our lives. And it was Del I found myself thinking of, Del kneeling on the green carpet of my office with his hands folded and his bald pate gleaming in the lamplight, Del who had asked us to take care of Mr. Jingles, to make sure the bad ’un wouldn’t hurt him anymore. Except the bad ’un hurts us all in the end, doesn’t he?
“Paul?” Elaine asked. Her voice was both kind and exhausted. Even digging a grave with a trowel and laying a mouse to rest in it is a lot of excitement for old sweeties like us, I guess. “Are you all right?”
My arm was around her waist. I squeezed it. “I’m fine,” I said.
“Look,” she said. “It’s going to be a beautiful sunset. Shall we stay out and watch it?”
“All right,” I said, and we stayed there on the lawn for quite awhile, arms around each other’s waists, first watching the bright colors come up in the sky, then watching them fade to ashes of gray.
Sainte Marie, Mère de Dieu, priez pour nous, pauvres pécheurs, maintenant et à l’heure de nôtre mort.
Amen.
13
1956.
Alabama in the rain.
Our third grandchild, a beautiful girl named Tessa, was graduating from the University of Florida. We went down on a Greyhound. Sixty-four, I was then, a mere stripling. Jan was fifty-nine, and as beautiful as ever. To me, at least. We were sitting in the seat all the way at the back, and she was fussing at me for not buying her a new camera to record the blessed event. I opened my mouth to tell her we had a day to shop in after we got down there, and she could have a new camera if she wanted one, it would fit the budget all right, and furthermore I thought she was just fussing because she was bored with the ride and didn’t like the book she’d brought. A Perry Mason, it was. That’s when everything in my memory goes white for a bit, like film that’s been left out in the sun.
Do you remember that accident? I suppose a few folks reading this might, but mostly not. Yet it made front-page headlines from coast to coast when it happened. We were outside Birmingham in a driving rain, Janice complaining about her old camera, and a tire blew. The bus waltzed sideways on the wet pavement and was hit broadside by a truck hauling fertilizer. The truck slammed the bus into a bridge abutment at better than sixty miles an hour, crushed it against the concrete, and broke it in half. Two shiny, rain-streaked pieces spun in two opposite directions, the one with the diesel tank in it exploding and sending a red-black fireball up into the rainy-gray sky. At one moment Janice was complaining about her old Kodak, and at the very next I found myself lying on the far side of the underpass in the rain and staring at a pair of blue nylon panties that had spilled out of someone’s suitcase. WEDNESDAY was stitched on them in black thread. There were burst-open suitcases everywhere. And bodies. And parts of bodies. There were seventy-three people on that bus, and only four survived the crash. I was one of them, the only one not seriously hurt.