Зеленая миля / The Green Mile

“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[28 - Steamboat Willy – Пароходик Вилли], 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.

8

Late that winter, long after these events were over, Brutal came to me one night when it was just the two of us, E Block temporarily empty and all the other guards temporarily reassigned. Percy had gone on to Briar Ridge.

“Come here,” Brutal said in a funny, squeezed voice that made me look around at him sharply. I had just come in out of a cold and sleety night, and had been brushing off the shoulders of my coat prior to hanging it up.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “but I found out where Mr. Jingles was staying. When he first came, I mean, before Delacroix took him over. Do you want to see?”

Of course I did. I followed him down the Green Mile to the restraint room. All the stuff we kept stored there was out in the hall; Brutal had apparently taken advantage of the lull in customer traffic to do some cleaning up. The door was open, and I saw our mop-bucket inside. The floor, that same sick lime shade as the Green Mile itself, was drying in streaks. Standing in the middle of the floor was a stepladder, the one that was usually kept in the storage room, which also happened to serve as the final stop for the state’s condemned. There was a shelf jutting out from the back of the ladder near the top, the sort of thing a workman would use to hold his toolkit or a painter the bucket he was working out of. There was a flashlight on it. Brutal handed it to me.

“Get on up there. You’re shorter than me, so you’ll have to go pretty near all the way, but I’ll hold your legs!”

“I’m ticklish down there,” I said, starting up. “Especially my knees!”

“I’ll mind that!”

“Good,” I said, “because a broken hip’s too high a price to pay in order to discover the origins of a single mouse.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.” My head was up by the caged light in the center of the ceiling by then, and I could feel the ladder wiggling a little under my weight. Outside, I could hear the winter wind moaning. “Just hold onto me.”

“I got you, don’t worry.” He gripped my calves firmly, and I went up one more step. Now the top of my head was less than a foot from the ceiling, and I could see the cobwebs a few enterprising spiders had spun in the crotches where the roof beams came together. I shone the light around but didn’t see anything worth the risk of being up here.

“No,” Brutal said. “You’re looking too far away, Paul. Look to your left, where those two beams come together. You see them? One’s a little discolored!”

“I see.”

“Shine the light on the join!”

I did, and saw what he wanted me to see almost right away. The beams had been pegged together with dowels, half a dozen of them, and one was gone, leaving a black, circular hole the size of a quarter. I looked at it, then looked doubtfully back over my shoulder at Brutal. “It was a small mouse,” I said, “but that small? Man, I don’t think so.”

“But that’s where he went,” Brutal said. “I’m just as sure as houses.”

“I don’t see how you can be.”

“Lean closer—don’t worry I got you—and take a whiff.”

I did as he asked, groping with my left hand for one of the other beams, and feeling a little better when I had hold of it. The wind outside gusted again; air puffed out of that hole and into my face. I could smell the keen breath of a winter night in the border South… and something else, as well.

The smell of peppermint.

Don’t let nothing happen to Mr. Jingles, I could hear Delacroix saying in a voice that wouldn’t stay steady I could hear that, and I could feel the warmth of Mr. Jingles as the Frenchman handed it to me, just a mouse, smarter than most of the species, no doubt, but still just a mouse for a’ that and a’ that. Don’t let that bad ‘un hurt my mouse, he’d said, and I had promised, as I always promised them at the end when walking the Green Mile was no longer a myth or a hypothesis but something they really had to do. Mail this letter to my brother, who I haven’t seen for twenty years? I promise. Say fifteen Hail Marys for my soul? I promise. Let me die under my spirit-name and see that it goes on my tombstone? I promise. It was the way you got them to go and be good about it, the way you saw them into the chair sitting at the end of the Green Mile with their sanity intact. I couldn’t keep all of those promises, of course, but I kept the one I made to Delacroix. As for the Frenchman himself, there had been hell to pay. The bad ‘un had hurt Delacroix, hurt him plenty. Oh, I know what he did, all right, but no one deserved what happened to Eduard Delacroix when he fell into Old Sparky’s savage embrace.

A smell of peppermint.

And something else. Something back inside that hole.

I took a pen out of my breast pocket with my right hand, still holding onto the beam with my left, not worried anymore about Brutal inadvertently tickling my sensitive knees. I unscrewed the pen’s cap onehanded, then poked the nib in and teased something out. It was a tiny splinter of wood which had been tinted a bright yellow, and I heard Delacroix’s voice again, so clearly this time that his ghost might have been lurking in that room with us—the one where William Wharton spent so much of his time.

Hey, you guys! the voice said this time—the laughing, amazed voice of a man who has forgotten, at least for a little while, where he is and what awaits him. Come and see what Mr. Jingles can do!

“Christ,” I whispered. I felt as if the wind had been knocked out of me.

“You found another one, didn’t you?” Brutal asked. “I found three or four.”