John Coffey was black, like most of the men who came to stay for awhile in E Block before dying in Old Sparkys lap, and he stood six feet, eight inches tall. He wasnt all willowy like the TV basketball fellows, thoughhe was broad in the shoulders and deep through the chest, laced over with muscle in every direction. Theyd put him in the biggest denims they could find in Stores, and still the cuffs of the pants rode halfway up on his bunched and scarred calves. The shirt was open to below his chest, and the sleeves stopped somewhere on his forearms. He was holding his cap in one huge hand, which was just as well; perched on his bald mahogany ball of a head, it would have looked like the kind of cap an organgrinders monkey wears, only blue instead of red. He looked like he could have snapped the chains that held him as easily as you might snap the ribbons on a Christmas present, but when you looked in his face, you knew he wasnt going to do anything like that. It wasnt dullalthough that was what Percy thought, it wasnt long before Percy was calling him the ijitbut lost. He kept looking around as if to make out where he was. Maybe even who he was. My first thought was that he looked like a black Samson only after Delilah had shaved him smooth as her faithless little hand and taken all the fun out of him.
Dead man walking! Percy trumpeted, hauling on that bear of a mans wristcuff, as if he really believed he could move him if Coffey decided he didnt want to move anymore on his own. Harry didnt say anything, but he looked embarrassed. Dead man!
Thatll be enough of that, I said. I was in what was going to be Coffeys cell, sitting on his bunk. Id known he was coming, of course, was there to welcome him and take charge of him, but had no idea of the mans pure size until I saw him. Percy gave me a look that said we all knew I was an asshole (except for the big dummy, of course, who only knew how to rape and murder little girls), but he didnt say anything.
The three of them stopped outside the cell door, which was standing open on its track. I nodded to Harry, who said: Are you sure you want to be in there with him, boss? I didnt often hear Harry Terwilliger sound nervoushed been right there by my side during the riots of six or seven years before and had never wavered, even when the rumors
that some of them had guns began to circulatebut he sounded nervous then.
Am I going to have any trouble with you, big boy? I asked, sitting there on the bunk and trying not to look or sound as miserable as I feltthat urinary infection I mentioned earlier wasnt as bad as it eventually got, but it was no day at the beach, let me tell you.
Coffey shook his head slowlyonce to the left, once to the right, then back to dead center. Once his eyes found me, they never left me.
Harry had a clipboard with Coffeys forms on it in one hand. Give it to him, I said to Harry. Put it in his hand.
Harry did. The big mutt took it like a sleepwalker.
Now bring it to me, big boy, I said, and Coffey did, his chains jingling and rattling. He had to duck his head just to enter the cell.
I looked up and down mostly to register his height as a fact and not an optical illusion. It was real: six feet, eight inches. His weight was given as two-eighty, but I think that was only an estimate; he had to have been three hundred and twenty, maybe as much as three hundred and fifty pounds. Under the space for scars and identifying marks, one word had been blocked out in the laborious printing of Magnusson, the old trusty in Registration: Numerous.
I looked up. Coffey had shuffled a bit to one side and I could see Harry standing across the corridor in front of Delacroixs cellhe was our only other prisoner in E Block when Coffey came in. Del was a slight, balding man with the worried face of an accountant who knows his embezzlement will soon be discovered. His tame mouse was sitting on his shoulder.
Percy Wetmore was leaning in the doorway of the cell which had just become John Coffeys. He had taken his hickory baton out of the custom-made holster he carried it in, and was tapping it against one palm the way a man does when he has a toy he wants to use. And all at once I couldnt stand to have him there. Maybe it was the unseasonable heat, maybe it was the urinary infection heating up my groin and making the itch of my flannel underwear all but unbearable, maybe it was knowing that the state had sent me a black man next door to an idiot to execute, and Percy clearly wanted to hand-tool him a little first. Probably it was all those things. Whatever it was, I stopped caring about his political connections for a little while.
Percy. I said. Theyre moving house over in the infirmary.
Bill Dodge is in charge of that detail
I know he is, I said. Go and help him.
That isnt my job, Percy said. This big lugoon is my job. Lugoon was Percys joke name for the big onesa combination of lug and goon. He resented the big ones. He wasnt skinny, like Harry Terwilliger, but he was short. A banty-rooster sort of guy, the kind that likes to pick fights, especially when the odds are all their way. And vain about his hair. Could hardly keep his hands off it.