Percy went into my office and slammed the door behind him.
“My, my,” Bill Dodge said. “Ain’t he the swollen and badly infected testicle.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Dean said.
“Oh, look on the bright side,” Bill said. He was always telling people to look on the bright side; it got so you wanted to punch his nose every time it came out of his mouth. “Your trick mouse got away, at least.”
“Yeah, but we won’t see him no more,” Dean said. “I imagine this time goddam Percy Wetmore’s scared him off for good.”
3.
That was logical but wrong. The mouse was back the very next evening, which just happened to be the first of Percy Wetmore’s two nights off before he slid over to the graveyard shift.
Steamboat Willy showed up around seven o’clock. I was there to see his reappearance; so was Dean.
Harry Terwilliger, too. Harry was on the desk. I was technically on days, but had stuck around to spend an extra hour with The Chief, whose time was getting close by then. Bitterbuck was stoical on the outside, in the tradition of his tribe, but I could see his fear of the end growing inside him like a poison
flower. So we talked. You could talk to them in the daytime but it wasn’t so good, with the shouts and conversation (not to mention the occasional fist-fight) coming from the exercise yard, the chonk-chonk-chonk of the stamping machines in the plate-shop, the occasional yell of a guard for someone to put down that pick or grab up that hoe or just to get your ass over here, Harvey. After four it got a little better, and after six it got better still. Six to eight was the optimum time. After that you could see the long thoughts starting to steal over their minds again – in their eyes you could see it, like afternoon shadows and it was best to stop. They still heard what you were saying, but it no longer made sense to them. Past eight they were getting ready for the watches of the night and imagining how the cap would feel when it was clamped to the tops of their heads, and how the air would smell inside the black bag which had been rolled down over their sweaty faces.
But I got The Chief at a good time. He told me about his first wife, and how they had built a lodge together up in Montana. Those had been the happiest days of his life, he said. The water was so pure and so cold that it felt like your mouth was cut every time you drank.
“Hey, Mr. Edgecombe,” he said. “You think, if a man he sincerely repent of what he done wrong, he might get to go back to the time that was happiest for him and live there forever? Could that be what heaven is like?”
“I’ve just about believed that very thing,” I said, which was a he I didn’t regret in the least. I had learned of matters eternal at my mother’s pretty knee, and what I believed is what the Good Book says about murderers: that there is no eternal life in them. I think they go straight to hell, where they burn in torment until God finally gives Gabriel the nod to blow the Judgment Trump. When he does, they’ll wink out …
and probably glad to go they will be. But I never gave a hint of such beliefs to Bitterbuck, or to any of them. I think in their hearts they knew it. Where is your brother, his blood crieth to me from the ground, God said to Cain, and I doubt if the words were much of a surprise to that particular problem-child; I bet he heard Abel’s blood whining out of the earth at him with each step he took.
The Chief was smiling when I left, perhaps thinking about his lodge in Montana and his wife lying bare-breasted in the light of the fire. He would be walking in a warmer fire soon, I had no doubt.
I went back up the corridor, and Dean told me about his set-to with Percy the previous night. I think he’d waited around just so he could, and I listened carefully. I always listened carefully when the subject was Percy, because I agreed with Dean a hundred per cent – I thought Percy was the sort of man who could cause a lot of trouble, as much for the rest of us as for himself.