He nodded. With Brutal's hand digging into the soft sides of his face the way it was, Percy looked eerily like Old Toot-Toot.
Brutal let go of him and stepped back. I nodded to Harry, who went behind Percy and started unsnapping and unbuckling.
"Keep it in mind, Percy," Harry said. "Keep it in mind and let bygones be bygones."
All of it suitably scary, three bogeymen in bluesuits . . . but I felt a kind of knowing despair sweep through me, all the same. He might keep quiet for a day or a week, continuing to calculate the odds on various actions, but in the end two things--his belief in his connections and his inability to walk away from a situation where he saw himself as the loser--would combine. When that happened, he would spill his guts. We had perhaps helped to save Melly Moores's life by taking John to her, and I wouldn't have changed that ("not for all the tea in China," as we used to say back in those days), but in the end we were going to hit the canvas and the ref was going to count us out. Short of murder, there was no way we could make Percy keep his end of the bargain, not once he was away from us and had started to get back what passed for his guts.
I took a little sidelong glance at Brutal and saw he knew this, too. Which didn't surprise me. There were no flies on Mrs. Howell's boy Brutus, never had been. He gave me a tiny shrug, just one shoulder lifting an inch and then dropping, but it was enough. So what? that shrug said. What else is there, Paul? We did what we had to do, and we did it the best we could.
Yes. Results hadn't been half-bad, either.
Harry undid the last buckle on the straitjacket. Grimacing with disgust and rage, Percy pawed it off and let it drop at his feet. He wouldn't look at any of us, not directly.
"Give me my gun and my baton," he said. I handed them over. He dropped the gun into its holster and shoved the hickory stick into its custom loop.
"Percy, if you think about it--"
"Oh, I intend to," he said, brushing past me. "I intend to think about it very hard. Starting right now. On my way home. One of you boys can clock me out at quitting time." He reached the door of the restraint room and turned to survey us with a look of angry, embarrassed contempt--a deadly combination for the secret we'd had some fool's hope of keeping. "Unless, of course, you want to try explaining why I left early."
He left the room and went striding up the Green Mile, forgetting in his agitation why that green-floored central corridor was so wide. He had made this mistake once before and had gotten away with it. He would not get away with it again.
I followed him out the door, trying to think of a way to soothe him down--I didn't want him leaving E Block the way he was now, sweaty and dishevelled, with the red print of my hand still on his cheek. The other three followed me.
What happened then happened very fast--it was all over in no more than a minute, perhaps even less. Yet I remember all of it to this day--mostly, I think, because I told Janice everything when I got home and that set it in my mind. What happened afterward--the dawn meeting with Curtis Anderson, the inquest, the press-meeting Hal Moores set up for us (he was back by then, of course), and the eventual Board of Enquiry in the state capital--those things have blurred over the years like so much else in my memory. But as to what actually happened next there on the Green Mile, yes, that I remember perfectly well.
Percy was walking up the right side of the Mile with his head lowered, and I'll say this much: no ordinary prisoner could have reached him. John Coffey wasn't an ordinary prisoner, though. John Coffey was a giant, and he had a giant's reach.
I saw his long brown arms shoot out from between the bars and yelled, "Watch it, Percy, watch it!" Percy started to turn, his left hand dropping to the butt of his stick. Then he was seized and yanked against the front of John Coffey's cell, the right side of his face smashing into the bars.
He grunted and turned toward Coffey, raising the hickory club. John was certainly vulnerable to it; his own face was pressed so strenuously into the space between two of the center bars that he looked as if he was trying to squeeze his entire head through. It would have been impossible, of course, but that was how it looked. His right hand groped, found the nape of Percy's neck, curled around it, and yanked Percy's head forward. Percy brought the club down between the bars and onto John's temple. Blood flowed, but John paid no attention. His mouth pressed against Percy's mouth. I heard a whispering rush--an exhalatory sound, as of long-held breath. Percy jerked like a fish on a hook, trying to get away, but he never had a chance; John's right hand was pressed to the back of his neck, holding him firm. Their faces seemed to melt together, like the faces of lovers I have seen kissing passionately through bars.
Percy screamed, the sound muffled as it had been through the tape, and made another effort to pull back. For an instant their lips came apart a little, and I saw the black, swirling tide that was flowing out of John Coffey and into Percy Wetmore. What wasn't going into him through his quivering mouth was flowing in by way of his nostrils. Then the hand on the nape of his neck flexed, and Percy was pulled forward onto John's mouth again; was almost impaled on it.
Percy's left hand sprang open. His treasured hickory baton fell to the green linoleum. He never picked it up again.
I tried to lunge forward, I guess I did lunge forward, but my movements felt old and creaky to myself. I grabbed for my gun, but the strap was still across the burled-walnut grip, and at first I couldn't get it out of its holster. Beneath me, I seemed to feel the floor shake as it had in the back bedroom of the Warden's neat little Cape Cod. That I'm not sure of, but I know that one of the caged lightbulbs overhead broke. Fragments of glass showered down. Harry yelled in surprise.
At last I managed to thumb loose the safety strap over the butt of my .38, but before I could pull it out of its holster, John had thrust Percy away from him and stepped back into his cell. John was grimacing and rubbing his mouth, as if he had tasted something bad.
"What'd he do?" Brutal shouted. "What'd he do, Paul?"
"Whatever he took out of Melly, Percy's got it now," I said.
Percy was standing against the bars of Delacroix's old cell. His eyes were wide and blank--double zeros. I approached him carefully, expecting him to start coughing and choking the way John had after he'd finished with Melinda, but he didn't. At first he only stood there.
I snapped my fingers in front of his eyes. "Percy! Hey, Percy! Wake up!"
Nothing. Brutal joined me, and reached toward Percy's empty face with both hands.
"That isn't going to work," I said.
Ignoring me, Brutal clapped his hands sharply together twice, right in front of Percy's nose. And it did work, or appeared to work. His eyelids fluttered and he stared around--dazed, like someone hit over the head struggling back to consciousness. He looked from Brutal to me. All these years later, I'm pretty sure he didn't see either of us, but I thought he did then; I thought he was coming out of it.
He pushed away from the bars and swayed a little on his feet. Brutal steadied him. "Easy, boy, you all right?" Percy didn't answer, just stepped past Brutal and turned toward the duty desk. He wasn't staggering, exactly, but he was listing to port.
Brutal reached out for him. I pushed his hand away. "Leave him alone." Would I have said the same if I'd known what was going to happen next? I've asked myself that question a thousand times since the fall of 1932. There's never any answer.
Percy made twelve or fourteen paces, then stopped again, head lowered. He was outside of Wild Bill Wharton's cell by then. Wharton was still making those sousaphone noises. He slept through the whole thing. He slept through his own death, now that I think of it, which made him a lot luckier than most of the men who ended up here. Certainly luckier than he deserved.
Before we knew what was happening, Percy drew his gun, stepped to the bars of Wharton's cell, and emptied all six shots into the sleeping man. Just bam-bam-bam, bam-bam-bam, as fast as he could pull the trigger. The sound in that enclosed space was deafening; when I told Janice the story the next morning, I could stil
l hardly hear the sound of my own voice for the ringing in my ears.
We ran at him, all four of us. Dean got there first--I don't know how, as he was behind Brutal and me when Coffey had hold of Percy--but he did. He grabbed Percy's wrist, prepared to wrestle the gun out of Percy's hand, but he didn't have to. Percy just let go, and the gun fell to the floor. His eyes went across us like they were skates and we were ice. There was a low hissing sound and a sharp ammoniac smell as Percy's bladder let go, then a brrrap sound and a thicker stink as he filled the other side of his pants, as well. His eyes had settled on a far corner of the corridor. They were eyes that never saw anything in this real world of ours again, so far as I know. Back near the beginning of this I wrote that Percy was at Briar Ridge by the time that Brutal found the colored slivers of Mr. Jingles's spool a couple of months later, and I didn't lie about that. He never got the office with the fan in the corner, though; never got a bunch of lunatic patients to push around, either. But I imagine he at least got his own private room.
He had connections, after all.
Wharton was lying on his side with his back against the wall of his cell. I couldn't see much then but a lot of blood soaking into the sheet and splattered across the cement, but the coroner said Percy had shot like Annie Oakley. Remembering Dean's story of how Percy had thrown his hickory baton at the mouse that time and barely missed, I wasn't too surprised. This time the range had been shorter and the target not moving. One in the groin, one in the gut, one in the chest, three in the head.
Brutal was coughing and waving at the haze of gunsmoke. I was coughing myself, but hadn't noticed it until then.
"End of the line," Brutal said. His voice was calm, but there was no mistaking the glaze of panic in his eyes.
I looked down the hallway and saw John Coffey sitting on the end of his bunk. His hands were clasped between his knees again, but his head was up and he no longer looked a bit sick. He nodded at me slightly, and I surprised myself--as I had on the day I offered him my hand--by returning the nod.
"What are we going to do?" Harry gibbered. "Oh Christ, what are we going to do?"
"Nothing we can do," Brutal said in that same calm voice. "We're hung. Aren't we, Paul?"
My mind had begun to move very fast. I looked at Harry and Dean, who were staring at me like scared kids. I looked at Percy, who was standing there with his hands and jaw dangling. Then I looked at my old friend, Brutus Howell.
"We're going to be okay," I said.
Percy at last commenced coughing. He doubled over, hands on his knees, almost retching. His face began to turn red. I opened my mouth, meaning to tell the others to stand back, but I never got a chance. He made a sound that was a cross between a dry-heave and a bullfrog's croak, opened his mouth, and spewed out a cloud of black, swirling stuff. It was so thick that for a moment we couldn't see his head. Harry said "Oh God save us" in a weak and watery voice. Then the stuff turned a white so dazzling it was like January sun on fresh snow. A moment later the cloud was gone. Percy straightened slowly up and resumed his vacant gaze down the length of the Green Mile.
"We didn't see that," Brutal said. "Did we, Paul?"
"No. I didn't and you didn't. Did you see it, Harry?"
"No," Harry said.
"Dean?"
"See what?" Dean took his glasses off and began to polish them. I thought he would drop them out of his trembling hands, but he managed not to.
" 'See what,' that's good. That's just the ticket. Now listen to your scoutmaster, boys, and get it right the first time, because time is short. It's a simple story. Let's not complicate it."
3
I TOLD ALL THIS to Jan at around eleven o'clock that morning--the next morning, I almost wrote, but of course it was the same day. The longest one of my whole life, without a doubt. I told it pretty much as I have here, finishing with how William Wharton had ended up lying dead on his bunk, riddled with lead from Percy's sidearm.
No, that's not right. What I actually finished with was the stuff that came out of Percy, the bugs or the whatever-it-was. That was a hard thing to tell, even to your wife, but I told it.
As I talked, she brought me black coffee by the half-cup--at first my hands were shaking too badly to pick up a whole one without spilling it. By the time I finished, the shaking had eased some, and I felt that I could even take some food--an egg, maybe, or some soup.
"The thing that saved us was that we didn't really have to lie, any of us."
"Just leave a few things out," she said, and nodded. "Little things, mostly, like how you took a condemned murderer out of prison, and how he cured a dying woman, and how he drove that Percy Wetmore crazy by--what?--spitting a pureed brain tumor down his throat?"
"I don't know, Jan," I said. "I only know that if you keep talking like that, you'll end up either eating that soup yourself, or feeding it to the dog."
"I'm sorry. But I'm right, aren't I?"
"Yeah," I said. "Except we got away with the--" The what? You couldn't call it an escape, and furlough wasn't right, either. "--the field trip. Not even Percy can tell them about that, if he ever comes back."
"If he comes back," she echoed. "How likely is that?"
I shook my head to indicate I had no idea. But I did, actually; I didn't think he was going to come back, not in 1932, not in '42 or '52, either. In that I was right. Percy Wetmore stayed at Briar Ridge until it burned flat in 1944. Seventeen inmates were killed in that fire, but Percy wasn't one of them. Still silent and blank in every regard--the word I learned to describe that state is catatonic--he was led out by one of the guards long before the fire reached his wing. He went on to another institution--I don't remember the name and guess it doesn't matter, anyway--and died in 1965. So far as I know, the last time he ever spoke was when he told us we could clock him out at quitting time . . . unless we wanted to explain why he had left early.
The irony was that we never had to explain much of anything. Percy had gone crazy and shot William Wharton to death. That was what we told, and so far as it went, every word was true. When Anderson asked Brutal how Percy had seemed before the shooting and Brutal answered with one word--"Quiet"--I had a terrible moment when I felt that I might burst out laughing. Because that was true, too, Percy had been quiet, for most of his shift he'd had a swatch of friction-tape across his mouth and the best he'd been able to come up with was mmmph, mmmph, mmmph.
Curtis kept Percy there until eight o'clock, Percy as silent as a cigar-store Indian but a lot more eerie. By then Hal Moores had arrived, looking grim but competent, ready to climb back into the saddle. Curtis Anderson let him do just that, and with a sigh of relief the rest of us could almost hear. The bewildered, frightened old man was gone; it was the Warden who strode up to Percy, grabbed him by the shoulders with his big hands, and shook him hard.
"Son!" he shouted into Percy's blank face--a face that was already starting to soften like wax, I thought. "Son! Do you hear me? Talk to me if you hear me! I want to know what happened!"
Nothing from Percy, of course. Anderson wanted to get the Warden aside, discuss how they were going to handle it--it was a political hot potato if there had ever been one--but Moores put him off, at least for the time being, and drew me down the Mile. John Coffey was lying on his bunk with his face to the wall, legs dangling outrageously, as they always did. He appeared to be sleeping and probably was . . . but he wasn't always what he appeared, as we had found out.
"Did what happened at my house have anything to do with what happened here when you got back?" Moores asked in a low voice. "I'll cover you as much as I can, even if it means my job, but I have to know."
I shook my head. When I spoke, I also kept my voice low-pitched. There were now almost a dozen screws milling around at the head of the aisle. Another was photographing Wharton in his cell. Curtis Anderson had turned to watch that, and for the time being, only Brutal was watching us. "No, sir. We got John back into his cell just like you see, then let Percy out of the restraint room, where we'd
stashed him for safekeeping. I thought he'd be hot under the collar, but he wasn't. Just asked for his sidearm and baton. He didn't say anything else, just walked off up the corridor. Then, when he got to Wharton's cell, he pulled his gun and started shooting."
"Do you think being in the restraint room . . . did something to his mind?"
"No, sir."
"Did you put him in the straitjacket?"
"No, sir. There was no need."
"He was quiet? Didn't struggle?"
"No struggle."
"Even when he saw you meant to put him in the restraint room, he was quiet and didn't struggle."
"That's right." I felt an urge to embroider on this--to give Percy at least a line or two--and conquered it. Simpler would be better, and I knew it. "There was no fuss. He just went over into one of the far corners and sat down."
"Didn't speak of Wharton then?"
"No, sir."
"Didn't speak of Coffey, either?"
I shook my head.
"Could Percy have been laying for Wharton? Did he have something against the man?"
"That might be," I said, lowering my voice even more. "Percy was careless about where he walked, Hal. One time Wharton reached out, grabbed him up against the bars, and messed him over some." I paused. "Felt him up, you could say."
"No worse than that? Just . . . 'messed him over' . . . and that was all?"
"Yes, but it was pretty bad for Percy, just the same. Wharton said something about how he'd rather screw Percy than Percy's sister."
"Um." Moores kept looking sideways at John Coffey, as if he needed constant reassurance that Coffey was a real person, actually in the world. "It doesn't explain what's happened to him, but it goes a good piece toward explaining why it was Wharton he turned on and not Coffey or one of you men. And speaking of your men, Paul, will they all tell the same story?"
"Yes, sir," I told him. "And they will," I said to Jan, starting in on the soup she brought to the table. "I'll see to it."