The Green Mile(90)

'It's right up ahead,' Harry replied, sounding nervous and irritable. 'Hold your damn water, Brutus.'

But Coffey, from what I'd seen of him, would have been happy to walk until the sun came up, maybe until it went back down again. He looked everywhere, starting - not in fear but in delight, I am quite sure - when an owl hoo'd. It came to me that, while he might be afraid of the dark inside, he wasn't afraid of it out here, not at all. He was caressing the night, rubbing his senses across it the way a man might rub his face across the swells and concavities of a woman's br**sts.

'We turn here,' Harry muttered.

A little finger of road - narrow, unpaved, weeds running up the center crown - angled off to the right. We turned up this and walked another quarter of a mile. Brutal was beginning to grumble again when Harry stopped, went to the left side of the track, and began to remove sprays of broken-off pine boughs. John and Brutal pitched in, and before I could join them, they had uncovered the dented snout of an old Farmall truck, its wired-on headlights staring at us like buggy eyes.

'I wanted to be as careful as I could, you know,' Harry said to Brutal in a thin, scolding voice. 'This may be a big joke to you, Brutus Howell, but I come from a very religious family, I got cousins back in the hollers so damn holy they make the Christians look like lions, and if I get caught playing at something like this - !'

'It's okay,' Brutal said. 'I'm just jumpy, that's all.'

'Me too,' Harry said stiffly. 'Now if this cussed old thing will just start - '

He walked around the hood of the truck, still muttering, and Brutal tipped me a wink. As far as Coffey was concerned, we had ceased to exist. His head was tilted back and he was drinking in the sight of the stars sprawling across the sky.

'I'll ride in back with him, if you want,' Brutal offered. Behind us, the Farmall's starter whined briefly, sounding like an old dog trying to find its feet on a cold winter morning; then the engine exploded into life. Harry raced it once and let it settle into a ragged idle. 'No need for both of us to do it.'

'Get up front,' I said. 'You can ride with him on the return trip. If we don't end up making that one locked into the back of our own stagecoach, that is.'

'Don't talk that way,' he said, looking genuinely upset. It was as if he had realized for the first time how serious this would be for us if we were caught. 'Christ, Paul!'

'Go on,' I said. 'In the cab.'

He did as he was told. I yanked on John Coffey's arm until I could get his attention back to earth for a bit, then led him around to the rear of the truck, which was stake-sided. Harry had draped canvas over the posts, and that would be of some help if we passed cars or trucks going the other way. He hadn't been able to do anything about the open back, though.

'Upsy-daisy, big boy,' I said.

'Goin for the ride now?'

'That's right.'

'Good.' He smiled. It was sweet and lovely, that smile, perhaps the more so because it wasn't complicated by much in the way of thought. He got up in back. I followed him, went to the front of the truckbed, and banged on top of the cab. Harry ground the transmission into first and the truck pulled out of the little bower he had hidden it in, shaking and juddering.

John Coffey stood spread-legged in the middle of the truckbed head cocked up at the stars again, smiling broadly, unmindful of the boughs that whipped at him as Harry turned his truck toward the highway. 'Look, boss!' he cried in a low, rapturous voice, pointing up into the black night. 'It's Cassie, the lady in the rockin chair!'

He was right; I could see her in the lane of stars between the dark bulk of the passing trees. But it wasn't Cassiopeia I thought of when he spoke of the lady in the rocking chair; it was Melinda Moores.

'I see her, John,' I said, and tugged on his arm. 'But you have to sit down now, all right?'

He sat with his back against the cab, never taking his eyes off the night sky. On his face was a look of sublime unthinking happiness. The Green Mile fell farther behind us with each revolution of the Farmall's bald tires, and for the time being, at least, the seemingly endless flow of John Coffey's tears had stopped.

7

It was twenty-five miles to Hal Moores's house on Chimney Ridge, and in Harry Terwilliger's slow and rattly farm truck, the trip took over an hour. It was an eerie ride, and although it seems to me now that every moment of it is still etched in my memory - every turn, every bump, every dip, the scary times (two of them) when trucks passed us going the other way - I don't think I could come even close to describing how I felt, sitting back there with John Coffey, both of us bundled up like Indians in the old blankets Harry had been thoughtful enough to bring along.

It was, most of all, a sense of lostness - the deep and terrible ache a child feels when he realizes he has gone wrong somewhere, all the landmarks are strange, and he no longer knows how to find his way home. I was out in the night with a prisoner - not just any prisoner, but one who had been tried and convicted for the murder of two little girls, and sentenced to die for the crime. My belief that he was innocent wouldn't matter if we were caught; we would go to jail ourselves, and probably Dean Stanton would, too. I had thrown over a life of work and belief because of one bad execution and because I believed the overgrown lummox sitting beside me might be able to cure a woman's inoperable brain tumor. Yet watching john watch the stars, I realized with dismay that I no longer did believe that, if I ever really had; my urinary infection seemed faraway and unimportant now, as such harsh and painful things always do once they are past (if a woman could really remember how bad it hurt to have her first baby, my mother once said, she'd never have a second). As for Mr. Jingles, wasn't it possible, even likely, that we had been wrong about how badly Percy had hurt him? Or that John - who really did have some kind of hypnotic power, there was no doubt of that much, at least - had somehow fooled us into thinking we'd seen something we hadn't seen at all? Then there was the matter of Hal Moores. On the day I'd surprised him in his office, I'd encountered a palsied, weepy old man. But I didn't think that was the truest side of the warden. I thought the real Warden Moores was the man who'd once broken the wrist of a skatehound who tried to stab him; the man who had pointed out to me with cynical accuracy that Delacroix's nuts were going to cook no matter who was out front on the execution team. Did I think that Hal Moores would stand meekly aside and let us bring a convicted child-murderer into his house to lay hands on his wife?