Кинг С. Зелёная миля (The Green Mile)

192 Pages·2013·1.713 MB·Russian

by  Берестова А.И.

STEPHEN
KING
ABRIDGED BESTSELLER
THE
GREEN
MILE
Адаптация, сокращение и словарь:
А. И. Берестова
Санкт-Петербург
ББК 81.2Англ
К41
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Кинг С.
К41 The Green Mile = Зелёная миля : книга для чтения на
английском языке / Адапт., сокр. и словарь А. И. Берес-
това. –СПб. : Антология, 2013. – 192 с. – (Abridged
Bestseller).
ISBN 978-5-94962-226-1
Глубокий старик Пол Эджкомб, бывший тюремный
надзиратель над смертниками, вспоминает необыкновенные
события особенной в его жизни осени 1932 года, когда в неё
вошёл странный чернокожий гигант Джон Коффи.
Для широкого круга изучающих английский язык.
Текст сокращён и адаптирован. Уровень Intermediate.
ББК 81.2Англ
© Берестова А. И., адаптация,
сокращение, словарь, 2013
ISBN 978-5-94962-226-1 © ООО «Антология», 2013
Part One
THE TWO DEAD GIRLS
1
These events took place in 1932 at the state prison at
Cold Mountain. The electric chair was there at that time.
The prisoners made jokes about the chair. People always
make jokes about things that frighten them but from which
they can’t get away. They called it Old Sparky, they
made jokes about the power bill, and how Warden Moores
would cook his Thanksgiving dinner that fall because his
wife, Melinda, was very ill and couldn’t cook.
But for those who actually had to sit down in that
chair, the humor went out of the situation in a hurry. I
controlled seventy-eight executions during my time at
Cold Mountain, and I think that, for most of those men,
the understanding of what was happening to them finally
came when their ankles were being fastened to the chair’s
legs. The understanding came then (you saw it in their
eyes) that their own legs had finished their careers. The
blood still ran in them, the muscles were still strong, but
they were finished, all the same; they were never going to
walk another country mile or dance with a girl. There was
a black silk bag that went over their heads after their last
words. I always thought that bag was really for us, not for
them: the bag didn’t allow us to see the awful fear in
their eyes as they realized they were going to die.
There was only one block for prisoners sentenced to
death at Cold Mountain – E Block. It was much smaller
4 StephenKingTheGreenMile
than the other four blocks for other prisoners. It was a
brick building with a horrible bare metal roof. There were
six cells inside, three on each side of a wide center aisle.
The cells were larger than in the other four blocks and all
singles. The prisoners were mixed – black and white (at
Cold Mountain, there was no segregation among the
walking dead), and that was a little piece of hell.
The floor of the wide corridor in the center of E Block
was covered with linoleum the color of tired old limes,
and so what was called the Last Mile at other prisons was
called the Green Mile at Cold Mountain. It was about
sixty long paces from south to north.
* * *
1932 was the year of John Coffey. The details of his
case can be found in the newspapers of that time. It was a
hot fall, I remember that; very hot, indeed. October almost
like August, and the warden’s wife, Melinda, was in the
hospital at Indianola. It was the fall when I had the worst
urinary infection of my life. It was so painful that I wished
to die every time I had to urinate. It was the fall of Delacroix,
the little half-bald Frenchman with the mouse, who came
in the summer and did that trick with the spool. But mostly
it was the fall that John Coffey came to E Block, sentenced
to death for the rape-murder of the Detterick twins.
There were four or five guards on the block each shift.
Dean Stanton, Harry Terwilliger, and Brutus Howell (the
men called him “Brutal,” but it was a joke, he wouldn’t
hurt a fly unless he had to, in spite of his size) are all dead
now, and so is Percy Wetmore, who really was brutal ...
and stupid. Percy had no business on E Block, where a
brutal nature was useless and sometimes dangerous, but he
was related to the governor by marriage, and so he stayed.
Percy Wetmore brought Coffey into the block, with
the cry: “Dead man walking! Dead man walking here!”
PartOneTheTwoDeadGirls 5
Coffey was the biggest man I’ve ever seen. There
were chains on his arms and across his huge chest. There
was a chain between his ankles. Percy Wetmore was on
one side of him, skinny little Harry Terwilliger was on
the other, and they looked like children walking along
with a captured bear. Even Brutus Howell looked like a
kid next to Coffey, and Brutal was over six feet tall and
broad, too.
John Coffey was black, and he was six feet, eight inches
tall. He was broad in the shoulders and his chest was huge,
and there were strong muscles in every direction. He was
very strong, and I am sure, he could tear the chains that
held him as easily as you might tear the ribbons on a
Christmas present, but when you looked in his face, you
knew he wasn’t going to do anything like that. His face
wasn’t stupid, but lost. He was looking around as if he
could not understand 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 and taken all
the fun out of him.
“Dead man walking!” Percy cried again.
“That’ll be enough of that,” I said. I was in the cell
which was to be Coffey’s cell. I was waiting for him. I
was there to welcome him and to take charge of him, but
had no idea of the man’s great size until I saw him.
The three of them stopped outside the cell door,
which was open. I nodded to Harry, who said: “Are you
sure you want to be in there with him, boss?” Harry
Terwilliger wasn’t often nervous, but that time he sounded
nervous.
“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 felt – that urinary infection I
mentioned earlier wasn’t as bad as it got later, but it was
bad enough, let me tell you.
Coffey shook his head slowly. When his eyes found
me, they never left me.
6 StephenKingTheGreenMile
Harry had a clipboard with Coffey’s forms on it in one
hand. “Give it to him,” I said to Harry “Put it in his hand.”
Harry did. The giant took it like a sleepwalker.
“Now bring it to me, big boy,” I said, and Coffey
did, his chains were jingling and rattling. He had to duck
his head just to enter the cell.
I looked through his forms. His height was as six feet,
eight inches. His weight was given as two hundred and
eighty pounds, but I think that it was maybe three hundred
and fifty pounds. Under the line for scars and identifying
marks, one word was written: Numerous.
I looked up. Coffey had moved a bit to one side and I
could see Harry standing in front of Delacroix’s cell – he
was our only other prisoner in E Block when Coffey came
in. Del was a slight, balding man with a worried face. His
tame mouse was sitting on his shoulder.
Percy Wetmore was standing in the doorway of the
cell which had just become John Coffey’s. He was tapping
his hickory baton against one palm as a man does when
he has a toy he wants to use. And all at once I understood
that Percy wanted to use his baton on Coffey. I couldn’t
allow it. I stopped caring about his political connections
for a little while.
“Percy.” I said. “Go and help Bill Dodge in the infirmary.”
“That isn’t my job,” Percy said. “This big idiot is my
job.” He didn’t like the big ones. He wasn’t thin, like
Harry Terwilliger, but he was short.
“Then your job is done,” I said. “Get over to the
infirmary.”
He didn’t want to go. Bill Dodge and his men were
moving heavy boxes and even the beds; the whole infirmary
was going to a new building on the west side of the
prison. Hot work, heavy lifting. Percy Wetmore didn’t
like hard work.
“They got all the men they need,” he said.
“I really don’t care what you do, Percy, just get out
of here for awhile!”
PartOneTheTwoDeadGirls 7
Percy didn’t go at once, but finally he turned and
went away. Delacroix’s mouse ran back and forth from
one of the little Frenchman’s shoulders to the other.
“Be still, Mr Jingles,” Delacroix said, and the mouse
stopped on his left shoulder just as if he had understood.
“Just be so still and so quiet.”
“You go and lie down, Del,” I said. “Take a rest. This
is none of your business, either!”
He did as I said. He had raped a young girl and killed
her, and had then dropped her body behind the apartment
house where she lived, and then set it on fire. The fire
had spread to the building itself, and six more people had
died, two of them children. It was the only crime he had
in him, and now he was just a mild-mannered man with a
worried face. Soon Old Sparky would make an end to
him ... but something that had done that awful thing
(killed the girl and set her on fire) was already gone, and
now he lay on his bunk, and his little companion ran
squeaking over his hands. Somehow, that was the worst;
Old Sparky never burned what was inside them. That
terrible something vacates, jumps to someone else, and
we kill husks that aren’t really alive anyway.
I turned my attention to the giant.
“If I let Harry take those chains off you, are you
going to be nice?”
He nodded. His strange eyes looked at me. There was
a kind of peace in them, but not a kind I was sure I could
trust. I nodded to Harry, who came in and unlocked the
chains. He showed no fear now, and I felt a bit easier.
Harry had been nervous because of Percy, not because of
the giant, and I trusted Harry’s instincts. I trusted the
instincts of all my day-to-day E Block men, except for
Percy.
I looked up at my new charge and said: “Can you
talk, big boy?”
“Yes, sir, boss, I can talk,” he said. His voice was a
deep and quiet rumble. He had no real Southern drawl –
8 StephenKingTheGreenMile
he said I, not Ah – but there was a kind of Southern
construction to his speech that I noticed later. As if he
was from the South, but not of it. He didn’t sound illiterate,
but he didn’t sound educated. In his speech as in so
many other things, he was a mystery. His eyes troubled
me – a kind of peaceful absence in them, as if he were
floating far, far away.
“Your name is John Coffey.”
“Yes, sir, boss, like the drink only not spelled the
same way.”
“So you can spell, can you? Read and write?”
“Just my name, boss,” said he, calmly.
I decided he wasn’t going to be any trouble. In that I
was both right and wrong.
“My name is Paul Edgecombe,” I said. “I’m the E
Block super – the head screw. You want something
from me, ask for me by name. If I’m not here, ask
this other, man – his name is Harry Terwilliger. Or you
ask for Mr Stanton or Mr Howell. Do you understand
that?”
Coffey nodded.
“Just don’t expect to get what you want unless we
decide that it’s what you need – this isn’t a hotel. Still
with me?”
He nodded again.
“This is a quiet place, big boy – not like the rest of the
prison. It’s just you and Delacroix over there. You won’t
work; mostly you’ll just sit. Give you a chance to think
things over.” Too much time for most of them, but I
didn’t say that. “Sometimes we play the radio, if all’s in
order. You like the radio?”
He nodded, but doubtfully, as if he wasn’t sure what
the radio was. I later found out that was true, in a way;
Coffey knew things when he encountered them again,
but in between he forgot.
“If you behave, you’ll eat on time, you’ll never see
the solitary cell down at the far end. You’ll have two
PartOneTheTwoDeadGirls 9
hours in the yard from four until six, except on Saturdays
when the rest of the prison population has their football
games. You’ll have your visitors on Sunday afternoons, if
you have someone who wants to visit you. Do you,
Coffey?”
He shook his head. “Got none, boss,” he said.
I looked at him attentively.
“Your time here can be easy or hard, big boy, it all
depends on you. Do you have any questions?”
“Do you leave a light on after bedtime?” he asked at
once.
Coffey was smiling a little uneasily, as if he knew we
would think him foolish. “Because I get a little afraid in
the dark sometimes,” he said. “If it’s a strange place.”
I looked at him – the pure size of him – and felt
strangely touched.
“Yes, it’s pretty bright in here all night long,” I said.
“Half the lights along the corridor burn from nine until
five every morning.”
He nodded, and smiled. I’m not sure he knew what a
corridor was, but he could see the 200-watt bulbs on the
ceiling.
I did something I’d never done to a prisoner before,
then – I offered him my hand. Even now I don’t know
why. Coffey took my hand with surprising gentleness, my
hand nearly disappeared in his, and that was all of it. I
had another moth in my killing bottle.
I stepped out of the cell. Harry pulled the door shut
and locked it. Coffey stood where he was a moment or
two longer, as if he didn’t know what to do next, and
then he sat down on his bunk, clasped his giant’s hands
between his knees, and lowered his head like a man who
grieves or prays. He said something then in his strange,
almost Southern voice.
“I couldn’t help it, boss,” he said. “I tried to take it
back, but it was too late!’
10 StephenKingTheGreenMile
* * *
“You’re going to have some trouble with Percy,” Harry
said as we walked back up the hall and into my office.
Dean Stanton, sort of my third in command, was sitting
behind my desk, working with the files, a job I never had
time to get around to. He just looked up as we came in
and continued his paperwork.
“I’ve been having trouble with that fellow since the
day he came here,” I said, wincing and pulling my pants
away from my crotch. “Did you hear what he was shouting
when he brought that giant here?”
“Couldn’t very well not,” Harry said. “I was there,
you know.”
“I was in the john and heard it just fine,” Dean said.
‘Dead man walking.’ He surely had read that in one of
those magazines he likes so much!”
And he probably had. Percy Wetmore was a great reader
of Argosy and Stag and Men’s Adventure. There was a
prison tale in every issue, it seemed, and Percy read them
with interest, like a man doing research. He hadn’t
participated in an execution yet. Perhaps, he was trying
to find out how to act, and thought the information was
in those magazines.
“He knows people,” Harry said. “He’s connected.
You’ll have to answer for sending him off the block, and
don’t expect that he will do some real work.”
“I don’t expect it,” I said, and I didn’t ... but I had
hopes. “I’m more interested in the big boy just now. Are
we going to have trouble with him?”
Harry shook his head with decision.
“He was quiet as a lamb at court in Trapingus County,”
Dean said.
I asked, “Do you know where he came from before he
showed up in ... Tefton? It was Tefton, wasn’t it?”
“Yep,” Dean said. “Tefton, in Trapingus County.
Nobody knows where he was before he showed up there