‘What?” Dean asked. “What is it?”
“State legislature must have opened the pursestrings enough to hire another screw this year after all,”
Brutal said, still laughing. “Lookie yonder.”
He pointed and we saw the mouse. I started to laugh, too, and Dean joined in. You really couldn’t help it, because a guard doing quarter-hour check rounds was just like that mouse looked like: a tiny, furry guard making sure no one was trying to escape or commit suicide. It would trot a little way toward us along the Green Mile, then turn its head from side to side, as if checking the cells. Then it would make another forward spurt. The fact that we could hear both of our current inmates snoring away in spite of the yelling and the laughter somehow made it even funnier.
It was a perfectly ordinary brown mouse, except for the way it seemed to be checking into the cells. It even went into one or two of them, skipping nimbly in between the lower bars in a way I imagine many of our inmates, past and present, would envy. Except it was out that the cons would always be wanting to skip, of course.
The mouse didn’t go into either of the occupied cells; only the empties. And finally it had worked its way almost up to where we were. I kept expecting it to turn back, but it didn’t. It showed no fear of us at all.
“It ain’t normal for a mouse to come up on people that way,” Dean said, a little nervously. “Maybe it’s rabid.”
“Oh, my Christ,” Brutal said through a mouthful of corned-beef sandwich. “The big mouse expert. The Mouse Man. You see it foamin at the mouth, Mouse Man?”
“I can’t see its mouth at all,” Dean said, and that made us all laugh again. I couldn’t see its mouth, either, but I could see the dark little drops that were its eyes, and they didn’t look crazy or rabid to me. They looked interested and intelligent. I’ve put men to death – men with supposedly immortal souls – that looked dumber than that mouse.
It scurried up the Green Mile to a spot that was less than three feet from the duty desk … which wasn’t
something fancy, like you might be imagining, but only the sort of desk the teachers used to sit behind up at the district high school. And there it did stop, curling its tail around its paws as prim as an old lady settling her skirts.
I stopped laughing all at once, suddenly feeling cold through my flesh all the way to the bones. I want to say I don’t know why I felt that way – no one likes to come out with something that’s going to make them look or sound ridiculous – but of course I do, and if I can tell the truth about the rest, I guess I can tell the truth about this. For a moment I imagined myself to be that mouse, not a guard at all but just another convicted criminal there on the Green Mile, convicted and condemned but still managing to look bravely up at a desk that must have seemed miles high to it (as the judgment seat of God will no doubt someday seem to us), and at the heavy-voiced, blue-coated giants who sat behind it. Giants that shot its kind with BB guns, or swatted them with brooms, or set traps on them, traps that broke their backs while they crept cautiously over the word VICTOR to nibble at the cheese on the little copper plate.
There was no broom by the duty desk, but there was a rolling mop-bucket with the mop still in the wringer; I’d taken my turn at swabbing the green lino and all six of the cells shortly before sitting down to the record-box with Dean. I saw that Dean meant to grab the mop- and take a swing with it. I touched his wrist just as his fingers touched the slender wooden handle. “Leave it be,” I said.
He shrugged and drew his hand back. I had a feeling he didn’t want to swat it any more than I did.