It was Mr. Jingles I was thinking about as I crossed the croquet course to the kitchen door – how Percy Wetmore had stamped on him and broken his back, and how Delacroix had screamed when he realized what his enemy had done – and I didn’t see Brad Dolan standing there, half-hidden by the Dumpster, until he reached out and grabbed my wrist.
“Out for a little stroll, Paulie?” he asked.
I jerked back from him, yanking my wrist out of his hand. Some of it was just being startled – anyone will jerk when they’re startled – but that wasn’t all of it. I’d been thinking about Percy Wetmore, remember, and it’s Percy that Brad always reminds me of. Some of it’s how Brad always goes around with a paperback stuffed into his pocket (with Percy it was always a men’s adventure magazine; with Brad it’s books of jokes that are only funny if you’re stupid and mean-hearted), some of it’s how he acts like he’s King Shit of Turd Mountain, but mostly it’s that he’s sneaky, and he likes to hurt.
He’d just gotten to work, I saw, hadn’t even changed into his orderly’s whites yet. He was wearing jeans and a cheesy-looking Western-style shirt. In one hand was the remains of a Danish he’d hooked out of the kitchen. He’d been standing under the leave, eating it where he wouldn’t get wet. And where he could watch for me, I’m pretty sure of that now. I’m pretty sure of something else, as well: I’ll have to watch out for Mr. Brad Dolan. He doesn’t like me much. I don’t know why, but I never knew why Percy Wetmore didn’t like Delacroix, either. And dislike is really too weak a word. Percy hated Del’s guts from the very first moment the little Frenchman came onto the Green Mile.
‘”What’s with this poncho you got on, Paulie?” he asked, flicking the collar. “This isn’t yours.”
“I got it in the hall outside the kitchen,” I said. I hate it when he calls me Paulie, and I think he knows it, but I was damned if I’d give him the satisfaction of seeing it. “There’s a whole row of them. I’m not hurting it any, would you say? Rain’s what it’s made for, after all.”
“But it wasn’t made for you, Paulie,” he said, giving it another little flick. “That’s the thing. Those slickers’re for the employees, not the residents.”
“I still don’t see what harm it does.”
He gave me a thin little smile. “It’s not about harm, it’s about the rules. What would life be without rules?
Paulie, Paulie, Paulie.” He shook his head, as if just looking at me made him feel sorry to be alive. “You probably think an old fart like you doesn’t have to mind about the rules anymore, but that’s just not true.
Paulie.”
Smiling at me. Disliking me. Maybe even hating me. And why? I don’t know. Sometimes there is no why. That’s the scary part.
“Well, I’m sorry if I broke the rules,” I said. It came out sounding whiney, a little shrill, and I hated myself for sounding that way, but I’m old, and old people whine easily. Old people scare easily.
Brad nodded. “Apology accepted. Now go hang that back up. You got no business out walking in the rain, anyway. Specially not in those woods. What if you were to slip and fall and break your damned hip?
Huh? Who do you think’d have to hoss your elderly freight back up the hill?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I just wanted to get away from him. The more I listened to him, the more he sounded like Percy. William Wharton, the crazyman who came to the Green Mile in the fall of `32, once grabbed Percy and scared him so bad that Percy squirted in his pants. You talk about this to anyone, Percy told the rest of us afterward, and you’ll all be on the breadlines in a week. Now, these many years later, I could almost hear Brad Dolan saying those same words, in that same tone of voice. It’s as if, by writing about those old times, I have unlocked some unspeakable door that connects the past to the present – Percy Wetmore to Brad Dolan, Janice Edgecombe to Elaine Connelly, Cold Mountain Penitentiary to the Georgia Pines old folks’ home. And if that thought doesn’t keep me awake tonight, I guess nothing will.