Зеленая миля / The Green Mile

Зеленая миля / The Green Mile

Stephen Edwin King

Эксклюзивное чтение на английском языке

Надзиратель Пол Эджкомб видел самых разных заключенных за годы своей работы в блоке смертников тюрьмы «Холодная гора». Но он никогда не видел никого, похожего на Джона Коффи.

Текст произведения снабжен грамматическим комментарием и словарем, в который вошли слова, содержащиеся в тексте.

Благодаря этому книга подойдет для любого уровня владения английским языком.

Стивен Кинг / Stephen King

Зеленая Миля / The Green Mile

В© Stephen King, 1996

В© РћРћРћ В«Р?здательство РђРЎРўВ», 2018

Part one

The Two Dead Girls

1

This happened in 1932, when the state penitentiary was still at Cold Mountain[1 - Cold Mountain – тюрьма «Холодная Гора»].

And the electric chair was there, too, of course.

The inmates made jokes about the chair, the way people always make jokes about things that frighten them but can’t be gotten away from. They called it Old Sparky, or the Big Juicy. They made cracks about the power bill, and how Warden Moores[2 - Warden Moores – начальник тюрьмы Мурс] would cook his Thanksgiving dinner that fall, with his wife, Melinda, too sick to cook.

But for the ones who actually had to sit down in that chair, the humor went out of the situation in a hurry. I presided over seventy-eight executions during my time at Cold Mountain (that’s one figure I’ve never been confused about; I’ll remember it on my deathbed), and I think that, for most of those men, the truth of what was happening to them finally hit all the way home when their ankles were being clamped to the stout oak of “Old Sparky’ ” legs.

The realization came then (you would see it rising in their eyes, a kind of cold dismay) that their own legs had finished their careers. The blood still ran in them, the muscles were still strong, but they were finished, all the same; they were never going to walk another country mile or dance with a girl at a barn-raising.