The Green Mile(60)

'It didn't look pleasant and it didn't look friendly,' she said. 'Paul, that Mr. Dolan's been asking around about you. He asked me about you - last week, this was. I didn't think much about it then, just that he's got himself a nasty long nose for other people's business, but now I wonder.'

'Asking about me?' I hoped I didn't sound as uneasy as I felt. 'Asking what?'

'Where you go walking, for one thing. And why you go walking.'

I tried to laugh. 'There's a man who doesn't believe in exercise, that much is clear.'

'He thinks you've got a secret.' She paused. 'So do I.'

I opened my mouth - to say what, I don't know - but Elaine raised one of her gnarled but oddly beautiful hands before I could get a single word out. 'If you do, I don't want to know what it is, Paul. Your business is your business. I was raised to think that way, but not everyone was. Be careful. That's all I want to tell you. And now I'll let you alone to do your work.'

She turned to go, but before she could get out the door, I called her name. She turned back, eyes questioning.

'When I finish what I'm writing - ' I began, then shook my head a little. That was wrong. 'If I finish what I'm writing, would you read it?'

She seemed to consider, then gave me the sort of smile a man could easily fall in love with, even a man as old as me. 'That would be my honor.'

'You'd better wait until you read it before you talk about honor,' I said, and it was Delacroix's death I was thinking of.

'I'll read it, though,' she said. 'Every word. I promise. But you have to finish writing it, first.'

She left me to it, but it was a long time before I wrote anything. I sat staring out the windows for almost an hour, tapping my pen against the side of the table, watching the gray day brighten a little at a time, thinking about Brad Dolan, who calls me Paulie and never tires of jokes about chinks and slopes and spicks and micks, thinking about what Elaine Connelly had said. He thinks you've got a secret. So do I.

And maybe I do. Yes, maybe I do. And of course Brad Dolan wants it. Not because he thinks it's important (and it's not, I guess, except to me), but because he doesn't think very old men like myself should have secrets. No taking the ponchos off the hook outside the kitchen; no secrets, either. No getting the idea that the likes of us are still human. And why shouldn't we be allowed such an idea? He doesn't know. And in that, too, he is like Percy.

So my thoughts, like a river that takes an oxbow turn, finally led back to where they had been when Brad Dolan reached out from beneath the kitchen eave and grabbed my wrist: to Percy, mean-spirited Percy Wetmore, and how he had taken his revenge on the man who had laughed at him. Delacroix had been throwing the colored spool he had - the one Mr. Jingles would fetch - and it bounced out of the cell and into the corridor. That was all it took; Percy saw his chance.

Chapter 17

2

'No you fool!' Brutal yelled, but Percy paid no attention. Just as Mr. Jingles reached the spool - too intent on it to realize his old enemy was at hand - Percy brought the sole of one hard black workshoe down on him. There was an audible snap as Mr. Jingles's back broke, and blood gushed from his mouth. His tiny black eyes bulged in their sockets, and in them I read an expression of surprised agony that was all too human.

Delacroix screamed with horror and grief. He threw himself at the door of his cell and thrust his arms out through the bars, reaching as far as he could, crying the mouse's name over and over.

Percy turned toward him, smiling. Toward me and Brutal, as well. 'There,' he said. 'I knew I'd get him, sooner or later. just a matter of time, really.' He turned and walked back up the Green Mile, leaving Mr. Jingles lying on the linoleum, his spreading blood red over green.

Dean got up from the duty desk, hitting the side of it with his knee and knocking the cribbage board to the floor. The pegs spilled out of their holes and rolled in all directions. Neither Dean nor Harry, who had been just about to go out, paid the slightest attention to the overturn of the game. 'What'd you do this time?' Dean shouted at Percy. 'What the hell'd you do this time, you stoopnagel?'

Percy didn't answer. He strode past the desk without saying a word, patting his hair with his fingers. He went through my office and into the storage shed. William Wharton answered for him. 'Boss Dean? I think what he did was teach a certain french-fry it ain't smart to laugh at him,' he said, and then began to laugh himself. It was a good laugh, a country laugh, cheery and deep. There were people I met during that period of my life (very scary people, for the most part) who only sounded normal when they laughed. Wild Bill Wharton was one of those.

I looked down at the mouse again, stunned. It was still breathing, but there were little minute beads of blood caught in the filaments of its whiskers, and a dull glaze was creeping over its previously brilliant oildrop eyes. Brutal picked up the colored spool, looked at it, then looked at me. He looked as dumbfounded as I felt. Behind us, Delacroix went on screaming out his grief and horror. It wasn't just the mouse, of course; Percy had smashed a hole in Delacroix's defenses and all his terror was pouring out. But Mr. Jingles was the focusing point for those pent-up feelings, and it was terrible to listen to him.

'Oh no,' he cried over and over again, amid the screams and the garbled pleas and prayers in Cajun French. 'Oh no, oh no, poor Mr. Jingles, poor old Mr. Jingles, oh no.'