I had no reply to that. Most of my attention that morning had been focused on the problem of Percy - and the lesser but not inconsiderable problem of Wild Bill Wharton. Now I realized that transportation wasn't going to be as simple as I had hoped.
Harry Terwilliger picked up the remains of his second sandwich, looked at it for a second, then put it down again. 'If we was to actually do this crazy thing,' he said, 'I guess we could use my pickup truck. Sit him in the back of that. Wouldn't be nobody much on the roads at that hour. We're talking about well after midnight, ain't we?'
'Yes,' I said.
'You guys're forgetting one thing,' Dean said. 'I know Coffey's been pretty quiet ever since he came on the block, doesn't do much but lay there on his bunk and leak from the eyes, but he's a murderer. Also, he's huge. If he decided he wanted to escape out of the back of Harry's truck, the only way we could stop him would be to shoot him dead. And a guy like that would take a lot of killing, even with a.45. Suppose we weren't able to put him down? And suppose he killed someone else? I'd hate losing my job, and I'd hate going to jail - I got a wife and kids depending on me to put bread in their mouths - but I don't think I'd hate either of those things near as much as having another dead little girl on my conscience.'
'That won't happen,' I said.
'How in God's name can you be so sure of that?'
I didn't answer. I didn't know just how to begin. I had known this would come up, of course I did, but I still didn't know how to start telling them what I knew. Brutal helped me.
'You don't think he did it, do you, Paul?' He looked incredulous. 'You think that big lug is innocent.'
'I'm positive he's innocent,' I said.
'How in the name of Jesus can you be?'
'There are two things,' I said. 'One of them is my shoe.' I leaned forward over the table and began talking.
Part Five.Night Journey
Chapter 21
1
Mr. H. G. Wells once wrote a story about a man who invented a time machine, and I have discovered that, in the writing of these memoirs, I have created my own time machine. Unlike Wells's, it can only travel into the past - back to 1932, as a matter of fact, when I was the bull-goose screw in E Block of Cold Mountain State Penitentiary - but it's eerily efficient, for all that. Still, this time machine reminds me of the old Ford I had in those days: you could be sure that it would start eventually, but you never knew if a turn of the key would be enough to fire the motor, or if you were going to have to get out and crank until your arm practically fell off.
I've had a lot of easy starts since I started telling the story of John Coffey, but yesterday I had to crank. I think it was because I'd gotten to Delacroix's execution, and part of my mind didn't want to have to relive that. It was a bad death, a terrible death, and it happened the way it did because of Percy Wetmore, a young man who loved to comb his hair but couldn't stand to be laughed at - not even by a half bald little Frenchman who was never going to see another Christmas.
As with most dirty jobs, however, the hardest part is just getting started. It doesn't matter to an engine whether you use the key or have to crank; once you get it going, it'll usually run just as sweet either way. That's how it worked for me yesterday. At first the words came in little bursts of phrasing, then in whole sentences, then in a torrent. Writing is a special and rather terrifying form of remembrance, I've discovered - there is a totality to it that seems almost like rape. Perhaps I only feel that way because I've become a very old man (a thing that happened behind my own back, I sometimes feel), but I don't think so. I believe that the combination of pencil and memory creates a kind of practical magic, and magic is dangerous. As a man who knew John Coffey and saw what he could do - to mice and to men - I feel very qualified to say that.
Magic is dangerous.
In any case, I wrote all day yesterday, the words simply flooding out of me, the sunroom of this glorified old folks' home gone, replaced by the storage room at the end of the Green Mile where so many of my problem children took their last sit-me-downs and the bottom of the stairs which led to the tunnel under the road. That was where Dean and Harry and Brutal and I confronted Percy Wetmore over Eduard Delacroix's smoking body and made Percy renew his promise to put in for transfer to the Briar Ridge state mental facility.