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.
2.
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!”