“Are you all right, Paul?” he asked. “Running a fever, maybe? Got a touch of the grippe? Cause there’s sweat all over your face.”
“I might have a touch of something, but mostly I’m fine,” I said. “Go on, Percy, tell the warden.”
He nodded and left – thank Christ for small favors. As soon as the door was closed, I lunged into my office. Leaving the duty desk unmanned was against regulations, but I was beyond caring about that. It was bad – like it had been that morning.
I managed to get into the little toilet cubicle behind the desk and to get my business out of my pants before the urine started to gush, but it was a near thing. I had to put a hand over my mouth to stifle a scream as I began to flow, and grabbed blindly for the lip of the washstand with the other. It wasn’t like my house, where I could fall to my knees and piss a puddle beside the woodpile; if I went to my knees here, the urine would go all over the floor.
I managed to keep my feet and not to scream, but it was a close thing on both counts. It felt like my urine had been filled with tiny slivers of broken glass. The smell coming up from the toilet bowl was swampy and unpleasant, and I could see white stuff – pus, I guess – floating on the surface of the water.
I took the towel off the rack and wiped my face with it. I was sweating, all right; it was pouring off me. I looked into the metal mirror and saw the flushed face of a man running a high fever looking back at me.
Hundred and three? Hundred and four?
Better not to know, maybe. I put the towel back on its bar, flushed the toilet, and walked slowly back across my office to the cellblock door. I was afraid Bill Dodge or someone else might have come in and seen three prisoners with no attendants, but the place was empty. Wharton still lay unconscious on his bunk, Delacroix had fallen silent, and John Coffey had never made a single noise at all, I suddenly realized. Not a peep. Which was worrisome.
I went down the Mile and glanced into Coffey’s cell, half-expecting to discover he’d committed suicide in one of the two common Death Row ways either hanging himself with his pants, or gnawing into his wrists. No such thing, it turned out. Coffey merely sat on the end of his bunk with his hands in his lap, the largest man I’d ever seen in my life, looking at me with his strange, wet eyes.
“Cap’n?” he said.
“What’s up, big boy?”
“I need to see you.”
“Ain’t you looking right at me, John Coffey?”
He said nothing to this, only went on studying me with his strange, leaky gaze. I sighed.
“In a second, big boy.”
I looked over at Delacroix, who was standing at the bars of his cell. Mr. Jingles, his pet mouse (Delacroix would tell you he’d trained Mr. Jingles to do tricks, but us folks who worked on the Green Mile were pretty much unanimous in the opinion that Mr. Jingles had trained himself), was jumping restlessly back and forth from one of Del’s outstretched hands to the other, like an acrobat doing leaps from platforms high above the center ring. His eyes were huge, his ears laid back against his sleek brown skull. I hadn’t any doubt that the mouse was reacting to Delacroix’s nerves. As I watched, he ran down Delacroix’s pants leg and across the cell to where the brightly colored spool lay against one wall. He pushed the spool back to Delacroix’s foot and then looked up at him eagerly, but the little Cajun took no notice of his friend, at least for the time being.
“What happen, boss?” Delacroix asked. “Who been hurt?”
“Everything’s jake,” I said. “Our new boy came in like a lion, but now he’s passed out like a lamb. All’s well that ends well.”
“It ain’t over yet,” Delacroix said, looking up the Mile toward the cell where Wharton was jugged.