The Green Mile(50)

'Goddam you, big dummy, how dey doin widdim?' Delacroix screamed. I heard Mr. Jingles squeaking, as if he wanted to know, too.

Percy arrived, his shirt wet and sticking to him from his struggles with the watermain, his face glowing with excitement. Dean came along behind him, wearing a bracelet of purplish bruise around his throat and looking a lot less thrilled.

'Come on, now, Wild Bill,' I said, and yanked Wharton to his feet. 'Little walky-walky.'

'Don't you call me that!' Wharton screamed shrilly, and I think that for the first time we were seeing real feelings, and not just a clever animal's camouflage spots. 'Wild Bill Hickok wasn't no range-rider! He never fought him no bear with a Bowie knife, either! He was just another bushwhackin John Law! Dumb sonofabitch sat with his back to the door and got kilt by a drunk!'

'Oh my suds and body, a history lesson!' Brutal exclaimed, and shoved Wharton out of his cell. 'A feller just never knows what he's going to get when he clocks in here, only that it's apt to be nice. But with so many nice people like you around, I guess that kind of stands to reason, don't it? And you know what? Pretty soon you'll be history yourself, Wild Bill. Meantime, you get on down the hall. We got a room for you. Kind of a cooling-off room.'

Wharton gave a furious, inarticulate scream and threw himself at Brutal, even though he was snugly buckled into the coat now, and his arms were wrapped around behind him. Percy made to draw his baton - the Wetmore Solution for all of life's problems - and Dean put a hand on his wrist. Percy gave him a puzzled, half-indignant look, as if to say that after what Wharton had done to Dean, Dean should be the last person in the world to want to hold him back.

Brutal pushed Wharton backward. I caught him and pushed him to Harry. And Harry propelled him on down the Green Mile, past the gleeful Delacroix and the impassive Coffey. Wharton ran to keep from falling on his face, spitting curses the whole way. Spitting them the way a welder's torch spits sparks. We banged him into the last cell on the right while Dean, Harry, and Percy (who for once wasn't complaining about being unfairly overworked) yanked all of the crap out of the restraint room. While they did that, I had a brief conversation with Wharton.

'You think you're tough,' I said, 'and maybe you are, sonny, but in here tough don't matter. Your stampeding days are over. If you take it easy on us, we'll take it easy on you. If you make it hard, you'll die in the end just the same, only we'll sharpen you like a pencil before you go.'

'You're gonna be so happy to see the end of me,' Wharton said in a hoarse voice. He was struggling against the straitjacket even though he must have known it would do no good, and his face was as red as a tomato. 'And until I'm gone, I'll make your lives miserable.' He bared his teeth at me like an angry baboon.

'If that's all you want, to make our lives miserable, you can quit now, because you've already succeeded,' Brutal said. 'But as far as your time on the Mile goes, Wharton, we don't care if you spend all of it in the room with the soft walls. And you can wear that damned nut-coat until your arms gangrene from lack of circulation and fall right off.' He paused. 'No one much comes down here, you know. And if you think anyone gives much of a shit what happens to you, one way or another, you best reconsider. To the world in general, you're already one dead outlaw.'

Wharton was studying Brutal carefully, and the color was fading out of his face. 'Lemme out of it,' he said in a placatory voice - a voice too sane and too reasonable to trust. 'I'll be good. Honest Injun.'

Harry appeared in the cell doorway. The end of the corridor looked like a rummage sale, but we'd set things to rights with good speed once we got started. We had before; we knew the drill. 'All ready,' Harry said.

Brutal grabbed the bulge in the canvas where Wharton's right elbow was and yanked him to his feet. 'Come on, Wild Billy. And look on the good side. You're gonna have at least twenty-four hours to remind yourself never to sit with your back to the door, and to never hold onto no aces and eights.'

'Lemme out of it,' Wharton said. He looked from Brutal to Harry to me, the red creeping back into his face. 'I'll be good - I tell you I've learned my lesson. I... I... ummmmmahhhhhhh - !'

He suddenly collapsed, half of him in the cell, half of him on the played-out lino of the Green Mile, kicking his feet and bucking his body.

'Holy Christ, he's pitchin a fit,' Percy whispered.

'Sure, and my sister's the Whore of Babylon,' Brutal said. 'She dances the hootchie-kootchie for Moses on Saturday nights in a long white veil.' He bent down and hooked a hand into one of Wharton's armpits. I got the other one. Wharton threshed between us like a hooked fish. Carrying his jerking body, listening to him grunt from one end and fart from the other was one of my life's less pleasant experiences.

I looked up and met John Coffey's eyes for a second. They were bloodshot, and his dark cheeks were wet. He had been crying again. I thought of Hammersmith making that biting gesture with his hand and shivered a little. Then I turned my attention back to Wharton.

We threw him into the restraint room like he was cargo, and watched him lie on the floor, bucking hard in the straitjacket next to the drain we had once checked for the mouse which had started its E Block life as Steamboat Willy.

'I don't much care if he swallows his tongue or something and dies,' Dean said in his hoarse and raspy voice, 'but think of the paperwork, boys! It'd never end.'