“Aw,” Harry said, “po’ baby.”
“Should have stayed home and got the cussed thing fixed,” Brutal said blandly. “We wouldn’t want you straining your arm none, would we, boys?”
“Yeah, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Percy sneered, but I thought he seemed reassured by the relative mildness of Brutal’s response. That was good. For the next few hours we’d have to walk a line with him –
not too hostile, but not too friendly, either. After last night, he’d find anything even approaching warmth suspect. We weren’t going to get him with his guard down, we all knew that, but I thought we could catch him with it a long piece from all the way up if we played things just right. It was important that we move fast, but it was also important – to me, at least – that nobody be hurt. Not even Percy Wetmore.
Dean came back and gave me a little nod.
“Percy,” I said, “I want you to go on in the storeroom and mop down the floor. Stairs to the tunnel, too.
Then you can write your report on last night.”
“That should be creative,” Brutal remarked, hooking his thumbs into his belt and looking up at the
ceiling.
“You guys are funnier’n a fuck in church,” Percy said, but beyond that he didn’t protest. Didn’t even point out the obvious, which was that the floor in there had already been washed at least twice that day. My guess is that he was glad for the chance to be away from us.
I went over the previous shift report, saw nothing that concerned me, and then took a walk down to Wharton’s cell. He was sitting there on his bunk with his knees drawn up and his arms clasped around his shins, looking at me with a bright, hostile smile.
“Well, if it ain’t the big boss,” he said. “Big as life and twice as ugly. You look happier’n a pig kneedeep in shit, Boss Edgecombe. Wife give your pecker a pull before you left home, did she?”
“How you doing, Kid?” I asked evenly, and at that he brightened for real. He let go of his legs, stood up, and stretched. His smile broadened, and some of the hostility went out of it.
“Well, damn!” he said. “You got my name right for once! What’s the matter with you, Boss Edgecombe?
You sick or sumpin?”
No, not sick. I’d been sick, but John Coffey had taken care of that. His hands no longer knew the trick of tying a shoe, if they ever had, but they knew other tricks. Yes indeed they did.
“My friend,” I told him, “if you want to be a Billy the Kid instead of a Wild Bill, it’s all the same to me.”
He puffed visibly, like one of those loathsome fish that live in South American rivers and can sting you almost to death with the spines along their backs and sides. I dealt with a lot of dangerous men during my time on the Mile, but few if any so repellent as William Wharton, who considered himself a great outlaw, but whose jailhouse behavior rarely rose above pissing or spitting through the bars of his cell. So far we hadn’t given him the awed respect he felt was his by right, but on that particular night I wanted him tractable. If that meant lathering on the softsoap, I would gladly lather it on.
“I got a lot in common with the Kid, and you just better believe it,” Wharton said. “I didn’t get here for stealing candy out of a dimestore.” As proud as a man who’s been conscripted into the Heroes’ Brigade of the French Foreign Legion instead of one whose ass has been slammed into a cell seventy long steps from the electric chair. “Where’s my supper?”
“Come on, Kid, report says you had it at five-fifty. Meatloaf with gravy, mashed, peas. You don’t con me that easy.”
He laughed expansively and sat down on his bunk again. “Put on the radio, then.” He said radio in the way people did back then when they were joking, so it rhymed with the fifties slang word “Daddy-O.”