Зеленая миля / The Green Mile

Not that I would quit; not with the Depression walking around outside the prison walls like a dangerous criminal, one that couldn’t be caged as our charges were. Better men than me were out on the roads or riding the rods. I was lucky and knew it—children grown and the mortgage, that two-hundred-pound block of marble, had been off my chest for the last two years. But a man’s got to eat, and his wife has to eat, too. Also, we were used to sending our daughter and son-in-law twenty bucks whenever we could afford it (and sometimes when we couldn’t, if Jane’s letters sounded particularly desperate).

He was an out-of-work high-school teacher, and if that didn’t qualify for desperate back in those days, then the word had no meaning. So no, you didn’t walk off a steady paycheck job like mine… not in cold blood, that was. But my blood wasn’t cold that fall. The temperatures outside were unseasonable, and the infection crawling around inside me had turned the thermostat up even more. And when a man’s in that kind of situation, why, sometimes his fist flies out pretty much of its own accord. And if you slug a connected man like Percy Wetmore once, you might as well just go right on slugging, because there’s no going back.

“Stick with it,” Moores said quietly. “That’s what I called you in here to say. I have it on good authority—the person who called me this morning, in fact—that Percy has an application in at Briar, and that his application will be accepted.

”

“Briar,” I said. That was Briar Ridge, one of two state-run hospitals. “What’s this kid doing? Touring state facilities?”

“It’s an administration job. Better pay, and papers to push instead of hospital beds in the heat of the day.” He gave me a slanted grin. “You know, Paul, you might be shed of him already if you hadn’t put him in the switch-room with Van Hay when The Chief walked.”

For a moment what he said seemed so peculiar I didn’t have a clue what he was getting at.

Maybe I didn’t want to have a clue.

“Where else would I put him?” I asked. “Christ, he hardly knows what he’s doing on the block! To make him part of the active execution team—” I didn’t finish. Couldn’t finish. The potential for screwups seemed endless.

“Nevertheless, you’d do well to put him out for Delacroix. If you want to get rid of him, that is.”

I looked at him with my jaw hung.