It’s funny how much a person can remember about times when his nerves were tuned so tight they almost sang.
“Maybe later, big boy,” I said. I stepped away from his cell and looked down the corridor. Brutal had strolled down to the far end, where he checked to make sure the restraint-room door was on the single lock instead of the double. I knew it was, because I’d already checked it myself. Later on, we’d want to be able to open that door as quick as we could. There would be no time spent emptying out the attic-type rick-rack that had accumulated in there over the years; we’d taken it out, sorted it, and stored it in other
places not long after Wharton joined our happy band. It had seemed to us the room with the soft walls was apt to get a lot of use, at least until “Billy the Kid” strolled the Mile.
John Coffey, who would usually have been lying down at this time, long, thick legs dangling and face to the wall, was sitting on the end of his bunk with his hands clasped, watching Brutal with an alertness – a thereness – that wasn’t typical of him. He wasn’t leaking around the eyes, either.
Brutal tried the door to the restraint room, then came on back up the Mile. Hie glanced at Coffey as he passed Coffey’s cell, and Coffey said a curious thing: “Sure. I’d like a ride.” As if responding to something Brutal had said.
Brutal’s eyes met mine. He knows, I could almost hear him saying. Somehow he knows.
I shrugged and spread my hands, as if to say Of course he knows.
5.
Old Toot-Toot made his last trip of the night down to E Block with his cart at about quarter to nine. We bought enough of his crap to make him smile with avarice.
“Say, you boys seen that mouse?” he asked.
We shook our heads.
“Maybe Pretty Boy has,” Toot said, and gestured with his head in the direction of the storage room, where Percy was either washing the floor, writing his report, or picking his ass.
“What do you care? It’s none of your affair, either way,” Brutal said. “Roll wheels, Toot. You’re stinkin the place up.”
Toot smiled his peculiarly unpleasant smile, toothless and sunken, and made a business of sniffing the air. “That ain’t me you smell,” he said. “That be Del, sayin so-long.”
Cackling, he rolled his cart out the door and into the exercise yard. And he went on rolling it for another ten years, long after I was gone – hell, long after Cold Mountain was gone – selling Moon Pies and pops to the guards and prisoners who could afford them. Sometimes even now I hear him in my dreams, yelling that he’s fryin, he’s fryin, he’s a done tom turkey.
The time stretched out after Toot was gone, the clock seeming to crawl. We had the radio for an hour and a half, Wharton braying laughter at Fred Allen and Allen’s Alley, even though I doubt like hell he understood many of the jokes. John Coffey sat on the end of his bunk, hands clasped, eyes rarely leaving whoever was at the duty desk. I have seen men waiting that way in bus stations for their buses to be called.
Percy came in from the storage room around quarter to eleven and handed me a report which had been laboriously written in pencil. Eraser-crumbs lay over the sheet of paper in gritty smears. He saw me run my thumb over one of these, and said hastily: “That’s just a first pass, like. I’m going to copy it over.
What do you think?”
What I thought was that it was the most outrageous goddam whitewash I’d read in all my born days.
What I told him was that it was fine, and he went away, satisfied.
Dean and Harry played cribbage, talking too loud, squabbling over the count too often, and looking at the crawling hands of the clock every five seconds or so. On at least one of their games that night, they appeared to go around the board three times instead of twice. There was so much tension in the air that I felt I could almost have carved it like clay, and the only people who didn’t seem to feel it were Percy and Wild Bill.