LITMIR.BIZ

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going to have you some trouble with Percy,” Harry said as we walked back up the hall and into my office. Dean Stanton, sort of my third in command—we didn’t actually have such things, a situation Percy Wetmore would have fixed up in a flash—was sitting behind my desk, updating the files, a job I never seemed to get around to. He barely looked up as we came in, just gave his little glasses a shove with the ball of his thumb and dived back into his paperwork.

      “I been having trouble with that peckerwood since the day he came here,” I said, gingerly, pulling my pants away from my crotch and wincing. “Did you hear what he was shouting when he brought that big galoot down?”

      “Couldn’t very well not,” Harry said. “I was there, you know.”

      “I was in the john and heard it just fine,” Dean said. He drew a sheet of paper to him, held it up into the light so I could see there was a coffee-ring as well as typing on it, and then tossed it into the waste basket. ‘Dead man walking.’ Must have read that in one of those magazines he likes so much!”

      And he probably had. Percy Wetmore was a great reader of Argosy and Stag and Men’s Adventure. There was a prison tale in every issue, it seemed, and Percy read them avidly, like a man doing research. It was like he was trying to find out how to act, and thought the information was in those magazines. He’d come just after we did Anthony Ray, the hatchet-killer—and he hadn’t actually participated in an execution yet, although he’d witnessed one from the switch-room.

      “He knows people,” Harry said. “He’s connected. You’ll have to answer for sending him off the block, and you’ll have to answer even harder for expecting him to do some real work.”

      “I don’t expect it,” I said, and I didn’t… but I had hopes. Bill Dodge wasn’t the sort to let a man just stand around and do the heavy looking-on. “I’m more interested in the big boy, for the time being. Are we going to have trouble with him?”

      Harry shook his head with decision.

      “He was quiet as a lamb at court down there in Trapingus County,” Dean said. He took his little rimless glasses off and began to polish them on his vest. “Of course they had more chains on him than Scrooge saw on Marley’s ghost, but he could have kicked up dickens if he’d wanted. That’s a pun, son.”

      “I know,” I said, although I didn’t. I just hate letting Dean Stanton get the better of me.

      “Big one, ain’t he?” Dean said.

      “He is,” I agreed. “Monstrous big.”

      “Probably have to crank Old Sparky up to Super Bake to fry his ass!”

      “Don’t worry about Old Sparky,” I said absently. “He makes the big ‘uns little.”

      Dean pinched the sides of his nose, where there were a couple of angry red patches from his glasses, and nodded. “Yep,” he said. “Some truth to that, all right.”

      I asked, “Do either of you know where he came from before he showed up in… Tefton? It was Tefton, wasn’t it?”

      “Yep,” Dean said. “Tefton, down in Trapingus County. Before he showed up there and did what he did, no one seems to know. He just drifted around, I guess. You might be able to find out a little more from the newspapers in the prison library, if you’re really interested. They probably won’t get around to moving those until next week.” He grinned. “You might have to listen to your little buddy bitching and moaning upstairs, though.”

      “I might just go have a peek, anyway,” I said, and later on that afternoon I did.

      The prison library was in back of the building that was going to become the prison auto shop—at least that was the plan. More pork in someone’s pocket was what I thought, but the Depression was on, and I kept my opinions to myself—the way I should have kept my mouth shut about Percy, but sometimes a man just can’t keep it clapped tight. A man’s mouth gets him in more trouble than his pecker ever could, most of the time. And the auto shop never happened, anyway—the next spring, the prison moved sixty miles down the road to Brighton. More backroom deals, I reckon. More barrels of pork. Wasn’t nothing to me.

      Administration had gone to a new building on the east side of the yard; the infirmary was being moved (whose country-bumpkin idea it had been to put an infirmary on the second floor in the first place was just another of life’s mysteries); the library was still partly stocked—not that it ever had much in it—and standing empty. The old building was a hot clapboard box kind of shouldered in between A and B Blocks. Their bathrooms backed up on it and the whole building was always swimming with this vague pissy smell, which was probably the only good reason for the move. The library was L-shaped, and not much bigger than my office. I looked for a fan, but they were all gone. It must have been a hundred degrees in there, and I could feel that hot throb in my groin when I sat down. Sort of like an infected tooth. I know that’s absurd, considering the region we’re talking about here, but it’s the only thing I could compare it to. It got a lot worse during and just after taking a leak, which I had done just before walking over.

      There was one other fellow there after all—a scrawny old trusty named Gibbons dozing away in the corner with a Wild West novel in his lap and his hat pulled down over his eyes. The heat wasn’t bothering him, nor were the grunts, thumps, and occasional curses from the infirmary upstairs (where it had to be at least ten degrees hotter, and I hoped Percy Wetmore was enjoying it). I didn’t bother him, either, but went around to the short side of the L, where the newspapers were kept. I thought they might be gone along with the fans, in spite of what Dean had said. They weren’t, though, and the business about the Detterick twins was easily enough looked out; it had been front-page news from the commission of the crime in June right through the trial in late August and September.

      Soon I had forgotten the heat and the thumps from upstairs and old Gibbons’s wheezy snores. The thought of those little nine-year-old girls—their fluffy heads of blonde hair and their engaging Bobbsey Twins smiles—in connection with Coffey’s hulking darkness was unpleasant but impossible to ignore. Given his size, it was easy to imagine him actually eating them, like a giant in a fairy tale. What he had done was even worse, and it was a lucky thing for him that he hadn’t just been lynched right there on the riverbank. If, that was, you considered waiting to walk the Green Mile and sit in Old Sparky’s lap lucky.

      4

      King Cotton had been deposed in the South seventy years before all these things happened and would never be king again, but in those years of the thirties it had a little revival. There were no more cotton plantations, but there were forty or fifty prosperous cotton farms in the southern part of our state. Klaus Detterick[17] owned one of them. By the standards of the nineteen-fifties he would have been considered only a rung above shirttail poor, but by those of the thirties he was considered well-to-do because he actually paid his store bill in cash at the end of most months, and he could meet the bank president’s eyes if they happened to pass on the street. The farmhouse was clean and commodious. In addition to the cotton, there were the other two c’s: chickens and a few cows. He and his wife had three children: Howard, who was twelve or thereabouts, and the twin girls, Cora[18] and Kathe[19].

      On a warm night in June of that year, the girls asked for and were given permission to sleep on the screen-enclosed side porch, which ran the length of the house. This was a great treat for them. Their mother kissed them goodnight just shy of nine, when the last light had gone out of the sky. It was the final time she saw either of them until they were in their coffins and the undertaker had repaired the worst of the damage.

      Country families went to bed early in those days—“soon as ‘twas dark under the table,” my own mother sometimes said—and slept soundly. Certainly Klaus, Marjorie[20], and Howie[21] Detterick did on the night the twins were

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