Coffey's Hands

7

“COME ON,” Brutal told Delacroix the following evening. “We’re going for a little walk. You and me and Mr. Jingles.”

Delacroix looked at him distrustfully, then reached down into the cigar box for the mouse. He cupped it in the palm of one hand and looked at Brutal with narrowed eyes.

“Whatchoo talking about?” he asked.

“It’s a big night for you and Mr. Jingles,” Dean said, as he and Harry joined Brutal. The chain of bruises around Dean’s neck had gone an unpleasant yellow color, but at least he could talk again without sounding like a dog barking at a cat. He looked at Brutal. “Think we ought to put the shackles on him, Brute?”

Brutal appeared to consider. “Naw,” he said at last. “He’s gonna be good, ain’t you, Del? You and the mouse, both. After all, you’re gonna be showin off for some high muck-a-mucks tonight.”

Percy and I were standing up by the duty desk, watching this, Percy with his arms folded and a small, contemptuous smile on his lips. After a bit, he took out his horn comb and went to work on his hair with it. John Coffey was watching, too, standing silently at the bars of his cell. Wharton was lying on his bunk, staring up at the ceiling and ignoring the whole show. He was still “being good,” although what he called good was what the docs at Briar Ridge called catatonic. And there was one other person there, as well. He was tucked out of sight in my office, but his skinny shadow fell out the door and onto the Green Mile.

“What dis about, you gran’ fou?” Del asked querulously, drawing his feet up on the bunk as Brutal undid the double locks on his cell door and ran it open. His eyes flicked back and forth among the three of them.

“Well, I tell you,” Brutal said. “Mr. Moores is gone for awhile—his wife is under the weather, as you may have heard. So Mr. Anderson is in charge, Mr. Curtis Anderson.”

“Yeah? What that got to do with me?”

“Well,” Harry said, “Boss Anderson’s heard about your mouse, Del, and wants to see him perform. He and about six other fellows are over in Admin, just waiting for you to show up. Not just plain old bluesuit guards, either. These are pretty big bugs, just like Brute said. One of them, I believe, is a politician all the way from the state capital.”

Delacroix swelled visibly at this, and I saw not so much as a single shred of doubt on his face. Of course they wanted to see Mr. Jingles; who would not?

He scrummed around, first under his bunk and then under his pillow. He eventually found one of those big pink peppermints and the wildly colored spool. He looked at Brutal questioningly, and Brutal nodded.

“Yep. It’s the spool trick they’re really wild to see, I guess, but the way he eats those mints is pretty damned cute, too. And don’t forget the cigar box. You’ll want it to carry him in, right?”

Delacroix got the box and put Mr. Jingles’s props in it, but the mouse he settled on the shoulder of his shirt. Then he stepped out of his cell, his puffed-out chest leading the way, and regarded Dean and Harry. “You boys coming?”

“Naw,” Dean said. “Got other fish to fry. But you knock em for a loop, Del—show em what happens when a Louisiana boy puts the hammer down and really goes to work.”

“You bet.” A smile shone out of his face, so sudden and so simple in its happiness that I felt my heart break for him a little, in spite of the terrible thing he had done. What a world we live in—what a world!

Delacroix turned to John Coffey, with whom he had struck up a diffident friendship not much different from a hundred other deathhouse acquaintances I’d seen.

“You knock em for a loop, Del,” Coffey said in a serious voice. “You show em all his tricks.”

Delacroix nodded and held his hand up by his shoulder. Mr. Jingles stepped onto it like it was a platform, and Delacroix held the hand out toward Coffey’s cell. John Coffey stuck out a huge finger, and I’ll be damned if that mouse didn’t stretch out his neck and lick the end of it, just like a dog.

“Come on, Del, quit lingerin,” Brutal said. “These folks’re settin back a hot dinner at home to watch your mouse cut his capers.” Not true, of course—Anderson would have been there until eight o’clock on any night, and the guards he’d dragged in to watch Delacroix’s “show” would be there until eleven or twelve, depending on when their shifts were scheduled to end. The politician from the state capital would most likely turn out to be an office janitor in a borrowed tie. But Delacroix had no way of knowing any of that.

“I’m ready,” Delacroix said, speaking with the simplicity of a great star who has somehow managed to retain the common touch. “Let’s go.” And as Brutal led him up the Green Mile with Mr. Jingles perched there on the little man’s shoulder, Delacroix once more began to bugle, “Messieurs et mesdames! Bienvenue au cirque de mousie!” Yet, even lost as deeply in his own fantasy world as he was, he gave Percy a wide berth and a mistrustful glance.

Harry and Dean stopped in front of the empty cell across from Wharton’s (that worthy had still not so much as stirred). They watched as Brutal unlocked the door to the exercise yard, where another two guards were waiting to join him, and led Delacroix out, bound for his command performance before the grand high poohbahs of Cold Mountain Penitentiary. We waited until the door was locked again, and then I looked toward my office. That shadow was still lying on the floor, thin as famine, and I was glad Delacroix had been too excited to see it.

“Come on out,” I said. “And let’s move along brisk, folks. I want to get two run-throughs in, and we don’t have much time.”

Old Toot-Toot, looking as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as ever, came out, walked to Delacroix’s cell, and strolled in through the open door. “Sittin down,” he said. “I’m sittin down, I’m sittin down, I’m sittin down.”

This is the real circus, I thought, closing my eyes for a second. This is the real circus right here, and we’re all just a bunch of trained mice. Then I put the thought out of my mind, and we started to rehearse.