“Do you leave a light on after bedtime?” he asked right away, as if he had only been waiting for the chance.
I blinked at him. I had been asked a lot of strange questions by newcomers to E Block – once about the size of my wife’s tits-but never that one.
Coffey was smiling a trifle uneasily, as if he knew we would think him foolish but couldn’t help himself.
“Because I get a little scared in the dark sometimes,” he said. “If it’s a strange place.”
I looked at him – the pure size of him – and felt strangely touched. They did touch you, you know; you didn’t see them at their worst, hammering out their horrors like demons at a forge.
“Yes, it’s pretty bright in here all night long,” I said. “Half the lights along the Mile burn from nine until five every morning.” Then I realized he wouldn’t have any idea of what I was talking about – he didn’t know the Green Mile from Mississippi mud – and so I pointed. “In the corridor.”
He nodded, relieved. I’m not sure he knew what a corridor was, either, but he could see the 200-watt bulbs in their wire cages.
I did something I’d never done to a prisoner before, then – I offered him my hand. Even now I don’t know why. Him asking about the lights, maybe. It made Harry Terwilliger blink, I can tell you that. Coffey took my hand with surprising gentleness, my hand all but disappearing into his, and that was all of it. I
had another moth in my killing bottle. We were done.
I stepped out of the cell. Harry pulled the door shut on its track and ran both locks. Coffey stood where he was a moment or two longer, as if he didn’t know what to do next, and then he sat down on his bunk, clasped his giant’s hands between his knees, and lowered his head like a man who grieves or prays. He said something then in his strange, almost Southern voice. I heard it with perfect clarity, and although I didn’t know much about what he’d done then – you don’t need to know about what a man’s done in order to feed him and groom him until it’s time for him to pay off what he owes – it still gave me a chill.
“I couldn’t help-it, boss,” he said. “I tried to take it back, but it was too late!’
3.
“You’re going to have you some trouble with Percy,” Harry said as we walked back up the hall and into my office. Dean Stanton, sort of my third in command – we didn’t actually have such things, a situation Percy Wetmore would have fixed up in a flash – was sitting behind my desk, updating the files, a job I never seemed to get around to. He barely looked up as we came in, just gave his little glasses a shove with the ball of his thumb and dived back into his paperwork.
“I been having trouble with that peckerwood since the day he came here,” I said, gingerly, pulling my pants away from my crotch and wincing. “Did you hear what he was shouting when he brought that big galoot down?”
“Couldn’t very well not,” Harry said. “I was there, you know.”
“I was in the john and heard it just fine,” Dean said. He drew a sheet of paper to him, held it up into the light so I could see there was a coffee-ring as well as typing on it, and then tossed it into the waste basket. ‘Dead man walking.’ Must have read that in one of those magazines he likes so much!”
And he probably had. Percy Wetmore was a great reader of Argosy and Stag and Men’s Adventure. There was a prison tale in every issue, it seemed, and Percy read them avidly, like a man doing research. It was like he was trying to find out how to act, and thought the information was in those magazines. He’d come just after we did Anthony Ray, the hatchet-killer – and he hadn’t actually participated in an execution yet, although he’d witnessed one from the switch-room.