The Green Mile(72)

'Bar-be-cue! Me and you! Stinky, pinky, phew-phew-phew! It wasn't Billy or Philadelphia Philly, it wasn't Jackie or Roy! It was a warm little number, a hot cucumber, by the name of Delacroix!'

'Shut up, you jerk,' I said.

Wharton grinned, showing his mouthful of dingy teeth. He wasn't dying, at least not yet; he was up, happy, practically tap-dancing. 'Come on in here and make me, why don't you?' he said happily, and then began another verse of 'The Barbecue Song,' making up words not quite at random. There was something going on in there, all right. A kind of green and stinking intelligence that was, in its own way, almost brilliant.

I went down to John Coffey. He wiped away his tears with the heels of his hands. His eyes were red and sore-looking, and it came to me that he was exhausted, too. Why he should have been, a man who trudged around the exercise yard maybe two hours a day and either sat or laid down in his cell the rest of the time, I didn't know, but I didn't doubt what I was seeing. It was too clear.

'Poor Del,' he said in a low, hoarse voice. 'Poor old Del.'

'Yes,' I said. 'Poor old Del. John, are you okay?'

'He's out of it,' Coffey said. 'Del's out of it. Isn't he, boss?'

'Yes. Answer my question, John. Are you okay?'

'Del's out of it, he's the lucky one. No matter how it happened, he's the lucky one.'

I thought Delacroix might have given him an argument on that, but didn't say so. I glanced around Coffey's cell, instead. 'Where's Mr. Jingles?'

'Ran down there.' He pointed through the bars, down the hall to the restraint-room door.

I nodded. 'Well, he'll be back.'

But he wasn't; Mr. Jingles's days on the Green Mile were over. The only trace of him we ever happened on was what Brutal found that winter: a few brightly colored splinters of wood, and a smell of peppermint candy wafting out of a hole in a beam.

I meant to walk away then, but I didn't. I looked at John Coffey, and he back at me as if he knew everything I was thinking. I told myself to get moving, to just call it a night and get moving, back to the duty desk and my report. Instead I said his name: 'John Coffey.'

'Yes, boss,' he said at once.

Sometimes a man is cursed with needing to know a thing, and that was how it was with me right then. I dropped down on one knee and began taking off one of my shoes.

7

The rain had quit by the time I got home, and a late grin of moon had appeared over the ridges to the north. My sleepiness seemed to have gone with the clouds. I was wide awake, and I could smell Delacroix on me. I thought I might smell him on my skin - barbecue, me and you, stinky, pinky, phew-phew-phew - for a long time to come.

Janice was waiting up, as she always did on execution nights. I meant not to tell her the story, saw no sense in harrowing her with it, but she got a clear look at my face as I came in the kitchen door and would have it all. So I sat down, took her warm hands in my cold ones (the heater in my old Ford barely worked, and the weather had turned a hundred and eighty degrees since the storm), and told her what she thought she wanted to hear. About halfway through I broke down crying, which I hadn't expected. I was a little ashamed, but only a little; it was her, you see, and she never taxed me with the times that I slipped from the way I thought a man should be... the way I thought I should be, at any rate. A man with a good wife is the luckiest of God's creatures, and one without must be among the most miserable, I think, the only true blessing of their lives that they don't know how poorly off they are. I cried, and she held my head against her breast, and when my own storm passed, I felt better... a little, anyway. And I believe that was when I had the first conscious sight of my idea. Not the shoe; I don't mean that. The shoe was related, but different. All my real idea was right then, however, was an odd realization: that John Coffey and Melinda Moores, different as they might have been in size and sex and skin color, had exactly the same eyes: woeful, sad, and distant. Dying eyes.

'Come to bed,' my wife said at last. 'Come to bed with me, Paul.'

So I did, and we made love, and when it was over she went to sleep. As I lay there watching the moon grin and listening to the walls tick - they were at last pulling in, exchanging summer for fall - I thought about John Coffey saying he had helped it. I helped Del's mouse. I helped Mr. Jingles. He's a circus mouse. Sure. And maybe, I thought, we were all circus mice, running around with only the dimmest awareness that God and all His heavenly host were watching us in our Bakelite houses through our ivy-glass windows.

I slept a little as the day began to lighten - two hours, I guess, maybe three; and I slept the way I always sleep these days here in Georgia Pines and hardly ever did then, in thin little licks. What I went to sleep thinking about was the churches youth. The names changed, depending on the whims of my mother and her sisters, but they were all really the same, all The First Backwoods Church of Praise Jesus, The Lord Is Mighty. In the shadow of those blunt, square steeples, the concept of atonement came up as regularly as the toll of the bell which called the faithful to worship. Only God could forgive sins, could and did, washing them away in the agonal blood of His crucified Son, but that did not change the responsibility of His children to atone for those sins (and even their simple errors of judgement) whenever possible. Atonement was powerful; it was the lock on the door you closed against the past.