The Green Mile(22)

'Yep,' Percy said. 'Threw one down in Knoxville. Those city boys didn't know what hit em. Walked two. Could have had a perfect game if the ump hadn't been such a lugoon.'

Dean could have left it at that, but he had seniority on Percy and part of a senior's job is to instruct, and at that time - before Coffey, before Delacroix - he still thought Percy might be teachable. So he reached out and grasped the younger man's wrist. 'You want to think about what you was doing just now,' Dean said. His intention, he said later, was to sound serious but not disapproving. Not too disapproving, anyway.

Except with Percy, that didn't work. He might not learn... but we would eventually.

'Say, Four-Eyes, I know what I was doing - trying to get that mouse! What're you, blind?'

'You also scared the cheese out of Bill, out of me, and out of them,' Dean said, pointing in the direction of Bitterbuck and Flanders.

'So what?' Percy asked, drawing himself up. 'They ain't in cradle-school, in case you didn't notice. Although you guys treat them that way half the time.'

'Well, I don't like to be scared,' Bill rumbled, 'and I work here, Wetmore, in case you didn't notice. I ain't one of your lugoons.'

Percy gave him a look that was narrow-eyed and a touch uncertain.

'And we don't scare them any more than we have to, because they're under a lot of strain,' Dean said. He was still keeping his voice low. 'Men that are under a lot of strain can snap. Hurt themselves. Hurt others. Sometimes get folks like us in trouble, too.'

Percy's mouth twitched at that. "In trouble" was an idea that had power over him. Making trouble was okay. Getting into it was not.

'Our job is talking, not yelling,' Dean said. 'A man who is yelling at prisoners is a man who has lost control.'

Percy knew who had written that scripture - me. The boss. There was no love lost between Percy Wetmore and Paul Edgecombe, and this was still summer, remember - long before the real festivities started.

'You'll do better,' Dean said, 'if you think of this place as like an intensive-care ward in a hospital. It's best to be quiet - '

'I think of it as a bucket of piss to drown rats in,' Percy said, 'and that's all. Now let me go.'

He tore free of Dean's hand, stepped between him and Bill, and stalked up the corridor with his head down. He walked a little too close to The President's side - close enough so that Flanders could have reached out, grabbed him, and maybe headwhipped him with his own prized hickory baton, had Flanders been that sort of man. He wasn't, of course, but The Chief perhaps was. The Chief, if given a chance, might have administered such a beating just to teach Percy a lesson. What Dean said to me on that subject when he told me this story the following night has stuck with me ever since, because it turned out to be a kind of prophecy. 'Wetmore don't understand that he hasn't got any power over them,' Dean said. 'That nothing he does can really make things worse for them, that they can only be electrocuted once. Until he gets his head around that, he's going to be a danger to himself and to everyone else down here.'

Percy went into my office and slammed the door behind him.

'My, my,' Bill Dodge said. 'Ain't he the swollen and badly infected testicle.'

'You don't know the half of it,' Dean said.

'Oh, look on the bright side,' Bill said. He was always telling people to look on the bright side; it got so you wanted to punch his nose every time it came out of his mouth. 'Your trick mouse got away, at least.'

'Yeah, but we won't see him no more,' Dean said. 'I imagine this time goddam Percy Wetmore's scared him off for good.'

Chapter 6

3

That was logical but wrong. The mouse was back the very next evening, which just happened to be the first of Percy Wetmore's two nights off before he slid over to the graveyard shift.

Steamboat Willy showed up around seven o'clock. I was there to see his reappearance; so was Dean. Harry Terwilliger, too. Harry was on the desk. I was technically on days, but had stuck around to spend an extra hour with The Chief, whose time was getting close by then. Bitterbuck was stoical on the outside, in the tradition of his tribe, but I could see his fear of the end growing inside him like a poison flower. So we talked. You could talk to them in the daytime but it wasn't so good, with the shouts and conversation (not to mention the occasional fist-fight) coming from the exercise yard, the chonk-chonk-chonk of the stamping machines in the plate-shop, the occasional yell of a guard for someone to put down that pick or grab up that hoe or just to get your ass over here, Harvey. After four it got a little better, and after six it got better still. Six to eight was the optimum time. After that you could see the long thoughts starting to steal over their minds again - in their eyes you could see it, like afternoon shadows - and it was best to stop. They still heard what you were saying, but it no longer made sense to them. Past eight they were getting ready for the watches of the night and imagining how the cap would feel when it was clamped to the tops of their heads, and how the air would smell inside the black bag which had been rolled down over their sweaty faces.

But I got The Chief at a good time. He told me about his first wife, and how they had built a lodge together up in Montana. Those had been the happiest days of his life, he said. The water was so pure and so cold that it felt like your mouth was cut every time you drank.