Зеленая миля / The Green Mile

One thing I didn’t feel right about in spite of my pain was leaving Wharton to Dean and Harry. They were good men, but Curtis Anderson’s report had suggested that William Wharton was exceptionally bad news. This man just doesn’t care, he had written, underlining for emphasis.

By then the pain had abated some, and I could think. The best idea, it seemed to me, was to leave for the prison early. I could get there at six, which was the time Warden Moores usually came in. He could get Brutus Howell reassigned to E Block long enough for Wharton’s reception, and I’d make my long-overdue trip to the doctor.

Cold Mountain was actually on my way.

Twice on the twenty-mile ride to the Penitentiary that sudden need to urinate overcame me. Both times I was able to pull over and take care of the problem without embarrassing myself (for one thing, traffic on country roads at such an hour was all but nonexistent). Neither of these two voidings was as painful as the one that had taken me off my feet on the way to the privy, but both times I had to clutch the passenger-side doorhandle of my little Ford coupe to hold myself up, and I could feel sweat running down my hot face.

I was sick, all right, good and sick.

I made it, though, drove in through the south gate, parked in my usual place, and went right up to see the warden. It was going on six o’clock by then. Miss Hannah’s office was empty—she wouldn’t be in until the relatively civilized hour of seven—but the light was on in Moores’s office; I could see it through the pebbled glass.

I gave a perfunctory knock and opened the door. Moores looked up, startled to see anyone at that unusual hour, and I would have given a great deal not to have been the one to see him in that condition, with his face naked and unguarded. His white hair, usually so neatly combed, was sticking up in tufts and tangles; his hands were in it, yanking and pulling, when I walked in. His eyes were raw, the skin beneath them puffy and swollen. His palsy was the worst I had ever seen it; he looked like a man who had just come inside after a long walk on a terribly cold night.

“Hal, I’m sorry, I’ll come back—!” I began.

“No,” he said. “Please, Paul. Come in. Shut the door and come in. I need someone now, if I ever needed anyone in my whole life. Shut the door and come in.”

I did as he asked, forgetting my own pain for the first time since I’d awakened that morning.