The Green Mile(108)

'It wasn't me opened it,' I said, and then drove home.

I got there late - after midnight - but my wife was waiting up for me. I'd suspected she would be, but it still did my heart good to see her, and to have her put her arms around my neck and her body nice and firm against mine. 'Hello, stranger,' she said, and then touched me down below. 'Nothing wrong with this fellow now, is there? He's just as healthy as can be.'

'Yes ma'am,' I said, and lifted her up in my arms. I took her into the bedroom and we made love as sweet as sugar, and as I came to my climax, that delicious feeling of going out and letting go, I thought of John Coffey's endlessly weeping eyes. And of Melinda Moores saying I dreamed you were wandering in the dark, and so was I.

Still lying on top of my wife, with her arms around my neck and our thighs together, I began to weep myself.

'Paul!' she said, shocked and afraid. I don't think she'd seen me in tears more than half a dozen times before in the entire course of our marriage. I have never been, in the ordinary course of things, a crying man. 'Paul, what is it?'

'I know everything there is to know,' I said through my tears. 'I know too goddam much, if you want to know the truth. I'm supposed to electrocute John Coffey in less than a week's time, but it was William Wharton who killed the Detterick girls. It was Wild Bill.'

5

The next day, the same bunch of screws who had eaten lunch in my kitchen after the botched Delacroix execution ate lunch there again. This time there was a fifth at our council of war: my wife. It was Jan who convinced me to tell the others; my first impulse had been not to. Wasn't it bad enough, I asked her, that we knew?

'You're not thinking clear about it,' she'd answered. 'Probably because you're still upset. They already know the worst thing, that John's on the spot for a crime he didn't commit. If anything, this makes it a little better.'

I wasn't so sure, but I deferred to her judgement. I expected an uproar when I told Brutal, Dean, and Harry what I knew (I couldn't prove it, but I knew, all right), but at first there was only thoughtful silence. Then, taking another of Janice's biscuits and beginning to put an outrageous amount of butter on it, Dean said: 'Did John see him, do you think? Did he see Wharton drop the girls, maybe even rape them?'

'I think if he'd seen that, he would have tried to stop it,' I said. 'As for seeing Wharton, maybe as he ran off, I suppose he might have. If he did, he forgot it later.'

'Sure,' Dean said. 'He's special, but that doesn't make him bright. He only found out it was Wharton when Wharton reached through the bars of his cell and touched him.'

Brutal was nodding. 'That's why John looked so surprised... so shocked. Remember the way his eyes opened?'

I nodded. 'He used Percy on Wharton like a gun, that was what Janice said, and it was what I kept thinking about. Why would John Coffey want to kill Wild Bill? Percy, maybe - Percy stamped on Delacroix's mouse right in front of him, Percy burned Delacroix alive and John knew it - but Wharton? Wharton messed with most of us in one way or another, but he didn't mess with John at all, so far as I know - hardly passed four dozen words with him the whole time they were on the Mile together, and half of those were that last night. Why would he want to? He was from Purdom County, and as far as white boys from up there are concerned, you don't even see a Negro unless he happens to step into your road. So why did he do it? What could he've seen or felt when Wharton touched him that was so bad that he saved back the poison he took out of Melly's body?'

'And half-killed himself doing it, too,' Brutal said.

'More like three-quarters. And the Detterick twins were all I could think of that was bad enough to explain what he did. I told myself the idea was nuts, too much of a coincidence, it just couldn't be. Then I remembered something Curtis Anderson wrote in the first memo I ever got about Wharton - that Wharton was crazy-wild, and that he'd rambled all over the state before the holdup where he killed all those people. Rambled all over the state. That stuck with me. Then there was the way he tried to choke Dean when he came in. That got me thinking about - '

'The dog,' Dean said. He was rubbing his neck where Wharton had wrapped the chain. I don't think he even knew he was doing it. 'How the dog's neck was broken.'

'Anyway, I went on up to Purdom County to check Wharton's court records - all we had here were the reports on the murders that got him to the Green Mile. The end of his career, in other words. I wanted the beginning.'

'Lot of trouble?' Brutal asked.

'Yeah. Vandalism, petty theft, setting haystack fires, even theft of an explosive - he and a friend swiped a stick of dy***ite and set it off down by a creek. He got going early, ten years old, but what I wanted wasn't there. Then the Sheriff turned up to see who I was and what I was doing, and that was actually lucky. I fibbed, told him that a cell-search had turned up a bunch of pictures in Wharton's mattress - little girls with no clothes on. I said I'd wanted to see if Wharton had any kind of history as a pederast, because there were a couple of unsolved cases up in Tennessee that I'd heard about. I was careful never to mention the Detterick twins. I don't think they crossed his mind, either.'

'Course not,' Harry said. 'Why would they have? That case is solved, after all.'

'I said I guessed there was no sense chasing the idea, since there was nothing in Wharton's back file. I mean, there was plenty in the file, but none of it about that sort of thing. Then the Sheriff - Catlett, his name is - laughed and said not everything a bad apple like Bill Wharton did was in the court files, and what did it matter, anyway? He was dead, wasn't he?