“If none of those asshole scribblers put it in their papers -”
“They won’t,” I said. “If they tried, their editors’d kill it. Too gruesome for a family audience. But they won’t even try – they were all vets tonight. Sometimes things go wrong, that’s all. They know it as well as we do.”
Anderson considered a moment longer, then nodded. He turned his attention to Percy, an expression of disgust on his usually pleasant face. “You’re a little asshole,” he said, “and I don’t like you a bit.” He nodded at Percy’s look of flabbergasted surprise. “If you tell any of your candy-ass friends I said that, I’ll deny it until Aunt Rhody’s old gray goose comes back to life, and these men will back me up. You’ve got a problem, son.”
He turned and started up the stairs. I let him get four steps and then said: “Curtis?”
He turned back, eyebrows raised, saying nothing.
“You don’t want to worry too much about Percy,” I said. “He’s moving on to Briar Ridge soon. Bigger and better things. Isn’t that right, Percy?”
“As soon as his transfer comes through,” Brutal added.
“And until it comes, he’s going to call in sick every night,” Dean put in.
That roused Percy, who hadn’t been working at the prison long enough to have accumulated any paid sick-time. He looked at Dean with bright distaste. “Don’t you wish,” he said.
6.
We were back on the block by one-fifteen or so (except for Percy, who had been ordered to clean up the storage room and was sulking his way through the job), me with a report to write. I decided to do it at the duty desk; if I sat in my more comfortable office chair, I’d likely doze off. That probably sounds peculiar to you, given what had happened only an hour before’ but I felt as if I’d lived three lifetimes since eleven o’clock the previous night, all of them without sleep.
John Coffey was standing at his cell door, tears streaming from his strange, distant eyes – it was like watching blood run out of some unhealable but strangely painless wound. Closer to the desk, Wharton was sitting on his bunk, rocking from side to side, and singing a song apparently of his own invention, and not quite nonsense. As well as I can remember, it went something like this:
“Bar-be-cue! Me and you!
Stinky, pinky, phew-phew-phew!
It wasn’t Billy or Philadelphia Philly, it wasn’t Jackie or Roy! It was a warm little number, a hot cucumber, by the name of Delacroix!”
“Shut up, you jerk,” I said.
Wharton grinned, showing his mouthful of dingy teeth. He wasn’t dying, at least not yet; he was up, happy, practically tap-dancing. “Come on in here and make me, why don’t you?” he said happily, and then began another verse of “The Barbecue Song,” making up words not quite at random. There was something going on in there, all right. A kind of green and stinking intelligence that was, in its own way, almost brilliant.
I went down to John Coffey. He wiped away his tears with the heels of his hands. His eyes were red and sore-looking, and it came to me that he was exhausted, too. Why he should have been, a man who trudged around the exercise yard maybe two hours a day and either sat or laid down in his cell the rest of the time, I didn’t know, but I didn’t doubt what I was seeing. It was too clear.
“Poor Del,” he said in a low, hoarse voice. “Poor old Del.”
“Yes,” I said. “Poor old Del. John, are you okay?”
“He’s out of it,” Coffey said. “Del’s out of it. Isn’t he, boss?”
“Yes. Answer my question, John. Are you okay?”
“Del’s out of it, he’s the lucky one. No matter how it happened, he’s the lucky one.”
I thought Delacroix might have given him an argument on that, but didn’t say so. I glanced around Coffey’s cell, instead. “Where’s Mr. Jingles?”
“Ran down there.” He pointed through the bars, down the hall to the restraint-room door.
I nodded. “Well, he’ll be back.”
But he wasn’t; Mr. Jingles’s days on the Green Mile were over. The only trace of him we ever happened on was what Brutal found that winter: a few brightly colored splinters of wood, and a smell of peppermint candy wafting out of a hole in a beam.