Зеленая миля / The Green Mile
Then, as I was swallowing aspirin in our kitchen and listening to Jan snore lightly in the other room, I remembered that today was the day William Wharton was scheduled on the block, and that Brutal wouldn’t be there—the roster had him over on the other side of the prison, helping to move the rest of the library and some leftover infirmary equipment to the new building. 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.
“It’s a brain tumor,” Moores said. “They got X-ray pictures of it. They seemed real pleased with their pictures, actually. One of them said they may be the best ones anyone’s ever gotten, at least so far; said they’re going to publish them in some biggety medical journal up in New England. It’s the size of a lemon, they said, and way down deep inside, where they can’t operate. They say she’ll be dead by Christmas. I haven’t told her. I can’t think how. I can’t think how for the life of me.”
Then he began to cry, big, gasping sobs that filled me with both pity and a kind of terror—when a man who keeps himself as tightly guarded as Hal Moores finally does lose control, it’s frightening to watch. I stood there for a moment, then went to him and put my arm around his shoulders. He groped out for me with both of his own arms, like a drowning man, and began to sob against my stomach, all restraint washed away. Later, after he got himself under control, he apologized. He did it without quite meeting my eyes, as a man does when he feels he has embarrassed himself dreadfully, maybe so deeply that he can never quite live it down. A man can end up hating the fellow who has seen him in such a state. I thought Warden Moores was better than that, but it never crossed my mind to do the business I had originally come for, and when I left Moores’s office, I walked over to E Block instead of back to my car. The aspirin was working by then, and the pain in my midsection was down to a low throb. I would get through the day somehow, I reckoned, get Wharton settled in, check back with Hal Moores that afternoon, and get my sick-leave for tomorrow. The worst was pretty much over, I thought, with no slightest idea that the worst of that day’s mischief hadn’t even begun.
11
“We thought he was still doped from the tests,” Dean said late that afternoon. His voice was low, rasping, almost a bark, and there were blackish-purple bruises rising on his neck. I could see it was hurting him to talk and thought of telling him to let it go, but sometimes it hurts more to be quiet. I judged that this was one of those times, and kept my own mouth shut. “We all thought he was doped, didn’t we?”
Harry Terwilliger nodded. Even Percy, sitting off by himself in his own sullen little party of one, nodded.
Brutal glanced at me, and for a moment I met his eyes. We were thinking pretty much that same thing, that this was the way it happened. You were cruising along, everything going according to Hoyle, you made one mistake, and bang, the sky fell down on you. They had thought he was doped, it was a reasonable assumption to make, but no one had asked if he was doped. I thought I saw something else in Brutal’s eyes, as well: Harry and Dean would learn from their mistake. Especially Dean, who could easily have gone home to his family dead. Percy wouldn’t. Percy maybe couldn’t. All Percy could do was sit in the corner and sulk because he was in the shit again.
There were seven of them that went up to Indianola to take charge of Wild Bill Wharton: Harry, Dean, Percy, two other guards in the back (I have forgotten their names, although I’m sure I knew them once), plus two up front. They took what we used to call the stagecoach—a Ford panel-truck which had been steel-reinforced and equipped with supposedly bulletproof glass. It looked like a cross between a milk-wagon and an armored car.
Harry Terwilliger was technically in charge of the expedition. He handed his paperwork over to the county sheriff (not Homer Cribus but some other elected yokel like him, I imagine), who in turn handed over Mr. William Wharton, hellraiser extraordinaire, as Delacroix might have put it. A Cold Mountain prison uniform had been sent ahead, but the sheriff and his men hadn’t bothered to put Wharton in it; they left that to our boys. Wharton was dressed in a cotton hospital johnny and cheap felt slippers when they first met him on the second floor of the General Hospital, a scrawny man with a narrow, pimply face and a lot of long, tangly blond hair. His ass, also narrow and also covered with pimples, stuck out the back of the johnny. That was the part of him Harry and the others saw first, because Wharton was standing at the window and looking out at the parking lot when they came in. He didn’t turn but just stood there, holding the curtains back with one hand, silent as a doll while Harry bitched at the county sheriff about being too lazy to get Wharton into his prison blues and the county sheriff lectured—as every county official I’ve ever met seems bound to do—about what was his job and what was not.
When Harry got tired of that part (I doubt it took him long), he told Wharton to turn around. Wharton did. He looked, Dean told us in his raspy bark of a half-choked voice, like any one of a thousand backcountry stampeders who had wound their way through Cold Mountain during our years there. Boil that look down and what you got was a dullard with a mean steak. Sometimes you also discovered a yellow streak in them, once their backs were to the wall, but more often there was nothing there but fight and mean and then more fight and more mean. There are people who see nobility in folks like Billy Wharton, but I am not one of them. A rat will fight, too, if it is cornered. This man’s face seemed to have no more personality than his acne-studded backside, Dean told us. His jaw was slack, his eyes distant, his shoulders slumped, his hands dangling. He looked shot up with morphine, all right, every bit as coo-coo as any dopefiend any of them had ever seen.
At this, Percy gave another of his sullen nods.
“Put this on,” Harry said, indicating the uniform on the foot of the bed—it had been taken out of the brown paper it was wrapped in, but otherwise not touched—it was still folded just as it had been in the prison laundry, with a pair of white cotton boxer shorts poking out of one shirtsleeve and a pair of white socks poking out of the other.
Wharton seemed willing enough to comply, but wasn’t able to get very far without help. He managed the boxers, but when it came to the pants, he kept trying to put both legs into the same hole. Finally Dean helped him, getting his feet to go where they belonged and then yanking the trousers up, doing the fly, and snapping the waistband. Wharton only stood there, not even trying to help once he saw that Dean was doing it for him. He stared vacantly across the room, hands lax, and it didn’t occur to any of them that he was shamming. Not in hopes of escape (at least I don’t believe that was it) but only in hopes of making the maximum amount of trouble when the right time came.
The papers were signed. William Wharton, who had become county property when he was arrested, now became the state’s property. He was taken down the back stairs and through the kitchen, surrounded by bluesuits. He walked with his head down and his long-fingered hands dangling. The first time his cap fell off, Dean put it back on him. The second time, he just tucked it into his own back pocket.
He had another chance to make trouble in the back of the stagecoach, when they were shackling him, and didn’t. If he thought (even now I’m not sure if he did, or if he did, how much), he must have thought that the space was too small and the numbers too great to cause a satisfactory hooraw. So on went the chains, one set running between his ankles and another set too long, it turned out, between his wrists.
The drive to Cold Mountain took an hour. During that whole time, Wharton sat on the lefthand bench up by the cab, head lowered, cuffed hands dangling between his knees. Every now and then he hummed a little, Harry said, and Percy roused himself enough from his funk to say that the lugoon dripped spittle from his lax lower lip, a drop at a time, until it had made a puddle between his feet. Like a dog dripping off the end of its tongue on a hot summer day.
They drove in through the south gate when they got to the pen, right past my car, I guess. The guard on the south pass tan back the big door between the lot and the exercise yard, and the stagecoach drove through. It was a slack time in the yard, not many men out and most of them hoeing in the garden. Pumpkin time, it would have been. They drove straight across to E Block and stopped. The driver opened the door and told them he was going to take the stagecoach over to the motor-pool to have the oil changed, it had been good working with them. The extra guards went with the vehicle, two of them sitting in the back eating apples, the doors now swinging open.
That left Dean, Harry and Percy with one shackled prisoner. It should have been enough, would have been enough, if they hadn’t been lulled by the stick thin country boy standing head-down there in the dirt with chains on his wrists and ankles. They marched him the twelve or so paces to the door that opened into E Block, falling into the same formation we used when escorting prisoners down the Green Mile. Harry was on his left, Dean was on his right, and Percy was behind, with his baton in his hand. No one told me that, but I know damned well he had it out; Percy loved that hickory stick. As for me, I was sitting in what would be Wharton’s home until it came time for him to check into the hot place—first cell on the right as you headed down the corridor toward the restraint room. I had my clipboard in my hands and was thinking of nothing but making my little set speech and getting the hell out. The pain in my groin was building up again, and all I wanted was to go into my office and wait for it to pass.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
Примечания
1
Cold Mountain – тюрьма «Холодная Гора»
2
Warden Moores – начальник тюрьмы Мурс
3
Beverly McCall – Беверли Маккол
4
Lester McCall – Лестер Маккол
5
John Coffey – Джон Коффи
6
Elmer Manfred – Элмер Мэнфред
7
Melinda – Мелинда
8
Delacroix – Делакруа
9
Detterick – Деттерик
10
Dean Stanton – Дин Стэнтон
11
Harry Terwilliger – Гарри Тервиллиджер
12
Brutus Howell – Брутус Хауэлл
13
Percy Wetmore – Перси Уэтмор
14
Bill Dodge – Билл Додж
15
Mr. Jingles – Мистер Джинглс
16
Paul Edgecombe – Пол Эджкомб
17
Klaus Detterick – Клаус Деттерик
18
Cora – Кора
19
Kathe – Кэти
20
Marjorie – Маржори
21
Howie – Хауи
22
Homer Cribus – Гомер Крибус
23
Rob McGee – Роб Макги
24
Bobo Marchant – Бобо Марчант
25
Arlen Bitterbuck – Арлен Биттербак
26
Old Toot-Toot – Старик Тут-Тут
27
Clarence Mulford – Клэрэнс Малфорд
28
Steamboat Willy – Пароходик Вилли
29
William Wharton – Уильям Уэртон
30
Brad Dolan – Брэд Долан
31
Maintenant, m’sieurs et mesdames! Le cirque présentement le mous' amusant et amazeant! – Внимание, месье и мадам! Цирк представляет забавную и восхитительную мышь!
Вы ознакомились с фрагментом книги.
Для бесплатного чтения открыта только часть текста.
Приобретайте полный текст книги у нашего партнера:
Полная версия книги