Зеленая миля / The Green Mile

The three of them stopped outside the cell door, which was standing open on its track. I nodded to Harry, who said: “Are you sure you want to be in there with him, boss?” I didn’t often hear Harry Terwilliger sound nervous—he’d been right there by my side during the riots of six or seven years before and had never wavered, even when the rumors that some of them had guns began to circulate—but he sounded nervous then.

“Am I going to have any trouble with you, big boy?” I asked, sitting there on the bunk and trying not to look or sound as miserable as I felt—that urinary infection I mentioned earlier wasn’t as bad as it eventually got, but it was no day at the beach, let me tell you.

Coffey shook his head slowly—once to the left, once to the right, then back to dead center. Once his eyes found me, they never left me.

Harry had a clipboard with Coffey’s forms on it in one hand. “Give it to him,” I said to Harry.

“Put it in his hand.”

Harry did. The big mutt took it like a sleepwalker.

“Now bring it to me, big boy,” I said, and Coffey did, his chains jingling and rattling. He had to duck his head just to enter the cell.

I looked up and down mostly to register his height as a fact and not an optical illusion. It was real: six feet, eight inches. His weight was given as two-eighty, but I think that was only an estimate; he had to have been three hundred and twenty, maybe as much as three hundred and fifty pounds.

Under the space for scars and identifying marks, one word had been blocked out in the laborious printing of Magnusson, the old trusty in Registration: Numerous.

I looked up. Coffey had shuffled a bit to one side and I could see Harry standing across the corridor in front of Delacroix’s cell—he was our only other prisoner in E Block when Coffey came in. Del was a slight, balding man with the worried face of an accountant who knows his embezzlement will soon be discovered.

His tame mouse was sitting on his shoulder.

Percy Wetmore was leaning in the doorway of the cell which had just become John Coffey’s. He had taken his hickory baton out of the custom-made holster he carried it in, and was tapping it against one palm the way a man does when he has a toy he wants to use. And all at once I couldn’t stand to have him there.