Зеленая миля / The Green Mile

As for Detterick, all the fight went out of him when he was finally pulled off—as if some strange galvanizing current had been running through the huge black man (I still have a tendency to think in electrical metaphors; you’ll have to pardon me), and when Detterick’s contact with that power source was finally broken, he went as limp as a man flung back from a live wire. He knelt wide-legged on the riverbank with his hands to his face, sobbing. Howie joined him and they hugged each other forehead to forehead.

Two men watched them while the rest formed a rifle-toting ring around the rocking, wailing black man. He still seemed not to realize that anyone but him was there. McGee stepped forward, shifted uncertainly from foot to foot for a bit, then hunkered.

“Mister,” he said in a quiet voice, and Coffey hushed at once. McGee looked at eyes that were bloodshot from crying. And still they streamed, as if someone had left a faucet on inside him. Those eyes wept, and yet were somehow untouched… distant and serene.

I thought them the strangest eyes I had ever seen in my life, and McGee felt much the same. “Like the eyes of an animal that never saw a man before,” he told a reporter named Hammersmith just before the trial.

“Mister, do you hear me?” McGee asked.

Slowly, Coffey nodded his head. Still he curled his arms around his unspeakable dolls, their chins down on their chests so their faces could not be clearly seen, one of the few mercies God saw fit to bestow that day.

“Do you have a name?” MeGee asked.

“John Coffey,” he said in a thick and tear-clotted voice. “Coffey like the drink, only not spelled the same way.”

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.