“L’homme mauvais, c’est”
“Well,” I said, “don’t let it get you down, Del. Nobody’s going to make you play skiprope with him out in the yard.”
There was a creaking sound from behind me as Coffey got off his bunk. “Boss Edgecombe!” he said again. This time he sounded urgent. “I need to talk to you!”
I turned to him, thinking, all right, no problem, talking was my business. All the time trying not to shiver, because the fever had turned cold, as they sometimes will. Except for my groin, which still felt as if it had been slit open, filled with hot coals, and then sewed back up again.
“So talk, John Coffey,” I said, trying to keep my voice light and calm. For the first time since he’d come onto E Block, Coffey looked as though he was really here, really among us. The almost ceaseless trickle of tears from the corners of his eyes had ceased, at least for the time being, and I knew he was seeing what he was looking at – Mr. Paul Edgecombe, E Block’s bull-goose screw, and not some place he wished he could return to, and take back the terrible thing he’d done.
“No,” he said. “You got to come in here.”
“Now, you know I can’t do that,” I said, still trying for the light tone, “at least not right this minute. I’m on my own here for the time being, and you outweigh me by just about a ton and a half. We’ve had us one hooraw this afternoon, and that’s enough. So we’ll just have us a chat through the bars, if it’s all the same to you, and – ”
“Please!” He was holding the bars so tightly that his knuckles were pale and his fingernails were white.
His face was long with distress, those strange eyes sharp with some need I could not understand. I remember thinking that maybe I could’ve understood it if I hadn’t been so sick, and knowing that would have given me a way of helping him through the rest of it. When you know what a man needs, you know the man, more often than not. “Please, Boss Edgecombe! You have to come in!”
That’s the nuttiest thing I ever heard, I thought, and then realized something even nuttier: I was going to do it. I had my keys off my belt and I was hunting through them for the ones that opened John Coffey’s cell. He could have picked me up and broken me over his knee like kindling on a day when I was well and feeling fine, and this wasn’t that day. All the same, I was going to do it. On my own, and less than half an hour after a graphic demonstration of where stupidity and laxness could get you when you were dealing with condemned murderers, I was going to open this black giant’s cell, go in, and sit with him. If I was discovered, I might well lose my job even if he didn’t do anything crazy, but I was going to do it, just the same.
Stop, I said to myself, you just stop now, Paul. But I didn’t. I used one key on the top lock, another on the bottom lock, and then I slid the door back on its track.
“You know, boss, that maybe not such a good idear,” Delacroix said in a voice so nervous and prissy it would probably have made me laugh under other circumstances.
“You mind your business and I’ll mind mine,” I said without looking around. My eyes were fixed on John Coffey’s, and fixed so hard they might have been nailed there. It was like being hypnotized. My voice sounded to my own ears like something which had come echoing down a long valley. Hell, maybe I was hypnotized. “You just lie down and take you a rest.”
“Christ, this place is crazy,” Delacroix said in a trembling voice. “Mr. Jingles, I just about wish they’d fry me and be done widdit!”
I went into Coffey’s cell. He stepped away as I stepped forward. When he was backed up against his bunk – it hit him in the calves, that’s how tall he was – he sat down on it. He patted the mattress beside him, his eyes never once leaving mine. I sat down there next to him, and he put his arm around my