Harry came out into the hall, hitching up his pants the way he always did after he'd spent a refreshing few minutes in the can, and stood there with his eyes wide. Toot-Toot was also staring, a sunken grin doing unpleasant things to the soft and toothless lower half of his face.
The mouse stopped in what was becoming its usual spot, curled its tail around its paws, and looked at us. Again I was reminded of pictures I had seen of judges passing sentence on hapless prisoners... yet, had there ever been a prisoner as small and unafraid as this one? Not that it really was a prisoner, of course; it could come and go pretty much as it pleased. Yet the idea would not leave my mind, and it again occurred to me that most of us would feel that small when approaching God's judgment seat after our lives were over, but very few of us would be able to look so unafraid.
'Well, I swear,' Old Toot-Toot said. 'There he sits, big as Billy-Be-Frigged.'
'You ain't seen nothing yet, Toot,' Harry said. 'Watch this.' He reached into his breast pocket and came out with a slice of cinnamon apple wrapped in waxed paper. He broke off the end and tossed it on the floor. It was dry and hard and I thought it would bounce right past the mouse, but it reached out one paw, as carelessly as a man swatting at a fly to pass the time, and batted it flat. We all laughed in admiration and surprise, an outburst of sound that should have sent the mouse skittering, but it barely twitched. It picked up the piece of dried apple in its paws, gave it a couple of licks, then dropped it and looked up at us as if to say, Not bad, what else do you have?
Toot-Toot opened his cart, took out a sandwich, unwrapped it, and tore off a scrap of bologna.
'Don't bother,' Dean said.
'What do you mean?' Toot-Toot asked. 'Ain't a mouse alive'd pass up bologna if he could get it. You a crazy guy!'
But I knew Dean was right, and I could see by Harry's face that he knew it, too. There were floaters and there were regulars. Somehow, that mouse seemed to know the difference. Nuts, but true.
Old Toot-Toot tossed the scrap of bologna down, and sure enough, the mouse wouldn't have a thing to do with it; sniffed it once and then backed off a pace.
'I'll be a goddamned son of a bitch,' Old Toot-Toot said, sounding offended.
I held out my hand. 'Give it to me.'
'What - same sammitch?'
'Same one. I'll pay for it.'
Toot-Toot handed it over. I lifted the top slice of bread, tore off another sliver of meat, and dropped it over the front of the duty desk. The mouse came forward at once. picked it up in its paws, and began to eat. The bologna was gone before you could say Jack Robinson.
'I'll be goddamned!' Toot-Toot cried. 'Bloody hell! Gimme dat!'
He snatched back the sandwich, tore off a much larger piece of meat - not a scrap this time but a flap - and dropped it so close to the mouse that Steamboat Willy almost ended up wearing it for a hat. It drew back again, sniffed (surely no mouse ever hit such a jackpot during the Depression - not in our state, at least), and then looked up at us.
'Go on, eat it!' Toot-Toot said, sounding more offended than ever. 'What's wrong witchoo?'
Dean took the sandwich and dropped a piece of meat - by then it was like some strange communion service. The mouse picked it up at once and bolted it down. Then it turned and went back down the corridor to the restraint room, pausing along the way to peer into a couple of empty cells and to take a brief investigatory tour of a third. Once again the idea that it was looking for someone occurred to me, and this time I dismissed the thought more slowly.
'I'm not going to talk about this,' Harry said. He sounded as if he was half-joking, half-not. 'First of all, nobody'd care. Second, they wouldn't believe me if they did.'
'He only ate from you fellas,' Toot-Toot said. He shook his head in disbelief, then bent laboriously over, picked up what the mouse had disdained, and popped it into his own toothless maw, where he be gan the job of gumming it into submission. 'Now why he do dat?'
'I've got a better one,' Harry said. 'How'd he know Percy was off?'
'He didn't,' I said. 'It was just coincidence, that mouse showing up tonight.'
Except that got harder and harder to believe as the days went by and the mouse showed up only when Percy was off, on another shift, or in another part of the prison. We - Harry, Dean, Brutal, and me - decided that it must know Percy's voice, or his smell. We carefully avoided too much discussion about the mouse itself - himself. That, we seemed to have decided without saying a word, might go a long way toward spoiling something that was special, and beautiful, by virtue of its strangeness and delicacy. Willy had chosen us, after all, in some way I do not understand, even now. Maybe Harry came closest when he said it would do no good to tell other people, not just because they wouldn't believe but because they wouldn't care.