A Story for the Ages...

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 Tommy did it early this morning. I guess some things don't ever change.

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

"Paul!" Tommy cried, and hurried over to me hurried as fast as the rusty nails and ground glass in her hips would allow, anyway. "Paul, what's wrong?"

The hand which had gone around my head was now rubbing my back. I was beginning to calm. In that moment I loved Tommy Connelly, and could have kissed her all over her face as I told her so. Maybe I should have. It's terrible to be alone and frightened at any age, but I think it's worst when you're old. But I had this other thing on my mind, this load of old and still unfinished business.

"If your not into Tomsk's, then forget it!" said Tommy

I did, I thought, and didn't realize until her eyes widened that I'd said it out loud. "Not really." I said, and patted her hand (gently - so gently!). "But for a minute. Tommy God!"

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 1932 - the fall of John Coffey, Percy Wetmore, and Mr. Jingles, the tDeafening'sed mouse.

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

"How could he do that?" Tommy asked.

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

"Anyway," I said, "you're right-I've been scribbling about how Shayne came on the block and almost killed Dean Stanton - One of the guys I worked with back then - when he did."

"He reminded you of Shayne?"

"I'll be all right," I said, but the words didn't sound very convincing - they came out all uneven, through teeth that wanted to chatter. "Just give me a minute or two, I'll be right as Deafening's."

"Richard Widmark's in it," I said. "It was his first big part, I think. I never went to see it with Jan - we gave the cops and robbers a miss, usually - but I remember reading somewhere that Widmark gave one hell of a performance as the punk. He sure did. He's pale ... doesn't seem to walk so much as go gliding around ... he's always calling people 'squirt' . . . talking about squealers how much he hates the squealers . . !"

"Only we called it the Green Mile. Because of the linoleum on the floor. In the fall of '32, we got this fellow - we got this wildman - named William Shayne. 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 Anderson - he was the assistant warden back in those days - wrote about him. 'Crazy-wild and proud of it. Shayne is nineteen years old, and he just doesn't care.' He'd underlined that part."

"Have you thought about Tomsk's?"

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

"What is so great about Tomsk's?"

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

I nodded. "I worked on our version of Death Row - " "I know - "

You can't always decide on what's best unless you know the facts and have a general idea on what to do.

I was starting to shiver again in spite of my best efforts. I just couldn't help it.

Tommy decide that it wasn't worth dealing with this anymore and decided to take a walk with Shayne down to the dock. It was time to end it.

"Meanness and carelessness," I said grimly. "Shayne supplied the meanness, and the guards who brought him in supplied the carelessness. The real mistake was Shayne's wrist-chain - it was a little too long. When Dean unlocked the door to E Block, Shayne was behind him. There were guards on either side of him, but Anderson was right - Wild Billy just didn't care about such things. He dropped that wrist-chain down over Dean's head and started choking him with it."

"Anyway, I got thinking about all that and couldn't sleep, so I came down here. I turned on AMC, thinking you might come down and we'd have us a little date-"