Stephen King - Coffey's Hands

I nodded. “Wharton?”

Bill laughed. “What a comedian. Makes Jack Benny sound like a Quaker. He told Rolfe Wettermark that he ate strawberry jam out of his wife’s pussy.”

“What did Rolfe say?”

“That he wasn’t married. Said it must have been his mother Wharton was thinking of.”

I laughed, and hard. That really was funny, in a low sort of way. And it was good just to be able to laugh without feeling like someone was lighting matches way down low in my gut. Bill laughed with me, then turned the rest of his coffee out in the yard, which was empty except for a few shuffling trusties, most of whom had been there for a thousand years or so.

Thunder rumbled somewhere far off, and unfocused heat lightning flashed in the darkening sky overhead. Bill looked up uneasily, his laughter dying.

“I tell you what, though,” he said, “I don’t like this weather much. Feels like something’s gonna happen. Something bad.”

About that he was right. The bad thing happened right around quarter of ten that night. That was when Percy killed Mr. Jingles.

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.