“I think he’ll keep his mouth shut,” I said.
“Really?” Dean looked skeptical. He took off his glasses and began to polish them. “Convince me.”
“First, he won’t know what really happened – he’s going to judge us by himself and think it was just a prank. Second – and more important – he’ll be afraid to say anything. That’s what I’m really counting on.
We tell him that if he starts writing letters and making phone calls, we start writing letters and making phone calls.”
“About the execution,” Harry said.
“And about the way he froze when Wharton attacked Dean,” Brutal said. “I think people finding out about that is what Percy Wetmore’s really afraid of.” He nodded slowly and thoughtfully. “It could work.
But Paul… wouldn’t it make more sense to bring Mrs. Moores to Coffey than Coffey to Mrs. Moores? We could take care of Percy pretty much the way you laid it out, then bring her in through the tunnel instead of taking Coffey out that way.”
I shook my head. “Never happen. Not in a million years.”
“Because of Warden Moores?”
“Mat’s right. He’s so hardheaded he makes old Doubting Thomas look like Joan of Arc. If we bring Coffey to his house, I think we can surprise him into at least letting Coffey make the try. Otherwise…”
“What were you thinking about using for a vehicle?” Brutal asked.
“My first thought was the stagecoach,” I said, “but we’d never get it out of the yard without being noticed, and everyone within a twenty-mile radius knows what it looks like, anyway. I guess maybe we can use my Ford.”
“Guess again,” Dean said, popping his specs back onto his nose. “You couldn’t get John Coffey into your car if you stripped him naked, covered him with lard, and used a shoehorn. You’re so used to looking at him that you’ve forgotten how big he is.”
I had no reply to that. Most of my attention that morning had been focused on the problem of Percy – and
the lesser but not inconsiderable problem of Wild Bill Wharton. Now I realized that transportation wasn’t going to be as simple as I had hoped.
Harry Terwilliger picked up the remains of his second sandwich, looked at it for a second, then put it down again. “If we was to actually do this crazy thing,” he said, “I guess we could use my pickup truck.
Sit him in the back of that. Wouldn’t be nobody much on the roads at that hour. We’re talking about well after midnight, ain’t we?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You guys’re forgetting one thing,” Dean said. “I know Coffey’s been pretty quiet ever since he came on the block, doesn’t do much but lay there on his bunk and leak from the eyes, but he’s a murderer. Also, he’s huge. If he decided he wanted to escape out of the back of Harry’s truck, the only way we could stop him would be to shoot him dead. And a guy like that would take a lot of killing, even with a .45. Suppose we weren’t able to put him down? And suppose he killed someone else? I’d hate losing my job, and I’d hate going to jail – I got a wife and kids depending on me to put bread in their mouths – but I don’t think I’d hate either of those things near as much as having another dead little girl on my conscience.”
“That won’t happen,” I said.
“How in God’s name can you be so sure of that?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t know just how to begin. I had known this would come up, of course I did, but I still didn’t know how to start telling them what I knew. Brutal helped me.
“You don’t think he did it, do you, Paul?” He looked incredulous. “You think that big lug is innocent.”
“I’m positive he’s innocent,” I said.
“How in the name of Jesus can you be?”
“There are two things,” I said. “One of them is my shoe.” I leaned forward over the table and began talking.
The Green Mile
Part Five:
Night Journey
1.
Mr. H. G. Wells once wrote a story about a man who invented a time machine, and I have discovered that, in the writing of these memoirs, I have created my own time machine. Unlike Wells’s, it can only travel into the past – back to 1932, as a matter of fact, when I was the bull-goose screw in E Block of Cold Mountain State Penitentiary – but it’s eerily efficient, for all that. Still, this time machine reminds me of the old Ford I had in those days: you could be sure that it would start eventually, but you never