Stephen King - Coffey's Hands

“You think you’re tough,” I said, “and maybe you are, sonny, but in here tough don’t matter. Your stampeding days are over. If you take it easy on us, we’ll take it easy on you. If you make it hard, you’ll die in the end just the same, only we’ll sharpen you like a pencil before you go.”

“You’re gonna be so happy to see the end of me,” Wharton said in a hoarse voice. He was struggling against the straitjacket even though he must have known it would do no good, and his face was as red as a tomato. “And until I’m gone, I’ll make your lives miserable.” He bared his teeth at me like an angry baboon.

“If that’s all you want, to make our lives miserable, you can quit now, because you’ve already succeeded,” Brutal said. “But as far as your time on the Mile goes, Wharton, we don’t care if you spend all of it in the room with the soft walls. And you can wear that damned nut-coat until your arms gangrene from lack of circulation and fall right off.” He paused. “No one much comes down here, you know. And if you think anyone gives much of a shit what happens to you, one way or another, you best reconsider. To the world in general, you’re already one dead outlaw.”

Wharton was studying Brutal carefully, and the choler was fading out of his face. “Lemme out of it,” he said in a placatory voice—a voice too sane and too reasonable to trust. “I’ll be good. Honest Injun.”

Harry appeared in the cell doorway. The end of the corridor looked like a rummage sale, but we’d set things to rights with good speed once we got started. We had before; we knew the drill. “All ready,” Harry said.

Brutal grabbed the bulge in the canvas where Wharton’s right elbow was and yanked him to his feet. “Come on, Wild Billy. And look on the good side. You’re gonna have at least twenty-four hours to remind yourself never to sit with your back to the door, and to never hold onto no aces and eights.”

“Lemme out of it,” Wharton said. He looked from Brutal to Harry to me, the red creeping back into his face. “I’ll be good—I tell you I’ve learned my lesson. I… I… ummmmmahhhhhhh —”

He suddenly collapsed, half of him in the cell, half of him on the played-out lino of the Green Mile, kicking his feet and bucking his body.

“Holy Christ, he’s pitchin a fit,” Percy whispered.

“Sure, and my sister’s the Whore of Babylon,” Brutal said. “She dances the hootchie-kootchie for Moses on Saturday nights in a long white veil.” He bent down and hooked a hand into one of Wharton’s armpits. I got the other one. Wharton threshed between us like a hooked fish. Carrying his jerking body, listening to him grunt from one end and fart from the other was one of my life’s less pleasant experiences.

I looked up and met John Coffey’s eyes for a second. They were bloodshot, and his dark cheeks were wet. He had been crying again. I thought of Hammersmith making that biting gesture with his hand and shivered a little. Then I turned my attention back to Wharton.

We threw him into the restraint room like he was cargo, and watched him lie on the floor, bucking hard in the straitjacket next to the drain we had once checked for the mouse which had started its E Block life as Steamboat Willy.

“I don’t much care if he swallows his tongue or something and dies,” Dean said in his hoarse and raspy voice, “but think of the paperwork, boys! It’d never end.”

“Never mind the paperwork, think of the hearing,” Harry said gloomily. “We’d lose our damned jobs. End up picking peas down Mississippi. You know what Mississippi is, don’t you? It’s the Indian word for asshole.”

“He ain’t gonna die, and he ain’t gonna swallow his tongue, either,” Brutal said. “When we open this door tomorrow, he’s gonna be just fine. Take my word for it.”

That’s the way it was, too. The man we took back to his cell the next night at nine was quiet, pallid, and seemingly chastened. He walked with his head down, made no effort to attack anyone when the straitjacket came off, and only stared listlessly at me when I told him it would go just the same the next time, and he just had to ask himself how much time he wanted to spend pissing in his pants and eating baby-food a spoonful at a time.

“I’ll be good, boss, I learnt my lesson,” he whispered in a humble little voice as we put him back in his cell. Brutal looked at me and winked.

Late the next day, William Wharton, who was Billy the Kid to himself and never that bushwhacking John Law Wild Bill Hickok, bought a Moon Pie from Old Toot-Toot. Wharton had been expressly forbidden any such commerce, but the afternoon crew was composed of floaters, as I think I have said, and the deal went down. Toot himself undoubtedly knew better, but to him the snack-wagon was always a case of a nickel is a nickel, a dime is a dime, I’d sing another chorus but I don’t have the time.

That night, when Brutal ran his check-round, Wharton was standing at the door of his cell. He waited until Brutal looked up at him, then slammed the heels of his hands into his bulging cheeks and shot a thick and amazingly long stream of chocolate sludge into Brutal’s face. He had crammed the entire Moon Pie into his trap, held it there until it liquefied, and then used it like chewing tobacco.

Wharton fell back on his bunk wearing a chocolate goatee, kicking his legs and screaming with laughter and pointing to Brutal, who was wearing a lot more than a goatee. “Li’l Black Sambo, yassuh, boss, yassuh, how doo you do?” Wharton held his belly and howled. “Gosh, if it had only been ka-ka! I wish it had been! If I’d had me some of that—”

“You are ka-ka,” Brutal growled, “and I hope you got your bags packed, because you’re going back down to your favorite toilet.”

Once again Wharton was bundled into the straitjacket, and once again we stowed him in the room with the soft walls. Two days, this time. Sometimes we could hear him raving in there, sometimes we could hear him promising that he’d be good, that he’d come to his senses and be good, and sometimes we could hear him screaming that he needed a doctor, that he was dying. Mostly, though, he was silent. And he was silent when we took him out again, too, walking back to his cell with his head down and his eyes dull, not responding when Harry said, “Remember, it’s up to you.” He would be all right for a while, and then he’d try something else. There was nothing he did that hadn’t been tried before (well, except for the thing with the Moon Pie, maybe; even Brutal admitted that was pretty original), but his sheer persistence was scary. I was afraid that sooner or later someone’s attention might lapse and there would be hell to pay. And the situation might continue for quite awhile, because somewhere he had a lawyer who was beating the bushes, telling folks how wrong it would be to kill this fellow upon whose brow the dew of youth had not yet dried… and who was, incidentally, as white as old Jeff Davis. There was no sense complaining about it, because keeping Wharton out of the chair was his lawyer’s job. Keeping him safely jugged was ours. And in the end, Old Sparky would almost certainly have him, lawyer or no lawyer.

THAT WAS THE WEEK Melinda Moores, the warden’s wife, came home from Indianola. The doctors were done with her; they had their interesting, newfangled X-ray photographs of the tumor in her head; they had documented the weakness in her hand and the paralyzing pains that racked her almost constantly by then, and were done with her. They gave her husband a bunch of pills with morphine in them and sent Melinda home to die. Hal Moores had some sick-leave piled up—not a lot, they didn’t give you a lot in those days, but he took what he had so he could help her do what she had to do.