cons were locked down, Brutal asked me if we shouldn’t have a look for Steamboat Willy down there in the restraint room.
“I guess we ought to,” I said. We’d had a good laugh over that mouse the night before, but I knew that if Brutal and I found it down there in the restraint room—particularly if we found it had gnawed itself the beginnings of a nest in one of the padded walls—we would kill it. Better to kill the scout, no matter how amusing it might be, than have to live with the pilgrims. And, I shouldn’t have to tell you, neither of us was very squeamish about a little mouse-murder. Killing rats was what the state paid us for, after all.
But we didn’t find Steamboat Willy—later to be known as Mr. Jingles—that night, not nested in the soft walls, or behind any of the collected junk we hauled out into the corridor. There was a great deal of junk, too, more than I would have expected, because we hadn’t had to use the restraint room in a long time.
That would change with the advent of William Wharton, but of course we didn’t know that at the time. Lucky us.
“Where’d it go?” Brutal asked at last, wiping sweat off the back of his neck with a big blue bandanna.
“No hole, no crack… there’s that, but—” He pointed to the drain in the floor. Below the grate, which the mouse could have gotten through, was a fine steel mesh that not even a fly would have passed. “How’d it get in? How’d it get out?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“He did come in here, didn’t he? I mean, the three of us saw him.”
“Yep, right under the door. He had to squeeze a little, but he made it.”
“Gosh,” Brutal said—a word that sounded strange, coming from a man that big. “It’s a good thing the cons can’t make themselves small like that, isn’t it?”
“You bet,” I said, running my eye over the canvas walls one last time, looking for a hole, a crack, anything. There was nothing. “Come on. Let’s go.”
Steamboat Willy showed up again three nights later, when Harry Terwilliger was on the duty desk. Percy was also on, and chased the mouse back down the Green Mile with the same mop Dean had been thinking of using. The rodent avoided Percy easily, slipping through the crack beneath the restraint-room door a hands-down winner. Cursing at the top of his voice, Percy unlocked the door and hauled all that shit out again. It was funny and scary at the same time, Harry said. Percy was vowing he’d catch the goddam mouse and tear its diseased little head right off, but he didn’t, of course. Sweaty and disheveled, the shirttail of his uniform hanging out in the back, he returned to the duty desk half an hour later, brushing his hair out of his eyes and telling Harry (who had sat serenely reading through most of the ruckus) that he was going to put a strip of insulation on the bottom of the door down there; that would solve the vermin problem, he declared.
“Whatever you think is best, Percy,” Harry said, turning a page of the oat opera he was reading. He thought Percy would forget about blocking the crack at the bottom of that door, and he was right.
8
Late that winter, long after these events were over, Brutal came to me one night when it was just the two of us, E Block temporarily empty and all the other guards temporarily reassigned. Percy had gone on to Briar Ridge.
“Come here,” Brutal said in a funny, squeezed voice that made me look around at him sharply. I had just come in out of a cold and sleety night, and had been brushing off the shoulders of my coat prior to hanging it up.
“Is something wrong?” I asked.
“No,” he said, “but I found out where Mr. Jingles was staying. When he first came, I mean, before Delacroix took him over. Do you want to see?”
Of course I did. I followed him down the Green Mile to the restraint room. All the stuff we kept stored there was out in the hall; Brutal had apparently taken advantage of the lull in customer traffic to do some cleaning up. The door was open, and I saw our mop-bucket inside. The floor, that same sick lime shade as the Green Mile itself, was drying in streaks. Standing in the middle of the floor was a stepladder, the one that was usually kept in the storage room, which also happened to serve as the final stop for the state’s condemned. There was a shelf jutting out from the back of the ladder near the top, the sort of thing a workman would use to hold his toolkit or a painter the bucket he was working out of. There was a flashlight on it. Brutal handed it to me.
“Get on up there. You’re shorter than me, so you’ll have to go pretty near all the way, but I’ll hold your legs!”
“I’m ticklish down there,” I said, starting up. “Especially my knees!”
“I’ll mind that!”
“Good,” I said, “because a broken hip’s too high a price to pay in order to discover the origins of a single mouse.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind.” My head was up by the caged light in the center of the ceiling by then, and I could feel the ladder wiggling a little under my weight. Outside, I could hear the winter wind moaning. “Just hold onto me.”
“I got you, don’t worry.” He gripped my calves firmly, and I went up one more step. Now the top of my head was less than a foot from the ceiling, and I could see the cobwebs a few enterprising spiders had spun in the crotches where the roof beams came together. I shone the light around but didn’t see anything worth the risk of being up here.
“No,” Brutal said. “You’re looking too far away, Paul. Look to your left, where those two beams come together. You see them? One’s a little discolored!”
“I see.”
“Shine the light on the join!”
I did, and saw what he wanted me to see almost right away. The beams had been pegged together with dowels, half a dozen of them, and one was gone, leaving a black, circular hole the size of a quarter. I looked at it, then looked doubtfully back over my shoulder at Brutal. “It was a small mouse,” I said, “but that small? Man, I don’t think so.”
“But that’s where he went,” Brutal said. “I’m just as sure as houses.”
“I don’t see how you can be.”
“Lean closer—don’t worry I got you—and take a whiff.”
I did as he asked, groping with my left hand for one of the other beams, and feeling a little better when I had hold of it. The wind outside gusted again; air puffed out of that hole and into my face. I could smell the keen breath of a winter night in the border South… and something else, as well.
The smell of peppermint.
Don’t let nothing happen to Mr. Jingles, I could hear Delacroix saying in a voice that wouldn’t stay steady I could hear that, and I could feel the warmth of Mr. Jingles as the Frenchman handed it to me, just a mouse, smarter than most of the species, no doubt, but still just a mouse for a’ that and a’ that. Don’t let that bad ‘un hurt my mouse, he’d said, and I had promised, as I always promised them at the end when walking the Green Mile was no longer a myth or a hypothesis but something they really had to do. Mail this letter to my brother, who I haven’t seen for twenty years? I promise. Say fifteen Hail Marys for my soul? I promise. Let me die under my spirit-name and see that it goes on my tombstone? I promise. It was the way you got them to go and be good
