chest. Harry, meanwhile, did up the back and snapped the cross-straps. Once Percy gave m and stuck out his arms, the whole thing took less than ten seconds.
“Okay, hon,” Brutal said. “Forward harch.”
But he wouldn’t. He looked at Brutal, then turned his terrified, streaming eyes on me. Nothing about his connections now, or how we’d have to go all the way to South Carolina just to get a free meal; he was far past that.
“Please,” he whispered in a hoarse, wet voice. “Don’t put me in with him, Paul.”
Then I understood why he had panicked, why he’d fought us so hard. He thought we were going to put him in with Wild Bill Wharton; that his punishment for the dry sponge was to be a dry cornholing from the resident psychopath. Instead of feeling sympathy for Percy at this realization, I felt disgust and a hardening of my resolve. He was, after all, judging us by the way he would have behaved, had our positions been reversed.
“Not Wharton,” I said. “The restraint room, Percy. You’re going to spend three or four hours in there, all by yourself in the dark, thinking about what you did to Del. It’s probably too late for you to learn any new lessons about how people are supposed to behave – Brute thinks so, anyway – but I’m an optimist.
Now move.”
He did, muttering under his breath that we’d be sorry for this, plenty sorry, just wait and see, but on the whole he seemed relieved and reassured.
When we herded him out into the hall, Dean gave us a look of such wide-eyed surprise and dewy innocence that I could have laughed, if the business hadn’t been so serious. I’ve seen better acting in backwoods Grange revues.
“Say, don’t you think the joke’s gone far enough?” Dean asked.
“You just shut up, if you know what’s good for you,” Brutal growled. These were lines we’d scripted at lunch, and that was just what they sounded like to me, scripted lines, but if Percy was scared enough and confused enough, they still might save Dean Stanton’s job in a pinch. I myself didn’t think so, but anything was possible. Any time I’ve doubted that, then or since, I just think about John Coffey, and Delacroix’s mouse.
We ran Percy down the Green Mile, him stumbling and gasping for us to slow down, he was going to go flat on his face if we didn’t slow down. Wharton was on his bunk, but we went by too fast for me to see if he was awake or asleep. John Coffey was standing at his cell door and watching. “You’re a bad man and you deserve to go in that dark place,” he said, but I don’t think Percy heard him.
Into the restraint room we went, Percy’s cheeks red and wet with tears, his eyes rolling into their sockets, his pampered locks all flopping down on his forehead. Harry pulled Percy’s gun with one hand and his treasured hickory, head-knocker with the other. “You’ll get em back, don’t worry,” Harry said. He sounded a trifle embarrassed.
“I wish I could say the same about your job,”
Percy replied. “All your jobs. You can’t do this to me! You can’t!”
He was obviously prepared to go on in that vein for quite awhile, but we didn’t have time to listen to his sermon. In my pocket was a roll of friction-tape, the thirties ancestor of the strapping-tape folks use today. Percy saw it and started to back away. Brutal grabbed him from behind and hugged him until I had slapped the tape over his mouth, winding the roll around to the back of his head, just to be sure. He was going to have a few less swatches of hair when the tape came off, and a pair of seriously chapped lips into the bargain, but I no longer much cared, I’d had a gutful of Percy Wetmore.
We backed away from him. He stood in the middle of the room, under the caged light, wearing the straitjacket, breathing through flared nostrils, and making muffled mmmph! mmmph! sounds from behind the tape. All in all, he looked as crazy as any other prisoner we’d ever jugged in that room.