The Green Mile(39)

But when I can't sleep, I sometimes creep downstairs and put on the television. There's no Home Box Office or anything at Georgia Pines - I guess that's a resource just a wee bit too expensive for our Resource Center - but we have the basic cable services, and that means we have the American Movie Channel. That's the one (just in case you don't have the basic cable services yourself) where most of the films are in black and white and none of the women take their clothes off. For an old fart like me, that's sort of soothing. There have been a good many nights when I've slipped right off to sleep on the ugly green sofa in front of the TV while Francis the Talking Mule once more pulls Donald O'Connor's skillet out of the fire, or John Wayne cleans up Dodge, or Jimmy Cagney calls someone a dirty rat and then pulls a gun. Some of them are movies I saw with my wife, Janice (not just my ladyfriend but my best friend), and they calm me. The clothes they wear, the way they walk and talk, even the music on the soundtrack - all those things calm me. They remind me, I suppose, of when I was a man still walking on the skin of the world, instead of a moth-eaten relic mouldering away in an old folks' home where many of the residents wear diapers and rubber pants.

There was nothing soothing about what I saw this morning, though. Nothing at all.

Elaine sometimes joins me for AMC's so-called Early Bird Matinee, which starts at 4:00 a.m. - she doesn't say much about it, but I know her arthritis hurts her something terrible, and that the drugs they give her don't help much anymore.

When she came in this morning, gliding like a ghost in her white terrycloth robe, she found me sitting on the lumpy sofa, bent over the scrawny sticks that used to be legs, and clutching my knees to try and still the shakes that were running through me like a high wind. I felt cold all over, except for my groin, which seemed to burn with the ghost of the urinary infection which had so troubled my life in the fall of 1932 - the fall of John Coffey, Percy Wetmore, and Mr. Jingles, the trained mouse.

The fall of William Wharton, it had been, too.

'Paul!' Elaine cried, and hurried over to me - hurried as fast as the rusty nails and ground glass in her hips would allow, anyway. 'Paul, what's wrong?'

'I'll be all right,' I said, but the words didn't sound very convincing - they came out all uneven, through teeth that wanted to chatter. 'Just give me a minute or two, I'll be right as rain.'

She sat next to me and put her arm around my shoulders. 'I'm sure,' she said. 'But what happened? For heaven's sake, Paul, you look like you saw a ghost.'

I did, I thought, and didn't realize until her eyes widened that I'd said it out loud.

'Not really.' I said, and patted her hand (gently - so gently!). 'But for a minute. Elaine - God!'

'Was it from the time when you were a guard at the prison?' she asked. 'The time that you've been writing about in the solarium?'

I nodded. 'I worked on our version of Death Row - '

'I know - '

'Only we called it the Green Mile. Because of the linoleum on the floor. In the fall of '32, we got this fellow - we got this wildman - named William Wharton. Liked to think of himself as Billy the Kid, even had it tattooed on his arm. Just a kid, but dangerous. I can still remember what Curtis Anderson - he was the assistant warden back in those days - wrote about him. "Crazy-wild and proud of it. Wharton is nineteen years old, and he just doesn't care." He'd underlined that part.'

The hand which had gone around my shoulders was now rubbing my back. I was beginning to calm. In that moment I loved Elaine Connelly, and could have kissed her all over her face as I told her so. Maybe I should have. It's terrible to be alone and frightened at any age, but I think it's worst when you're old. But I had this other thing on my mind, this load of old and still unfinished business.

'Anyway,' I said, 'you're right - I've been scribbling about how Wharton came on the block and almost killed Dean Stanton - one of the guys I worked with back then - when he did.'

'How could he do that?' Elaine asked.

'Meanness and carelessness,' I said grimly. 'Wharton supplied the meanness, and the guards who brought him in supplied the carelessness. The real mistake was Wharton's wrist-chain - it was a little too long. When Dean unlocked the door to E Block, Wharton was behind him. There were guards on either side of him, but Anderson was right - Wild Billy just didn't care about such things. He dropped that wrist-chain down over Dean's head and started choking him with it.'

Elaine shuddered.

'Anyway, I got thinking about all that and couldn't sleep, so I came down here. I turned on AMC, thinking you might come down and we'd have us a little date - '

She laughed and kissed my forehead just above the eyebrow. It used to make me prickle all over when Janice did that, and it still made me prickle all over when Elaine did it early this morning. I guess some things don't ever change.

' - and what came on was this old black-and-white gangster movie from the forties. Kiss of Death, it's called.'

I could feel myself wanting to start shaking again and tried to suppress it.

'Richard Widmark's in it,' I said. 'It was his first big part, I think. I never went to see it with Jan - we gave the cops and robbers a miss, usually - but I remember reading somewhere that Widmark gave one hell of a performance as the punk. He sure did. He's pale... doesn't seem to walk so much as go gliding around... he's always calling people 'squirt'... talking about squealers how much he hates the squealers... '