Coffey on the Mile

I sat in the Georgia Pines sunroom, my father's fountain pen in my hand, and time was lost to me as I recalled the night Harry and Brutal and I took John Coffey off the Mile and to Melinda Moores, in an effort to save her life. I wrote about the drugging of William Wharton, who fancied himself the second coming of Billy the Kid; I wrote of how we stuck Percy in the straitjacket and jugged him in the restraint room at the end of the Green Mile; I wrote about our strange night journey—both terrifying and exhilarating—and the miracle that befell at the end of it. We saw John Coffey drag a woman back, not just from the edge of her grave, but from what seemed to us to be the very bottom of it.

I wrote and was very faintly aware of the Georgia Pines version of life going on around me. Old folks went down to supper, then trooped off to the Resource Center (yes, you are permitted a chuckle) for their evening dose of network sitcoms. I seem to remember my friend Elaine bringing me a sandwich, and thanking her, and eating it, but I couldn't tell you what time of the evening she brought it, or what was in it. Most of me was back in 1932, when our sandwiches were usually bought off old Toot-Toot's rolling gospel snack-wagon, cold pork a nickel, corned beef a dime.

I remember the place quieting down as the relics who live here made ready for another night of thin and troubled sleep; I heard Mickey—maybe not the best orderly in the place, but certainly the kindest—singing "Red River Valley" in his good tenor as he went around dispensing the evening meds: "From this valley they say you are going... We will miss your bright eyes and sweet smile... " The song made me think of Melinda again, and what she had said to John after the miracle had happened. I dreamed of you. I dreamed you were wandering in the dark, and so was I. We found each other.

Georgia Pines grew quiet, midnight came and passed, and still I wrote. I got to Harry reminding us that, even though we had gotten John back to the prison without being discovered, we still had Percy waiting for us. 'The evening ain't over as long as we got him to contend with' is more or less what Harry said.

That's where my long day of driving my father's pen at last caught up with me. I put it down—just for a few seconds, I thought, so I could flex some life back into the fingers—and then I put my forehead down on my arm and closed my eyes to rest them. When I opened them again and raised my head, morning sun glared in at me through the windows. I looked at my watch and saw it was past eight. I had slept, head on arms like an old drunk, for what must have been six hours. I got up, wincing, trying to stretch some life into my back. I thought about going down to the kitchen, getting some toast, and going for my morning walk, then looked down at the sheafs of scribbled pages scattered across the desk. All at once I decided to put off the walk for awhile. I had a chore, yes, but it could keep, and I didn't feel like playing hide-and-seek with Brad Dolan that morning.

Instead of walking, I'd finish my story. Sometimes it's better to push on through, no matter how much your mind and body may protest. Sometimes it's the only way to get through. And what I remember most about that morning is how desperately I wanted to get free of John Coffey's persistent ghost.

'Okay,' I said. 'One more mile. But first... '

I walked down to the toilet at the end of the second floor hall. As I stood inside there, urinating, I happened to glance up at the smoke detector on the ceiling. That made me think of Elaine, and how she had distracted Dolan so I could go for my walk and do my little chore the day before. I finished peeing with a grin on my face.

I walked back to the sunroom, feeling better (and a lot comfier in my nether regions). Someone—Elaine, I have no doubt—had set down a pot of tea beside my pages. I drank greedily, first one cup, then another, before I even sat down. Then I resumed my place, uncapped the fountain pen, and once more began to write.

I was just slipping fully into my story when a shadow fell on me. I looked up and felt a sinking in my stomach. It was Dolan standing between me and the windows. He was grinning.

'Missed you going on your morning walk, Paulie, he said, 'so I thought I'd come and see what you were up to. Make sure you weren't, you know, sick.'

'You're all heart and a mile wide,' I said. My voice sounded all right—so far, anyway—but my heart was pounding hard. I was afraid of him, and I don't think that realization was entirely new. He reminded me of Percy Wetmore, and I'd never been afraid of him... but when I knew Percy, I had been young.

Brad's smile widened, but became no less pleasant.

'Folks tellin me you been in here all night, Paulie, just writing your little report. Now, that's just no good. Old farts like you need their beauty rest.'

'Percy—' I began, then saw a frown crease his grin and realized my mistake. I took a deep breath and began again. 'Brad, what have you got against me?'

He looked puzzled for a moment, maybe a bit unsettled. Then the grin returned. 'Old-timer,' he said, 'could be I just don't like your face. What you writin, anyway? Last will n testicles?'

He came forward, craning. I slapped my hand over the page I'd been working on. The rest of them I began to rake together with my free hand, crumpling some in my hurry to get them under my arm and under cover.

'Now,' he said, as if speaking to a baby, 'that ain't going to work, you old sweetheart. If Brad wants to look, Brad is going to look. And you can take that to the everfucking bank.'

His hand, young and hideously strong, closed over my wrist, and squeezed. Pain sank into my hand like teeth, and I groaned.

'Let go,' I managed.

'When you let me see,' he replied, and he was no longer smiling. His face was cheerful, though; the kind of good cheer you only see on the faces of folks who enjoy being mean. 'Let me see, Paulie. I want to know what you're writing.' My hand began to move away from the top page. From our trip with John back through the tunnel under the road. 'I want to see if it has anything to do with where you—'

'Let that man alone.'

The voice was like a harsh whipcrack on a dry, hot day... and the way Brad Dolan jumped, you would have thought his ass had been the target. He let go of my hand, which thumped back down on my paperwork, and we both looked toward the door.

Elaine Connelly was standing there, looking fresh and stronger than she had in days. She wore jeans that showed off her slim hips and long legs; there was a blue ribbon in her hair. She had a tray in her arthritic hands—juice, a scrambled egg, toast, more tea. And her eyes were blazing.

'What do you think you're doing?' Brad asked. 'He can't eat up here.'

'He can, and he's going to,' she said in that same dry tone of command. I had never heard it before, but I welcomed it now. I looked for fear in her eyes and saw not a speck—only rage. 'And what you're going to do is get out of here before you go beyond the cockroach level of nuisance to that of slightly larger vermin—Rattus Americanus, let us say!'

He took a step toward her, looking both unsure of himself and absolutely furious. I thought it a dangerous combination, but Elaine didn't flinch as he approached. 'I bet I know who set off that goddam smoke alarm,' Dolan said. 'Might could have been a certain old bitch with claws for hands. Now get out of here. Me and Paulie haven't finished our little talk, yet!'

'His name is Mr. Edgecombe,' she said, 'and if I ever hear you call him Paulie again, I think I can promise you that your days of employment here at Georgia Pines will end, Mr. Dolan.'

'Just who do you think you are?' he asked her. He was hulking over her, now, trying to laugh and not quite making it.

'I think,' she said calmly, 'that I am the grandmother of the man who is currently Speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives. A man who loves his relatives, Mr. Dolan. Especially his older relatives.'

The effortful smile dropped off his face the way that writing comes off a blackboard swiped with a wet sponge. I saw uncertainty, the possibility that he was being bluffed, the fear that he was not, and a certain dawning logical assumption: it would be easy enough to check, she must know that, ergo she was telling the truth.

Suddenly I began to laugh, and although the sound was rusty, it was right. I was remembering how many times Percy Wetmore had threatened us with his connections, back in the bad old days. Now, for the first time in my long, long life, such a threat was being made again... but this time it was being made on my behalf.

Brad Dolan looked at me, glaring, then looked back at her.

'I mean it,' Elaine said. 'At first I thought I'd just let you be—I'm old, and that seemed easiest. But when my friends are threatened and abused, I do not just let be. Now get out of here. And without one more word.'

His lips moved like those of a fish—oh, how badly he wanted to say that one more word (perhaps the one that rhymes with witch). He didn't, though. He gave me a final look, and then strode past her and out into the hall.

I let out my breath in a long, ragged sigh as Elaine set the tray down in front of me and then set herself down across from me. 'Is your grandson really Speaker of the House?' I asked.

'He really is.'

'Then what are you doing here?'

'Speaker of the statehouse makes him powerful enough to deal with a roach like Brad Dolan, but it doesn't make him rich,' she said, laughing. 'Besides, I like it here. I like the company.'

'I will take that as a compliment,' I said, and I did.

'Paul, are you all right? You look so tired.' She reached across the table and brushed my hair away from my forehead and eyebrows. Her fingers were twisted, but her touch was cool and wonderful. I closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them again, I had made a decision.

'I'm all right,' I said. 'And almost finished. Elaine, would you read something?' I offered her the pages I had clumsily swept together. They were probably no longer in the right order—Dolan really had scared me badly—but they were numbered and she could quickly put them right.

She looked at me consideringly, not taking what I was offering. Yet, anyway. 'Are you done?'

'It'll take you until afternoon to read what's there,' I said. 'If you can make it out at all, that is.'

Now she did take the pages, and looked down at them. 'You write with a very fine hand, even when that hand is obviously tired,' she said. 'I'll have no trouble with this.'

'By the time you finish reading, I will have finished writing,' I said. 'You can read the rest in a half an hour or so. And then... if you're still willing... I'd like to show you something.'

'Is it to do with where you go most mornings and afternoons?'

I nodded.

She sat thinking about it for what seemed a long time, then nodded herself and got up with the pages in her hand. 'I'll go out back,' she said. 'The sun is very warm this morning.'

'And the dragon's been vanquished,' I said. 'This time by the lady fair.'

She smiled, bent, and kissed me over the eyebrow in the sensitive place that always makes me shiver. 'We'll hope so,' she said, 'but in my experience, dragons like Brad Dolan are hard to get rid of.' She hesitated. 'Good luck, Paul. I hope you can vanquish whatever it is that has been festering in you.'

'I hope so, too,' I said, and thought of John Coffey. I couldn't help it, John had said. I tried, but it was too late.

I ate the eggs she'd brought, drank the juice, and pushed the toast aside for later. Then I picked up my pen and began to write again, for what I hoped would be the last time.

One last mile.

A green one.

When we brought John back to E Block that night, the gurney was a necessity instead of a luxury. I very much doubt if he could have made it the length of the tunnel on his own; it takes more energy to walk at a crouch than it does upright, and it was a damned low ceiling for the likes of John Coffey. I didn't like to think of him collapsing down there. How would we explain that, on top of trying to explain why we had dressed Percy in the madman's dinner-jacket and tossed him in the restraint room?

But we had the gurney—thank God—and John Coffey lay on it like a beached whale as we pushed him back to the storage-room stairs. He got down off it, staggered, then simply stood with his head lowered, breathing harshly. His skin was so gray he looked as if he'd been rolled in flour. I thought he'd be in the infirmary by noon... if he wasn't dead by noon, that was.

Brutal gave me a grim, desperate look. I gave it right back. 'We can't carry him up, but we can help him,' I said. 'You under his right arm, me under his left.'

'What about me?' Harry asked.

'Walk behind us. If he looks like going over backward, shove him forward again.'

'And if that don't work, kinda crouch down where you think he's gonna land and soften the blow,' Brutal said.

'Gosh,' Harry said thinly, 'you oughta go on the Orpheum Circuit, Brute, that's how funny you are.'

'I got a sense of humor, all right,' Brutal admitted.

In the end, we did manage to get John up the stairs. My biggest worry was that he might faint, but he didn't. 'Go around me and check to make sure the storage room's empty,' I gasped to Harry.

'What should I say if it's not?' Harry asked, squeezing under my arm. ' "Avon calling," and then pop back in here?'

'Don't be a wisenheimer,' Brutal said.

Harry eased the door open a little way and poked his head through. It seemed to me that he stayed that way for a very long time. At last he pulled back, looking almost cheerful. 'Coast's clear. And it's quiet.'

'Let's hope it stays that way,' Brutal said. 'Come on, John Coffey, almost home.'

He was able to cross the storage room under his own power, but we had to help him up the three steps to my office and then almost push him through the little door. When he got to his feet again, he was breathing stertorously, and his eyes had a glassy sheen. Also—I noticed this with real horror—the right side of his mouth had pulled down, making it look like Melinda's had, when we walked into her room and saw her propped up on her pillows.

Dean heard us and came in from the desk at the head of the Green Mile. 'Thank God! I thought you were never coming back, I'd half made up my mind you were caught, or the Warden plugged you, or—' He broke off, really seeing John for the first time. 'Holy cats, what's wrong with him? He looks like he's dying!'

'He's not dying... are you, John?' Brutal said. His eyes flashed Dean a warning.

'Course not, I didn't mean actually dyin'—Dean gave a nervous little laugh—'but, jeepers... '

'Never mind,' I said. 'Help us get him back to his cell.'

Once again we were foothills surrounding a mountain, but now it was a mountain that had suffered a few million years, worth of erosion, one that was blunted and sad. John Coffey moved slowly, breathing through his mouth like an old man who smoked too much, but at least he moved.

'What about Percy?' I asked. 'Has he been kicking up a ruckus?'

'Some at the start,' Dean said. 'Trying to yell through the tape you put over his mouth. Cursing, I believe.'

'Mercy me,' Brutal said. 'A good thing our tender ears were elsewhere.'

'Since then, just a mulekick at the door every once in awhile, you know.' Dean was so relieved to see us that he was babbling. His glasses slipped down to the end of his nose, which was shiny with sweat, and he pushed them back up. We passed Wharton's cell. That worthless young man was flat on his back, snoring like a sousaphone. His eyes were shut this time, all right.

Dean saw me looking and laughed.

'No trouble from that guy! Hasn't moved since he laid back down on his bunk. Dead to the world. As for Percy kicking the door every now and then, I never minded that a bit. Was glad of it, tell you the truth. If he didn't make any noise at all, I'd start wonderin if he hadn't choked to death on that gag you slapped over his cakehole. But that's not the best. You know the best? It's been as quiet as Ash Wednesday morning in New Orleans! Nobody's been down all night!' He said this last in a triumphant, gloating voice. 'We got away with it, boys! We did!'

That made him think of why we'd gone through the whole comedy in the first place, and he asked about Melinda.

'She's fine,' I said. We had reached John 's cell. What Dean had said was just starting to sink in: We got away with it, boys... we did.

'Was it like... you know... the mouse?' Dear asked. He glanced briefly at the empty cell when Delacroix had lived with Mr. Jingles, then down a the restraint room, which had been the mouse's seeming point of origin. His voice dropped, the way people's voices do when they enter a big church where even the silence seems to whisper. 'Was it a... ' He gulped. 'Shoot, you know what I mean—was it a miracle?'

The three of us looked at each other briefly, confirming what we already knew. 'Brought her back from her damn grave is what he did,' Harry said. 'Yeah, it was a miracle, all right.'

Brutal opened the double locks on the cell, and gave John a gentle push inside. 'Go on, now, big boy. Rest awhile. You earned it. We'll just settle Percy's hash—'

'He's a bad man,' John said in a low, mechanical voice.

'That's right, no doubt, wicked as a warlock,' Brutal agreed in his most soothing voice, 'but don't you worry a smidge about him, we're not going to let him near you. You just ease down on that bunk of yours and I'll have that cup of coffee to you in no time. Hot and strong. You'll feel like a new man.'

John sat heavily on his bunk. I thought he'd fall back on it and roll to the wall as he usually did, but he just sat there for the time being, hands clasped loosely between his knees, head lowered, breathing hard through his mouth. The St. Christopher's medal Melinda had given him had fallen out of the top of his shirt and swung back and forth in the air. He'll keep you safe, that's what she'd told him, but John Coffey didn't look a bit safe. He looked like he had taken Melinda's place on the lip of that grave Harry had spoken of.

But I couldn't think about John Coffey just then I turned around to the others. 'Dean, get Percy's pistol and hickory stick.'

'Okay.' He went back up to the desk, unlocked the drawer with the gun and the stick in it, and brought them back.

'Ready?' I asked them. My men—good men, and was never prouder of them than I was that night, nodded. Harry and Dean both looked nervous; Brutal as stolid as ever. 'Okay. I'm going to do the talking. The less the rest of you open your mouths, the better it'll probably be and the quicker it'll probably wrap up... for better or worse. Okay?'

They nodded again. I took a deep breath and walked down to the Green Mile restraint room.

Percy looked up, squinting, when the light fell on him. He was sitting on the floor and licking at the tape I had slapped across his mouth. The part I'd wound around to the back of his head had come free (probably the sweat and brilliantine in his hair had loosened it), and he'd gotten a ways toward getting the rest off, as well. Another hour and he would've been bawling for help at the top of his lungs.

He used his feet to shove himself a little way backward when we came in, then stopped, no doubt realizing that there was nowhere to go except for the southeast corner of the room.

I took his gun and stick from Dean and held them out in Percy's direction. 'Want these back?' I asked.

He looked at me warily, then nodded his head.

'Brutal,' I said. 'Harry. Get him on his feet.'

They bent, hooked him under the canvas arms of the straitjacket, and up he came. I moved toward him until we were almost nose to nose. I could smell the sour sweat in which he'd been basting. Some of it probably came from his efforts to get free of the quiet-down coat, or to administer the occasional kicks to the door Dean had heard, but I thought most of his sweat had come as a result of plain old fear: fear of what we might do to him when we came back.

I'll be okay, they ain't killers, Percy would think... and then, maybe, he'd think of Old Sparky and it would cross his mind that yes, in a way we were killers. I'd done seventy-seven myself, more than any of the men I'd ever put the chest-strap on, more than Sergeant York himself got credit for in World War I. Killing Percy wouldn't be logical, but we'd already behaved illogically, he would have told himself as he sat there with his arms behind him, working with his tongue to get the tape off his mouth. And besides, logic most likely doesn't have much power over a person's thoughts when that person is sitting on the floor of a room with soft walls, wrapped up as neat and tight as any spider ever wrapped a fly.

Which is to say, if I didn't have him where I wanted now, I never would.

'I'll take the tape off your mouth if you promise not to start yowling,' I said. 'I want to have a talk with you, not a shouting match. So what do you say? Will you be quiet?'

I saw relief come up in his eyes as he realized that, if I wanted to talk, he really did stand a good chance of getting out of this with a whole skin. He nodded his head.

'If you start noising off, the tape goes back on,' I said. 'Do you understand that, too?'

Another nod, rather impatient this time.

I reached up, grabbed the end of the runner he'd worked loose, and gave it a hard yank. It made a loud peeling sound. Brutal winced. Percy yipped with pain and began rubbing his lips. He tried to speak, realized he couldn't do it with a hand over his mouth, and lowered it.

'Get me out of this nut-coat, you lugoon,' he spat.

'In a minute,' I said.

'Now! Now! Right n—'

I slapped his face. It was done before I'd even known I was going to do it... but of course I'd known it might come to that. Even back during the first talk about Percy that I'd had with Warden Moores, the one where Hal advised me to put Percy out for the Delacroix execution, I'd known it might come to that. A man's hand is like an animal that's only half-tame; mostly it's good, but sometimes it escapes and bites the first thing it sees.

The sound was a sharp snap, like a breaking branch. Dean gasped. Percy stared at me in utter shock, his eyes so wide they looked as if they must fall out of their sockets. His mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, like the mouth of a fish in an aquarium tank.

'Shut up and listen to me,' I said. 'You deserved to be punished for what you did to Del, and we gave you what you deserved. This was the only way we could do it. We all agreed, except for Dean, and he'll go along with us, because we'll make him sorry if he doesn't. Isn't that so, Dean?'

'Yes,' Dean whispered. He was milk-pale. 'Guess it is.'

'And we'll make you sorry you were ever born,' I went on. 'We'll see that people know about how you sabotaged the Delacroix execution—'

'Sabotaged—!'

'—how you almost got Dean killed. We'll blab enough to keep you out of almost any job your uncle can get you.'

Percy was shaking his head furiously. He didn't believe that, perhaps couldn't believe that. My handprint stood out on his pale cheek like a fortune-teller's sign.

'And no matter what, we'd see you beaten within an inch of your life. We wouldn't have to do it ourselves. We know people, too, Percy, are you so foolish you don't realize that? They aren't up in the state capital, but they still know how to legislate certain matters. These are people who have friends in here, people who have brothers in here, people who have fathers in here. They'd be happy to amputate the nose or the penis of a shitheels like you. They'd do it just so someone they care for could get an extra three hours in the exercise yard each week.'

Percy had stopped shaking his head. Now he was only staring. Tears stood in his eyes, but didn't fall. I think they were tears of rage and frustration. Or maybe I just hoped they were.

'Okay—now look on the sunny side, Percy. Your lips sting a little from having the tape pulled off them, I imagine, but otherwise there's nothing hurt but your pride... and nobody needs to know about that but the people in this room right now. And we'll never tell, will we, boys?'

They shook their heads. 'Course not,' Brutal said. 'Green Mile business stays on the Green Mile. Always has.'

'You're going on to Briar Ridge and we're going to leave you alone until you go,' I said. 'Do you want to leave it at that, Percy, or do you want to play hardball with us?'

There was a long, long silence as he considered—I could almost see the wheels turning in his head as he tried out and rejected possible counters. And at last, I think a more basic truth must have overwhelmed the rest of his calculations: the tape was off his mouth, but he was still wearing the straitjacket and probably he had to piss like a racehorse.

'All right,' he said. 'We'll consider the matter closed. Now get me out of this coat. It feels like my shoulders are—'

Brutal stepped forward, shouldering me aside, and grabbed Percy's face with one big hand—fingers denting in Percy's right cheek, thumb making a deep dimple in his left.

'In a few seconds,' he said. 'First, you listen to me. Paul here is the big boss, and so he has to talk elegant sometimes.'

I tried to remember anything elegant I might've said to Percy and couldn't come up with much. Still, I thought it might be best to keep my mouth shut; Percy looked suitably terrorized, and I didn't want to spoil the effect.

'People don't always understand that being elegant isn't the same as being soft, and that's where I come in. I don't worry about being elegant. I just say things straight out. So here it is, straight out: if you go back on your promise, we'll most likely take an ass-fucking. But then we'll find you—if we have to go all the way to Russia, we'll find you—and we will fuck you, not just up the ass but in every hole you own. We'll fuck you until you'll wish you were dead, and then we'll rub vinegar in the parts that are bleeding. Do you understand me?'

He nodded. With Brutal's hand digging into the soft sides of his face the way it was, Percy looked eerily like Old Toot-Toot.

Brutal let go of him and stepped back. I nodded to Harry, who went behind Percy and started unsnapping and unbuckling.

'Keep it in mind, Percy,' Harry said. 'Keep it in mind and let bygones be bygones.'

All of it suitably scary, three bogeymen in bluesuits... but I felt a kind of knowing despair sweep through me, all the same. He might keep quiet for a day or a week, continuing to calculate the odds on various actions, but in the end two things—his belief in his connections and his inability to walk away from a situation where he saw himself as the loser would combine. When that happened, he would spill his guts. We had perhaps helped to save Melly Moores's life by taking John to her, and I wouldn't have changed that ("not for all the tea in China," as we used to say back in those days), but in the end we were going to hit the canvas and the ref was going to count us out. Short of murder, there was no way we could make Percy keep his end of the bargain, not once he was away from us and had started to get back what passed for his guts.

I took a little sidelong glance at Brutal and saw he knew this, too. Which didn't surprise me. There were no flies on Mrs. Howell's boy Brutus, never had been. He gave me a tiny shrug, just one shoulder lifting an inch and then dropping, but it was enough. So what? that shrug said. What else is there, Paul? We did what we had to do, and we did it the best we could.

Yes. Results hadn't been half-bad, either.

Harry undid the last buckle on the straitjacket. Grimacing with disgust and rage, Percy pawed it off and let it drop at his feet. He wouldn't look at any of us, not directly.

'Give me my gun and my baton,' he said. I handed them over. He dropped the gun into its holster and shoved the hickory stick into its custom loop.

'Percy, if you think about it—'

'Oh, I intend to,' he said, brushing past me. 'I intend to think about it very hard. Starting right now. On my way home. One of you boys can clock me out at quitting time.' He reached the door of the restraint room and turned to survey us with a look of angry, embarrassed contempt—a deadly combination for the secret we'd had some fool's hope of keeping. 'Unless, of course, you want to try explaining why I left early.'

He left the room and went striding up the Green Mile, forgetting in his agitation why that green floored central corridor was so wide. He had mad this mistake once before and had gotten away with it. He would not get away with it again.

I followed him out the door, trying to think of a way to soothe him down—I didn't want him leaving E Block the way he was now, sweaty and dishevelled, with the red print of my hand still on his cheek. The other three followed me.

What happened then happened very fast—it was all over in no more than a minute, perhaps even less. Yet I remember all of it to this day—mostly, I think, because I told Janice everything when I got home and that set it in my mind. What happened afterward—the dawn meeting with Curtis Anderson, the inquest, the press-meeting Hal Moores set up for us (he was back by then, of course), and the eventual Board of Enquiry in the state capital—those things have blurred over the years like so much else in my memory. But as to what actually happened next there on the Green Mile, yes, that I remember perfectly well.

Percy was walking up the right side of the Mile with his head lowered, and I'll say this much: no ordinary Prisoner could have reached him. John Coffey wasn't an ordinary prisoner, though. John Coffey was a giant, and he had a giant's reach.

I saw his long brown arms shoot out from between the bars and yelled, 'Watch it, Percy, watch it!' Percy started to turn, his left hand dropping to the butt of his stick. Then he was seized and yanked against the front of John Coffey's cell, the right side of his face smashing into the bars.

He grunted and turned toward Coffey, raising the hickory club. John was certainly vulnerable to it; his own face was pressed so strenuously into the space between two of the center bars that he looked as if he was trying to squeeze his entire head through. It would have been impossible, of course, but that was how it looked. His right hand groped, found the nape of Percy's neck, curled around it, and yanked Percy's head forward. Percy brought the club down between the bars and onto John 's temple. Blood flowed, but John paid no attention. His mouth pressed against Percy's mouth. I heard a whispering rush—an exhalatory sound, as of long-held breath. Percy jerked like a fish on a hook, trying to get away, but he never had a chance; John 's right hand was pressed to the back of his neck, holding him firm. Their faces seemed to melt together, like the faces of lovers I have seen kissing passionately through bars.

Percy screamed, the sound muffled as it had been through the tape, and made another effort to pull back. For an instant their lips came apart a little, and I saw the black, swirling tide that was flowing out of John Coffey and into Percy Wetmore. What wasn't going into him through his quivering mouth was flowing in by way of his nostrils. Then the hand on the nape of his neck flexed, and Percy was pulled forward onto John 's mouth again; was almost impaled on it.

Percy's left hand sprang open. His treasured hickory baton fell to the green linoleum. He never picked it up again.

I tried to lunge forward, I guess I did lunge forward, but my movements felt old and creaky to myself. I grabbed for my gun, but the strap was still across the burled-walnut grip, and at first I couldn't get it out of its holster. Beneath me, I seemed to feel the floor shake as it had in the back bedroom of the Warden's neat little Cape Cod. That I'm not sure of, but I know that one of the caged lightbulbs overhead broke. Fragments of glass showered down. Harry yelled in surprise.

At last I managed to thumb loose the safety strap over the butt of my.38, but before I could pull it out of its holster, John had thrust Percy away from him and stepped back into his cell. John was grimacing and rubbing his mouth, as if he had tasted something bad.

'What'd he do?' Brutal shouted. 'What'd he do, Paul?'

'Whatever he took out of Melly, Percy's got it now,' I said.

Percy was standing against the bars of Delacroix's old cell. His eyes were wide and blank—double zeros. I approached him carefully, expecting him to start coughing and choking the way John had after he'd finished with Melinda, but he didn't. At first he only stood there.

I snapped my fingers in front of his eyes. 'Percy! Hey, Percy! Wake up!'

Nothing. Brutal joined me, and reached toward Percy's empty face with both hands.

'That isn't going to work,' I said.

Ignoring me, Brutal clapped his hands sharply together twice, right in front of Percy's nose. And it did work, or appeared to work. His eyelids fluttered and he stared around—dazed, like someone hit over the head struggling back to consciousness. He looked from Brutal to me. All these years later, I'm pretty sure he didn't see either of us, but I thought he did then; I thought he was coming out of it.

He pushed away from the bars and swayed a little on his feet. Brutal steadied him. 'Easy, boy, you all right?' Percy didn't answer, just stepped past Brutal and turned toward the duty desk. He wasn't staggering, exactly, but he was listing to port.

Brutal reached out for him. I pushed his hand away. 'Leave him alone.' Would I have said the same if I'd known what was going to happen next? I've asked myself that question a thousand times since the fall of 1932. There's never any answer.

Percy made twelve or fourteen paces, then stopped again, head lowered. He was outside of Wild Bill Wharton's cell by then. Wharton was still making those sousaphone noises. He slept through the whole thing. He slept through his own death, now that I think of it, which made him a lot luckier than most of the men who ended up here. Certainly luckier than he deserved.

Before we knew what was happening, Percy drew his gun, stepped to the bars of Wharton's cell, and emptied all six shots into the sleeping man' just bam-bam-bam, bam-bam-bam, as fast as he could pull the trigger. The sound in that enclosed space was deafening; when I told Janice the story the next morning, I could still hardly hear the sound of my own voice for the ringing in my ears.

We ran at him, all four of us. Dean got there first—I don't know how, as he was behind Brutal and me when Coffey had hold of Percy—but he did. He grabbed Percy's wrist, prepared to wrestle the gun out of Percy's hand, but he didn't have to. Percy just let go, and the gun fell to the floor. His eyes went across us like they were skates and we were ice. There was a low hissing sound and a sharp ammoniac smell as Percy's bladder let go, then a brrrap sound and a thicker stink as he filled the other side of his pants, as well. His eyes had settled on a far corner of the corridor. They were eyes that never saw anything in this real world of ours again, so far as I know. Back near the beginning of this I wrote that Percy was at Briar Ridge by the time that Brutal found the colored slivers of Mr. Jingles's spool a couple of months later, and I didn't lie about that. He never got the office with the fan in the comer, though; never got a bunch of lunatic patients to push around, either. But I imagine he at least got his own private room.

He had connections, after all.

Wharton was lying on his side with his back against the wall of his cell. I couldn't see much then but a lot of blood soaking into the sheet and splattered across the cement, but the coroner said Percy had shot like Annie Oakley. Remembering Dean's story of how Percy had thrown his hickory baton at the mouse that time and barely missed, I wasn't too surprised. This time the range had been shorter and the target not moving. One in the groin, one in the gut, one in the chest, three in the head.

Brutal was coughing and waving at the haze of gunsmoke. I was coughing myself, but hadn't noticed it until then.

'End of the line,' Brutal said. His voice was calm, but there was no mistaking the glaze of panic in his eyes.

I looked down the hallway and saw John Coffey sitting on the end of his bunk. His hands were clasped between his knees again, but his head was up and he no longer looked a bit sick. He nodded at me slightly, and I surprised myself—as I had on the day I offered him my hand—by returning the nod.

'What are we going to do?' Harry gibbered. 'Oh Christ, what are we going to do?'

'Nothing we can do,' Brutal said in that same calm voice. 'We're hung. Aren't we, Paul?'

My mind had begun to move very fast. I looked at Harry and Dean, who were staring at me like scared kids. I looked at Percy, who was standing there with his hands and jaw dangling. Then I looked at my old friend, Brutus Howell.

'We're going to be okay,' I said.

Percy at last commenced coughing. He doubled over, hands on his knees, almost retching. His face began to turn red. I opened my mouth, meaning to tell the others to stand back, but I never got a chance. He made a sound that was a cross between a dry heave and a bullfrog's croak, opened his mouth, and spewed out a cloud of black, swirling stuff. It was so thick that for a moment we couldn't see his head. Harry said 'Oh God save us' in a weak and watery voice. Then the stuff turned a white so dazzling it was like January sun on fresh snow. A moment later the cloud was gone. Percy straightened slowly up and resumed his vacant gaze down the length of the Green Mile.

'We didn't see that,' Brutal said. 'Did we, Paul?'

'No. I didn't and you didn't. Did you see it, Harry?'

'No,' Harry said.

'Dean?'

'See what?' Dean took his glasses off and began to polish them. I thought he would drop them out of his trembling hands, but he managed not to.

'See what, that's good. That's just the ticket. Now listen to your scoutmaster, boys, and get it right the first time, because time is short. It's a simple story. Let's not complicate it.'

I told all this to Jan at around eleven o'clock that morning—the next morning, I almost wrote, but of course it was the same day. The longest one of my whole life, without a doubt. I told it pretty much as I have here, finishing with how William Wharton had ended up lying dead on his bunk, riddled with lead from Percy's sidearm.

No, that's not right. What I actually finished with was the stuff that came out of Percy, the bugs or the whatever-it-was. That was a hard thing to tell, even to your wife, but I told it.

As I talked, she brought me black coffee by the half-cup—at first my hands were shaking too badly to pick up a whole one without spilling it. By the time I finished, the shaking had eased some, and I felt that I could even take some food—an egg, maybe, or some soup.

'The thing that saved us was that we didn't really have to lie, any of us.'

'Just leave a few things out,' she said, and nodded. 'Little things, mostly, like how you took a condemned murderer out of prison, and how he cured a dying woman, and how he drove that Percy Wetmore crazy by—what?—spitting a pureed brain tumor down his throat?'

'I don't know, Jan,' I said. 'I only know that if you keep talking like that, you'll end up either eating that soup yourself, or feeding it to the dog.'

'I'm sorry. But I'm right, aren't I?'

'Yeah,' I said. Except we got away with the—' The what? You couldn't call it an escape, and furlough wasn't right, either. '—the field trip. Not even Percy can tell them about that, if he ever comes back.'

'If he comes back,' she echoed. 'How likely is that?'

I shook my head to indicate I had no idea. But I did, actually; I didn't think he was going to come back, not in 1932, not in '42 or '52, either. In that I was right. Percy Wetmore stayed at Briar Ridge until it burned flat in 1944. Seventeen inmates were killed in that fire, but Percy wasn't one of them. Still silent and blank in every regard—the word I learned to describe that state is catatonic—he was led out by one of the guards long before the fire reached his wing. He went on to another institution—I don't remember the name and guess it doesn't matter, anyway—and died in 1965. So far as I know, the last time he ever spoke was when he told us we could clock him out at quitting time... unless we wanted to explain why he had left early.

The irony was that we never had to explain much of anything. Percy had gone crazy and shot William Wharton to death. That was what we told, and so far as it went, every word was true. When Anderson asked Brutal how Percy had seemed before the shooting and Brutal answered with one word—"Quiet"—I had a terrible moment when I felt that I might burst out laughing. Because that was true, too, Percy had been quiet, for most of his shift he'd had a swatch of friction-tape across his mouth and the best he'd been able to come up with was mmmph, mmmph, mmmph.

Curtis kept Percy there until eight o'clock, Percy as silent as a cigar-store Indian but a lot more eerie. By then Hal Moores had arrived, looking grim but competent, ready to climb back into the saddle. Curtis Anderson let him do just that, and with a sigh of relief the rest of us could almost hear. The bewildered, frightened old man was gone; it was the Warden who strode up to Percy, grabbed him by the shoulders with his big hands, and shook him hard.

'Son!' he shouted into Percy's blank face—a face that was already starting to soften like wax, I thought. 'Son! Do you hear me? Talk to me if you hear me! I want to know what happened!'

Nothing from Percy, of course. Anderson wanted to get the Warden aside, discuss how they were going to handle it—it was a political hot potato if there had ever been one—but Moores put him off, at least for the time being, and drew me down the Mile. John Coffey was lying on his bunk with his face to the wall, legs dangling outrageously, as they always did. He appeared to be sleeping and probably was... but he wasn't always what he appeared, as we had found out.

'Did what happened at my house have anything to do with what happened here when you got back?' Moores asked in a low voice. 'I'll cover you as much as I can, even if it means my job, but I have to know.'

I shook my head. When I spoke, I also kept my voice low-pitched. There were now almost a dozen screws milling around at the head of the aisle. Another was photographing Wharton in his cell. Curtis Anderson had turned to watch that, and for the time being, only Brutal was watching us. 'No, sir. We got John back into his cell just like you see, then let Percy out of the restraint room, where we'd stashed him for safekeeping. I thought he'd be hot under the collar, but he wasn't. Just asked for his sidearm and baton. He didn't say anything else, just walked off up the corridor. Then, when he got to Wharton's cell he pulled his gun and started shooting.'

'Do You think being in the restraint room... something to his mind?'

'No, sir.'

'Did you put him in the straitjacket?'

'No, sir. There was no need.'

'He was quiet? Didn't struggle?'

'No struggle.'

'Even when he saw you meant to put him in restraint room, he was quiet and didn't struggle.'

'That's right.' I felt an urge to embroider on this to give Percy at least a line or two—and conquered it. Simpler would be better, and I knew it. 'There, was no fuss. He just went over into one of the far corners and sat down.'

'Didn't speak of Wharton then?'

'No, sir. '

'Didn't speak of Coffey, either?'

I shook my head.

'Could Percy have been laying for Wharton? Did he have something against the man?'

'That might be,' I said, lowering my voice even more. 'Percy was careless about where he walked, Hal. One time Wharton reached out, grabbed him up against the bars, and messed him over some.' I paused. 'Felt him up, you could say.'

'No worse than that? just... "messed him over"... and that was all?'

'Yes, but it was pretty bad for Percy, just the same. Wharton said something about how he'd rather screw Percy than Percy's sister.'

'Urn.' Moores kept looking sideways at John Coffey, as if he needed constant reassurance that Coffey was a real person, actually in the world. 'It doesn't explain what's happened to him, but it goes a good piece toward explaining why it was Wharton he turned on and not Coffey or one of you men. And speaking of your men, Paul, will they all tell the same story?'

'Yes, sir,' I told him. 'And they will,' I said to Jan, starting in on the soup she brought to the table. 'I'll see to it.'

'You did lie,' she said. 'You lied to Hal.'

Well, that's a wife for you, isn't it? Always poking around for moth-holes in your best suit, and finding one more often than not.

'I guess, if you want to look at it that way. I didn't tell him anything we both won't be able to live with, though. Hal's in the clear, I think. He wasn't even there, after all. He was home tending his wife until Curtis called him.'

'Did he say how Melinda was?'

'Not then, there wasn't time, but we spoke again just as Brutal and I were leaving. Melly doesn't remember much, but she's fine. Up and walking. Talking about next year's flower beds.'

My wife sat watching me eat for some little time. Then she asked, 'Does Hal know it's a miracle, Paul? Does he understand that?'

'Yes. We all do, all of us that were there.'

'Part of me wishes I'd been there, too,' she said, 'but I think most of me is glad I wasn't. If I'd seen the scales fall from Saul's eyes on the road to Damascus. I probably would have died of a heart attack.'

'Naw,' I said, tilting my bowl to capture the last spoonful, 'probably would have cooked him some soup. This is pretty fine, hon.'

'Good.' But she wasn't really thinking about soup or cooking or Saul's conversion on the Damascus road. She was looking out the window toward the ridges, her chin propped on her hand, her eyes as hazy as those ridges look on summer mornings when it's going to be hot. Summer mornings like the one when the Detterick girls had been found, I thought for no reason. I wondered why they hadn't screamed. Their killer had hurt them; there had been blood on the porch, and on the steps. So why hadn't they screamed?

'You think John Coffey really killed that man Wharton, don't you?' Janice asked, looking back from the window at last. 'Not that it was an accident, or anything like that; you think he used Percy Wetmore on Wharton like a gun.'

'Yes.'

'Why?'

'I don't know.'

'Tell me again about what happened when you took Coffey off the Mile, would you? Just that part.'

So I did. I told her how the skinny arm shooting out from between the bars and grabbing John 's bicep had reminded me of a snake-one of the water moccasins we were all scared of when we were kids swimming in the river—and how Coffey had said Wharton was a bad man. Almost whispering it.

'And Wharton said...?' My wife was looking out the window again, but she was listening, all right.

'Wharton said, "That's right, nigger, bad as you'd want." '

'And that's all.'

'Yes. I had a feeling that something was going to happen right then, but nothing did. Brutal took Wharton's hand off John and told him to lie down, which Wharton did. He was out on his feet to start with. Said something about how niggers should have their own electric chair, and that was all. We went about our business.'

'John Coffey called him a bad man.'

'Yep. Said the same thing about Percy once, too. Maybe more than once. I can't remember exactly when, but I know he did.'

'But Wharton never did anything to John Coffey personally, did he? Like he did to Percy, I mean.'

'No. The way their cells were—Wharton up by the duty desk on one side, John down a ways on the other—they could hardly see each other.'

'Tell me again how Coffey looked when Wharton grabbed him.'

'Janice, this isn't getting us anywhere.'

'Maybe it isn't and maybe it is. Tell me again how he looked.'

I sighed. 'I guess you'd have to say shocked. He gasped. Like you would if you were sunning at the beach and I snuck up and trickled a little cold water down your back. Or like he'd been slapped.'

'Well, sure,' she said. 'Being grabbed out of nowhere like that startled him, woke him up for a second.'

'Yes,' I said. And then, 'No.'

'Well which is it? Yes or no?'

'No. It wasn't being startled. It was like when he wanted me to come into his cell so he could cure my infection. Or when he wanted me to hand him the mouse. It was being surprised, but not by being touched... not exactly, anyway... oh Christ, Jan, I don't know.'

'All right, we'll leave it,' she said. 'I just can't imagine why John did it, that's all. It's not as if he's violent by nature. Which leads to another question, Paul: how can you execute him if you're right about those girls? How can you possibly put him in the electric chair if someone else—'

I jerked in my chair. My elbow struck my bowl and knocked it off onto the floor, where it broke. An idea had come to me. It was more intuition than logic at that point, but it had a certain black elegance.

'Paul?' Janice asked, alarmed. 'What's wrong?'

'I don't know,' I said. 'I don't know anything for sure, but I'm going to find out if I can.'

The aftermath of the shooting was a three-ring circus with the governor in one ring, the prison in another, and poor brain-blasted Percy Wetmore in the third. And the ringmaster? Well, the various gentlemen of the press took turns at that job. They weren't as bad then as they are now—they didn't allow themselves to be as bad—but even back then before Geraldo and Mike Wallace and the rest of them, they could gallop along pretty good when they really got the bit in their teeth. That was what happened this time, and while the show lasted, it was a good one.

But even the liveliest circus, the one with the scariest freaks, funniest clowns, and wildest animals, has to leave town eventually. This one left after the Board of Enquiry, which sounds pretty special and fearsome, but actually turned out to be pretty tame and perfunctory. Under other circumstances, the governor undoubtedly would have demanded someone's head on a platter, but not this time. His nephew by marriage—his wife's own blood kin—had gone crackers and killed a man. Had killed a killer—there was that, at least, and thank God for it—but Percy had still shot the man as he lay sleeping in his cell, which was not quite sporting. When you added in the fact that the young man in question remained just as mad as a March hare, you could understand why the governor only wanted it to go away, and as soon as possible.

Our trip to Warden Moores's house in Harry Terwilliger's truck never came out. The fact that Percy had been straitjacketed and locked in the restraint room during the time we were away never came out. The fact that William Wharton had been doped to the gills when Percy shot him never came out, either. Why would it? The authorities had no reason to suspect anything in Wharton's system but half a dozen slugs. The coroner removed those, the mortician put him in a pine box, and that was the end of the man with Billy the Kid tattooed on his left forearm. Good riddance to bad rubbish, you might say.

All in all, the uproar lasted about two weeks. During that time I didn't dare fart sideways, let alone so take a day off to investigate the idea I'd gotten at my kitchen table on the morning after all the upheavals. I knew for sure that the circus had left town when I got to work on a day just shy of the middle of November—the twelfth, I think, but don't hold me to that. That was the day I found the piece of paper I'd been dreading on the middle of my desk: the DOE on John Coffey. Curtis Anderson had signed it instead of Hal Moores, but of course it was just as legal either way, and of course it had needed to go through Hal in order to get to me. I could imagine Hal sitting at his desk in Administration with that piece of paper in his hand, sitting there and thinking of his wife, who had become something of a nine days, wonder to the doctors at Indianola General Hospital. She'd had her own DOE papers handed to her by those doctors, but John Coffey had tom them up. Now, however, it was Coffey's turn to walk the Green Mile, and who among us could stop it? Who among us would stop it?

The date on the death warrant was November 20th. Three days after I got it—the fifteenth, I think—I had Janice call me in sick. A cup of coffee later I was driving north in my badly sprung but otherwise reliable Ford. Janice had kissed me on my way and wished me good luck; I'd thanked her but no longer had any clear idea what good luck would be—finding what I was looking for or not finding it. All I knew for sure is that I didn't feel much like singing as I drove. Not that day.

By three that afternoon I was well up in the ridge country. I got to the Purdom County Courthouse just before it closed, looked at some records, then had a visit from the Sheriff, who had been informed by the county clerk that a stranger was poking in amongst the local skeletons. Sheriff Catlett wanted to know what I thought I was doing. I told him. Catlett thought it over and then told me something interesting. He said he'd deny he'd ever said a word if I spread it around, and it wasn't conclusive anyway, but it was something, all right. It was sure something. I thought about it all the way home, and that night there was a lot of thinking and precious little sleeping on my side of the bed.

The next day I got up while the sun was still just a rumor in the east and drove downstate to Trapingus County. I skirted around Homer Cribus, that great bag of guts and waters, speaking to Deputy Sheriff Rob McGee instead. McGee didn't want to hear what I was telling him. Most vehemently didn't want to hear it. At one point I was pretty sure he was going to punch me in the mouth so he could stop hearing it, but in the end he agreed to go out and ask Klaus Detterick a couple of questions. Mostly, I think, so he could be sure I wouldn't. 'He's only thirty-nine, but he looks like an old man these days,' McGee said, 'and he don't need a smartass prison guard who thinks he's a detective to stir him up just when some of the sorrow has started to settle. You stay right here in town. I don't want you within hailing distance of the Detterick farm, but I want to be able to find you when I'm done talking to Klaus. If you start feeling restless, have a piece of pie down there in the diner. It'll weight you down.' I ended up having two pieces, and it was kind of heavy.

When McGee came into the diner and sat down at the counter next to me, I tried to read his face and failed. 'Well?' I asked.

'Come on home with me, we'll talk there,' he said. 'This place is a mite too public for my taste.'

We had our conference on Rob McGee's front porch. Both. of us were bundled up and chilly, but Mrs. McGee didn't allow smoking anywhere in her house. She was a woman ahead of her time. McGee talked awhile. He did it like a man who doesn't in the least enjoy what he's hearing out of his own mouth.

'It proves nothing, you know that, don't you?' he asked when he was pretty well done. His tone was belligerent, and he poked his home-rolled cigarette at me in an aggressive way as he spoke, but his face was sick. Not all proof is what you see and hear in a court of law, and we both knew it. I have an idea that was the only time in his life when Deputy McGee wished he was as country-dumb as his boss.

'I know,' I said.

'And if you're thinking of getting him a new trial on the basis of this one thing, you better think again, se or. John Coffey is a Negro, and in Trapingus County we're awful particular about giving new trials to Negroes.'

'I know that, too.'

'So what are you going to do?'

I pitched my cigarette over the porch rail and into the street. Then I stood up. It was going to be a long, cold ride back home, and the sooner I got going the sooner the trip would be done. 'That I wish I did know, Deputy McGee,' I said, 'but I don't. The only thing I know tonight for a fact is that second piece of pie was a mistake.'

'I'll tell you something, smart guy,' he said, still speaking in that tone of hollow belligerence. 'I don't think you should have opened Pandora's Box in the first place.'

'It wasn't me opened it,' I said, and then drove home.

I got there late—after midnight—but my wife was waiting up for me. I'd suspected she would be, but it still did my heart good to see her, and to have her put her arms around my neck and her body nice and firm against mine. 'Hello, stranger,' she said, and then touched me down below. 'Nothing wrong with this fellow now, is there? He's just as healthy as can be.'

'Yes ma'am,' I said, and lifted her up in my arms. I took her into the bedroom and we made love as sweet as sugar, and as I came to my climax, that delicious feeling of going out and letting go, I thought of John Coffey's endlessly weeping eyes. And of Melinda Moores saying I dreamed you were wandering in the dark, and so was I.

Still lying on top of my wife, with her arms around my neck and our thighs together, I began to weep myself.

'Paul!' she said, shocked and afraid. I don't think she'd seen me in tears more than half a dozen times before in the entire course of our marriage. I have never been, in the ordinary course of things, a crying man. 'Paul, what is it?'

'I know everything there is to know,' I said through my tears. 'I know too goddam much, if you want to know the truth. I'm supposed to electrocute John Coffey in less than a week's time, but it was William Wharton who killed the Detterick girls. It was Wild Bill.'

The next day, the same bunch of screws who had eaten lunch in my kitchen after the botched Delacroix execution ate lunch there again. This time there was a fifth at our council of war: my wife. It was Jan who convinced me to tell the others; my first impulse had been not to. Wasn't it bad enough, I asked her, that we knew?

'You're not thinking clear about it,' she'd answered. 'Probably because you're still upset. They already know the worst thing, that John's on the spot for a crime he didn't commit. If anything, this makes it a little better.'

I wasn't so sure, but I deferred to her judgement. I expected an uproar when I told Brutal, Dean, and Harry what I knew (I couldn't prove it, but I knew, all right), but at first there was only thoughtful silence. Then, taking another of Janice's biscuits and beginning to put an outrageous amount of butter on it, Dean said: 'Did John see him, do you think? Did he see Wharton drop the girls, maybe even rape them?'

'I think if he'd seen that, he would have tried to stop it,' I said. 'As for seeing Wharton, maybe as he ran off, I suppose he might have. If he did, he forgot it later.'

'Sure,' Dean said. 'He's special, but that doesn't make him bright. He only found out it was Wharton when Wharton reached through the bars of his cell and touched him.'

Brutal was nodding. 'That's why John looked so surprised... so shocked. Remember the way his eyes opened?'

I nodded. 'He used Percy on Wharton like a gun, that was what Janice said, and it was what I kept thinking about. Why would John Coffey want to kill Wild Bill? Percy, maybe—Percy stamped on Delacroix's mouse right in front of him, Percy burned Delacroix alive and John knew it—but Wharton? Wharton messed with most of us in one way or another, but he didn't mess with John at all, so far as I know—hardly passed four dozen words with him the whole time they were on the Mile together, and half of those were that last night. Why would he want to? He was from Purdom County, and as far as white boys from up there are concerned, you don't even see a Negro unless he happens to step into your road. So why did he do it? What could he've seen or felt when Wharton touched him that was so bad that he saved back the poison he took out of Melly's body?'

'And half-killed himself doing it, too,' Brutal said.

'More like three-quarters. And the Detterick twins were all I could think of that was bad enough to explain what he did. I told myself the idea was nuts, too much of a coincidence, it just couldn't be. Then I remembered something Curtis Anderson wrote in the first memo I ever got about Wharton—that Wharton was crazy-wild, and that he'd rambled all over the state before the holdup where he killed all those people. Rambled all over the state. That stuck with me. Then there was the way he tried to choke Dean when he came in. That got me thinking about—'

'The dog,' Dean said. He was rubbing his neck where Wharton had wrapped the chain. I don't think he even knew he was doing it. 'How the dog's neck was broken.'

'Anyway, I went on up to Purdom County to check Wharton's court records—all we had here were the reports on the murders that got him to the Green Mile. The end of his career, in other words. I wanted the beginning.'

'Lot of trouble?' Brutal asked.

'Yeah. Vandalism, petty theft, setting haystack fires, even theft of an explosive—he and a friend swiped a stick of dynamite and set it off down by a creek. He got going early, ten years old, but what I wanted wasn't there. Then the Sheriff turned up to see who I was and what I was doing, and that was actually lucky. I fibbed, told him that a cell-search had turned up a bunch of pictures in Wharton's mattress—little girls with no clothes on. I said I'd wanted to see if Wharton had any kind of history as a pederast, because there were a couple of unsolved cases up in Tennessee that I'd heard about. I was careful never to mention the Detterick twins. I don't think they crossed his mind, either.'

'Course not,' Harry said. 'Why would they have? That case is solved, after all.'

'I said I guessed there was no sense chasing the idea, since there was nothing in Wharton's back file. I mean, there was plenty in the file, but none of it about that sort of thing. Then the Sheriff—Catlett, his name is—laughed and said not everything a bad apple like Bill Wharton did was in the court files, and what did it matter, anyway? He was dead, wasn't he?

'I said I was doing it just to satisfy my own curiosity, nothing else, and that relaxed him. He took me back to his office, sat me down, gave me a cup of coffee and a sinker, and told me that sixteen months ago, when Wharton was barely eighteen, a man in the western part of the county caught him in the barn with his daughter. It wasn't rape, exactly; the fellow described it to Catlett as "not much more'n stinkfinger." Sorry, honey.'

'That's all right,' Janice said. She looked pale, though.

'How old was the girl?' Brutal asked.

'Nine,' I said.

He winced.

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