“Yeah,” Brutal said. “Right now that’s just about the only thing I do understand.”
I looked back over my shoulder. “Harry, stay by the truck with him until I call for you. I don’t want Moores to see him until I’m ready.” Except I was never going to be ready. I knew that now.
Brutal and I had just reached the foot of the steps when the front door was hauled open hard enough to flap the brass knocker against its plate. There stood Hal Moores in blue pajama pants and a strapstyle tee-shirt, his iron-gray hair standing up in tufts and twists. He was a man who had made a thousand enemies over the course of his career, and he knew it. Clasped in his right hand, the abnormally long barrel not quite pointing at the floor, was the pistol which had always been mounted over the mantel. It
was the sort of gun known as a Ned Buntline Special, it had been his grandfather’s, and right then (I saw this with a further sinking in my gut) it was fully cocked.
“Who the hell goes there at two-thirty in the goddam morning?” he asked. I heard no fear at all in his voice. And -for the time being, at least – his shakes had stopped. The hand holding the gun was as steady as a stone. “Answer me, or – ” The barrel of the gun began to rise.
“Stop it, Warden!” Brutal raised his hands, palms out, toward the man with the gun. I have never heard his voice sound the way it did then; it was as if the shakes turned out of Moores’s hands had somehow found their way into Brutus Howell’s throat. “It’s us! It’s Paul and me and . . . it’s us!”
He took the first step up, so that the light over the stoop could fall fully on his face, I joined him. Hal Moores looked back and forth between us, his angry determination giving way to bewilderment. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “Not only is it the shank of the morning, you boys have the duty. I know you do, I’ve got the roster pinned up in my workshop. So what in the name of … oh, Jesus. It’s not a lockdown, is it? Or a riot?” He looked between us, and his gaze sharpened. “Who else is down by that truck?”
Let me do the talking. So I had instructed Brutal, but now the time to talk was here and I couldn’t even open my mouth. On my way into work that afternoon I had carefully planned out what I was going to say when we got here, and had thought that it didn’t sound too crazy. Not normal – nothing about it was normal – but maybe close enough to normal to get us through the door and give us a chance. Give John a chance. But now all my carefully rehearsed words were lost in a roaring confusion. Thoughts and images
– Del burning, the mouse dying, Toot jerking in Old Sparky’s lap and screaming that he was a done tom turkey – whirled inside my head like sand caught in a dust-devil. I believe there is good in the world, all of it flowing in one way or another from a loving God. But I believe there’s another force as well, one every bit as real as the God I have prayed to my whole life, and that it works consciously to bring all our decent impulses to ruin. Not Satan, I don’t mean Satan (although I believe he is real, too), but a kind of demon of discord, a prankish and stupid thing that laughs with glee when an old man sets himself on fire trying to light his pipe or when a much-loved baby puts its first Christmas toy in its mouth and chokes to death on it. I’ve had a lot of years to think on this, all the way from Cold Mountain to Georgia Pines, and I believe that force was actively at work among us on that morning, swirling everywhere like a fog, trying to keep John Coffey away from Melinda Moores.