Something Brad said the other day struck me as actually smart, but I don’t give him a lot of credit for it; even a stopped clock is right twice a day, the proverb has it. “You’re just lucky you don’t have that Alzheimer’s disease, Paulie,” was what he said. I hate him calling me that, Paulie, but he goes on doing it, anyway; I’ve given up asking him to quit. There are other sayings – not quite proverbs – that apply to Brad Dolan: “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink” is one; “You can dress him up but you can’t take him out” is another. In his thickheadedness he is also like Percy.
When he made his comment about Alzheimer’s, he was mopping the floor of the solarium, where I had been going over the pages I have already written. There’s a great lot of them, and I think there’s apt to be a great lot more before I am through. “That Alzheimer’s, do you know what it really is?”
“No,” I said, – but I’m sure you’ll tell me, Brad.”
“It’s AIDS for old people,” he said, and then burst out laughing, hucka-hucka-hucka-huck!, just like he does over those idiotic jokes of his.
I didn’t laugh, though, because what he said struck a nerve somewhere. Not that I have Alzheimer’s; although there’s plenty of it on view here at beautiful Georgia Pines, I myself just suffer the standard oldguy memory problems. Those problems seem to have more to do with when than what. Looking over what I have written so far, it occurs to me that I remember everything that happened back in ’32; it’s the order of events that sometimes gets confused in my head. Yet, if I’m careful, I think I can keep even that sorted out. More or less.
John Coffey came to E Block and the Green Mile in October of that year, condemned for the murder of the nine-year-old Detterick twins. That’s my major landmark, and if I keep it in view, I should do just fine. William ‘Wild Bill” Wharton came after Coffey; Delacroix came before. So did the mouse, the one Brutus Howell – Brutal, to his friends – called Steamboat Willy and Delacroix ended up calling Mr.
Jingles.
Whatever you called him, the mouse came first, even before Del – it was still summer when he showed up, and we had two other prisoners on the Green Mile: The Chief, Arlen Bitterbuck; and The Pres, Arthur Flanders.
That mouse. That goddam mouse. Delacroix loved it, but Percy Wetmore sure didn’t.
Percy hated it from the first.
2.
The mouse came back just about three days after Percy had chased it down the Green Mile that first time.
Dean Stanton and Bill Dodge were talking politics, which meant in those days, they were talking Roosevelt and Hoover – Herbert, not J. Edgar. They were eating Ritz crackers from a box Dean had purchased from old Toot-Toot an hour or so before. Percy was standing in the office doorway, practicing quick draws with the baton he loved so much, as he listened. He’d pull it out of that ridiculous handtooled holster he’d gotten somewhere, then twirl it (or try to; most times he would have dropped it if not for the rawhide loop he kept on his wrist), then re-holster it. I was off that night, but got the full report from Dean the following evening.
The mouse came up the Green Mile just as it had before, hopping along, then stopping and seeming to check the empty cells. After a bit of that it would hop on, undiscouraged, as if it had known all along it would be a long search, and it was up to that.
The President was awake this time, standing at his cell door. That guy was a piece of work, managing to look natty even in his prison blues. We knew just by the way he looked that he wasn’t made for Old Sparky, and we were right – less than a week after Percy’s second run at that mouse, The Pres’s sentence was commuted to life and he joined the general population.