Pleasure Reading 3

Part 3

Coffey's Hands

Looking back through what the narrator has written, he sees that he called Georgia Pines, where he now lives, a nursing home. According to the brochures they keep in the lobby and send out to prospective clients, it’s a "State-of-the-art retirement complex for the elderly." Except for shouting once at Delacroix, Percy kept his mouth shut once the excitement was over. This was probably the result of shock rather than any effort at tact. The narrator went down the Mile and glanced into Coffey's cell, half-expecting to discover he'd committed suicide in one of the two common Death Row ways either hanging himself with his pants, or gnawing into his wrists. No such thing, it turned out. John Coffey said that the narrator have to come in. The narrator had his keys off his belt and he was hunting through them for the ones that opened John Coffey's cell. The narrator went into Coffey's cell. He sat down there next to him, and he put his arm around his shoulders. He sighed like a man will when he's faced with a job he doesn't much want to do, and then he put his hand down in the narrator’s crotch, on that shelf of bone a foot or so below the navel. The narrator was aware that his fingers were hooked down into claws on thin air, and that his feet were drumming on the floor of Coffey's cell. Then it was over. He hitched under the narrator’s hand, then made an unpleasant gagging, retching sound. His mouth opened the way horses sometimes open their mouths to allow the bit - reluctantly, with the lips peeling back from the teeth in a kind of desperate sneer. Then his teeth parted, too, and he exhaled a cloud of tiny black insects that looked like gnats or noseeums. They swirled furiously between his knees, turned white, and disappeared.