Coffey's Hands

10

AT FIRST it seemed like it was going to be a pretty good night in spite of the heat—John Coffey was being his usual quiet self, Wild Bill was making out to be Mild Bill, and Delacroix was in good spirits for a man who had a date with Old Sparky in a little more than twenty-four hours.

He did understand what was going to happen to him, at least on the most basic level; he had ordered chili for his last meal and gave me special instructions for the kitchen. “Tell em to lay on dat hot-sauce,” he said. “Tell em the kind dat really jump up your t’roat an’ say howdy—the green stuff, none of dat mild. Dat stuff gripe me like a motherfucker, I can’t get off the toilet the nex’ day, but I don’t think I gonna have a problem this time, n’est-ce pas?”

Most of them worry about their immortal souls with a kind of moronic ferocity, but Delacroix pretty much dismissed my questions about what he wanted for spiritual comfort in his last hours. If “dat fella” Schuster had been good enough for Big Chief Bitterbuck, Del reckoned, Schuster would be good enough for him. No, what he cared about—you’ve guessed already, I’m sure—was what was going to happen to Mr. Jingles after he, Delacroix, passed on. I was used to spending long hours with the condemned on the night before their last march, but this was the first time I’d spent those long hours pondering the fate of a mouse.

Del considered scenario after scenario, patiently working the possibilities through his dim mind. And while he thought aloud, wanting to provide for his pet mouse’s future as if it were a child that had to be put through college, he threw that colored spool against the wall. Each time he did it, Mr. Jingles would spring after it, track it down, and then roll it back to Del’s foot. It started to get on my nerves after awhile—first the clack of the spool against the stone wall, then the minute clitter of Mr. Jingles’s paws. Although it was a cute trick, it palled after ninety minutes or so. And Mr. Jingles never seemed to get tired. He paused every now and then to refresh himself with a drink of water out of a coffee saucer Delacroix kept for just that purpose, or to munch a pink crumb of peppermint candy, and then back to it he went. Several times it was on the tip of my tongue to tell Delacroix to give it a rest, and each time I reminded myself that he had this night and tomorrow to play the spool-game with Mr. Jingles, and that was all. Near the end, though, it began to be really difficult to hold onto that thought—you know how it is, with a noise that’s repeated over and over. After a while it shoots your nerve. I started to speak after all, then something made me look over my shoulder and out the cell door. John Coffey was standing at his cell door across the way, and he shook his head at me: right, left, back to center. As if he had read my mind and was telling me to think again.

I would see that Mr. Jingles got to Delacroix’s maiden aunt, I said, the one who had sent him the big bag of candy. His colored spool could go as well, even his “house”—we’d take up a collection and see that Toot gave up his claim on the Corona box. No, said Delacroix after some consideration (he had time to throw the spool against the wall at least five times, with Mr. Jingles either nosing it back or pushing it with his paws), that wouldn’t do. Aunt Hermione was too old, she wouldn’t understand Mr. Jingles’s frisky ways, and suppose Mr. Jingles outlived her? What would happen to him then? No, no, Aunt Hermione just wouldn’t do.

Well, then, I asked, suppose one of us took it? One of us guards? We could keep him right here on E Block. No, Delacroix said, he thanked me kindly for the thought, certainement, but Mr. Jingles was a mouse that yearned to be free. He, Eduard Delacroix, knew this, because Mr. Jingles had—you guessed it—whispered the information in his ear.

“All right,” I said, “one of us will take him home, Del. Dean, maybe. He’s got a little boy that would just love a pet mouse, I bet.”

Delacroix actually turned pale with horror at the thought. A little kid in charge of a rodent genius like Mr. Jingles? How in the name of le bon Dieu could a little kid be expected to keep up with his training, let alone teach him new tricks? And suppose the kid lost interest and forgot to feed him for two or three days at a stretch? Delacroix, who had roasted six human beings alive in an effort to cover up his original crime, shuddered with the delicate revulsion of an ardent anti-vivisectionist.

All right, I said, I’d take him myself (promise them anything, remember; in their last forty-eight hours, promise them anything). How would that be?

“No, sir, Boss Edgecombe,” Del said apologetically. He threw the spool again. It hit the wall, bounced, spun; then Mr. Jingles was on it like white on rice and nosing it back to Delacroix. “Thank you kindly—merci beaucoup—but you live out in the woods, and Mr. Jingles, he be scared to live out dans la forêt. I know, because—”

“I think I can guess how you know, Del,” I said.

Delacroix nodded, smiling. “But we gonna figure this out. You bet!” He threw the spool. Mr. Jingles clittered after it. I tried not to wince.

In the end it was Brutal who saved the day. He had been up by the duty desk, watching Dean and Harry play cribbage. Percy was there, too, and Brutal finally tired of trying to start a conversation with him and getting nothing but sullen grunts in response. He strolled down to where I sat on a stool outside of Delacroix’s cell and stood there listening to us with his arms folded.

“How about Mouseville?” Brutal asked into the considering silence which followed Del’s rejection of my spooky old house out in the woods. He threw the comment out in a casual just-an-idea tone of voice.

“Mouseville?” Delacroix asked, giving Brutal a look both startled and interested. “What Mouseville?”

“It’s this tourist attraction down in Florida,” he said. “Tallahassee, I think. Is that right, Paul? Tallahassee?”

“Yep,” I said, speaking without a moment’s hesitation, thinking God bless Brutus Howell. “Tallahassee. Right down the road apiece from the dog university.” Brutal’s mouth twitched at that, and I thought he was going to queer the pitch by laughing, but he got it under control and nodded. I’d hear about the dog university later, though, I imagined.

This time Del didn’t throw the spool, although Mr. Jingles stood on Del’s slipper with his front paws raised, clearly lusting for another chance to chase. The Cajun looked from Brutal to me and back to Brutal again. “What dey do in Mouseville?” he asked.

“You think they’d take Mr. Jingles?” Brutal asked me, simultaneously ignoring Del and drawing him on. “Think he’s got the stuff, Paul?”

I tried to appear considering. “You know,” I said, “the more I think of it, the more it seems like a brilliant idea.” From the corner of my eye I saw Percy come partway down the Green Mile (giving Wharton’s cell a very wide berth). He stood with one shoulder leaning against an empty cell, listening with a small, contemptuous smile on his lips.

“What dis Mouseville?” Del asked, now frantic to know.

“A tourist attraction, like I told you,” Brutal said. “There’s, oh I dunno, a hundred or so mice there. Wouldn’t you say, Paul?”

“More like a hundred and fifty these days,” I said. “It’s a big success. I understand they’re thinking of opening one out in California and calling it Mouseville West, that’s how much business is booming. Trained mice are the coming thing with the smart set, I guess—I don’t understand it, myself.”

Del sat with the colored spool in his hand, looking at us, his own situation forgotten for the time being.

“They only take the smartest mice,” Brutal cautioned, “the ones that can do tricks. And they can’t be white mice, because those are pet-shop mice.”

“Pet-shop mice, yeah, you bet!” Delacroix said fiercely. “I hate dem pet-shop mice!”

“And what they got,” Brutal said, his eyes distant now as he imagined it, “is this tent you go into—”

“Yeah, yeah, like inna cirque! Do you gotta pay to get in?”

“You shittin me? Course you gotta pay to get in. A dime apiece, two cents for the kiddies. And there’s, like, this whole city made out of Bakelite boxes and toilet-paper rolls, with windows made out of isinglass so you can see what they’re up to in there—”

“Yeah! Yeah!” Delacroix was in ecstasy now. Then he turned to me. “What ivy-glass?”

“Like on the front of a stove, where you can see in,” I said.

“Oh sure! Dat shit!” He cranked his hand at Brutal, wanting him to go on, and Mr. Jingles’s little oildrop eyes practically spun in their sockets, trying to keep that spool in view. It was pretty funny. Percy came a little closer, as if wanting to get a better look, and I saw John Coffey frowning at him, but I was too wrapped up in Brutal’s fantasy to pay much attention. This took telling the condemned man what he wanted to hear to new heights, and I was all admiration, believe me.

“Well,” Brutal said, “there’s the mouse city, but what the kids really like is the Mouseville All-Star Circus, where there’s mice that swing on trapezes, and mice that roll these little barrels, and mice that stack coins—”

“Yeah, dat’s it! Dat’s the place for Mr. Jingles!” Delacroix said. His eyes sparkled and his cheeks were high with color. It occurred to me that Brutus Howell was a kind of saint. “You gonna be a circus mouse after all, Mr. Jingles! Gonna live in a mouse city down Florida! All ivy-glass windows! Hurrah!”

He threw the spool extra-hard. It hit low on the wall, took a crazy bounce, and squirted out between the bars of his cell door and onto the Mile. Mr. Jingles raced out after it, and Percy saw his chance.

“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 it. There was an audible snap as Mr. Jingles’s back broke, and blood gushed from his mouth. His tiny dark 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 between the bars, reaching as far as he could, crying the mouse’s name over and over.

Percy turned toward him, smiling. Toward the three of us. “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, not hurrying, leaving Mr. Jingles lying on the linoleum in a spreading pool of his own blood.