The Two Dead Girls

7

DELACROIX’S MOUSE was one of God’s mysteries. I never saw one in E Block before that summer, and never saw one after that fall, when Delacroix passed from our company on a hot and thundery night in October—passed from it in a manner so unspeakable I can barely bring myself to recall it. Delacroix claimed that he trained that mouse, which started its life among us as Steamboat Willy, but I really think it was the other way around. Dean Stanton felt the same way, and so did Brutal. Both of them were there the night the mouse put in its first appearance, and as Brutal said, “The thing ’us half-tame already, and twice as smart as that Cajun what thought he owned it.”

Dean and I were in my office, going over the record-box for the last year, getting ready to write follow-up letters to witnesses of five executions, and to write follow-ups to follow-ups in another six stretching all the way back to ’29. Basically, we wanted to know just one thing: were they pleased with the service? I know it sounds grotesque, but it was an important consideration. As taxpayers they were our customers, but very special ones. A man or a woman who will turn out at midnight to watch a man die has got a special, pressing reason to be there, a special need, and if execution is a proper punishment, then that need ought to be satisfied. They’ve had a nightmare. The purpose of the execution is to show them that the nightmare is over. Maybe it even works that way. Sometimes.

“Hey!” Brutal called from outside the door, where he was manning the desk at the head of the hall. “Hey, you two! Get out here!”

Dean and I gazed at each other with identical expressions of alarm, thinking that something had happened to either the Indian from Oklahoma (his name was Arlen Bitterbuck, but we called him The Chief… or, in Harry Terwilliger’s case, Chief Goat Cheese, because that was what Harry claimed Bitterbuck smelled like), or the fellow we called The President. But then Brutal started to laugh, and we hurried to see what was happening. Laughing in E Block sounded almost as wrong as laughing in church.

Old Toot-Toot, the trusty who ran the food-wagon in those days, had been by with his holy-rolling cartful of goodies, and Brutal had stocked up for a long night—three sandwiches, two pops, and a couple of Moon Pies. Also a side of potato salad Toot had undoubtedly filched from the prison kitchen, which was supposed to be off-limits to him. Brutal had the logbook open in front of him, and for a wonder he hadn’t spilled anything on it yet. Of course, he was just getting started.

“What?” Dean asked. “What is it?”

“State legislature must have opened the purse-strings enough to hire another screw this year after all,” Brutal said, still laughing. “Lookie yonder.”

He pointed and we saw the mouse. I started to laugh, too, and Dean joined in. You really couldn’t help it, because a guard doing quarter-hour check rounds was just what that mouse looked like: a tiny, furry guard making sure no one was trying to escape or commit suicide. It would trot a little way toward us along the Green Mile, then turn its head from side to side, as if checking the cells. Then it would make another forward spurt. The fact that we could hear both of our current inmates snoring away in spite of the yelling and the laughter somehow made it even funnier.

It was a perfectly ordinary brown mouse, except for the way it seemed to be checking into the cells. It even went into one or two of them, skipping nimbly in between the lower bars in a way I imagine many of our inmates, past and present, would envy. Except it was out that the cons would always be wanting to skip, of course.

The mouse didn’t go into either of the occupied cells; only the empties. And finally it had worked its way almost up to where we were. I kept expecting it to turn back, but it didn’t. It showed no fear of us at all.

“It ain’t normal for a mouse to come up on people that way,” Dean said, a little nervously. “Maybe it’s rabid.”

“Oh, my Christ,” Brutal said through a mouthful of corned-beef sandwich. “The big mouse expert. The Mouse Man. You see it foamin at the mouth, Mouse Man?”

“I can’t see its mouth at all,” Dean said, and that made us all laugh again. I couldn’t see its mouth, either, but I could see the dark little drops that were its eyes, and they didn’t look crazy or rabid to me. They looked interested and intelligent. I’ve put men to death—men with supposedly immortal souls—that looked dumber than that mouse.

It scurried up the Green Mile to a spot that was less than three feet from the duty desk… which wasn’t something fancy, like you might be imagining, but only the sort of desk the teachers used to sit behind up at the district high school. And there it did stop, curling its tail around its paws as prim as an old lady settling her skirts.

I stopped laughing all at once, suddenly feeling cold through my flesh all the way to the bones. I want to say I don’t know why I felt that way—no one likes to come out with something that’s going to make them look or sound ridiculous—but of course I do, and if I can tell the truth about the rest, I guess I can tell the truth about this. For a moment I imagined myself to be that mouse, not a guard at all but just another convicted criminal there on the Green Mile, convicted and condemned but still managing to look bravely up at a desk that must have seemed miles high to it (as the judgment seat of God will no doubt someday seem to us), and at the heavy-voiced, blue-coated giants who sat behind it. Giants that shot its kind with BB guns, or swatted them with brooms, or set traps on them, traps that broke their backs while they crept cautiously over the word VICTOR to nibble at the cheese on the little copper plate.

There was no broom by the duty desk, but there was a rolling mop-bucket with the mop still in the wringer; I’d taken my turn at swabbing the green lino and all six of the cells shortly before sitting down to the record-box with Dean. I saw that Dean meant to grab the mop and take a swing with it. I touched his wrist just as his fingers touched the slender wooden handle. “Leave it be,” I said.

He shrugged and drew his hand back. I had a feeling he didn’t want to swat it any more than I did.

Brutal tore a corner off his corned-beef sandwich and held it out over the front of the desk, tweezed delicately between two fingers. The mouse seemed to look up with an even livelier interest, as if it knew exactly what it was. Probably did; I could see its whiskers twitch as its nose wriggled.

“Aw, Brutal, no!” Dean exclaimed, then looked at me. “Don’t let him do that, Paul! If he’s gonna feed the damn thing, we might as well put out the welcome mat for anything on four legs.”

“I just want to see what he’ll do,” Brutal said. “In the interests of science, like.” He looked at me—I was the boss, even in such minor detours from routine as this. I thought about it and shrugged like it didn’t matter much, one way or another. The truth was, I kind of wanted to see what he’d do, too.

Well, he ate it—of course. There was a Depression on, after all. But the way he ate it fascinated us all. He approached the fragment of sandwich, sniffed his way around it, and then he sat up in front of it like a dog doing a trick, grabbed it, and pulled the bread apart to get at the meat. He did it as deliberately and knowingly as a man tucking into a good roast-beef dinner in his favorite restaurant. I never saw an animal eat like that, not even a well-trained house dog. And all the while he was eating, his eyes never left us.

“Either one smart mouse or hungry as hell,” a new voice said. It was Bitterbuck. He had awakened and now stood at the bars of his cell, naked except for a pair of saggy-seated boxer shorts. A home-rolled cigarette poked out from between the second and third knuckles of his right hand, and his iron-gray hair lay over his shoulders—once probably muscular but now beginning to soften—in a pair of braids.

“You got any Injun wisdom about micies, Chief?” Brutal asked, watching the mouse eat. We were all pretty fetched by the neat way it held the bit of corned beef in its forepaws, occasionally turning it or glancing at it, as if in admiration and appreciation.

“Naw,” Bitterbuck said. “Knowed a brave once had a pair of what he claimed were mouse-skin gloves, but I didn’t believe it.” Then he laughed, as if the whole thing was a joke, and left the bars. We heard the bunk creak as he lay down again.

That seemed to be the mouse’s signal to go. It finished up what it was holding, sniffed at what was left (mostly bread with yellow mustard soaking into it), and then looked back at us, as if it wanted to remember our faces if we met again. Then it turned and scurried off the way it had come, not pausing to do any cell-checks this time. Its hurry made me think of the White Rabbit in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and I smiled. It didn’t pause at the door to the restraint room, but disappeared beneath it. The restraint room had soft walls, for people whose brains had softened a little. We kept cleaning equipment stored in there when we didn’t need the room for its created purpose, and a few books (most were westerns by Clarence Mulford, but one—loaned out only on special occasions—featured a profusely illustrated tale in which Popeye, Bluto, and even Wimpy the hamburger fiend took turns shtupping Olive Oyl). There were craft items as well, including the crayons Delacroix later put to some good use. Not that he was our problem yet; this was earlier, remember. Also in the restraint room was the jacket no one wanted to wear—white, made of double-sewn canvas, and with the buttons and snaps and buckles going up the back. We all knew how to zip a problem child into that jacket lickety-larrup. They didn’t get violent often, our lost boys, but when they did, brother, you didn’t wait around for the situation to improve on its own.

Brutal reached into the desk drawer above the kneehole and brought out the big leather-bound book with the word VISITORS stamped on the front in gold leaf. Ordinarily, that book stayed in the drawer from one month to the next. When a prisoner had visitors—unless it was a lawyer or a minister—he went over to the room off the messhall that was kept special for that purpose. The Arcade, we called it. I don’t know why.

“Just what in the Gorry do you think you’re doing?” Dean Stanton asked, peering over the tops of his spectacles as Brutal opened the book and paged grandly past years of visitors to men now dead.

“Obeyin Regulation 19,” Brutal said, finding the current page. He took the pencil and licked the tip—a disagreeable habit of which he could not be broken—and prepared to write. Regulation 19 stated simply: “Each visitor to E Block shall show a yellow Administration pass and shall be recorded without fail.”

“He’s gone nuts,” Dean said to me.

“He didn’t show us his pass, but I’m gonna let it go this time,” Brutal said. He gave the tip of his pencil an extra lick for good luck, then filled in 9:49 p.m. under the column headed TIME ON BLOCK.

“Sure, why not, the big bosses probably make exceptions for mice,” I said.

“Course they do,” Brutal agreed. “Lack of pockets.” He turned to look at the wall-clock behind the desk, then printed 10:01 in the column headed TIME OFF BLOCK. The longer space between these two numbers was headed NAME OF VISITOR. After a moment’s hard thought—probably to muster his limited spelling skills, as I’m sure the idea was in his head already—Brutus Howell carefully wrote STEAMBOAT WILLY, which was what most people called Mickey Mouse back in those days. It was because of that first talkie cartoon, where he rolled his eyes and bumped his hips around and pulled the whistle cord in the pilothouse of the steamboat.

“There,” Brutal said, slamming the book closed and returning it to its drawer, “all done and buttoned up.”

I laughed, but Dean, who couldn’t help being serious about things even when he saw the joke, was frowning and polishing his glasses furiously. “You’ll be in trouble if someone sees that.” He hesitated and added, “The wrong someone.” He hesitated again, looking nearsightedly around almost as if he expected to see that the walls had grown ears, before finishing: “Someone like Percy Kiss-My-Ass-and-Go-to-Heaven Wetmore.”

“Huh,” Brutal said. “The day Percy Wetmore sits his narrow shanks down here at this desk will be the day I resign.”

“You won’t have to,” Dean said. “They’ll fire you for making jokes in the visitors’ book if Percy puts the right word in the right ear. And he can. You know he can.”

Brutal glowered but said nothing. I reckoned that later on that night he would erase what he had written. And if he didn’t, I would.

The next night, after getting first Bitterbuck and then The President over to D Block, where we showered our group after the regular cons were locked down, Brutal asked me if we shouldn’t have a look for Steamboat Willy down there in the restraint room.

“I guess we ought to,” I said. We’d had a good laugh over that mouse the night before, but I knew that if Brutal and I found it down there in the restraint room—particularly if we found it had gnawed itself the beginnings of a nest in one of the padded walls—we would kill it. Better to kill the scout, no matter how amusing it might be, than have to live with the pilgrims. And, I shouldn’t have to tell you, neither of us was very squeamish about a little mouse-murder. Killing rats was what the state paid us for, after all.

But we didn’t find Steamboat Willy—later to be known as Mr. Jingles—that night, not nested in the soft walls, or behind any of the collected junk we hauled out into the corridor. There was a great deal of junk, too, more than I would have expected, because we hadn’t had to use the restraint room in a long time. That would change with the advent of William Wharton, but of course we didn’t know that at the time. Lucky us.

“Where’d it go?” Brutal asked at last, wiping sweat off the back of his neck with a big blue bandanna. “No hole, no crack… there’s that, but—” He pointed to the drain in the floor. Below the grate, which the mouse could have gotten through, was a fine steel mesh that not even a fly would have passed. “How’d it get in? How’d it get out?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“He did come in here, didn’t he? I mean, the three of us saw him.”

“Yep, right under the door. He had to squeeze a little, but he made it.”

“Gosh,” Brutal said—a word that sounded strange, coming from a man that big. “It’s a good thing the cons can’t make themselves small like that, isn’t it?”

“You bet,” I said, running my eye over the canvas walls one last time, looking for a hole, a crack, anything. There was nothing. “Come on. Let’s go.”

Steamboat Willy showed up again three nights later, when Harry Terwilliger was on the duty desk. Percy was also on, and chased the mouse back down the Green Mile with the same mop Dean had been thinking of using. The rodent avoided Percy easily, slipping through the crack beneath the restraint-room door a hands-down winner. Cursing at the top of his voice, Percy unlocked the door and hauled all that shit out again. It was funny and scary at the same time, Harry said. Percy was vowing he’d catch the goddam mouse and tear its diseased little head right off, but he didn’t, of course. Sweaty and disheveled, the shirttail of his uniform hanging out in the back, he returned to the duty desk half an hour later, brushing his hair out of his eyes and telling Harry (who had sat serenely reading through most of the ruckus) that he was going to put a strip of insulation on the bottom of the door down there; that would solve the vermin problem, he declared.

“Whatever you think is best, Percy,” Harry said, turning a page of the oat opera he was reading. He thought Percy would forget about blocking the crack at the bottom of that door, and he was right.