Bill Dodge was standing in the door to the exercise yard, drinking coffee and smoking him a little smoke.
He looked around at me and said, “Well, lookit here. Paul Edgecombe, big as life and twice as ugly.”
“How’d the day go, Billy?”
“All right.”
“Delacroix?”
“Fine. He seems to understand it’s tomorrow, and yet it’s like he don’t understand. You know how most of em are when the end finally comes for them.”
I nodded. “Wharton?’
Bill laughed. “What a comedian. Makes Jack Benny sound like a Quaker. He told Rolfe Wettermark that he ate strawberry jam out of his wife’s pussy.”
“What did Rolfe say?”
“That he wasn’t married. Said it must have been his mother Wharton was thinking of.”
I laughed, and hard. That really was funny, in a low sort of way. And it was good just to be able to laugh without feeling like someone was lighting matches way down low in my gut. Bill laughed with me, then turned the rest of his coffee out in the yard, which was empty except for a few shuffling trusties, most of whom had been there for a thousand years or so.
Thunder rumbled somewhere far off, and unfocused heat lightning flashed in the darkening sky overhead. Bill looked up uneasily, his laughter dying.
“I tell you what, though,” he said, “I don’t like this weather much. Feels like something’s gonna happen.
Something bad.”
About that he was right. The bad thing happened right around quarter of ten that night. That was when Percy killed Mr. Jingles.
10.
At first it seemed like it was going to be a pretty good night in spite of the heat – John Coffey was being his usual quiet self, Wild Bill was making out to be Mild Bill, and Delacroix was in good spirits for a man who had a date with Old Sparky in a little more than twenty-four hours.
He did understand what was going to happen to him, at least on the most basic level; he had ordered chili for his last meal and gave me special instructions for the kitchen. “Tell em to lay on dat hotsauce,” he said. “Tell em the kind dat really jump up your t’roat an’ say howdy – the green stuff, none of dat mild.
Dat stuff gripe me like a motherfucker, I can’t get off the toilet the nex’ day, but I don’t think I gonna
have a problem this time, n’est-ce pas?”
Most of them worry about their immortal souls with a kind of moronic ferocity, but Delacroix pretty much dismissed my questions about what he wanted for spiritual comfort in his last hours. If “dat fella”
Schuster had been good enough for Big Chief Bitterbuck, Del reckoned, Schuster would be good enough for him. No, what he cared about – you’ve guessed already, I’m sure – was what was going to happen to Mr. Jingles after he, Delacroix, passed on. I was used to spending long hours with the condemned on the night before their last march, but this was the first time I’d spent those long hours pondering the fate of a mouse.
Del considered scenario after scenario, patiently working the possibilities through his dim mind. And while he thought aloud, wanting to provide for his pet mouse’s future as if it were a child that had to be put through college, he threw that colored spool against the wall. Each time he did it, Mr. Jingles would spring after it, track it down, and then roll it back to Del’s foot. It started to get on my nerves after awhile
-first the clack of the spool against the stone wall, then the minute clitter of Mr. Jingles’s paws. Although it was a cute trick, it palled after ninety minutes or so. And Mr. Jingles never seemed to get tired. He paused every now and then to refresh himself with a drink of water out of a coffee saucer Delacroix kept for just that purpose, or to munch a pink crumb of peppermint candy, and then back to it he went. Several times it was on the tip of my tongue to tell Delacroix to give it a rest, and each time I reminded myself that he had this night and tomorrow to play the spool-game with Mr. Jingles, and that was all. Near the end, though, it began to be really difficult to hold onto that thought – you know how it is, with a noise that’s repeated over and over. After a while it shoots your nerve. I started to speak after all, then something made me look over my shoulder and out the cell door. John Coffey was standing at his cell door across the way, and he shook his head at me: right, left, back to center. As if he had read my mind and was telling me to think again.