Stephen King - Coffey on the Mile

THAT WAS MY NIGHT OFF. I sat in the living room of our little house, smoking cigarettes, listening to the radio, and watching the dark come up out of the ground to swallow the sky. Television is all right, I’ve nothing against it, but I don’t like how it turns you away from the rest of the world and toward nothing but its own glassy self. In that one way, at least, radio was better.

Janice came in, knelt beside the arm of my chair, and took my hand. For a little while neither of us said anything, just stayed that way, listening to Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge and watching the stars come out. It was all right with me.

“I’m so sorry I called you a coward,” she said. “I feel worse about that than anything I’ve ever said to you in our whole marriage.”

“Even the time when we went camping and you called me Old Stinky Sam?” I asked, and then we laughed and had a kiss or two and it was better again between us. She was so beautiful, my Janice, and I still dream of her. Old and tired of living as I am, I’ll dream that she walks into my room in this lonely, forgotten place where the hallways all smell of piss and old boiled cabbage, I dream she’s young and beautiful with her blue eyes and her fine high breasts that I couldn’t hardly keep my hands off of, and she’ll say, Why, honey, I wasn’t in that bus crash . You made a mistake, that’s all. Even now I dream that, and sometimes when I wake up and know it was a dream, I cry. I, who hardly ever cried at all when I was young.

“Does Hal know?” she asked at last.

“That John’s innocent? I don’t see how he can.”

“Can he help? Does he have any influence with Cribus?”

“Not a bit, honey.”

She nodded, as if she had expected this. “Then don’t tell him. If he can’t help, for God’s sake don’t tell him.”

“No.”

She looked up at me with steady eyes. “And you won’t call in sick that night. None of you will. You can’t.”

“No, we can’t. If we’re there, we can at least make it quick for him. We can do that much. It won’t be like Delacroix.” For a moment, mercifully brief, I saw the black silk mask burning away from Del’s face and revealing the cooked blobs of jelly which had been his eyes.

“There’s no way out for you, is there?” She took my hand, rubbed it down the soft velvet of her cheek. “Poor Paul. Poor old guy.”

I said nothing. Never before or after in my life did I feel so much like running from a thing. Just taking Jan with me, the two of us with a single packed carpetbag between us, running to anywhere.

“My poor old guy,” she repeated, and then: “Talk to him.”

“Who? John?”

“Yes. Talk to him. Find out what he wants.”

I thought about it, then nodded. She was right. She usually was.

TWO DAYS LATER, on the eighteenth, Bill Dodge, Hank Bitterman, and someone else—I don’t remember who, some floater—took John Coffey over to D Block for his shower, and we rehearsed his execution while he was gone. We didn’t let Toot-Toot stand in for John; all of us knew, even without talking about it, that it would have been an obscenity.

I did it.

“John Coffey,” Brutal said in a not-quite-steady voice as I sat clamped into Old Sparky, “you have been condemned to die in the electric chair, sentence passed by a jury of your peers…”

John Coffey’s peers? What a joke. So far as I knew, there was no one like him on the planet. Then I thought of what John had said while he stood looking at Sparky from the foot of the stairs leading down from my office: They’re still in there. I hear them screaming.

“Get me out of it,” I said hoarsely. “Undo these clamps and let me up.”

They did it, but for a moment I felt frozen there, as if Old Sparky did not want to let me go.

As we walked back to the block, Brutal spoke to me in a low voice, so not even Dean and Harry, who were setting up the last of the chairs behind us, would overhear. “I done a few things in my life that I’m not proud of, but this is the first time I ever felt really actually in danger of hell.”

I looked at him to make sure he wasn’t joking. I didn’t think he was. “What do you mean?”

“I mean we’re fixing to kill a gift of God,” he said. “One that never did any harm to us, or to anyone else. What am I going to say if I end up standing in front of God the Father Almighty and He asks me to explain why I did it? That it was my job? My job ?”

WHEN JOHN GOT BACK from his shower and the floaters had left, I unlocked his cell, went in, and sat down on the bunk beside him. Brutal was on the desk. He looked up, saw me in there on my own, but said nothing. He just went back to whatever paperwork he was currently mangling, licking away at the tip of his pencil the whole time.

John looked at me with his strange eyes—bloodshot, distant, on the verge of tears… and yet calm, too, as if crying was not such a bad way of life, not once you got used to it. He even smiled a little. He smelled of Ivory soap, I remember, as clean and fresh as a baby after his evening bath.

“Hello, boss,” he said, and then reached out and took both of my hands in both of his. It was done with a perfect unstudied naturalness.

“Hello, John.” There was a little block in my throat, and I tried to swallow it away. “I guess you know that we’re coming down to it now. Another couple of days.”

He said nothing, only sat there holding my hands in his. I think, looking back on it, that something had already begun to happen to me, but I was too fixed—mentally and emotionally—on doing my duty to notice.

“Is there anything special you’d like that night for dinner, John? We can rustle you up most anything. Even bring you a beer, if you want. Just have to put her in a coffee cup, that’s all.”

“Never got the taste,” he said.

“Something special to eat, then?”

His brow creased below that expanse of clean brown skull. Then the lines smoothed out and he smiled. “Meatloaf’d be good.”

“Meatloaf it is. With gravy and mashed.” I felt a tingle like you get in your arm when you’ve slept on it, except this one was all over my body. In my body. “What else to go with it?”

“Dunno, boss. Whatever you got, I guess. Okra, maybe, but I’s not picky.”

“All right,” I said, and thought he would also have Mrs. Janice Edgecombe’s peach cobbler for dessert. “Now, what about a preacher? Someone you could say a little prayer with, night after next? It comforts a man, I’ve seen that many times. I could get in touch with Reverend Schuster, he’s the man who came when Del—”

“Don’t want no preacher,” John said. “You been good to me, boss. You can say a prayer, if you want. That’d be all right. I could get kneebound with you a bit, I guess.”

“ Me! John, I couldn’t—”

He pressed down on my hands a little, and that feeling got stronger. “You could ,” he said. “Couldn’t you, boss?”

“I suppose so,” I heard myself say. My voice seemed to have developed an echo. “I suppose I could, if it came to that.”

The feeling was strong inside me by then, and it was like before, when he’d cured my waterworks, but it was different, too. And not just because there was nothing wrong with me this time. It was different because this time he didn’t know he was doing it . Suddenly I was terrified, almost choked with a need to get out of there. Lights were going on inside me where there had never been lights before. Not just in my brain; all over my body.