The Green Mile(86)

'Stop that yelling,' Brutal said. 'Unless you want to have a pair of the world's most unique teabag caddies.'

Percy quit yelling for help and just stood there, trembling and looking down at the cover of the crude cartoon book, which showed Popeye and Olive doing it in a creative way I had heard of but never tried. 'Oooh, Popeye!' read the balloon over Olive's head. 'Uck-uck-uck-uck!' read the one over Popeye's. He was still smoking his pipe.

'Hold out your arms,' Brutal said, 'and let's have no more foolishness about it. Do it now.'

'I won't,' Percy said. 'I won't, and you can't make me.'

'You're dead wrong about that, you know,' Brutal said, then clamped down on Percy's ears and twisted them the way you might twist the dials on an oven. An oven that wasn't cooking the way you wanted, Percy let out a miserable shriek of pain and surprise that I would have given a great deal not to have heard. It wasn't just pain and surprise, you see; it was understanding. For the first time in his life, Percy was realizing that awful things didn't just happen to other people, those not fortunate enough to be related to the governor. I wanted to tell Brutal to stop, but of course I couldn't. Things had gone much too far for that. All I could do was to remind myself that Percy had put Delacroix through God knew what agonies simply because Delacroix had laughed at him. The reminder didn't go very far toward soothing the way I felt. Perhaps it might have, if I'd been built more along the lines of Percy.

'Stick those arms out there, honey,' Brutal said, 'or you get another.'

Harry had already let go of young Mr. Wetmore. Sobbing like a little kid, the tears which had been standing in his eyes now spilling down his cheeks, Percy shot his hands out straight in front of him, like a sleepwalker in a movie comedy. I had the sleeves of the straitjacket up his arms in a trice. I hardly had it over his shoulders before Brutal had let go of Percy's ears and grabbed the straps hanging down from the jacket's cuffs. He yanked Percy's hands around to his sides, so that his arms were crossed tightly on his chest. Harry, meanwhile, did up the back and snapped the cross-straps. Once Percy gave m and stuck out his arms, the whole thing took less than ten seconds.

'Okay, hon,' Brutal said. 'Forward harch.'

But he wouldn't. He looked at Brutal, then turned his terrified, streaming eyes on me. Nothing about his connections now, or how we'd have to go all the way to South Carolina just to get a free meal; he was far past that.

'Please,' he whispered in a hoarse, wet voice. 'Don't put me in with him, Paul.'

Then I understood why he had panicked, why he'd fought us so hard. He thought we were going to put him in with Wild Bill Wharton; that his punishment for the dry sponge was to be a dry cornholing from the resident psychopath. Instead of feeling sympathy for Percy at this realization, I felt disgust and a hardening of my resolve. He was, after all, judging us by the way he would have behaved, had our positions been reversed.

'Not Wharton,' I said. 'The restraint room, Percy. You're going to spend three or four hours in there, all by yourself in the dark, thinking about what you did to Del. It's probably too late for you to learn any new lessons about how people are supposed to behave - Brute thinks so, anyway - but I'm an optimist. Now move.'

He did, muttering under his breath that we'd be sorry for this, plenty sorry, just wait and see, but on the whole he seemed relieved and reassured.

When we herded him out into the hall, Dean gave us a look of such wide-eyed surprise and dewy innocence that I could have laughed, if the business hadn't been so serious. I've seen better acting in backwoods Grange revues.

'Say, don't you think the joke's gone far enough?' Dean asked.

'You just shut up, if you know what's good for you,' Brutal growled. These were lines we'd scripted at lunch, and that was just what they sounded like to me, scripted lines, but if Percy was scared enough and confused enough, they still might save Dean Stanton's job in a pinch. I myself didn't think so, but anything was possible. Any time I've doubted that, then or since, I just think about John Coffey, and Delacroix's mouse.

We ran Percy down the Green Mile, him stumbling and gasping for us to slow down, he was going to go flat on his face if we didn't slow down. Wharton was on his bunk, but we went by too fast for me to see if he was awake or asleep. John Coffey was standing at his cell door and watching. 'You're a bad man and you deserve to go in that dark place,' he said, but I don't think Percy heard him.

Into the restraint room we went, Percy's cheeks red and wet with tears, his eyes rolling into their sockets, his pampered locks all flopping down on his forehead. Harry pulled Percy's gun with one hand and his treasured hickory, head-knocker with the other. 'You'll get em back, don't worry,' Harry said. He sounded a trifle embarrassed.

'I wish I could say the same about your job,' Percy replied. 'All your jobs. You can't do this to me! You can't!'

He was obviously prepared to go on in that vein for quite awhile, but we didn't have time to listen to his sermon. In my pocket was a roll of friction-tape, the thirties ancestor of the strapping-tape folks use today. Percy saw it and started to back away. Brutal grabbed him from behind and hugged him until I had slapped the tape over his mouth, winding the roll around to the back of his head, just to be sure. He was going to have a few less swatches of hair when the tape came off, and a pair of seriously chapped lips into the bargain, but I no longer much cared, I'd had a gutful of Percy Wetmore.