The Green Mile

  When I came into his office, he started to get up and I waved him back down. I took the seat across the desk from him, and began by asking about his wife . . . except in our part of the world, that's not how you do it. "How's that pretty gal of yours?" is what I asked, as if Melinda had seen only seventeen summers instead of sixty-two or -three. My concern was genuine--she was a woman I could have loved and married myself, if the lines of our lives had coincided--but I didn't mind diverting him a little from his main business, either.

  He sighed deeply. "Not so well, Paul. Not so well at all."

  "More headaches?"

  "Only one this week, but it was the worst yet--put her flat on her back for most of the day before yesterday. And now she's developed this weakness in her right hand--" He raised his own liverspotted right hand. We both watched it tremble above his blotter for a moment or two, and then he lowered it again. I could tell he would have given just about anything not to be telling me what he was telling me, and I would have given just about anything not to be hearing it. Melinda's headaches had started in the spring, and all that summer her doctor had been saying they were "nervous-tension migraines," perhaps caused by the stress of Hal's coming retirement. Except that neither of them could wait for his retirement, and my own wife had told me that migraine is not a disease of the old but the young; by the time its sufferers reached Melinda Moores's age, they were usually getting better, not worse. And now this weakness of the hand. It didn't sound like nervous tension to me; it sounded like a damned stroke.

  "Dr. Haverstrom wants her to go in hospital up to Indianola," Moores said. "Have some tests. Head X-rays, he means. Who knows what else. She is scared to death." He paused, then added, "Truth to tell, so am I."

  "Yeah, but you see she does it," I said. "Don't wait. If it turns out to be something they can see with an X-ray, it may turn out to be something they can fix."

  "Yes," he agreed, and then, for just a moment--the only one during that part of our interview, as I recall--our eyes met and locked. There was the sort of nakedly perfect understanding between us that needs no words. It could be a stroke, yes. It could also be a cancer growing in her brain, and if it was that, the chances that the doctors at Indianola could do anything about it were slim going on none. This was '32, remember, when even something as relatively simple as a urinary infection was either sulfa and stink or suffer and wait.

  "I thank you for your concern, Paul. Now let's talk about Percy Wetmore."

  I groaned and covered my eyes.

  "I had a call from the state capital this morning," the warden said evenly. "It was quite an angry call, as I'm sure you can imagine. Paul, the governor is so married he's almost not there, if you take my meaning. And his wife has a brother who has one child. That child is Percy Wetmore. Percy called his dad last night, and Percy's dad called Percy's aunt. Do I have to trace the rest of this out for you?"

  "No," I said. "Percy squealed. Just like the schoolroom sissy telling teacher he saw Jack and Jill smooching in the cloakroom."

  "Yep," Moores agreed, "that's about the size of it."

  "You know what happened between Percy and Delacroix when Delacroix came in?" I asked. "Percy and his damned hickory billy-club?"

  "Yes, but--"

  "And you know how he runs it along the bars sometimes, just for the pure hell of it. He's mean, and he's stupid, and I don't know how much longer I can take him. That's the truth."

  We'd known each other five years. That can be a long time for men who get on well, especially when part of the job is trading life for death. What I'm saying is that he understood what I meant. Not that I would quit; not with the Depression walking around outside the prison walls like a dangerous criminal, one that couldn't be caged as our charges were. Better men than me were out on the roads or riding the rods. I was lucky and knew it--children grown and the mortgage, that two-hundred-pound block of marble, had been off my chest for the last two years. But a man's got to eat, and his wife has to eat, too. Also, we were used to sending our daughter and son-in-law twenty bucks whenever we could afford it (and sometimes when we couldn't, if Jane's letters sounded particularly desperate). He was an out-of-work high-school teacher, and if that didn't qualify for desperate back in those days, then the word had no meaning. So no, you didn't walk off a steady-paycheck job like mine . . . not in cold blood, that was. But my blood wasn't cold that fall. The temperatures outside were unseasonable, and the infection crawling around inside me had turned the thermostat up even more. And when a man's in that kind of situation, why, sometimes his fist flies out pretty much of its own accord. And if you slug a connected man like Percy Wetmore once, you might as well just go right on slugging, because there's no going back.

  "Stick with it," Moores said quietly. "That's what I called you in here to say. I have it on good authority--the person who called me this morning, in fact--that Percy has an application in at Briar, and that his application will be accepted."

  "Briar," I said. That was Briar Ridge, one of two state-run hospitals. "What's this kid doing? Touring state facilities?"

  "It's an administration job. Better pay, and papers to push instead of hospital beds in the heat of the day." He gave me a slanted grin. "You know, Paul, you might be shed of him already if you hadn't put him in the switch-room with Van Hay when The Chief walked."

  For a moment what he said seemed so peculiar I didn't have a clue what he was getting at. Maybe I didn't want to have a clue.

  "Where else would I put him?" I asked. "Christ, he hardly knows what he's doing on the block! To make him part of the active execution team--" I didn't finish. Couldn't finish. The potential for screw-ups seemed endless.

  "Nevertheless, you'd do well to put him out for Delacroix. If you want to get rid of him, that is."

  I looked at him with my jaw hung. At last I was able to get it up where it belonged so I could talk. "What are you saying? That he wants to experience one right up close where he can smell the guy's nuts cooking?"

  Moores shrugged. His eyes, so soft when he had been speaking about his wife, now looked flinty. "Delacroix's nuts are going to cook whether Wetmore's on the team or not," he said. "Correct?"

  "Yes, but he could screw up. In fact, Hal, he's almost bound to screw up. And in front of thirty or so witnesses . . . reporters all the way up from Louisiana . . ."

  "You and Brutus Howell will make sure he doesn't," Moores said. "And if he does anyway, it goes on his record, and it'll still be there long after his statehouse connections are gone. You understand?"

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

  "He may want to stay for Coffey, but if we're lucky, he'll get all he needs from Delacroix. You just make sure you put him out for that one."

  I had planned to stick Percy in the switch-room again, then down in the tunnel, riding shotgun on the gurney that would take Delacroix to the meatwagon parked across the road from the prison, but I tossed all those plans back over my shoulder without so much as a second look. I nodded. I had the sense to know it was a gamble I was taking, but I didn't care. If it would get rid of Percy Wetmore, I'd tweak the devil's nose. He could take part in his execution, clamp on the cap, and then look through the grille and tell Van Hay to roll on two; he could watch the little Frenchman ride the lightning that he, Percy Wetmore, had let out of the bottle. Let him have his nasty little thrill, if that's what state-sanctioned murder was to him. Let him go on to Briar Ridge, where he would have his own office and a fan to cool it. And if his uncle by marriage was voted out of office in the next election and he had to find out what work was like in the tough old sunbaked world where not all the bad guys were locked behind bars and sometimes you got your own head whipped, so much the better.

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

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

  "Seems
a little better."

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

  "I don't think so," I said. "So far he's been as quiet as a dead rooster. He's strange--strange eyes--but quiet. We'll keep tabs on him, though. Don't worry about that."

  "You know what he did, of course."

  "Sure."

  He was seeing me through to the outer office by then, where old Miss Hannah sat bashing away at her Underwood as she had ever since the last ice age had ended, it seemed. I was happy to go. All in all, I felt as if I'd gotten off easy. And it was nice to know there was a chance of surviving Percy, after all.

  "You send Melinda a whole basket of my love," I said. "And don't go buying you an extra crate of trouble, either. It'll probably turn out to be nothing but migraine, after all."

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

  As for me, I went back to E Block to start another day. There was paperwork to be read and written, there were floors to be mopped, there were meals to be served, a duty roster to be made out for the following week, there were a hundred details to be seen to. But mostly there was waiting--in prison there's always plenty of that, so much it never gets done. Waiting for Eduard Delacroix to walk the Green Mile, waiting for William Wharton to arrive with his curled lip and Billy the Kid tattoo, and, most of all, waiting for Percy Wetmore to be gone out of my life.

  7

  DELACROIX'S MOUSE was one of God's mysteries. I never saw one in E Block before that summer, and never saw one after that fall, when Delacroix passed from our company on a hot and thundery night in October--passed from it in a manner so unspeakable I can barely bring myself to recall it. Delacroix claimed that he trained that mouse, which started its life among us as Steamboat Willy, but I really think it was the other way around. Dean Stanton felt the same way, and so did Brutal. Both of them were there the night the mouse put in its first appearance, and as Brutal said, "The thing 'us half-tame already, and twice as smart as that Cajun what thought he owned it."

  Dean and I were in my office, going over the record-box for the last year, getting ready to write follow-up letters to witnesses of five executions, and to write follow-ups to follow-ups in another six stretching all the way back to '29. Basically, we wanted to know just one thing: were they pleased with the service? I know it sounds grotesque, but it was an important consideration. As taxpayers they were our customers, but very special ones. A man or a woman who will turn out at midnight to watch a man die has got a special, pressing reason to be there, a special need, and if execution is a proper punishment, then that need ought to be satisfied. They've had a nightmare. The purpose of the execution is to show them that the nightmare is over. Maybe it even works that way. Sometimes.

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

  Dean and I gazed at each other with identical expressions of alarm, thinking that something had happened to either the Indian from Oklahoma (his name was Arlen Bitterbuck, but we called him The Chief . . . or, in Harry Terwilliger's case, Chief 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 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 put men to death--men with supposedly immortal souls--that looked dumber than that mouse.

  It scurried up the Green Mile to a spot that was less than three feet from the duty desk . . . which wasn't something fancy, like you might be imagining, but only the sort of desk the teachers used to sit behind up at the district high school. And there it did stop, curling its tail around its paws as prim as an old lady settling her skirts.

  I stopped laughing all at once, suddenly feeling cold through my flesh all the way to the bones. I want to say I don't know why I felt that way--no one likes to come out with something that's going to make them look or sound ridiculous--but of course I do, and if I can tell the truth about the rest, I guess I can tell the truth about this. For a moment I imagined myself to be that mouse, not a guard at all but just another convicted criminal there on the Green Mile, convicted and condemned but still managing to look bravely up at a desk that must have seemed miles high to it (as the judgment seat of God will no doubt someday seem to us), and at the heavy-voiced, blue-coated giants who sat behind it. Giants that shot its kind with BB guns, or swatted them with brooms, or set traps on them, traps that broke their backs while they crept cautiously over the word VICTOR to nibble at the cheese on the little copper plate.

  There was no broom by the duty desk, but there was a rolling mop-bucket with the mop still in the wringer; I'd taken my turn at swabbing the green lino and all six of the cells shortly before sitting down to the record-box with Dean. I saw that Dean meant to grab the mop and take a swing with it. I touched his wrist just as his fingers touched the slender wooden handle. "Leave it be," I said.

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

  Brutal tore a corner off his corned-beef sandwich and held it out over the front of the desk, tweezed delicately between two fingers. The mouse seemed to look up with an even livelier interest, as if it knew exactly what it was. Probably did; I could see its whiskers twitch as its nose wriggled.

  "Aw, Brutal, no!" Dean exclaimed, then looked at me. "Don't let him do that, Paul! If he's gonna feed the damn thing, we might as well put out the welcome mat for anything on four legs."

  "I just want to see what he'll do," Brutal said. "In the interests of science, like." He looked at me--I was the boss, even in such minor detours from routine as this. I thought about it and shrug
ged like it didn't matter much, one way or another. The truth was, I kind of wanted to see what he'd do, too.

  Well, he ate it--of course. There was a Depression on, after all. But the way he ate it fascinated us all. He approached the fragment of sandwich, sniffed his way around it, and then he sat up in front of it like a dog doing a trick, grabbed it, and pulled the bread apart to get at the meat. He did it as deliberately and knowingly as a man tucking into a good roast-beef dinner in his favorite restaurant. I never saw an animal eat like that, not even a well-trained house dog. And all the while he was eating, his eyes never left us.

  "Either one smart mouse or hungry as hell," a new voice said. It was Bitterbuck. He had awakened and now stood at the bars of his cell, naked except for a pair of saggy-seated boxer shorts. A home-rolled cigarette poked out from between the second and third knuckles of his right hand, and his iron-gray hair lay over his shoulders--once probably muscular but now beginning to soften--in a pair of braids.

  "You got any Injun wisdom about micies, Chief?" Brutal asked, watching the mouse eat. We were all pretty fetched by the neat way it held the bit of corned beef in its forepaws, occasionally turning it or glancing at it, as if in admiration and appreciation.

  "Naw," Bitterbuck said. "Knowed a brave once had a pair of what he claimed were mouse-skin gloves, but I didn't believe it." Then he laughed, as if the whole thing was a joke, and left the bars. We heard the bunk creak as he lay down again.

  That seemed to be the mouse's signal to go. It finished up what it was holding, sniffed at what was left (mostly bread with yellow mustard soaking into it), and then looked back at us, as if it wanted to remember our faces if we met again. Then it turned and scurried off the way it had come, not pausing to do any cell-checks this time. Its hurry made me think of the White Rabbit in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and I smiled. It didn't pause at the door to the restraint room, but disappeared beneath it. The restraint room had soft walls, for people whose brains had softened a little. We kept cleaning equipment stored in there when we didn't need the room for its created purpose, and a few books (most were westerns by Clarence Mulford, but one--loaned out only on special occasions--featured a profusely illustrated tale in which Popeye, Bluto, and even Wimpy the hamburger fiend took turns shtupping Olive Oyl). There were craft items as well, including the crayons Delacroix later put to some good use. Not that he was our problem yet; this was earlier, remember. Also in the restraint room was the jacket no one wanted to wear--white, made of double-sewn canvas, and with the buttons and snaps and buckles going up the back. We all knew how to zip a problem child into that jacket lickety-larrup. They didn't get violent often, our lost boys, but when they did, brother, you didn't wait around for the situation to improve on its own.