Зеленая миля / The Green Mile

It’s best to be quiet—”

“I think of it as a bucket of piss to drown rats in,” Percy said, “and that’s all. Now let me go.”

He tore free of Dean’s hand, stepped between him and Bill, and stalked up the corridor with his head down. He walked a little too close to The President’s side—close enough so that Flanders could have reached out, grabbed him, and maybe headwhipped him with his own prized hickory baton, had Flanders been that sort of man. He wasn’t, of course, but The Chief perhaps was.

The Chief, if given a chance, might have administered such a beating just to teach Percy a lesson. What Dean said to me on that subject when he told me this story the following night has stuck with me ever since, because it turned out to be a kind of prophecy. “Wetmore don’t understand that he hasn’t got any power over them,” Dean said. “That nothing he does can really make things worse for them, that they can only be electrocuted once. Until he gets his head around that, he’s going to be a danger to himself and to everyone else down here.” else down here.”

Percy went into my office and slammed the door behind him.

“My, my,” Bill Dodge said. “Ain’t he the swollen and badly infected testicle.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Dean said.

“Oh, look on the bright side,” Bill said. He was always telling people to look on the bright side; it got so you wanted to punch his nose every time it came out of his mouth.

“Your trick mouse got away, at least.”

“Yeah, but we won’t see him no more,” Dean said. “I imagine this time goddam Percy Wetmore’s scared him off for good.”

3

That was logical but wrong. The mouse was back the very next evening, which just happened to be the first of Percy Wetmore’s two nights off before he slid over to the graveyard shift.

Steamboat Willy showed up around seven o’clock. I was there to see his reappearance; so was Dean. Harry Terwilliger, too. Harry was on the desk. I was technically on days, but had stuck around to spend an extra hour with The Chief, whose time was getting close by then. Bitterbuck was stoical on the outside, in the tradition of his tribe, but I could see his fear of the end growing inside him like a poison flower. So we talked.