Pleasure Reading 2

Part 2

"The Mouse on the Mile"

The nursing home where the narrator crossing his last bunch of t's and dotting my last mess of i's is called Georgia Pines. Looking over what the narrator have written so far, it occurs to him that he remember everything that happened back in '32; it's the order of events that sometimes gets confused in his head. John Coffey came to E Block and the Green Mile in October of that year, condemned for the murder of the nine-year-old Detterick twins. William "Wild Bill" Wharton came after Coffey; Delacroix came before. So did the mouse, the one Brutus Howell - Brutal, to his friends - called Steamboat Willy and Delacroix ended up calling Mr. Jingles. That goddam mouse. Delacroix loved it, but Percy Wetmore sure didn't. Percy hated it from the first. The mouse came back just about three days after Percy had chased it down the Green Mile that first time. The mouse came up the Green Mile just as it had before, hopping along, then stopping and seeming to check the empty cells. After a bit of that it would hop on, undiscouraged, as if it had known all along it would be a long search, and it was up to that. The mouse stopped where it had before, no more than three feet from the duty desk, looking up at Dean like a prisoner before the bar. It glanced up at Bill for a moment, then switched its attention back to Dean. Percy it hardly seemed to notice at all. Dean broke off a piece of Ritz cracker and dropped it in front of the mouse. It just looked with its sharp black eyes at the orangey fragment for a second or two, its filament-fine whiskers twitching as it sniffed. Then it reached out, took the cracker in its paws, sat up, and began to eat, but before it had done more than take a preliminary nibble or two, Percy threw his baton at it, launching it like a spear. The narrator get to the end of Mr. Jingles's story in good time.