been as sharp as shards of broken glass. It ducked—yes, just as a human being would have—and dropped the chunk of cracker. The heavy hickory baton passed over its head and spine close enough so its fur ruffled (that’s what Dean said, anyway, and so I pass it on, although I’m not sure I really believe it), then hit the green linoleum and bounced against the bars of an empty cell. The mouse didn’t wait to see if it was a mistake; apparently remembering a pressing engagement elsewhere, it turned and was off down the corridor toward the restraint room in a flash.
Percy roared with frustration—he knew how close he had come—and chased after it again. Bill Dodge grabbed at his arm, probably out of simple instinct, but Percy pulled away from him. Still, Dean said, it was probably that grab which saved Steamboat Willy’s life, and it was still a near thing. Percy wanted not just to kill the mouse but to squash it, so he ran in big, comical leaps, like a deer, stamping down with his heavy black workshoes. The mouse barely avoided Percy’s last two jumps, first zigging and then zagging. It went under the door with a final flick of its long pink tail, and so long, stranger—it was gone.
“Fuck!” Percy said, and slammed the flat of his hand against the door. Then he began to sort through his keys, meaning to go into the restraint room and continue the chase.
Dean came down the corridor after him, deliberately walking slow in order to get his emotions under control. Part of him wanted to laugh at Percy, he told me, but part of him wanted to grab the man, whirl him around, pin him against the restraint-room door, and whale the living daylights out of him. Most of it, of course, was just being startled; our job on E Block was to keep rumpus to a minimum, and rumpus was practically Percy Wetmore’s middle name. Working with him was sort of like trying to defuse a bomb with somebody standing behind you and every now and then clashing a pair of cymbals together. In a word, upsetting. Dean said he could see that upset in Arlen Bitterbucks eyes… even in The President’s eyes, although that gentleman was usually as cool as the storied cucumber.
And there was something else, as well. In some part of his mind, Dean had already begun to accept the mouse as—well, maybe not as a friend, but as a part of life on the block. That made what Percy had done and what he was trying to do not right. Not even if it was a mouse he was trying to do it to. And the fact that Percy would never understand how come it wasn’t right was pretty much the perfect example of why he was all wrong for the job he thought he was doing.
By the time Dean reached the end of the corridor, he had gotten himself under control again, and knew how he wanted to handle the matter. The one thing Percy absolutely couldn’t stand was to look foolish, and we all knew it.
“Coises, foiled again,” he said, grinning a little, kidding Percy along.
Percy gave him an ugly look and flicked his hair off his brow. “Match your mouth, Four-Eyes. I’m riled. Don’t make it worse!”
“So it’s moving day again, is it?” Dean said, not quite laughing… but laughing with his eyes. “Well, when you get everything out this time, would you mind mopping the floor?”
Percy looked at the door. Looked at his keys. Thought about another long, hot, fruitless rummage in the room with the soft walls while they all stood around and watched him… The Chief and The Pres, too.
“I’ll be damned if I understand what’s so funny,” he said. “We don’t need mice in the cellblock—we got enough vermin in here already, without adding mice.”
“Whatever you say, Percy,” Dean said, holding up his hands. He had a moment right there, he told me the next night, when he believed Percy might just take after him.
Bill Dodge strolled up then and smoothed it over. “Think you dropped this,” he said, and handed Percy his baton. “An inch lower, you woulda broken the little barstid’s back.”
Percy’s chest expanded at that. “Yeah, it wasn’t a bad shot,” he said, carefully re-seating his headknocker in its foolish holster. “I used to be a pitcher in high school. Threw two no-hitters.”
“Is that right, now?” Bill said, and the respectful tone of voice (although he winked at Dean when Percy turned away) was enough to finish defusing the situation.
“Yep,” Percy said. “Threw one down in Knoxville. Those city boys didn’t know what hit em. Walked two. Could have had a perfect game if the ump hadn’t been such a lugoon.”
Dean could have left it at that, but he had seniority on Percy and part of a senior’s job is to instruct, and at that time—before Coffey, before Delacroix—he still thought Percy might be teachable. So he reached out and grasped the younger man’s wrist. “You want to think about what you was doing just now,” Dean said. His intention, he said later, was to sound serious but not disapproving. Not too disapproving, anyway.
Except with Percy, that didn’t work. He might not learn… but we would eventually.
“Say, Four-Eyes, I know what I was doing—trying to get that mouse! What’re you, blind?”
“You also scared the cheese out of Bill, out of me, and out of them,” Dean said, pointing in the direction of Bitterbuck and Flanders.
“So what?” Percy asked, drawing himself up. “They ain’t in cradle-school, in case you didn’t notice. Although you guys treat them that way half the time.”
“Well, I don’t like to be scared,” Bill rumbled, “and I work here, Wetmore, in case you didn’t notice. I ain’t one of your lugoons.”
Percy gave him a look that was narrow-eyed and a touch uncertain.
“And we don’t scare them any more than we have to, because they’re under a lot of strain,” Dean said. He was still keeping his voice low. “Men that are under a lot of strain can snap. Hurt themselves. Hurt others. Sometimes get folks like us in trouble, too.”
Percy’s mouth twitched at that. “In trouble” was an idea that had power over him. Making trouble was okay. Getting into it was not.
“Our job is talking, not yelling,” Dean said. “A man who is yelling at prisoners is a man who has lost control.”
Percy knew who had written that scripture—me. The boss. There was no love lost between Percy Wetmore and Paul Edgecombe, and this was still summer, remember—long before the real festivities started.
“You’ll do better,” Dean said, “if you think of this place as like an intensive-care ward in a hospital. It’s best to be quiet—”
“I think of it as a bucket of piss to drown rats in,” Percy said, “and that’s all. Now let me go.”
He tore free of Dean’s hand, stepped between him and Bill, and stalked up the corridor with his head down. He walked a little too close to The President’s side—close enough so that Flanders could have reached out, grabbed him, and maybe headwhipped him with his own prized hickory baton, had Flanders been that sort of man. He wasn’t, of course, but The Chief perhaps was. The Chief, if given a chance, might have administered such a beating just to teach Percy a lesson. What Dean said to me on that subject when he told me this story the following night has stuck with me ever since, because it turned out to be a kind of prophecy. “Wetmore don’t understand that he hasn’t got any power over them,” Dean said. “That nothing he does can really make things worse for them, that they can only be electrocuted once. Until he gets his head around that, he’s going to be a danger to himself and to everyone else down here.” else down here.”
Percy went into my office and slammed the door behind him.
“My, my,” Bill Dodge said. “Ain’t he the swollen and badly infected testicle.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Dean said.
“Oh, look on the bright side,” Bill said. He was always telling people to look on the bright side; it got so you wanted to punch his nose every time it came out of his mouth. “Your trick mouse got away, at least.”
“Yeah, but we won’t see him no more,” Dean said. “I imagine this time goddam Percy Wetmore’s scared him off for good.”
3
That