We slunk north along the highway in a little congaline, Harry first, then John Coffey, then Brutal, then me. We breasted the first rise and walked down the other side, where all we could see of the prison was the bright glow of the lights in the tops of the trees. And still Harry led us onward.
“Where’d you park it?” Brutal stage-whispered, vapor puffing from his mouth in a white cloud.
“Baltimore?”
“It’s right up ahead,” Harry replied, sounding nervous and irritable. “Hold your damn water, Brutus.”
But Coffey, from what I’d seen of him, would have been happy to walk until the sun came up, maybe until it went back down again. He looked everywhere, starting – not in fear but in delight, I am quite sure
– when an owl hoo’d. It came to me that, while he might be afraid of the dark inside, he wasn’t afraid of it out here, not at all. He was caressing the night, rubbing his senses across it the way a man might rub his face across the swells and concavities of a woman’s breasts.
“We turn here,” Harry muttered.
A little finger of road – narrow, unpaved, weeds running up the center crown-angled off to the right. We turned up this and walked another quarter of a mile. Brutal was beginning to grumble again when Harry stopped, went to the left side of the track, and began to remove sprays of broken-off pine boughs. John and Brutal pitched in, and before I could join them, they had uncovered the dented snout of an old Farmall truck, its wired-on headlights staring at us like buggy eyes.
“I wanted to be as careful as I could, you know,” Harry said to Brutal in a thin, scolding voice. “This may be a big joke to you, Brutus Howell, but I come from a very religious family, I got cousins back in the hollers so damn holy they make the Christians look like lions, and if I get caught playing at something like this-!”
“It’s okay,” Brutal said. “I’m just jumpy, that’s all.”
“Me too,” Harry said stiffly. “Now if this cussed old thing will just start-”
He walked around the hood of the truck, still muttering, and Brutal tipped me a wink. As far as Coffey was concerned, we had ceased to exist. His head was tilted back and he was drinking in the sight of the stars sprawling across the sky.
“I’ll ride in back with him, if you want,” Brutal offered. Behind us, the Farmall’s starter whined briefly,
sounding like an old dog trying to find its feet on a cold winter morning; then the engine exploded into life. Harry raced it once and let it settle into a ragged idle. “No need for both of us to do it.”
“Get up front,” I said. “You can ride with him on the return trip. If we don’t end up making that one locked into the back of our own stagecoach, that is.”
“Don’t talk that way,” he said, looking genuinely upset. It was as if he had realized for the first time how serious this would be for us if we were caught. “Christ, Paul!”
“Go on,” I said. “In the cab.”
He did as he was told. I yanked on John Coffey’s arm until I could get his attention back to earth for a bit, then led him around to the rear of the truck, which was stake-sided. Harry had draped canvas over the posts, and that would be of some help if we passed cars or trucks going the other way. He hadn’t been able to do anything about the open back, though.
“Upsy-daisy, big boy,” I said.
“Goin for the ride now?”
“That’s right.”
“Good.” He smiled. It was sweet and lovely, that smile, perhaps the more so because it wasn’t complicated by much in the way of thought. He got up in back. I followed him, went to the front of the truckbed, and banged on top of the cab. Harry ground the transmission into first and the truck pulled out of the little bower he had hidden it in, shaking and juddering.
John Coffey stood spread-legged in the middle of the truckbed head cocked up at the stars again, smiling broadly, unmindful of the boughs that whipped at him as Harry turned his truck toward the highway.