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Chapter Text

The green mile was written by Stephen King all characters belong to Stephen King.

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(Y/n Willows p.o.v)

This happened in 1932, when the state penitentiary was still at Cold Mountain. And the electric chair was there, too, of course. The inmates made jokes about the chair, the way people always make jokes about things that frighten them but can't be gotten away from. They called it Old Sparky, or the Big Juicy. They made cracks about the power bill, and how Warden Moores would cook his Thanksgiving dinner that fall, with his wife, Melinda, too sick to cook.

But for the ones who actually had to sit down in that chair, the humor went out of the situation in a hurry. I presided over forty-eight executions during my time at Cold Mountain (that's one figure I've never been confused about; I'll remember it on my deathbed), and I think that, for most of those people, the truth of what was happening to them finally hit all the way home when their ankles were being clamped to the stout oak of "Old Sparky's" legs. 

The realization came then (you would see it rising in their eyes, a kind of cold dismay) that their own legs had finished their careers. The blood still ran in them, the muscles were still strong, but they were finished, all the same they were never going to walk another country mile or dance with a girl at a barn-raising. Old Sparky's clients came to a knowledge of their deaths from the ankles up. There was a black silk bag that went over their heads after they had finished their rambling and mostly disjointed last remarks. It was supposed to be for them, but I always thought it was really for us, to keep us from seeing the awful tide of dismay in their eyes as they realized they were going to die with their knees bent.

There was no death row at Cold Mountain, only E Block, set apart from the other four and about a quarter their size, brick instead of wood, with a horrible bare metal roof that glared in the summer sun like a delirious eyeball. Six cells inside, three on each side of a wide center aisle, each almost twice as big as the cells in the other four blocks. Singles, too. Great accommodations for a prison (especially in the thirties), but the inmates would have traded for cells in any of the other four. Believe me, they would have traded.

There was never a time during my years on the block all six cells were occupied at one time thank God for small favors. Four was the most, mixed black and white (at Cold Mountain, there was no segregation among the walking dead), and that was a little piece of hell. One was a woman, Beverly McCall. She was as beautiful as a sunset and more a mystery than anything. She put up with six years of her husband beating her, but wouldn't put up with his creeping around for a single day. On the evening after she found out he was cheating, she stood waiting for the unfortunate Lester McCall, known to his pals (and, presumably, to his extremely short-term mistress) as Cutter, at the top of the stairs leading to the apartment over his barber shop. 

She waited until he got his overcoat half off, then dropped his cheating guts onto his tu-tone shoes. Used one of Cutter's own razors to do it. Two nights before she was due to sit in Old Sparky, she called me to her cell and said she had been visited by her African spirit-father in a dream. He told her to discard her slave-name and to die under her free name, Matuomi. That was her request, that her death-warrant should be read under the name of Beverly Matuomi. I guess her spirit-father didn't give her any first name, or one she could make out, anyhow. I said yes, okay. One thing those years serving as the bull-goose screw taught me was never to refuse the condemned unless I absolutely had to. In the case of Beverly Matuomi, it made no difference, anyway. The governor called the next day around three in the afternoon, commuting her sentence to life in the Grassy Valley Penal Facility for Women I was glad to see Bev going left instead of right when she got to the duty desk, let me tell you.

Few years or so later had to be at least ten , Iq saw that name on the obituary page of the paper, under a picture of a skinny-faced black lady with a cloud of white hair and glasses with rhinestones at the corners. It was Beverly. She'd spent the last ten years of her life a free woman, the obituary said, and had rescued the small-town library of Raines Falls pretty much single-handed. She had also taught Sunday school and had been much loved in that little backwater. LIBRARIAN DIES OF HEART FAILURE, the headline said, and below that, in smaller type, almost as an afterthought: Served Over Two Decades in Prison for Murder. Only the eyes, wide and blazing behind the glasses with the rhinestones at the corners, were the same. They were the eyes of a woman who even at seventy-whatever would not hesitate to pluck a safety razor from its blue jar of disinfectant, if the urge seemed pressing. You know murderers, even if they finish up as old lady librarians in dozey little towns. At least you do if you've spent as much time minding murderers as I did. There was only one time I ever had a question about the nature of my job. 

The wide corridor up the center of E Block was floored with linoleum the color of tired old limes, and so what was called the Last Mile at other prisons was called the Green Mile at Cold Mountain. It ran, I guess, sixty long paces from south to north, bottom to top. At the bottom was the restraint room. At the top end was a T-junction. A left turn meant life--if you called what went on in the sunbaked exercise yard life, and many did; many lived it for years, with no apparent ill effects. Thieves and arsonists and sex criminals, all talking their talk and walking their walk and making their little deals.

A right turn, though--that was different. First you went into Paul's office (where the carpet was also green, a thing he kept meaning to change and not didn't ever get around to), and crossed in front of my desk, which was flanked by the American flag on the left and the state flag on the right. On the far side were two doors. One led into the small W.C. that I and the E Block guards (sometimes even Warden Moores) used the other opened on a kind of storage shed. This was where you ended up when you walked the Green Mile.

It was a small door I had to duck my head when I went through. You came out on a little landing, then went down three cement steps to a board floor. It was a miserable room without heat and with a metal roof, just like the one on the block to which it was an adjunct. It was cold enough in there to see your breath during the winter, and stifling in the summer. At the execution of Elmer Manfred in July or August of '30, that one was, I believe we had nine witnesses pass out.

On the left side of the storage shed again there was life. Tools (all locked down in frames crisscrossed with chains, as if they were carbine rifles instead of spades and pickaxes), dry goods, sacks of seeds for spring planting in the prison gardens, boxes of toilet paper, pallets cross-loaded with blanks for the prison plate-shop...even bags of lime for marking out the baseball diamond and the football gridiron--the cons played in what was known as The Pasture, and fall afternoons were greatly looked forward to at Cold Mountain.

On the right once again death. Old Sparky his ownself, sitting up on a plank platform at the southeast corner of the storeroom, stout oak legs, broad oak arms that had absorbed the terrorized sweat of scores of men in the last few minutes of their lives, and the metal cap, usually hung jauntily on the back of the chair, like some robot kid's beanie in a Buck Rogers comic-strip. A cord ran from it and through a gasket-circled hole in the cinderblock wall behind the chair. Off to one side was a galvanized tin bucket. If you looked inside it, you would see a circle of sponge, cut just right to fit the metal cap. Before executions, it was soaked in brine to better conduct the charge of direct-current electricity that ran through the wire, through the sponge, and into the condemned man's brain.

It was a hot fall, I'll remember that hot fall for as long as I live, indeed. October almost like August, and the warden's wife, Melinda, up in the hospital at Indianola for a spell. It was the fall and Paul says he had the worst urinary infection of his life, said not bad enough to put him in the hospital myself, but almost bad enough for him to wish he was dead every time he used the bathroom. It was the fall of Delacroix, the little half-bald Frenchman. 

There were four or five other guards on the block each shift, but a lot of them were floaters. Dean Stanton, Harry Terwilliger, and Brutus Howell we called him "Brutal," but it was a joke, he wouldn't hurt a fly unless he had to, in spite of his size, and Percy Wetmore, who really was brutal . . . not to mention stupid. Percy had no business on E Block, where an ugly nature was useless and sometimes dangerous, but he was related to the governor by marriage, and so he stayed.

It was Percy Wetmore who ushered our newest prisoner onto the block, with the supposedly traditional cry of "Dead man walking! Dead man walking here!"

It was still as hot as the hinges of h*ll, October or not. The door to the exercise yard opened, letting in a flood of brilliant light and the biggest man I've ever seen, He wore chains on his arms and across his water-barrel of a chest; he wore legirons on his ankles and shuffled a chain between them that sounded like cascading coins as it ran along the lime-colored corridor between the cells. Percy Wetmore was on one side of him, skinny little Harry Terwilliger was on the other, and they looked like children walking along with a captured bear. Even Brutus Howell looked like a kid next to Coffey, and Brutal was over six feet tall and broad as well.

John Coffey was a black male, like most of the men who came to stay for awhile in E Block before dying in Old Sparky's lap, and he stood seven feet, three inches tall. He wasn't all willowy (pun intended) like dean or harry, he was broad in the shoulders and deep through the chest, laced over with muscle in every direction. They'd put him in the biggest denims they could find in Stores, and still the cuffs of the pants rode halfway up on his bunched and scarred calves. The shirt was open to below his chest, and the sleeves stopped somewhere on his forearms. He was holding his cap in one huge hand, which was just as well; perched on his bald mahogany ball of a head, it would have looked like the kind of cap an organ-grinder's monkey wears, only blue instead of red. He looked like he could have snapped the chains that held him as easily as you might snap the ribbons on a Christmas present, but when you looked in his face, you knew he wasn't going to do anything like that. It wasn't dull--although that was what Percy thought, it wasn't long before Percy was calling him the ijit--but lost. He kept looking around as if to make out where he was. Maybe even who he was.

"Dead man walking!" Percy trumpeted, hauling on that bear of a man's wristcuff, as if he really believed he could move him if Coffey decided he didn't want to move anymore on his own. Harry didn't say anything, but he looked embarrassed. "Dead man--"

"That'll be enough of that," Paul said. Paul was in what was going to be Coffey's cell, sitting on his bunk. He'd known he was coming, of course, he was there to welcome him and take charge of him. Percy gave me a look that said he knew he was an *sshole (except for the John Coffey, of course, who only knew how to rape and murder little girls), but he didn't say anything.

The four of us stopped outside the cell door, which was standing open on its track. Paul nodded to Harry, who said "Are you sure you want to be in there with him, boss?" I didn't often hear Harry Terwilliger sound nervous he'd been right there by my side during the riots of six or seven years before and had never wavered, even when the rumors that some of them had guns began to circulate but he sounded nervous then.

"Am I going to have any trouble with you, big boy?" Paul asked, sitting there on the bunk and trying not to look or sound as miserable as ne felt-- I'd bet that urinary infection I wasn't as bad as it eventually got, he described it 'no day at the beach, let me tell you'. Coffey shook his head slowly once to the left, once to the right, then back to dead center. Once his eyes found Paul, they never left him. Harry had a clipboard with Coffey's forms on it in one hand. "Give it to him," Paul said to Harry. "Put it in his hand." Harry did. The big mutt took it like a sleepwalker.

"Now bring it to me, big boy," Paul said, and Coffey did, his chains jingling and rattling. He had to duck his head just to enter the cell. I looked up. Coffey had shuffled a bit to one side and I could see Harry standing across the corridor in front of Delacroix's cell he was our only other prisoner in E Block when Coffey came in. Del was a slight, balding man with the worried face of an accountant who knows his embezzlement will soon be discovered.

Percy Wetmore was leaning in the doorway of the cell which had just become John Coffey's. He had taken his hickory baton out of the custom-made holster he carried it in, and was tapping it against one palm the way a man does when he has a toy he wants to use. And all at once I couldn't stand to have him there. Maybe it was the uniform I had on heating up my skin and making the itch of my flannel all but unbearable, maybe it was knowing that the state had sent us a black man next door to an idiot to execute, and Percy clearly wanted to hand-tool him a little first. Probably it was both those things. Whatever it was, I stopped caring about his political connections for a little while.

"Percy," Paul said. "They're moving house over in the infirmary." Percy looked at Paul like he insulted his mother than replied with " Bill Dodge is in charge of that detail--" Paul had cut him off "I know he is," I said. "Go and help him." Percy was a taken a-back "That isn't my job," Percy said. "This big lugoon is my job." 'Lugoon' was Percy's joke name for the big ones--a combination of lug and goon. He resented the big ones. He wasn't skinny, like Harry Terwilliger, but he was short. A banty-rooster sort of guy, the kind that likes to pick fights, especially when the odds are all their way. And vain about his hair. Could hardly keep his hands off it.

"Then your job is done," Paul said. "Get over to the infirmary." Percy lower lip pooched out. Bill Dodge and his men were helping my friend moving boxes and stacks of sheets, even the beds; the whole infirmary was going to a new frame building over on the west side of the prison. Hot work, heavy lifting. Percy Wetmore wanted no part of either. "They got all the men they need," he said. "Then get over there and straw-boss," Paul said, raising my voice. I saw Harry wince and paid no attention. If the governor ordered Warden Moores to fire Paul for ruffling the wrong set of feathers, who was Hal Moores going to put in his place? Percy? It was a joke. "I really don't care what you do, Percy, as long as you get out of here for awhile." 

For a moment I thought he was going to stick and there'd be real trouble, with Coffey standing there the whole time like the world's biggest stopped clock. Then Percy rammed his billy back into its hand-tooled holster foolish d*mned vanitorious thing and went stalking up the corridor. I don't remember which guard was sitting at the duty desk that day one of the floaters, I guess but Percy must not have liked the way he looked, because he growled, "You wipe that smirk off your sh*tepoke face or I'll wipe it off for you" as he went by. There was a rattle of keys, a momentary blast of hot sunlight from the exercise yard, and then Percy Wetmore was gone, at least for the time being. 

"Be still, Mr. Jingles," Delacroix said, and the mouse stopped on his left shoulder just as if he had understood. "Just be so still and so quiet." In Delacroix's lilting Cajun accent, quiet came out sounding exotic and foreign kwaht. "You go lie down, Del," Paul said curtly. "Take you a rest. This is none of your business, either." He did as Paul said. It was said he had r@ped a young girl and killed her, and had then dropped her body behind the apartment house where she lived, doused it with coal-oil, and then set it on fire, hoping in some muddled way to dispose of the evidence of his crime. The fire had spread to the building itself, had engulfed it, and six more people had died, two of them children. It was the only crime he had in him, actually I didn't believe he ever had any crime in him at all. 

He would sit down with Old Sparky in a little while, and Old Sparky would make an end to him . . . but whatever it was that had done that awful thing was already gone, and now he lay on his bunk, letting his little companion run squeaking over his hands. Paul turned my attention back to the giant. "If I let Harry take those chains off you, are you going to be nice?" He nodded. It was like his head-shake own, up, back to center. His strange eyes looked at me. There was a kind of peace in them, but not a kind I was sure I could trust. Paul crooked a finger to Harry, who came in and unlocked the chains. He showed no fear now, even when he knelt between Coffey's treetrunk legs to unlock the ankle irons, and that eased me some. It was Percy who had made Harry nervous, and I trusted Harry's instincts. I trusted the instincts of all my day-to-day E Block men, except for Percy.

Paul had told me earlier he had a little set speech he'd make to men new on the block. When Harry stood back (Coffey had remained motionless during the entire unlocking ceremony, as placid as a Percheron), "Can you talk, big boy?" Paul asked John. "Yes, sir, boss, I can talk," he said. His voice was a deep and quiet rumble. It made me think of a freshly tuned tractor engine. He had no real Southern drawl he said I, not Ah. As if he was from the South, but not of it. He didn't sound illiterate, but he didn't sound educated. In his speech as in so many other things, he was a mystery. Mostly it was his eyes that troubled me a kind of peaceful absence in them, as if he were floating far, far away.

"Your name is John Coffey." Paul said almost as if asking a question, "Yes, sir, boss, like the drink, only not spelled the same way." Paul glaced at him before writing on the board so more "So you can spell, can you? Read and write?" Paul asked him, "Just my name, boss," said he, serenely. Paul sighed quietly. I'd already decided he wasn't going to be any trouble, he had a sweet demeanor, who knows maybe he'd be like Del.

"My name is Paul Edgecombe," Paul said introducing himself. "I'm the E Block super the head screw. You want something from me, ask for me by name. If I'm not here, ask these four right there, his name is Harry Terwilliger. Or you ask for Mr. Stanton or Mr. Howell. Or Y/n Willows. Do you understand that?" He said. Coffey nodded. "Just don't expect to get what you want unless we decide it's what you need this isn't a hotel. Still with me?" He nodded again. "This is a quiet place, big boy not like the rest of the prison. It's just you and Delacroix over there. You won't work mostly you'll just sit. Give you a chance to think things over." Too much time for most of them, but Paul didn't say that. "Sometimes we play the radio, if all's in order. You like the radio?"

He nodded, but doubtfully, as if he wasn't sure what the radio was. "If you behave, you'll eat on time, you'll never see the solitary cell down at the far end, or have to wear one of those canvas coats that buttons up the back. You'll have two hours in the yard afternoons from four until six, except on Saturdays when the rest of the prison population has their flag football games. You'll have your visitors on Sunday afternoons, if you have someone who wants to visit you. Do you, Coffey?" Paul asked. He shook his head. "Got none, boss," he said.

"Well, your lawyer, then." Paul said. "I believe I've seen the back end of him," he said. "He was give to me on loan. Don't believe he could find his way up here in the mountains." Paul looked at him closely to see if he might be trying a little joke, but he didn't seem to be. And I really hadn't expected any different. Appeals weren't for the likes of John Coffey, not back then; they had their day in court and then the world forgot them until they saw a squib in the paper saying a certain fellow had taken a little electricity along about midnight. But a man with a wife, children, or friends to look forward to on Sunday afternoons was easier to control, if control looked to be a problem. Here it didn't, and that was good. Because he was so damned big.

Paul shifted a little on the bunk, he seemed to be uncomfortable so he stood up. John backed away from Paul respectfully, and clasped his hands in front of him. "Your time here can be easy or hard, big boy, it all depends on you. I'm here to say you might as well make it easy on all of us, because it comes to the same in the end. We'll treat you as right as you deserve. Do you have any questions?" Paul asked just wanting to get this over with. "Do you leave a light on after bedtime?" he asked right away, as if he had only been waiting for the chance.

I can only assume we all made the same face, pure confusion. Many strange questions had been asked by newcomers to E Block once about the size of Paul wife's...parts but never that one. Coffey was smiling a trifle uneasily, as if he knew we would think him foolish but couldn't help himself. "Because I get a little scared in the dark sometimes," he said. "If it's a strange place." We looked at him the pure size of him and felt strangely touched. "Yes, it's pretty bright in here all night long," Paul said. "Half the lights along the Mile burn from nine until five every morning." He nodded, relieved. I'm not sure he knew what anything was but he could see the 200-watt bulbs in their wire cages.

Paul did something he'd never done to a prisoner before, he offered him his hand. Him asking about the lights, maybe. It made Harry Terwilliger blink, I can tell you that. Coffey took his hand with surprising gentleness, Paul's hand all but disappearing into his, and that was all of it. He had another moth in the killing bottle. We were done. Paul stepped out of the cell. Harry pulled the door shut on its track and ran both locks. Coffey stood where he was a moment or two longer, as if he didn't know what to do next, and then he sat down on his bunk, clasped his giant's hands between his knees, and lowered his head like a man who grieves or prays. He said something then in his strange, almost-Southern voice. "I couldn't help it, boss," he said. "I tried to take it back, but it was too late." 

"You're going to have you some trouble with Percy," Harry said as we walked back up the hall and into Paul's office. Dean Stanton, sort of the third in command, we didn't actually have such things, a situation Percy Wetmore would have fixed up in a flash was sitting behind Paul's desk, updating the files, another job Paul never seemed to get around to. He barely looked up as we came in, just gave his little glasses a shove with the ball of his thumb and dived back into his paperwork.

"I been having trouble with that peckerwood since the day he came here," Paul said, gingerly, wincing a bit. "Did you hear what he was shouting when he brought that big galoot down?" Paul asked. "Couldn't very well not," Harry said. "I was there, you know." He replied "I was in the john and heard it just fine," Dean said. He drew a sheet of paper to him, held it up into the light so paul could see there was a coffee-ring as well as typing on it, and then tossed it into the waste basket. " 'Dead man walking.' Must have read that in one of those magazines he likes so much."

And he probably had. Percy Wetmore was a great reader of Argosy and Stag and Men's Adventure. There was a prison tale in every issue, it seemed, and Percy read them avidly, like a man doing research. It was like he was trying to find out how to act, and thought the information was in those magazines. He'd come just after we did Anthony Ray, the hatchet-killer and he hadn't actually participated in an execution yet, although he'd witnessed one from the switch-room.

"He knows people," Harry said. "He's connected. You'll have to answer for sending him off the block, and you'll have to answer even harder for expecting him to do some real work." Harry points out. "I don't expect it," Paul said, and I didn't either . . . but I had hopes. Bill Dodge wasn't the sort to let a man just stand around and do the heavy looking-on. "I'm more interested in the big boy, for the time being. Are we going to have trouble with him?" Harry shook his head with decision.

A little after that everyone except me and Dean had left the room, Dean was sitting at the desk while I sat in a chair in the middle of the room, titled enough to be facing Dean, I was in deep thought so I didn't hear Dean ask his question. "Y/n?" Dean asked while snapping his fingers. "I'm sorry Dean, I was thinkin' 'bout somethin'." Dean layed back in the chair and let out a deep sigh. "I was askin' what you thought of Mr. Coffey?" He asked again. "Oh, well he's a mystery too me, big, tall, perfect for causing chaos . . . but he's quiet, shy, and respectful, not to mention afraid of the dark" I said still baffled at the last part.

"Court transcript says he was quiet as a lamb at court down there in Trapingus County," Dean said. He took his little rimless glasses off and began to polish them on his vest. "Of course they had more chains on him than Scrooge saw on Marley's ghost, but he could have kicked up dickens if he'd wanted. That's a pun, son." You smiled deviously at you pun "I know," Dean said, I knew Dean hated my puns, and he'd die drowning in 'em if I didn't know better. "Big one, ain't he?" Dean said. "He is," I agreed. "Monstrous big." 

"Probably have to crank Old Sparky up to Super Bake to fry his ass." Dean said. "Don't worry about Old Sparky," I said absently. "He makes the big 'uns little." Dean pinched the sides of his nose, where there were a couple of angry red patches from his glasses, and nodded. "Yep," he said. "Some truth to that, all right."

I asked,"Does anyone know where he came from before he showed up in . . . Tefton? It was Tefton, wasn't it?"

"Yep," Dean said. "Tefton, down in Trapingus County. Before he showed up there and did what he did, no one seems to know. He just drifted around, I guess. You might be able to find out a little more from the newspapers in the prison library, if you're really interested. They probably won't get around to moving those until next week." He grinned. "You might have to listen to your little buddy b*tching and moaning upstairs, though."

"I might just go have a peek, anyway," I said.

*Itty-bitty time skip*

The prison library was in back of the building that was going to become the prison auto shop at least that was the plan. More pork in someone's pocket was what I thought, but the Depression was on, and I kept my opinions to myself the way I should have kept my mouth shut about Percy, but sometimes a man just can't keep it clapped tight. A person's mouth gets him in more trouble than anything else ever could, most of the time. And the auto shop never happened, anyway the next spring, the prison moved sixty miles down the road to Brighton. More backroom deals, I reckon. More barrels of pork. Wasn't nothing to me.

Administration had gone to a new building on the east side of the yard the infirmary was being moved (whose country-bumpkin idea it had been to put an infirmary on the second floor in the first place was just another of life's mysteries); the library was still partly stocked not that it ever had much in it and standing empty. The old building was a hot clapboard box kind of shouldered in between A and B Blocks. Their bathrooms backed up on it and the whole building was always swimming with this vague pee smell, which was probably the only good reason for the move. The library was L-shaped, and not much bigger than Paul's office. I looked for a fan, but they were all gone. It must have been a hundred degrees in there, and I could feel that hot throb on my skin when I sat down. 

There was one other fellow there after all a scrawny old trusty named Gibbons dozing away in the corner with a Wild West novel in his lap and his hat pulled down over his eyes. The heat wasn't bothering him, nor were the grunts, thumps, and occasional curses from the infirmary upstairs (where it had to be at least ten degrees hotter, and I hoped Percy Wetmore was enjoying it). I didn't bother him, either, but went around to the short side of the L, where the newspapers were kept. I thought they might be gone along with the fans, in spite of what Dean had said. They weren't, though, and the business about the Detterick twins was easily enough looked out; it had been front-page news from the commission of the crime in June right through the trial in late August and September.

Soon I had forgotten the heat and the thumps from upstairs and old Gibbons's wheezy snores. The thought of those little nine-year-old girls--their fluffy heads of blonde hair and their engaging Bobbsey Twins smiles--in connection with Coffey's hulking darkness was unpleasant but impossible to ignore. Given his size, it was easy to imagine him actually eating them, like a giant in a fairy tale. What he had done was even worse, and it was a lucky thing for him that he hadn't just been lynched right there on the riverbank. If, that was, you considered waiting to walk the Green Mile and sit in Old Sparky's lap lucky.

Chapter Text

(Slanted means reading)

(Bold means remembering things)

(pt.2) TWO LITTLE DEAD GIRLS

(Y/n Willows p.o.v)

I took the drafted paper back to the mile, when I got to the mile, I saw Dean walking up the mile making his daily report, stopping ever little bit to check on Del and Coffey. I also saw Harry sitting at the desk, I walked passed them and went into Paul's office, with Paul sitting at his desk. He glanced up at me for moment before returning to his paperwork, he asked "Did you find the fan?" I sat in the chair, "Nope. Somebody must have snagged it already. Or maybe Dean lied and wants to watch the world burn" Paul chuckled at the last bit, then went back to work. I look down at the paper and begin reading, the title said, in big bold letters.

MAN KILLED AND R@PED TWO GIRLS

King cotton had been deposed in the South seventy years before all these things happened and would never be king again, but in those years of the thirties it had a little revival. There were no more cotton plantations, but there were forty or fifty prosperous cotton farms in the southern part of our state. Klaus Detterick owned one of them. He was considered well-to-do because he actually paid his store bill in cash at the end of most months, and he could meet the bank president's eyes if they happened to pass on the street. He and his wife had three children Howard, who was twelve or thereabouts, and the twin girls, Cora and Kathe. 

On a warm night in June of that year, the girls asked for and were given permission to sleep on the screen-enclosed side porch, which ran the length of the house. This was a great treat for them. Their mother kissed them goodnight just shy of nine, when the last light had gone out of the sky. It was the final time she saw either of them until they were in their coffins and the undertaker had repaired the worst of the damage.

Country families went to bed early in those days and slept soundly. Certainly Klaus, Marjorie, and Howie Detterick did on the night the twins were taken. Klaus would almost certainly have been wakened by Bowser, the family's big old half-breed collie, if he had barked, but Bowser didn't. Not that night, not ever again. Klaus was up at first light to do the milking. The porch was on the side of the house away from the barn, and Klaus never thought to look in on the girls. Bowser's failure to join him was no cause for alarm, either. The dog held the cows and the chickens alike in great disdain, and usually hid in his doghouse behind the barn when the chores were being performed, unless called . . . and called energetically, at that.

Marjorie came downstairs fifteen minutes or so after her husband had pulled on his boots in the mudroom and tromped out to the barn. She started the coffee, then put bacon on to fry. The combined smells brought Howie down from his room under the eaves, but not the girls from the porch. She sent Howie out to fetch them as she cracked eggs into the bacon grease. Klaus would want the girls out to get fresh ones as soon as breakfast was over. Except no breakfast was eaten in the Detterick house that morning. Howie came back from the porch, white around the gills and with his formerly sleep-puffy eyes now wide open. "They're gone," he said.

Marjorie went out onto the porch, at first more annoyed than alarmed. She said later that she had supposed, if she had supposed anything, that the girls had decided to take a walk and pick flowers by the dawn's early light. That or some similar green-girl foolishness. One look, and she understood why Howie had been white.

She screamed for Klaus shrieked for him and Klaus came on the dead run, his workboots whitened by the half-full pail of milk he had spilled on them. What he found on the porch would have jellied the legs of the most courageous parent. The blankets in which the girls would have bundled themselves as the night drew on and grew colder had been cast into one corner. The screen door had been yanked off its upper hinge and hung drunkenly out into the dooryard. And on the boards of both the porch and the steps beyond the mutilated screen door, there were spatters of blood.

Marjorie begged her husband not to go hunting after the girls alone, and not to take their son if he felt he had to go after them, but she could have saved her breath. He took the shotgun he kept mounted in the mudroom high out of the reach of little hands, and gave Howie the .22 they had been saving for his birthday in July. Then they went, neither of them paying the slightest attention to the shrieking, weeping woman who wanted to know what they would do if they met a gang of wandering hobos or a bunch of bad people escaped from the county farm over in Laduc. The blood was no longer runny, but it was only tacky yet, and still closer to true red than the maroon that comes when blood has well dried. The abduction hadn't happened too long ago. Klaus must have reasoned that there was still a chance for his girls, and he meant to take it.

Neither one of them could track worth a damn they were gatherers, not hunters, men who went into the woods after coon and deer in their seasons not because they much wanted to, but because it was an expected thing. And the dooryard around the house was a blighted patch of dirt with tracks all overlaid in a meaningless tangle. They went around the barn, and saw almost at once why Bowser, a bad biter but a good barker, hadn't sounded the alarm. 

He lay half in and half out of a doghouse which had been built of leftover barnboards, his head turned most of the way around on his neck. It would have taken a man of enormous power to have done that to such a big animal, the prosecutor later told John Coffey's jury . . . and then he had looked long and meaningfully at the hulking defendant, sitting behind the defense table with his eyes cast down and wearing a brand-new pair of state-bought bib overalls that looked like damnation in and of themselves. Beside the dog, Klaus and Howie found a scrap of cooked link sausage. Coffey had first charmed the dog with treats, and then, as Bowser began to eat the last one, had reached out his hands and broken its neck with one mighty snap of his wrists.

Beyond the barn was Detterick's north pasture, where no cows would graze that day. It was drenched with morning dew, and leading off through it, cutting on a diagonal to the northwest and plain as day, was the beaten track of a man's passage. Even in his state of near-hysteria, Klaus Detterick hesitated at first to follow it. It wasn't fear of the man or men who had taken his daughters it was fear of following the abductor's backtrail . . . of going off in exactly the wrong direction at a time when every second might count.

Howie solved that dilemma by plucking a shred of yellow cotton cloth from a bush growing just beyond the edge of the dooryard. Klaus was shown this same scrap of cloth as he sat on the witness stand, and began to weep as he identified it as a piece of his daughter Kathe's sleeping-shorts. Twenty yards beyond it, hanging from the jutting finger of a juniper shrub, they found a piece of faded green cloth that matched the nightie Cora had been wearing when she kissed her ma and pa goodnight.

The Dettericks, father and son, set off at a near-run with their guns held in front of them, as soldiers do when crossing contested ground under heavy fire. The farmhouse was on the exchange another sign to the neighbors that the Dettericks were prospering, at least moderately, in disastrous times and Marjorie used Central to call as many of her neighbors that were also on the exchange as she could, telling them of the disaster which had fallen like a lightning-stroke out of a clear sky, knowing that each call would produce overlapping ripples, like pebbles tossed rapidly into a stilly pond. Then she lifted the handset one last time, and spoke those words that were almost a trademark of the early telephone systems of that time, at least in the rural South "Hello, Central, are you on the line?" Central was, but for a moment could say nothing that worthy woman was all agog. At last she managed, "Yes, ma'am, Mrs. Detterick, I sure am, oh dear sweet blessed Jesus, I'm a-prayin right now that your little girls are all right-"

"Yes, thank you," Marjorie said. "But you tell the Lord to wait long enough for you to put me through to the high sheriff's office down Tefton, all right?" The Trapingus County high sheriff McGee listened to Marjorie Detterick babble for maybe two minutes, then cut her off with four or five questions--quick and curt, like a trained fighter's flicking little jabs to the face, the kind of punches that are so small and so hard that the blood comes before the sting. When he had answers to these, he said "I'll call Bobo Marchant. He's got dogs. You stay put, Miz Detterick. If your man and your boy come back, make them stay put, too. Try, anyway."

Her man and her boy had, meanwhile, followed the track of the abductor three miles to the northwest, but when his trail ran out of open fields and into piney woods, they lost it. They were farmers, not hunters, and by then they knew it was an animal they were after. Along the way they had found the yellow top that matched Kathe's shorts, and another piece of Cora's nightie. Both items were drenched with blood, and neither Klaus nor Howie was in as much of a hurry as they had been at the start a certain cold certainty must have been filtering into their hot hopes by then, working its way downward the way cold water does, sinking because it is heavier.

They cast into the woods, looking for signs, found none, cast in a second place with similar lack of result, then in a third. This time they found a fantail of blood splashed across the needles of a loblolly pine. They went in the direction it seemed to point for a little way, then began the casting-about process again. It was by then nine o'clock in the morning, and from behind them they began to hear shouting men and baying dogs. Rob McGee had put together a jackleg posse in the time it would have taken Sheriff Cribus to finish his first brandy-sweetened cup of coffee, and by quarter past the hour they reached Klaus and Howie Detterick, the two of them stumbling desperately around on the edge of the woods. 

Soon the men were moving again, with Bobo's dogs leading the way. McGee let Klaus and Howie go on with them they wouldn't have gone back if he'd ordered them, no matter how much they dreaded the outcome, and McGee must have seen that but he made them unload their weapons. The others had done the same, McGee said; it was safer. What he didn't tell them was that the Dettericks were the only ones who had been asked to turn their loads over to the deputy. Half-distracted and wanting only to go through to the end of the nightmare and be done with it, they did as he asked. When Rob McGee got the Dettericks to unload their guns and give him their loads, he probably saved John Coffey's miserable excuse for a life.

The baying, yawping dogs pulled them through two miles of scrub pine, always on that same rough northwest heading. Then they came out on the edge of the Trapingus River. Here they found a wide trampled patch in the grass and low bushes, a patch so bloody that many of the men had to sprint back into the woods and relieve themselves of their breakfasts. They also found the rest of Cora's nightgown lying in this bloody patch, and Howie, who had held up admirably until then, reeled back against his father and nearly fainted.

It was here that Bobo Marchant's dogs had their first and only disagreement of the day. There were six in all, two bloodhounds, two bluetick hounds, and a couple of those terrier like mongrels border Southerners call coon hounds. The coonies wanted to go northwest, upstream along the Trapingus the rest wanted to go in the other direction, southeast. They got all tangled in their leads.

Bobo shortleashed them into a pack, then ran Cora Detterick's torn nightgown under their noses, to kind of remind them what they were doing out on a day when the temperature would be in the mid-nineties by noon and the noseeums were already circling the heads of the possemen in clouds. The coonies took another sniff, decided to vote the straight ticket, and off they all went downstream, in full cry.

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.

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 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. 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.

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.

It took four men to haul the hysterical farmer off John Coffey, and he fetched Coffey, 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 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. McGee thought he'd had seen the strangest eyes in his life "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?" McGee 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 clear 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. 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 r@pes.

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. McGee 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. 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.

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', I thought as I finished reading the story, "how's the readin' goin'?" Paul asked, not looking up from his paper "It's awful, horrible. What happened those too girls is terrible." I said, Paul nodded agreeing with what I had said. He took a long breath. I hadn't noticed before, but his head was shiny with sweat "Hot ain't it?" I asked, knowing the answer, "Is that a real question?" He asked back while taking a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiping his forhead with it.

I chuckled at him, and said "Why don't you go sit by nurse Amani's cooler, y'know? where she keeps the ice." Paul put the handkerchief back in his pocket, "I might just do that, if she'll let me." he said standing up, "Paul, it's Amani, 'course she'll let you" I replied, "Yeah. You're right, I'll be back in a minute" Paul said, walking off to go to the infirmary. Amani, one of the best nurses around here, a real softie, and a pushover, but she ain't stupid, she'll have a go with you if you aggravated her enough.

(Itty-bitty Time skip) 

From one set of old newspapers stacked in a pair of Pomona orange crates, it was enough to make it hard for me to sleep that night. When I had got up at two in the morning, one my dogs had found me sitting in the kitchen, drinking buttermilk and listening to the radio, the weather man said 'cool winds coming from the east'. My dog's name is chubby, he put his head on my knee, as if asking 'What wrong?' I patted his head, "Hey chub's, I had a nightmare is all" I talked to him as if he could respond back, sometimes I believe he tried, with a huff, or bark, or whine, but it wasn't the same, though I appreciated it. I think he might have appreciated it too.

I sighed heavy, "I have to go back to work in six and a half hours, and deal with..Percy all day." Chubby huffed, I told him story about Percy every night, I think chub's hated Percy as much as I did, good dog. "Maybe I'll call out, take a sick day" I said chub's moved over to his bowl, and looked at me. "Are you hungry? Or..." I thought aloud as I came up with what he was trying to tell me.

"You're right chub's, I need to support us, the house, the farm, everything..." I said, so much going on, some tell me it would drive them crazy taking care of everything, but I bet they wouldn't if it was all they had. I got up from my chair and pushed it in, put the buttermilk back, and turned the radio off. I wanted to get some rest, but before I stepped out onto the back porch to let in some cool air and checked the wind direction with a wet thumb, I thought 'the weather man was wrong . . . again'. No matter, if he said there would a tornado tomorrow, I'd definitely miss this cold air in the morning.

I went back inside and turned off the kitchen light, I started up the stairs, each step making a eerie creak, I went into the bedroom, and found my other dog, Bubba, spread out all over my bed, he took up most of it, being both Chubby and bubba were saints bernards, I patted his tummy and told him to move, he didn't, I rolled him over to where I had just enough room on MY bed, soon after, Chubby joined the party and jumped up there with us, nearly crushing me. When i finally got to sleep. I dreamed of girls with shy smiles and blood in their hair.

(Itty-bitty Time skip) 

The next morning, the warden stopped me, as I was going into the building, and asked me to tell Paul to come to his office, because it was important. I walked into Paul's office asking him to stop by the warden's office as soon as he could. However he didn't hurry to Warden Moores's office, instead he stripped off his uniform coat instead, hung it over the back of his chair, today was another hot one. 

Then I sat down and went over Brutus' 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 taken 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. Y/n, Paul, or Harry may have better luck."

"Getting the talk started" was at the center of our job, really. 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 Paul, Harry, 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 from 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. 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 back-slanting 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. Wharton is 22 years old, has Billy the Kid tattooed on upper 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."

Crazy-wild was one way to put it, I couldn't really believe it, but after a while I could. William Wilson Wharton-Willows, or w.w I called him when we were little, the child I saw everyday, I happily fed, I changed his diapers . . . only for him to end up killin' people. William is my half-brother. My mother cheated on my father when I was little, but no matter, same dad or not, I absolutely adored him. He was so adorable, he left home when he was fifteenth looking for work, hadn't seen or heard of him 'till now.

I hear a door creak to my right, it was Paul, I ask "Couldn't put off seein' Mr. Moores anymore, hmm?" Of course I was joking. He fixed his uniform coat, and said "Yup, done with the papers, your me, 'till I'm back." That was Paul's way of saying 'you're in charge, while I'm gone'. A job nobody should take lightly.

There was still 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.

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

"Hey!" Brutal called from outside the door, where he was manning the desk at the head of the hall. "Hey, you three! 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's case, Chief Goat 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 purse-strings 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, so did Paul joined in. You really couldn't help it, because a guard doing quarter-hour check rounds was just what 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 seen men put 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, 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 never taken my turn at swabbing the little creatures, i liked watched them scamper around. 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 looked at Paul, "Leave it be" Paul said, Dean 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 Paul, The truth was, of of us, except dean, kinda wanted to see what he'd do, too. Paul shrugged, "Sure." Brutal threw it down, and we watched it. 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, for the 'non-married or un-loyal, featured a profusely illustrated tale in which Popeye, Bluto, and even Wimpy the hamburger fiend took turns shtupping Olive Oyl, I knew because I had walked into i scene that I wish I would forget already, it includes Curtis Anderson. Sometimes I don't understand why people do what they do.

But besides all that, there were craft items as well, including the crayons Delacroix put to some good use. 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, 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 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." 

I began laugh as Dean said "He's gone nuts," I felt it was humorous, "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-*ss-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, he would probably kill it, or put it in Percy's uniform pocket.

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 four of us saw him."

"Yep, right under the door. He had to squeeze a little, but he made it." I said, "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."

Chapter Text

(Y/n Willows p.o.v)

It was time for the execution of Arlen Bitterbuck, in reality no chief but first elder of his tribe on the Washita Reservation, and a member of the Cherokee Council as well. He had killed a man while drunk, while both of them were drunk, in fact. The Chief had crushed the man's head with a cement block. At issue had been a pair of boots.

Visiting hours for most Cold Mountain prisoners were as rigid as steel beams, but that didn't hold for our boys on E Block. So, Bitterbuck was allowed over to the long room adjacent to the cafeteria, the Arcade. It was divided straight down the middle by mesh interwoven with strands of barbed wire. Here The Chief would visit with his second wife and those of his children who would still treat with him. It was time for the good-byes. He was taken over there by Bill Dodge and two other floaters. The rest of us had work to do, one hour to cram in at least two rehearsals. Three if we could manage it.

Percy didn't make much protest over being put in the switch room with Jack Van Hay for the Bitterbuck electrocution, he was too green to know if he was being given a good spot or a bad one. What he did know was that he had a rectangular mesh window to look through, and although he probably didn't care to be looking at the back of the chair instead of the front, he would still be close enough to see the sparks flying.

Right outside that window was a black wall telephone with no crank or dial on it. That phone could only ring in, and only from one place the governor's office. I've seen lots of jailhouse movies over the years where the official phone rings just as they're getting ready to pull the switch on some poor innocent sap, but ours never rang during all my years on E Block, never once. In the movies, salvation is cheap. So is innocence. You pay a quarter, and a quarter's worth is just what you get. Real life costs more, and most of the answers are different.

We had a tailor's dummy down in the tunnel for the run to the meatwagon, and we had Old Toot-Toot for the rest. Over the years, Toot had somehow become the traditional standin for the condemned, as time-honored in his way as the goose you sit down to on Christmas, whether you like goose or not. Most of the other screws liked him, were amused by his funny accent, also French, but Canadian rather than Cajun, and softened into it's own thing by his years of incarceration in the South. Even Brutal got a kick out of Old Toot. I had to admit so did I, but not so much Paul, found him quite annoying actually.

We were all there for the rehearsal, just as we would all be there for the main event. Brutus Howell had been "put out," as we said, which meant that he would place the cap, monitor the governor's phone-line, summon the doctor from his place by the wall if he was needed, and give the actual order to roll on two when the time came. If it went well, there would be no credit for anyone. If it didn't go well, Brutal would be blamed by the witnesses and I would be blamed by the warden. Neither of us complained about this, it wouldn't have done any good. The world turns, that's all. You can hold on and turn with it, or stand up to protest and be spun right off.

Dean, Harry Terwilliger, and Paul walked down to The Chief's cell for the first rehearsal not three minutes after Bill and his troops had escorted Bitterbuck off the block and over to the Arcade. The cell door was open, and Old Toot-Toot sat on The Chief's bunk, his wispy white hair flying. "There come-stains all over dis sheet," Toot-Toot remarked. "He mus' be tryin to get rid of it before you fellas boil it off." And he cackled.

"Shut up, Toot," Dean said. "Let's play this serious."

"Okay," Toot-Toot said, immediately composing his face into an expression of thunderous gravity. But his eyes twinkled. Old Toot never looked so alive as when he was playing dead. Paul stepped forward. "Arlen Bitterbuck, as an officer of the court and of the state of blah-blah, I have a warrant for blah-blah, such execution to be carried out at twelve-oh-one on blah-blah, will you step forward?"

Toot got off the bunk. "I'm steppin forward, I'm steppin forward, I'm steppin forward," he said.

"Turn around," Dean said, and when Toot-Toot turned, Dean examined the dandruffy top of his head. The crown of The Chief's head would be shaved tomorrow night, and Dean's check then would be to make sure he didn't need a touch-up. Stubble could impede conduction, make things harder. Everything we were doing today was about making things easier. "All right, Arlen, let's go," I said to Toot-Toot, and away we went.

"I'm walkin down the corridor, I'm walkin down the corridor, I'm walkin down the corridor," Toot said. I flanked him on the left, Dean on the right. Harry was directly behind him, and Paul was infront of him. At the head of the corridor we turned right, away from life as it was lived in the exercise yard and toward death as it was died in the storage room. We went into my office, and Toot dropped to his knees without having to be asked. He knew the script, all right, probably better than any of us. God knew he'd been there longer than any of us.

"I'm prayin, I'm prayin, I'm prayin," Toot-Toot said, holding his gnarled hands up. They looked like that famous engraving, you probably know the one I mean. "The Lord is my shepherd, so on n so forth."

"Who's Bitterbuck got?" Harry asked. "We're not going to have some Cherokee medicine man in here shaking his dick, are we?"

"Actually-"

"Still prayin, still prayin, still gettin right with Jesus," Toot overrode me.

"Shut up, you old gink," Dean said.

"I'm prayin!"

"Then pray to yourself."

"What's keepin you guys?" Brutal hollered in from the storage room. That had also been emptied for our use. We were in the killing zone again, all right, it was a thing you could almost smell. "Hold your friggin water!" Harry yelled back. "Don't be so goddam impatient!"

"Prayin," Toot said, grinning his unpleasant sunken grin. "Prayin for patience, just a little goddam patience."

"Actually, Bitterbuck's a Christian, he says," I told them, "and he's perfectly happy with the Baptist guy who came for Tillman Clark. Schuster, his name is. I like him, too. He's fast, and he doesn't get them all worked up. On your feet, Toot. You prayed enough for one day."

"Walkin," Toot said. "Walkin again, walkin again, yes sir, walkin on the Green Mile."

Short as he was, he still had to duck a little to get through the door on the far side of the office. The rest of us had to duck even more. This was a vulnerable time with a real prisoner, and when I looked across to the platform where Old Sparky stood and saw Brutal with his gun drawn. Toot-Toot went down the steps and stopped. The folding wooden chairs, about forty of them, were already in place. Bitterbuck would cross to the platform on an angle that would keep him safely away from the seated spectators, and half a dozen guards would be added for insurance. Bill Dodge would be in charge of those. We had never had a witness menaced by a condemned prisoner in spite of what was, admittedly, a raw set-up . . . and that was how we meant to keep it.

"Ready, boys?" Toot asked when we were back in our original formation at the foot of the stairs leading down from pa office. I nodded, and we walked to the platform. What we looked like more than anything, I often thought, was a color-guard that had forgotten its flag. "What am I supposed to do?" Percy called from behind the wire mesh between the storage room and the switch room.

"Watch and learn," Paul called back. "And keep yer hands off yer wiener," Harry muttered. Toot-Toot heard him, though, and cackled. I wanted to laugh, but Paul would have had a hissy-fit, if I did. We escorted him up onto the platform and Toot turned around on his own, the old vet in action. "Sittin down," he said, "sittin down, sittin down, takin a seat in Old Sparky's lap."

I dropped to my right knee before his right leg. Dean dropped to his left knee before his left leg. It was at this point we ourselves would be most vulnerable to physical attack, should the condemned man go berserk . . . which, every now and then, they did. We dropped our chins to protect our throats. And, of course, we moved to secure the ankles and neutralize the danger as fast as we could. The Chief would be wearing slippers when he took his final promenade, but 'it could have been worse' isn't much comfort to a man with a ruptured larynx. While forty or so spectators, many of them gentlemen of the press, sit in those Grange-hall chairs, watching the whole thing.

We clamped Toot-Toot's ankles. The clamp on Dean's side was slightly bigger, because it carried the juice. When Bitterbuck sat down tomorrow night, he would do so with a shaved left calf. Indians have very little body-hair as a rule, but we would take no chances. While we were clamping Toot-Toot's ankles, Brutal secured his right wrist. Harry stepped smoothly forward and clamped the left. When they were done, Harry nodded to Brutal, and Brutal called back to Van Hay "Roll on one!"

I heard Percy asking Jack Van Hay what that meant, it was hard to believe how little he knew, how little he'd picked up during his time on E Block, and Van Hay's murmur of explanation. Today Roll on one meant nothing, but when he heard Brutal say it tomorrow night, Van Hay would turn the knob that goosed the prison generator behind B Block. The witnesses would hear the genny as a steady low humming, and the lights all over the prison would brighten. In the other cellblocks, prisoners would observe those overbright lights and think it had happened, the execution was over, when in fact it was just beginning.

Brutal stepped around the chair so that Toot could see him. "Arlen Bitterbuck, you have been condemned to die in the electric chair, sentence passed by a jury of your peers and imposed by a judge in good standing in this state. God save the people of this state. Do you have anything to say before sentence is carried out?"

"Yeah," Toot said, eyes gleaming, lips bunched in a toothless happy grin. "I want a fried chicken dinner with gravy on the taters, I want to shit in your hat, and I got to have Mae West sit on my face, because I am one horny motherfucker."

Brutal tried to hold onto his stern expression, but it was impossible. He laughed, he had broke, who was next. Dean he had held his arm over his stomach, like he'd been shot. Harry slapped his knee, heh-heh-heh. They sound like a whole bunch of crazy people.

"Shut up, Brutal," Paul said. "You too, Dean. Harry. Toot." Paul looked at me last, bet I looked real dopey, "Something to say? Y/n?" I looked at him, then at Toot. With my job, possibly my life, on the line, I said "I would've said Hedy Lamarr." Silence, then, well there might have been six hyenas in the room with me.

Brutal threw back his head and began laughing. Dean collapsed onto the edge of the platform like he'd been gutshot, head down between his knees, howling like a coyote, with one hand clapped to his brow as if to keep his brains in there where they belonged. Harry was knocking his own head against the wall and going huh-huh-huh as if he had a glob of food stuck in his throat. Even Jack Van Hay, a man not known for his sense of humor, was laughing. I knew Paul wanted to laugh, he smiled even, but what example would he be setting if he did.

"Alright, Alright, that's enough. Ya'll knock it off!" Toot gave me a grin, then looked at Paul "What's wrong witchoo?" he asked Paul. "It's not funny," He said. "That's what's wrong with me, and if you're not smart enough to get it, you better just keep your gob shut." Except it was funny, in its way, and I suppose that was what had really made him mad.

I looked around, saw Brutal staring at me, still grinning a little. "Sh*t," Paul said, "I'm getting too old for this job."

"Nah," Brutal said. "You're in your prime, Paul." Paul rolled his eyes, "Are you going to be quiet, Toot?" Paul asked. "Yes," he said, his averted face that of the world's oldest, poutiest child.

Paul nodded to Brutal that he should get on with the rehearsal. He took the mask from the brass hook on the back of the chair and rolled it down over Toot-Toot's head, pulling it snug under his chin, which opened the hole at the top to its widest diameter. Then Brutal leaned over, picked the wet circle of sponge out of the bucket, pressed one finger against it, then licked the tip of the finger. That done, he put the sponge back in the bucket. Tomorrow he wouldn't. Tomorrow he would tuck it into the cap perched on the back of the chair. Not today, though, there was no need to get Toot's old head wet.

The cap was steel, and with the straps dangling down on either side, it looked sort of like a doughboy's helmet. Brutal put it on Old Toot-Toot's head, snugging it down over the hole in the black head-covering.

"Gettin the cap, gettin the cap, gettin the cap," Toot said, and now his voice sounded squeezed as well as muffled. The straps held his jaw almost closed, and I suspected Brutal had snugged it down a little tighter than he strictly had to for purposes of rehearsal. He stepped back, faced the empty seats, and said, "Arlen Bitterbuck, electricity shall now be passed through your body until you are dead, in accordance with state law. May God have mercy on your soul."

Brutal turned to the mesh-covered rectangle. "Roll on two."

Old Toot, perhaps trying to recapture his earlier flare of comic genius, began to buck and flail in the chair, as Old Sparky's actual customers almost never did. "Now I'm fryin!" he cried. "Fryin! Fryyyin! Geeeaah! I'm a done tom turkey!"

Harry and Dean, I saw, were not watching this at all. They had turned away from Sparky and were looking across the empty storage room at the door leading back into my office. "Well, I'll be godd*mned," Harry said. "One of the witnesses came a day early."

Sitting in the doorway with its tail curled neatly around its paws, watching with its beady black oilspot eyes, was the mouse.

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The 'execution' went well, then the real execution of Arlen Bitterbuck, council elder of the Washita Cherokee, was it. He got his braids wrong, his hands were shaking too badly to make a good job of it, and his eldest daughter, a woman of thirty-odd, was allowed to plait them nice and even. She wanted to weave feathers in at the tips, the pinfeathers of a hawk, his bird, but I couldn't allow it. They might catch fire and burn. I didn't tell her that, of course, just said it was against regulations. She made no protest, only bowed her head and put her hands to her temples to show her disappointment and her disapproval. She conducted herself with great dignity, that woman, and by doing so practically guaranteed that her father would do the same.

The Chief left his cell with no protest or holding back when the time came. Sometimes we had to pry their fingers off the bars, I broke one or two in my time and have never forgotten the muffled snapping sound, but The Chief wasn't one of those, thank God. He walked strong up the Green Mile to my office, and there he dropped to his knees to pray with Brother Schuster, who had driven down from the Heavenly Light Baptist Church in his flivver. Schuster gave The Chief a few psalms, and The Chief started to cry when Schuster got to the one about lying down beside the still waters. It wasn't bad, though, no hysteria, nothing like that. I had an idea he was thinking about still water so pure and so cold it felt like it was cutting your mouth every time you drank some.

Actually, I like to see them cry a little. It's when they don't that I get worried. A lot of men can't get up from their knees again without help, but The Chief did okay in that department. He swayed a little at first, like he was light-headed, and Dean put out a hand to steady him, but Bitterbuck had already found his balance again on his own, so out we went.

Almost all the chairs were occupied, with the people in them murmuring quietly among themselves, like folks do when they're waiting for a wedding or a funeral to get started. That was the only time Bitterbuck faltered. I don't know if it was any one person in particular that bothered him, or all of them together, but I could hear a low moaning start up in his throat, and all at once the arm I was holding had a drag in it that hadn't been there before. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Harry moving up to cut off The Chief's retreat if Bitterbuck all at once decided he wanted to go hard.

I tightened my grip on his elbow and tapped the inside of his arm with one finger. "Steady, Chief," I said out of the corner of my mouth, not moving my lips. "The only thing most of these people will remember about you is how you go out, so give them something good, show them how a Washita does it."

He glanced at me sideways and gave a little nod. Then he took one of the braids his daughter had made and kissed it. I looked to Brutal, standing at parade rest behind the chair, resplendent in his best blue uniform, all the buttons on the tunic polished and gleaming, his hat sitting square-john perfect on his big head. Paul gave him a little nod and he shot it right back, stepping forward to help Bitterbuck mount the platform if he needed help. Turned out he didn't.

It was less than a minute from the time Bitterbuck sat down in the chair to the moment when Brutal called "Roll on two!" softly back over his shoulder. The lights dimmed down again, but only a little, you wouldn't have noticed it if you hadn't been looking for it. That meant Van Hay had pulled the switch some wit had labeled Mabel's hair dryer. There was a low humming from the cap, and Bitterbuck surged forward against the clamps and the restraining belt across his chest. 

Over against the wall, the prison doctor watched expressionlessly, lips thinned down until his mouth looked like a single white stitch. There was no flopping and flailing, such as Old Toot-Toot had done at rehearsal, only that powerful forward surge, as a man may surge forward from the hips while in the grip of a powerful orgasm. The Chief's blue shirt pulled tight at the buttons, creating little strained smiles of flesh between them.

And there was a smell. Not bad in itself, but unpleasant in its associations. Van Hay gave him thirty seconds, then turned the juice off. The doctor stepped forward from his place and listened with his stethoscope. There was no talk from the witnesses now. The doctor straightened up and looked through the mesh. "Disorganized," he said, and made a twirling, cranking gesture with one finger. 

He had heard a few random heartbeats from Bitterbuck's chest, probably as meaningless as the final jitters of a decapitated chicken, but it was better not to take chances. You didn't want him suddenly sitting up on the gurney when you had him halfway through the tunnel, bawling that he felt like he was on fire.

Van Hay rolled on three and The Chief surged forward again, twisting a little from side to side in the grip of the current. When doc listened this time, he nodded. It was over. We had once again succeeded in destroying what we could not create. Some of the folks in the audience had begun talking in those low voices again, most sat with their heads down, looking at the floor, as if stunned. Or ashamed.

Harry and Dean came up with the stretcher. It was actually Percy's job to take one end, but he didn't know and no one had bothered to tell him. The Chief, still wearing the black silk hood, was loaded onto it by Brutal and me, and we whisked him through the door which led to the tunnel as fast as we could manage it without actually running. Smoke, too much of it, was rising from the hole in the top of the mask, and there was a horrible stench.

"Aw, man!" Percy cried, his voice wavering. "What's that smell?"

"Just get out of my way and stay out of it," Brutal said, shoving past him to get to the wall where there was a mounted fire extinguisher. It was one of the old chemical kind that you had to pump. Dean, meanwhile, had stripped off the hood. It wasn't as bad as it could have been, Bitterbuck's left braid was smouldering like a pile of wet leaves.

"Never mind that thing," Paul told Brutal. Paul slapped at The Chief's head, Percy staring at him, wide-eyed, the whole time, until the smoke quit rising. Then we carried the body down the twelve wooden steps to the tunnel. Here it was as chilly and dank as a dungeon, with the hollow plinkplink sound of dripping water. Hanging lights with crude tin shades, they were made in the prison machine-shop showed a brick tube that ran thirty feet under the highway. The top was curved and wet.

There was a gurney waiting. We loaded Bitterbuck's body onto it, and I made a final check to make sure his hair was out. That one braid was pretty well charred, and I was sorry to see that the cunning little bow on that side of his head was now nothing but a blackened lump.

Percy slapped the dead man's cheek. The flat smacking sound of his hand made us all jump. Percy looked around at us with a cocky smile on his mouth, eyes glittering. Then he looked back at Bitterbuck again. "Adios, Chief," he said. "Hope hell's hot enough for you."

"Don't do that," Brutal said, his voice hollow and declamatory in the dripping tunnel. "He's paid what he owed. He's square with the house again. You keep your hands off him."

"Aw, blow it out," Percy said, but he stepped back uneasily when Brutal moved toward him, shadow rising behind him. But instead of grabbing at Percy, Brutal grabbed hold of the gurney and began pushing Arlen Bitterbuck slowly toward the far end of the tunnel, where his last ride was waiting, parked on the soft shoulder of the highway. The gurney's hard rubber wheels moaned on the boards, its shadow rode the bulging brick wall, waxing and waning, Dean and Harry grasped the sheet at the foot and pulled it up over The Chief's face, which had already begun to take on the waxy, characterless cast of all dead faces, the innocent as well as the guilty.

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It was quite, the next night, until, we heard Del start laughing, Harry was at the desk, on the mile, and soon he was laughing, too. Me and Paul got up and went on down to Delacroix's cell to see what he possibly had to laugh about. "Look, Cap'n!" he said when he saw me. "I done tame me a mouse!"

It was Steamboat Willy. He was in Delacroix's cell. He was sitting on Delacroix's shoulder and looking calmly out through the bars at us with his little oildrop eyes. His tail was curled around his paws, and he looked completely at peace. As for Delacroix, friend, you wouldn't have known it was the same man who'd sat cringing and shuddering at the foot of his bunk not a week before.

"Watch dis!" Delacroix said. The mouse was sitting on his right shoulder. Delacroix stretched out his left arm. The mouse scampered up to the top of Delacroix's head, using the man's hair, which was thick enough in back, at least, to climb up. Then he scampered down the other side, Delacroix giggling as his tail tickled the side of his neck. The mouse ran all the way down his arm to his wrist, then turned, scampered back up to Delacroix's left shoulder, and curled his tail around his feet again.

"I'll be d*mned," Harry said.

"I train him to do that," Delacroix said proudly. "His name is Mr. Jingles."

"Nah," Harry said goodnaturedly. "It's Steamboat Willy, like in the pitcher-show. Boss Howell named him."

"It's Mr. Jingles," Delacroix said. "He whisper it in my ear. Cap'n, can I have a box for him? Can I have a box for my mous', so he can sleep in here wit me?" His voice began to fall into wheedling tones I had heard a thousand times before. "I put him under my bunk and he never be a scrid of trouble, not one."

"Your English gets a hell of a lot better when you want something," Paul said.

"Oh-oh," Harry murmured, nudging Paul. "Here comes trouble."

But Percy didn't look like trouble to me, not that night. He wasn't running his hands through his hair or fiddling with that baton of his, and the top button of his uniform shirt was actually undone. It was the first time I'd seen him that way. Mostly, though, what struck me was the expression on his face. There was a calmness there. Not serenity, I don't think Percy Wetmore had a serene bone in his body, but the look of a man who has discovered he can wait for the things he wants. It was quite a change from the young man I'd had to threaten with Brutus Howell's fists only a few days before.

Delacroix didn't see the change, though, he cringed against the wall of his cell, drawing his knees up to his chest. His eyes seemed to grow until they were taking up half his face. The mouse scampered up on his bald pate and sat there. I don't know if he remembered that he also had reason to distrust Percy, but it certainly looked as if he did. Probably it was just smelling the little Frenchman's fear, and reacting off that.

"Well, well," Percy said. "Looks like you found yourself a friend, Eddie."

Delacroix tried to reply, some hollow defiance about what would happen to Percy if Percy hurt his new pal would have been my guess, but nothing came out. His lower lip trembled a little, but that was all. On top of his head, Mr. Jingles wasn't trembling. He sat perfectly still with his back feet in Delacroix's hair and his front ones splayed on Delacroix's bald skull, looking at Percy, seeming to size him up. The way you'd size up an old enemy.

Percy looked at me. "Isn't that the same one I chased? The one that lives in the restraint room?"

Paul nodded. I had an idea Percy hadn't seen the newly named Mr. Jingles since that last chase, and he showed no signs of wanting to chase it now. "Yes, that's the one," Paul said. "Only Delacroix there says his name is Mr. Jingles, not Steamboat Willy. Says the mouse whispered it in his ear."

"Is that so," Percy said. "Wonders never cease, do they?" I half-expected him to pull out his baton and start tapping it against the bars, just to show Delacroix who was boss, but he only stood there with his hands on his hips, looking in. And for no reason I could have told you in words, Paul said "Delacroix there was just asking for a box, Percy. He thinks that mouse will sleep in it, I guess. That he can keep it for a pet. What do you think about that?"

"I think it'll probably shit up his nose some night while he's sleeping and then run away," Percy said evenly, "but I guess that's the French boy's lookout. I seen a pretty nice cigar box on Toot-Toot's cart the other night. I don't know if he'd give it away, though. Probably want a nickel for it, maybe even a dime." Now I did risk a glance at Harry, and saw his mouth hanging open. 

Percy leaned closer to Delacroix, putting his face between the bars. Delacroix shrank back even farther. I swear to God that he would have melted into that wall if he'd been able. "You got a nickel or maybe as much as a dime to pay for a cigar box, you lugoon?" he asked.

"I got four pennies," Delacroix said. "I give them for a box, if it a good one, s'il est bon."

"I'll tell you what," Percy said. "If that toothless old whoremaster will sell you that Corona box for four cents, I'll sneak some cotton batting out of the dispensary to line it with. We'll make us a regular Mousie Hilton, before we're through." He shifted his eyes to me. "I'm supposed to write a switch-room report about Bitterbuck," he said. "Is there some pens in your office, Paul?"

"Yes, indeed," I said. "Forms, too. Lefthand top drawer."

"Well, that's aces," he said, and went swaggering off. Harry and I looked at each other. "Is he sick, do you think?" Harry asked. "Maybe went to his doctor and found out he's only got three months to live?"

I told him I didn't have the slightest idea what was up. 

Toot-Toot felt that four cents was far too little for a prime Corona cigar box, and in that he was probably right, cigar boxes were highly prized objects in prison. A thousand different small items could be stored in them, the smell was pleasant, and there was something about them that reminded our customers of what it was like to be free men. Because cigarettes were permitted in prison but cigars were not, I imagine.

When Toot still proved reluctant, Brutal went to work on him, first telling him he ought to be ashamed of himself for behaving like such a cheapskate, then promising him that he, Brutus Howell, would personally put that Corona box back in Toot's hands the day after Delacroix's execution. "Six cents might or might not be enough if you was speaking about selling that cigar box, we could have a good old barber-shop argument about that," Brutal said, "but you have to admit it's a great price for renting one. He's gonna walk the Mile in a month, six weeks at the very outside. Why, that box'll be back on the shelf under your cart almost before you know it's gone."

"He could get a soft-hearted judge to give im a stay and still be here to sing 'Should old acquaintances be forgot,' " Toot said, but he knew better and Brutal knew he did. Old Toot-Toot had been pushing that damned Bible-quoting cart of his around Cold Mountain since Pony Express days, practically, and he had plenty of sources . . . better than ours, I thought then. He knew Delacroix was fresh out of soft-hearted judges. All he had left to hope for was the governor, who as a rule didn't issue clemency to folks who had baked half a dozen of his constituents.

"Even if he don't get a stay, that mouse'd be shitting in that box until October, maybe even Thanksgiving," Toot argued, but Brutal could see he was weakening. "Who gonna buy a cigar box some mouse been using for a toilet?"

"Oh jeez-Louise," Brutal said. "That's the numbest thing I've ever heard you say, Toot. I mean, that takes the cake. First, Delacroix will keep the box clean enough to eat a church dinner out of--the way he loves that mouse, he'd lick it clean if that's what it took."

"Easy on dat stuff," Toot said, wrinkling his nose.

"Second," Brutal went on, "mouse-sh*t is no big deal, anyway. It's just hard little pellets, looks like birdshot. Shake it right out. Nothing to it."

Old Toot knew better than to carry his protest any further, he'd been on the yard long enough to understand when he could afford to face into the breeze and when he'd do better to bend in the hurricane. This wasn't exactly a hurricane, but we bluesuits liked the mouse, and we liked the idea of Delacroix having the mouse, and that meant it was at least a gale. So Delacroix got his box, and Percy was as good as his word, two days later the bottom was lined with soft pads of cotton batting from the dispensary. Percy handed them over himself, and I could see the fear in Delacroix's eyes as he reached out through the bars to take them. 

He was afraid Percy would grab his hand and break his fingers. I was a little afraid of it, too, but no such thing happened. That was the closest I ever came to liking Percy, but even then it was hard to mistake the look of cool amusement in his eyes. Delacroix had a pet; Percy had one, too. Delacroix would keep his, petting it and loving it as long as he could; Percy would wait patiently (as patiently as a man like him could, anyway), and then burn his alive.

"Mousie Hilton, open for business," Harry said. "The only question is, will the little bugger use it?"

That question was answered as soon as Delacroix caught Mr. Jingles up in one hand and lowered him gently into the box. The mouse snuggled into the white cotton as if it were Aunt Bea's comforter, and that was his home from then until . . . well, I'll get to the end of Mr. Jingles's story in good time.

A week or so after Mr. Jingles had settled into the cigar box, Delacroix called me and Brutal down to his cell to see something. He did that so much, but I knew if he called, there'd be something interesting happened, Mr. Jingles rolled over on his back with his paws in the air, it was the cutest thing on God's earth.

Delacroix had been pretty much forgotten by the world following his conviction, but he had one relation, an old maiden aunt, I believe, who wrote him once a week. She had also sent him an enormous bag of peppermint candies. Delacroix was not allowed to have the whole bag at once, naturally, it was a fivepounder, and he would have gobbled them until he had to go to the infirmary with stomach-gripes. Like almost every murderer we ever had on the Mile, he had absolutely no understanding of moderation. We'd give them out to him half a dozen at a time, and only then if he remembered to ask.

Mr. Jingles was sitting beside Delacroix on the bunk when we got down there, holding one of those pink candies in his paws and munching contentedly away at it. Delacroix was simply overcome with delight, he was like a classical pianist watching his five-year-old son play his first halting exercises. But don't get me wrong, it was funny, a real hoot. The candy was half the size of Mr. Jingles, and his white-furred belly was already distended from it.

"Take it away from him, Eddie," Brutal said, half-laughing and half-horrified. "Christ almighty Jesus, he'll eat till he busts. I can smell that peppermint from here. How many have you let him have?"

"This his second," Delacroix said, looking a little nervously at Mr. Jingles's belly. "You really think he . . . you know . . . bus' his guts?"

"Might," Brutal said.

That was enough authority for Delacroix. He reached for the half-eaten pink mint. I expected the mouse to nip him, but Mr. Jingles gave over that mint, what remained of it, anyway, as meek as could be. I looked at Brutal, and Brutal gave his head a little shake as if to say no, he didn't understand it, either. Then Mr. Jingles plopped down into his box and lay there on his side in an exhausted way that made all three of us laugh. After that, we got used to seeing the mouse sitting beside Delacroix, holding a mint and munching away on it just as neatly as an old lady at an afternoon tea-party, both of them surrounded by what I later smelled in that hole in the beam, the half-bitter, half-sweet smell of peppermint candy.

There's one more thing to tell you about Mr. Jingles before moving on to the arrival of William Wharton, which was when the cyclone really touched down on E Block. A week or so after the incident of the peppermint candies, around the time when we'd pretty much decided Delacroix wasn't going to feed his pet to death, in other words, the Frenchman called me down to his cell. I was on my own for the time being, Brutal over at the commissary for something, and according to the regs, I was not supposed to approach a prisoner in such circumstances. But since I probably could have shot-putted Delacroix twenty yards one-handed on a good day, I decided to break the rule and see what he wanted.

"Watch this, Madame Williow," he said. "You gonna see what Mr. Jingles can do!" He reached behind the cigar box and brought up a small wooden spool. "Where'd you get that?" I asked him, although I supposed I knew. There was really only one person he could have gotten it from. "Old Toot-Toot," he said. "Watch this."

I was already watching, and could see Mr. Jingles in his box, standing up with his small front paws propped on the edge, his black eyes fixed on the spool Delacroix was holding between the thumb and first finger of his right hand. I felt a funny little chill go up my back. I had never seen a mere mouse attend to something with such sharpness, with such intelligence.

Delacroix bent over and rolled the threadless spool across the floor of his cell. It went easily, like a pair of wheels connected by an axle. The mouse was out of his box in a flash and across the floor after it, like a dog chasing after a stick. I exclaimed with surprise, and Delacroix grinned.

The spool hit the wall and rebounded. Mr. Jingles went around it and pushed it back to the bunk, switching from one end of the spool to the other whenever it looked like it was going to veer off-course. He pushed the spool until it hit Delacroix's foot. Then he looked up at him for a moment, as if to make sure Delacroix had no more immediate tasks for him (a few arithmetic problems to solve, perhaps, or some Latin to parse). Apparently satisfied on this score, Mr. Jingles went back to the cigar box and settled down in it again.

"You taught him that," I said. "Yes ma'am," Delacroix said, his smile only slightly dissembling. "He fetch it every time. Smart as h*ll, ain't he?"

"And the spool?" I asked. "How did you know to fetch that for him, Eddie?"

"He whisper in my ear that he want it," Delacroix said serenely. "Same as he whisper his name."

Delacroix showed all the other guys his mouse's trick . . . all except Percy. To Delacroix, it didn't matter that Percy had suggested the cigar box and procured the cotton with which to line it. Delacroix was like some dogs, kick them once and they never trust you again, no matter how nice you are to them.

Three or four days after Mr. Jingles started doing the trick with the spool, Harry Terwilliger rummaged through the arts and crafts stuff we kept in the restraint room, found the Crayolas, and brought them to Delacroix with a smile that was almost embarrassed. "I thought you might like to make that spool different colors," he said. "Then your little pal'd be like a circus mouse, or something."

"A circus mouse!" Delacroix said, looking completely, rapturously happy. I suppose he was completely happy, maybe for the first time in his whole miserable life. "That just what he is, too! A circus mouse! When I get outta here, he gonna make me rich, like inna circus! You see if he don't."  

Harry told Delacroix to make the spool as colorful as he could as quick as he could, because he'd have to take the crayons back after dinner.

Del made it colorful, all right. When he was done, one end of the spool was yellow, the other end was green, and the drum in the middle was firehouse red. We got used to hearing Delacroix trumpet, "Maintenant, m'sieurs et mesdames! Le cirque presentement le mous' amusant et amazeant!" That wasn't exactly it, but it gives you an idea of that stewpot French of his. Then he'd make this sound way down in his throat--I think it was supposed to represent a drumroll--and fling the spool. 

Mr. Jingles would be after it in a flash, either nosing it back or rolling it with his paws. That second way really was something you would have paid to see in a circus, I think. Delacroix and his mouse and his mouse's brightly colored spool.

Chapter Text

(Y/n Willows p.o.v)

William Wharton, had been found guilty, he was taken to Indianola General Hospital for tests. He had had a number of supposed seizures during the trial, twice serious enough to send him crashing to the floor, where he lay shaking and flopping and drumming his feet on the boards. Wharton's court-appointed lawyer claimed he suffered from "epilepsy spells" and had committed his crimes while of unsound mind, the prosecution claimed the fits were the sham acting of a coward desperate to save his own life. After observing the so-called "epilepsy spells" at first hand, the jury decided the fits were an act. The judge concurred but ordered a series of pre-sentencing tests after the verdict came down. 

It's a blue-eyed wonder that Wharton didn't escape from the hospital, but he didn't. They had him surrounded by guards, I suppose, and perhaps he still had hopes of being declared incompetent by reason of epilepsy. He wasn't. The doctors found nothing wrong with his brain, physiologically, at least, and Billy "the Kid" Wharton was at last bound for Cold Mountain.

The day our new psychopath joined us was an eventful one for me, it was crazy, the boy I had grown up with, and protected from bullies, was the newest addition to the mile. All I could say is that I was nervous, I made it, though, drove in through the south gate, parked in my usual place. It was going on seven o'clock by then. 

(Itty-bitty time skip)

I didn't want to go, I'm sure anyone who knew, would have understood, but nobody did. Probably because I had never talked about it, I had never really mentioned my family, unless someone asked of course.

There were seven of us that went up to Indianola to take charge of Wild Bill, Harry, Dean, Percy, two other guards in the back , plus me and one more up front. They took what we used to call the stagecoach, a Ford panel-truck which had been steel-reinforced and equipped with supposedly bulletproof glass. It looked like a cross between a milk-wagon and an armored car.

Harry Terwilliger was technically in charge of the expedition. He handed his paperwork over to the county sheriff, who in turn handed over Mr. William Wharton, hellraiser extraordinaire. A Cold Mountain prison uniform had been sent ahead, but the sheriff and his men hadn't bothered to put Wharton in it, they left that to our boys. Wharton was dressed in a cotton hospital johnny and cheap felt slippers when they first met him on the second floor of the General Hospital, a scrawny man with a narrow, pimply face and a lot of long, tangly dark blond hair. 

That was the part of him we saw first, his bottom, because Wharton was standing at the window and looking out at the parking lot when they came in. He didn't turn but just stood there, holding the curtains back with one hand, silent as a doll, while Harry whined at the county sheriff about being too lazy to get Wharton into his prison blues and the county sheriff lectured, as every county official I've ever met seems bound to do, about what was his job and what was not.

But when he got tired of fussing, he told Wharton to turn around. Wharton did. I looked, he was . . . the same. He looked like he did when he was little. I didn't know if he recognized me, or if he was too strung out on the drugs, but he smiled widely, I think I'll always remember that smile.

"Put this on," Harry said, indicating the uniform on the foot of the bed, it had been taken out of the brown paper it was wrapped in, but otherwise not touched, it was still folded just as it had been in the prison laundry, with a pair of white cotton boxer shorts poking out of one shirtsleeve and a pair of white socks poking out of the other.

William seemed willing enough to comply, but wasn't able to get very far without help. He managed the boxers, but when it came to the pants, he kept trying to put both legs into the same hole. Finally Dean helped him, getting his feet to go where they belonged and then yanking the trousers up, doing the fly, and snapping the waistband. William only stood there, not even trying to help once he saw that Dean was doing it for him. He stared vacantly across the room, hands lax, and it didn't occur to any of them that he was shamming.

The papers were signed. William Wharton, who had become county property when he was arrested, now became the state's property. He was taken down the back stairs and through the kitchen, surrounded by bluesuits. He walked with his head down and his long-fingered hands dangling. The first time his cap fell off, Dean put it back on him. The second time, he just tucked it into his own back pocket.

On went the chains, one set running between his ankles and another set between his wrists.

The drive to Cold Mountain took an hour. During that whole time, William sat on the lefthand bench up by the cab, head lowered, cuffed hands dangling between his knees. Every now and then he hummed a little.

They drove in through the south gate when they got to the pen, right past my car. The guard on the south pass ran back the big door between the lot and the exercise yard, and the stagecoach drove through. It was a slack time in the yard, not many men out and most of them hoeing in the garden. Pumpkin time, it would have been. They drove straight across to E Block and stopped. The driver opened the door and told them he was going to take the stagecoach over to the motor-pool to have the oil changed, it had been good working with them. The extra guards went with the vehicle, two of them sitting in the back eating apples, the doors now swinging open.

That left me Dean, Harry, and Percy with one shackled prisoner. It should have been enough, would have been enough. We marched him the twelve or so paces to the door that opened into E Block, falling into the same formation we used when escorting prisoners down the Green Mile. I was in front of him, Harry was on his left, Dean was on his right, and Percy was behind, with his baton in his hand. 

I unlocked the door. I selected the right key from the bunch on my belt and slid it into the lock. William came alive just as turned the key and pulled the handle. 

(Third person p.o.v)

A scream was heard through the partly opened door and didn't associate it with anything human at first, it sounded like a dog had gotten into the yard somehow and had been hurt, that perhaps some mean-tempered con had hit it with a hoe.

Wharton lifted his arms, dropped the chain which hung between his wrists over Y/n's head, and commenced to choke her with it, he jerks it tight. Dean grabbed the back of Wharton's shirt, trying to pull him back only to get headbutted and knocked into the wall. Wharton gave Y/n a shove, all the time yelling and gibbering, even laughing. He had his arms cocked at the elbows with his fists up by Y/n's ears, yanking the chain as tight as he could, whipsawing it back and forth.

Harry landed on Wharton's back, wrapping one hand in our new boy's greasy blond hair and slamming his other fist into the side of Wharton's face as hard as he could. He had both a baton of his own and a sidearm pistol, but in his excitement drew neither. We'd had trouble with prisoners before, you bet, but never one who'd taken any of us by surprise the way that Wharton did. 

And he was strong. All that slack looseness was gone. Wharton, now near the duty desk, whirled to his left and flung Harry off. Harry hit the desk and went sprawling.

"Whoooee, boys!" Wharton laughed. "Ain't this a party, now? Is it, or what?" Still screaming and laughing, Wharton went back to choking y/n with his chain. Why not? He knew what we all knew, they could only fry him once. "Get him off, Percy, get 'em off!" Harry screamed, struggling to his feet. But Percy only stood there, hickory baton in hand, eyes as wide as soup-plates. 

(Paul Edgecomb's P.o.v)

I came out of Wharton's cell, dropping my clipboard and pulling my .38. For the second time that day I had forgotten the infection that was heating up my middle. What I saw was the face of an animal, not an intelligent animal, but one filled with cunning . . . and meanness . . . and joy. Yes. He was doing what he had been made to do. 

The place and the circumstances didn't matter. The other thing I saw was Y/n Willow's red, swelling face. She was dying in front of my eyes. Wharton saw the gun in my hand and turned Y/n toward it, so that I'd almost certainly have to hit one to hit the other. 

From over Y/n's shoulder, one blazing blue eye dared me to shoot. Wharton's other eye was hidden by Y/n's hair. Behind them I saw Percy standing irresolute, with his baton half-raised. And then, filling the open doorway to the prison yard, a miracle in the flesh, Brutus Howell. They had finished moving the last of the infirmary equipment, and he had come over to see who wanted coffee.

He acted without a moment's hesitation, shoved Percy aside and into the wall with tooth-rattling force, pulled his own baton out of its loop, and brought it crashing down on the back of Wharton's head with all the force in his massive right arm. There was a dull whock! sound, an almost hollow sound, as if there were no brain at all under Wharton's skull, and the chain finally loosened around Dean's neck. Wharton went down like a sack of meal and Y/n crawled away, hacking harshly and holding one hand to her throat, her eyes bulging.

I knelt by her and she shook her head violently. "Okay," she rasped. "Take care . . . him!" She motioned at Wharton. "Lock! Cell!"

I didn't think he'd need a cell, as hard as Brutal had hit him, I thought he'd need a coffin. No such luck, though. Wharton was conked out, but a long way from dead. He lay sprawled on his side, one arm thrown out so that the tips of his fingers touched the linoleum of the Green Mile, his eyes shut, his breathing slow but regular. There was even a peaceful little smile on his face, as if he'd gone to sleep listening to his favorite lullaby. A tiny red rill of blood was seeping out of his hair and staining the collar of his new prison shirt. That was all.

"Percy," I said. "Help me!" Percy didn't move, only stood against the wall, staring with wide, stunned eyes. I don't think he knew exactly where he was. "Percy, godd*mmit, grab hold of him!" He got moving, then, and Harry helped him. Together the three of us hauled the unconscious Mr. Wharton into his cell while Brutal helped Y/n to her feet and held her as gently as a mother, while Y/n bent over and hacked air back into her lungs.

When we were sure that Y/n was going to keep breathing and that she wasn't going to pass out on the spot, Harry, Dean, and Brutal escorted her over to the infirmary. Delacroix, who had been absolutely silent during the scuffle, he had been in prison lots of times, that one, and knew when it was prudent to keep his yap shut and when it was relatively safe to open it again, began bawling loudly down the corridor as Harry, Dean, and Brutal, helped Y/n out.