Stephen King - Coffey's Hands

LOOKING BACK through what Ive written, I see that I called Georgia Pines, where I now live, a nursing home. The folks who run the place wouldnt be very happy with that! According to the brochures they keep in the lobby and send out to prospective clients, its a state-of-the-art retirement complex for the elderly. It even has a Resource Centerthe brochure says so. The folks who have to live here (the brochure doesnt call us inmates, but sometimes I do) just call it the TV room.

Folks think Im stand-offy because I dont go down to the TV room much in the day, but its the programs I cant stand, not the folks. Oprah, Ricki Lake, Carnie Wilson, Rolandathe world is falling down around our ears, and all these people care for is talking about fucking to women in short skirts and men with their shirts hanging open. Well, helljudge not, lest ye be judged, the Bible says, so Ill get down off my soapbox. Its just that if I wanted to spend time with trailer trash, Id move two miles down to the Happy Wheels Motor Court, where the police cars always seem to be headed on Friday and Saturday nights with their sirens screaming and their blue lights flashing. My special friend, Elaine Connelly, feels the same way. Elaine is eighty, tall and slim, still erect and clear-eyed, very intelligent and refined. She walks very slowly because theres something wrong with her hips, and I know that the arthritis in her hands gives her terrible misery, but she has a beautiful long necka swan neck, almostand long, pretty hair that falls to her shoulders when she lets it down.

Best of all, she doesnt think Im peculiar, or stand-offy. We spend a lot of time together, Elaine and I. If I hadnt reached such a grotesque age, I suppose I might speak of her as my ladyfriend. Still, having a special friendjust thatis not so bad, and in some ways, its even better. A lot of the problems and heartaches that go with being boyfriend and girlfriend have simply burned out of us. And although I know that no one under the age of, say, fifty would believe this, sometimes the embers are better than the campfire. Its strange, but its true.

So I dont watch TV during the day. Sometimes I walk; sometimes I read; mostly what Ive been doing for the last month or so is writing this memoir among the plants in the solarium. I think theres more oxygen in that room, and it helps the old memory. It beats the hell out of Geraldo Rivera, I can tell you that.

But when I cant sleep, I sometimes creep downstairs and put on the television. Theres no Home Box Office or anything at Georgia PinesI guess thats a resource just a wee bit too expensive for our Resource Centerbut we have the basic cable services, and that means we have the American Movie Channel. Thats the one (just in case you dont have the basic cable services yourself) where most of the films are in black and white and none of the women take their clothes off. For an old fart like me, thats sort of soothing. There have been a good many nights when Ive slipped right off to sleep on the ugly green sofa in front of the TV while Francis the Talking Mule once more pulls Donald OConnors skillet out of the fire, or John Wayne cleans up Dodge, or Jimmy Cagney calls someone a dirty rat and then pulls a gun. Some of them are movies I saw with my wife, Janice (not just my ladyfriend but my best friend), and they calm me. The clothes they wear, the way they walk and talk, even the music on the soundtrackall those things calm me. They remind me, I suppose, of when I was a man still walking on the skin of the world, instead of a moth-eaten relic mouldering away in an old folks home where many of the residents wear diapers and rubber pants.

There was nothing soothing about what I saw this morning, though. Nothing at all.

Elaine sometimes joins me for AMCs so-called Early Bird Matinee, which starts at 4:00 a.m.she doesnt say much about it, but I know her arthritis hurts her something terrible, and that the drugs they give her dont help much anymore.

When she came in this morning, gliding like a ghost in her white terrycloth robe, she found me sitting on the lumpy sofa, bent over the scrawny sticks that used to be legs, and clutching my knees to try and still the shakes that were running through me like a high wind. I felt cold all over, except for my groin, which seemed to burn with the ghost of the urinary infection which had so troubled my life in the fall of 1932the fall of John Coffey, Percy Wetmore, and Mr. Jingles, the trained mouse.

The fall of William Wharton, it had been, too.

Paul! Elaine cried, and hurried over to mehurried as fast as the rusty nails and ground glass in her hips would allow, anyway. Paul, whats wrong?

Ill be all right, I said, but the words didnt sound very convincingthey came out all uneven, through teeth that wanted to chatter. Just give me a minute or two, Ill be right as rain.

She sat next to me and put her arm around my shoulders. Im sure, she said. But what happened? For heavens sake, Paul, you look like you saw a ghost.

I did, I thought, and didnt realize until her eyes widened that Id said it out loud.

Not really, I said, and patted her hand (gentlyso gently!). But for a minute, ElaineGod!

Was it from the time when you were a guard at the prison? she asked. The time that youve been writing about in the solarium?

I nodded. I worked on our version of Death Row

I know

Only we called it the Green Mile. Because of the linoleum on the floor. In the fall of 32, we got this fellowwe got this wildmannamed William Wharton. Liked to think of himself as Billy the Kid, even had it tattooed on his arm. Just a kid, but dangerous. I can still remember what Curtis Andersonhe was the assistant warden back in those dayswrote about him. Crazy-wild and proud of it. Wharton is nineteen years old, and he just doesnt care. Hed underlined that part.

The hand which had gone around my shoulders was now rubbing my back. I was beginning to calm. In that moment I loved Elaine Connelly, and could have kissed her all over her face as I told her so. Maybe I should have. Its terrible to be alone and frightened at any age, but I think its worse when youre old. But I had this other thing on my mind, this load of old and still unfinished business.

Anyway, I said, youre rightIve been scribbling about how Wharton came on the block and almost killed Dean Stantonone of the guys I worked with back thenwhen he did.

How could he do that? Elaine asked.

Meanness and carelessness, I said grimly. Wharton supplied the meanness, and the guards who brought him in supplied the carelessness. The real mistake was Whartons wrist-chainit was a little too long. When Dean unlocked the door to E Block, Wharton was behind him. There were guards on either side of him, but Anderson was rightWild Billy just didnt care about such things. He dropped that wrist-chain down over Deans head and started choking him with it.

Elaine shuddered.

Anyway, I got thinking about all that and couldnt sleep, so I came down here. I turned on AMC, thinking you might come down and wed have us a little date

She laughed and kissed my forehead just above the eyebrow. It used to make me prickle all over when Janice did that, and it still made me prickle all over when Elaine did it early this morning. I guess some things dont ever change.

and what came on was this old black-and-white gangster movie from the forties. Kiss of Death, its called.

I could feel myself wanting to start shaking again and tried to suppress it.

Richard Widmarks in it, I said. It was his first big part, I think. I never went to see it with Janwe gave the cops and robbers a miss, usuallybut I remember reading somewhere that Widmark gave one hell of a performance as the punk. He sure did. Hes pale doesnt seem to walk so much as go