Stephen King: The Two Dead Girls

McGee nodded, then pointed a thumb at the chest pocket of Coffey’s jumper, which was bulging. It looked to McGee like it might have been a gun—not that a man Coffey’s size would need a gun to do some major damage, if he decided to go off. “What’s that in there, John Coffey? Is that maybe a heater? A pistol?”

“Nosir,” Coffey said in his thick voice, and those strange eyes—welling tears and agonized on top, distant and weirdly serene underneath, as if the true John Coffey was somewhere else, looking out on some other landscape where murdered little girls were nothing to get all worked up about—never left Deputy McGee’s. “That’s just a little lunch I have.”

“Oh, now, a little lunch, is that right?” McGee asked, and Coffey nodded and said yessir with his eyes running and clear snot-runners hanging out of his nose. “And where did the likes of you get a little lunch, John Coffey?” Forcing himself to be calm, although he could smell the girls by then, and could see the flies lighting and sampling the places on them that were wet. It was their hair that was the worst, he said later… and this wasn’t in any newspaper story; it was considered too grisly for family reading. No, this I got from the reporter who wrote the story, Mr. Hammersmith. I looked him up later on, because later on John Coffey became sort of an obsession with me. McGee told this Hammersmith that their blonde hair wasn’t blonde anymore. It was auburn. Blood had run down their cheeks out of it like it was a bad dye-job, and you didn’t have to be a doctor to see that their fragile skulls had been dashed together with the force of those mighty arms. Probably they had been crying. Probably he had wanted to make them stop. If the girls had been lucky, this had happened before the rapes.

Looking at that made it hard for a man to think, even a man as determined to do his job as Deputy McGee was. Bad thinking could cause mistakes, maybe more bloodshed. McGee drew him in a deep breath and calmed himself. Tried, anyway.

“Wellsir, I don’t exactly remember, be dog if I do,” Coffey said in his tear-choked voice, “but it’s a little lunch, all right, sammidges and I think a swee’ pickle.”

“I might just have a look for myself, it’s all the same to you,” McGee said. “Don’t you move now, John Coffey. Don’t do it, boy, because there are enough guns aimed at you to make you disappear from the waist up should you so much as twitch a finger.”

Coffey looked out across the river and didn’t move as McGee gently reached into the chest pocket of those biballs and pulled out something wrapped in newspaper and tied with a hank of butcher’s twine. McGee snapped the string and opened the paper, although he was pretty sure it was just what Coffey said it was, a little lunch. There was a bacon-tomato sandwich and a jelly fold-over. There was also a pickle, wrapped in its own piece of a funny page John Coffey would never be able to puzzle out. There were no sausages. Bowser had gotten the sausages out of John Coffey’s little lunch.

McGee handed the lunch back over his shoulder to one of the other men without taking his eyes off Coffey. Hunkered down like that, he was too close to want to let his attention stray for even a second. The lunch, wrapped up again and tied for good measure, finally ended up with Bobo Marchant, who put it in his knapsack, where he kept treats for his dogs (and a few fishing lures, I shouldn’t wonder). It wasn’t introduced into evidence at the trial—justice in this part of the world is swift, but not as swift as a bacon-tomato sandwich goes over—though photographs of it were.

“What happened here, John Coffey?” McGee asked in his low, earnest voice. “You want to tell me that?”

And Coffey said to McGee and the others almost exactly the same thing he said to me; they were also the last words the prosecutor said to the jury at Coffey’s trial. “I couldn’t help it,” John Coffey said, holding the murdered, violated girls naked in his arms. The tears began to pour down his cheeks again. “I tried to take it back, but it was too late.”

“Boy, you are under arrest for murder,” McGee said, and then he spit in John Coffey’s face.

The jury was out forty-five minutes. Just about time enough to eat a little lunch of their own. I wonder they had any stomach for it.

I THINK YOU KNOW I didn’t find all that out during one hot October afternoon in the soon-to-be-defunct prison library, from one set of old newspapers stacked in a pair of Pomona orange crates, but I learned enough to make it hard for me to sleep that night. When my wife got up at two in the morning and found me sitting in the kitchen, drinking buttermilk and smoking home-rolled Bugler, she asked me what was wrong and I lied to her for one of the few times in the long course of our marriage. I said I’d had another run-in with Percy Wetmore. I had, of course, but that wasn’t the reason she’d found me sitting up late. I was usually able to leave Percy at the office.

“Well, forget that rotten apple and come on back to bed,” she said. “I’ve got something that’ll help you sleep, and you can have all you want.”

“That sounds good, but I think we’d better not,” I said. “I’ve got a little something wrong with my waterworks, and wouldn’t want to pass it on to you.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Waterworks, huh,” she said. “I guess you must have taken up with the wrong streetcorner girl the last time you were in Baton Rouge.” I’ve never been in Baton Rouge and never so much as touched a streetcorner girl, and we both knew it.

“It’s just a plain old urinary infection,” I said. “My mother used to say boys got them from taking a leak when the north wind was blowing.”

“Your mother also used to stay in all day if she spilled the salt,” my wife said. “Dr. Sadler—”

“No, sir,” I said, raising my hand. “He’ll want me to take sulfa, and I’ll be throwing up in every corner of my office by the end of the week. It’ll run its course, but in the meantime, I guess we best stay out of the playground.”

She kissed my forehead right over my left eyebrow, which always gives me the prickles… as Janice well knew. “Poor baby. As if that awful Percy Wetmore wasn’t enough. Come to bed soon.”

I did, but before I did, I stepped out onto the back porch to empty out (and checked the wind direction with a wet thumb before I did—what our parents tell us when we are small seldom goes ignored, no matter how foolish it may be). Peeing outdoors is one joy of country living the poets never quite got around to, but it was no joy that night; the water coming out of me burned like a line of lit coal-oil. Yet I thought it had been a little worse that afternoon, and knew it had been worse the two or three days before. I had hopes that maybe I had started to mend. Never was a hope more ill-founded. No one had told me that sometimes a bug that gets up inside there, where it’s warm and wet, can take a day or two off to rest before coming on strong again. I would have been surprised to know it. I would have been even more surprised to know that, in another fifteen or twenty years, there would be pills you could take that would smack that sort of infection out of your system in record time… and while those pills might make you feel a little sick at your stomach or loose in your bowels, they almost never made you vomit the way Dr. Sadler’s sulfa pills did. Back in ’32, there wasn’t much you could do but wait, and try to ignore that feeling that someone had spilled coal-oil inside your works and then touched a match to it.

I finished my butt, went into the bedroom, and finally got to sleep. I dreamed of girls with shy smiles and blood in their hair.