The Green Mile(17)

Brutal reached into the desk drawer above the kneehole and brought out the big leather-bound book with the word VISITORS stamped on the front in gold leaf. Ordinarily, that book stayed in the drawer from one month to the next. When a prisoner had visitors - unless it was a lawyer or a minister - he went over to the room off the messhall that was kept special for that purpose. The Arcade, we called it. I don't know why.

'Just what in the Gorry do you think you're doing?' Dean Stanton asked, peering over the tops of his spectacles as Brutal opened the book and paged grandly past years of visitors to men now dead.

'Obeyin Regulation 19,' Brutal said, finding the current page. He took the pencil and licked the tip - a disagreeable habit of which he could not be broken - and prepared to write. Regulation 19 stated simply: 'Each visitor to E Block shall show a yellow Administration pass and shall be recorded without fail'

'He's gone nuts,' Dean said to me.

'He didn't show us his pass, but I'm gonna let it go this time,' Brutal said. He gave the tip of his pencil an extra lick for good luck, then filled in 9:49 p.m. under the column headed TIME ON BLOCK.

'Sure, why not, the big bosses probably make exceptions for mice,' I said.

'Course they do,' Brutal agreed. 'Lack of pockets.' He turned to look at the wall-clock behind the desk, then printed 10:01 in the column headed TIME OFF BLOCK. The longer space between these two numbers was headed NAME OF VISITOR. After a moment's hard thought - probably to muster his limited spelling skills, as I'm sure the idea was in his head already - Brutus Howell carefully wrote STEAMBOAT WILLY, which was what most people called Mickey Mouse back in those days. It was because of that first talkie cartoon, where he rolled his eyes and bumped his hips around and pulled the whistle cord in the pilothouse of the steamboat.

'There,' Brutal said, slamming the book closed and returning it to its drawer, 'all done and buttoned up.'

I laughed, but Dean, who couldn't help being serious about things even when he saw the joke, was frowning and polishing his glasses furiously. 'You'll be in trouble if someone sees that.' He hesitated and added, 'The wrong someone.' He hesitated again, looking nearsightedly around almost as if he expected to see that the walls had grown ears, before finishing: 'Someone like Percy Kiss-My-Ass-and-Go-to-Heaven Wetmore.'

'Huh,' Brutal said. 'The day Percy Wetmore sits his narrow shanks down here at this desk will be the day I resign.'

'You won't have to,' Dean said. 'They'll fire you for making jokes in the visitors' book if Percy puts the right word in the right ear. And he can. You know he can.'

Brutal glowered but said nothing. I reckoned that later on that night he would erase what he had written. And if he didn't, I would.

The next night, after getting first Bitterbuck and then The President over to D Block, where we showered our group after the regular cons were locked down, Brutal asked me if we shouldn't have a look for Steamboat Willy down there in the restraint room.

'I guess we ought to,' I said. We'd had a good laugh over that mouse the night before, but I knew that if Brutal and I found it down there in the restraint room - particularly if we found it had gnawed itself the beginnings of a nest in one of the padded walls - we would kill it. Better to kill the scout, no matter how amusing it might be, than have to live with the pilgrims. And, I shouldn't have to tell you, neither of us was very squeamish about a little mouse-murder. Killing rats was what the state paid us for, after all.

But we didn't find Steamboat Willy - later to be known as Mr. Jingles - that night, not nested in the soft walls, or behind any of the collected junk we hauled out into the corridor. There was a great deal of junk, too, more than I would have expected, because we hadn't had to use the restraint room in a long time. That would change with the advent of William Wharton, but of course we didn't know that at the time. Lucky us.

'Where'd it go?' Brutal asked at last, wiping sweat off the back of his neck with a big blue bandanna. 'No hole, no crack... there's that, but - ' He pointed to the drain in the floor. Below the grate, which the mouse could have gotten through, was a fine steel mesh that not even a fly would have passed. 'How'd it get in? How'd it get out?'

'I don't know,' I said.

'He did come in here, didn't he? I mean, the three of us saw him.'

'Yep, right under the door. He had to squeeze a little, but he made it.'

'Gosh,' Brutal said - a word that sounded strange, coming from a man that big. 'It's a good thing the cons can't make themselves small like that, isn't it?'

'You bet,' I said, running my eye over the canvas walls one last time, looking for a hole, a crack, anything. There was nothing. 'Come on. Let's go.'

Steamboat Willy showed up again three nights later, when Harry Terwilliger was on the duty desk. Percy was also on, and chased the mouse back down the Green Mile with the same mop Dean had been thinking of using. The rodent avoided Percy easily, slipping through the crack beneath the restraint-room door a hands-down winner. Cursing at the top of his voice, Percy unlocked the door and hauled all that shit out again. It was funny and scary at the same time, Harry said. Percy was vowing he'd catch the goddam mouse and tear its diseased little head right off, but he didn't, of course. Sweaty and disheveled, the shirttail of his uniform hanging out in the back, he returned to the duty desk half an hour later, brushing his hair out of his eyes and telling Harry (who had sat serenely reading through most of the ruckus) that he was going to put a strip of insulation on the bottom of the door down there; that would solve the vermin problem, he declared.