“How in the name of Christ can you call a direct-current abortion like that a success? We’ve got witnesses that won’t sleep for a month! Hell, that fat old broad probably won’t sleep for a year!”
Brutal pointed at the gurney, and the shape under the sheet. “He’s dead, ain’t he? As for your witnesses, most of them will be telling their friends tomorrow night that it was poetic justice—Del there burned a bunch of people alive, so we turned around and burned him alive. Except they won’t say it was us. They’ll say it was the will of God, working through us. Maybe there’s even some truth to that. And you want to know the best part? The absolute cat’s pajamas? Most of their friends will wish they’d been here to see it.” He gave Percy a look both distasteful and sardonic as he said this last.
“And if their feathers are a little ruffled, so what?” Harry asked. “They volunteered for the damn job, nobody drafted them.”
“I didn’t know the sponge was supposed to be wet,” Percy said in his robot’s voice. “It’s never wet in rehearsal.”
Dean looked at him with utter disgust. “How many years did you spend pissing on the toilet seat before someone told you to put it up before you start?” he snarled.
Percy opened his mouth to reply, but I told him to shut up. For a wonder, he did. I turned to Anderson.
“Percy fucked up, Curtis—that’s what happened, pure and simple.” I turned toward Percy, daring him to contradict me. He didn’t, maybe because he read my eyes: better that Anderson hear stupid mistake than on purpose. And besides, whatever was said down here in the tunnel didn’t matter. What mattered, what always matters to the Percy Wetmores of the world, is what gets written down or overheard by the big bugs—the people who matter. What matters to the Percys of the world is how it plays in the newspapers.
Anderson looked at the five of us uncertainly. He even looked at Del, but Del wasn’t talking. “I guess it could be worse,” Anderson said.
“That’s right,” I agreed. “He could still be alive.”
Curtis blinked—that possibility seemed not to have crossed his mind. “I want a complete report about this on my desk tomorrow,” he said. “And none of you are going to talk to Warden Moores about it until I’ve had my chance. Are you?”
We shook our heads vehemently. If Curtis Anderson wanted to tell the warden, why, that was fine by us.
“If none of those asshole scribblers put it in their papers—”
“They won’t,” I said. “If they tried, their editors’d kill it. Too gruesome for a family audience. But they won’t even try—they were all vets tonight. Sometimes things go wrong, that’s all. They know it as well as we do.”
Anderson considered a moment longer, then nodded. He turned his attention to Percy, an expression of disgust on his usually pleasant face. “You’re a little asshole,” he said, “and I don’t like you a bit.” He nodded at Percy’s look of flabbergasted surprise. “If you tell any of your candy-ass friends I said that, I’ll deny it until Aunt Rhody’s old gray goose comes back to life, and these men will back me up. You’ve got a problem, son.”
He turned and started up the stairs. I let him get four steps and then said: “Curtis?”
He turned back, eyebrows raised, saying nothing.
“You don’t want to worry too much about Percy,” I said. “He’s moving on to Briar Ridge soon. Bigger and better things. Isn’t that right, Percy?”
“As soon as his transfer comes through,” Brutal added.
“And until it comes, he’s going to call in sick every night,” Dean put in.
That roused Percy, who hadn’t been working at the prison long enough to have accumulated any paid sick-time. He looked at Dean with bright distaste. “Don’t you wish,” he said.
6
WE WERE BACK on the block by one-fifteen or so (except for Percy, who had been ordered to clean up the storage room and was sulking his way through the job), me with a report to write. I decided to do it at the duty desk; if I sat in my more comfortable office chair, I’d likely doze off. That probably sounds peculiar to you, given what had happened only an hour before, but I felt as if I’d lived three lifetimes since eleven o’clock the previous night, all of them without sleep.
John Coffey was standing at his cell door, tears streaming from his strange, distant eyes—it was like watching blood run out of some unhealable but strangely painless wound. Closer to the desk, Wharton was sitting on his bunk, rocking from side to side, and singing a song apparently of his own invention, and not quite nonsense. As well as I can remember, it went something like this:
“Shut up, you jerk,” I said.
Wharton grinned, showing his mouthful of dingy teeth. He wasn’t dying, at least not yet; he was up, happy, practically tap-dancing. “Come on in here and make me, why don’t you?” he said happily, and then began another verse of “The Barbecue Song,” making up words not quite at random. There was something going on in there, all right. A kind of green and stinking intelligence that was, in its own way, almost brilliant.
I went down to John Coffey. He wiped away his tears with the heels of his hands. His eyes were red and sore-looking, and it came to me that he was exhausted, too. Why he should have been, a man who trudged around the exercise yard maybe two hours a day and either sat or lay down in his cell the rest of the time, I didn’t know, but I didn’t doubt what I was seeing. It was too clear.
“Poor Del,” he said in a low, hoarse voice. “Poor old Del.”
“Yes,” I said. “Poor old Del. John, are you okay?”
“He’s out of it,” Coffey said. “Del’s out of it. Isn’t he, boss?”
“Yes. Answer my question, John. Are you okay?”
“Del’s out of it, he’s the lucky one. No matter how it happened, he’s the lucky one.”
I thought Delacroix might have given him an argument on that, but didn’t say so. I glanced around Coffey’s cell, instead. “Where’s Mr. Jingles?”
“Ran down there.” He pointed through the bars, down the hall to the restraint-room door.
I nodded. “Well, he’ll be back.”
But he wasn’t; Mr. Jingles’s days on the Green Mile were over. The only trace of him we ever happened on was what Brutal found that winter: a few brightly colored splinters of wood, and a smell of peppermint candy wafting out of a hole in a beam.
I meant to walk away then, but I didn’t. I looked at John Coffey, and he back at me as if he knew everything I was thinking. I told myself to get moving, to just call it a night and get moving, back to the duty desk and my report. Instead I said his name: “John Coffey.”
“Yes, boss,” he said at once.
Sometimes a man is cursed with needing to know a thing, and that was how it was with me right then. I dropped down on one knee and began taking off one of my shoes.
7
THE RAIN HAD QUIT by the time I got home, and a late grin of moon had appeared over the ridges to the north. My sleepiness seemed to have gone with the clouds. I was wide awake, and I could smell Delacroix on me. I thought I might smell him on my skin—barbecue, me and you, stinky, pinky, phew-phew-phew—for a long time to come.