shoulders, as if we were at the movies and I was his girl.
“What do you want, John Coffey?” I asked, still looking into his eyes – those sad, serene eyes.
“Just to help,” he said. He sighed like a man will when he’s faced with a job he doesn’t much want to do, and then he put his hand down in my crotch, on that shelf of bone a foot or so below the navel.
“Hey!” I cried. “Get your goddam hand—”
A jolt slammed through me then, a big painless whack of something. It made me jerk on the cot and bow my back, made me think of Old Toot shouting that he was frying, he was frying, he was a done tom turkey. There was no heat, no feeling of electricity, but for a moment the color seemed to jump out of everything, as if the world had been somehow squeezed and made to sweat. I could see every pore on john Coffey’s face, I could see every bloodshot snap in his haunted eyes, I could see a tiny healing scrape on his chin. I was aware that my fingers were hooked down into claws on thin air, and that my feet were drumming on the floor of Coffey’s cell.
Then it was over. So was my urinary infection. Both the heat and the miserable throbbing pain were gone from my crotch, and the fever was likewise gone from my head. I could still feel the sweat it had drawn out of my skin, and I could smell it, but it was gone, all right.
“What’s going on?” Delacroix called shrilly. His voice still came from far away, but when John Coffey bent forward, breaking eye-contact with me, the little Cajun’s voice suddenly came clear. It was as if someone had pulled wads of cotton or a pair of shooters’ plugs out of my ears. “What’s he doing to you?”
I didn’t answer. Coffey was bent forward over his own lap with his face working and his throat bulging.
His eyes were bulging, too. He looked like a man with a chicken bone caught in his throat.
“John!” I said. I clapped him on the back; it was all I could think of to do. “John, what’s wrong?”
He hitched under my hand, then made an unpleasant gagging, retching sound. His mouth opened the way horses sometimes open their mouths to allow the bit – reluctantly, with the lips peeling back from the teeth in a kind of desperate sneer. Then his teeth parted, too, and he exhaled a cloud of tiny black insects that looked like gnats or noseeums. They swirled furiously between his knees, turned white, and disappeared.
Suddenly all the strength went out of my middsection. It was as if the muscles there had turned to water.
I slumped back against the stone side of Coffey’s cell. I remember thinking the name of the Savior –
Christ, Christ, Christ, over and over, like that – and I remember thinking that the fever had driven me delirious. That was all.
Then I became aware that Delacroix was bawling for help; he was telling the world that John Coffey was killing me, and telling it at the top of his lungs. Coffey was bending over me, all right, but only to make sure I was okay.
“Shut up, Del,” I said, and got on my feet. I waited for the pain to rip into my guts, but it didn’t happen. I was better. Really. There was a moment of dizziness, but that passed even before I was able to reach out and grab the bars of Coffey’s cell door for balance. “I’m totally okey-doke.”
“You get on outta here,” Delacroix said, sounding like a nervy old woman telling a kid to climb down out
of that-ere apple tree. “You ain’t suppose to be in there wit no one else on the block.”
I looked at John Coffey, who sat on the bunk with his huge hands on the tree stumps of his knees. John Coffey looked back at me. He had to tilt his head up a little, but not much.
“What did you do, big boy?” I asked in a low voice. “What did you do to me?”