‘ How can you be so obtuse?‘ Andy said, so low that Chester could barely hear. But heheard the warden just fine.
‘What? What did you call me?‘‘Obtuse? Andy cried. ‘Is it deliberate?‘‘Dufresne, you‘ve taken five minutes of my time - no, seven - and I have a very busyschedule today. So I believe we‘ll just declare this little meeting closed and -‘‘The country club will have ail the old time-cards, don‘t you realize that?‘ Andy shouted.
They‘ll have tax-forms and W-2s and unemployment compensation forms, all with hisname on them! There will be employees there now that were there then, maybe Briggshimself! It‘s been fifteen years, not forever! They‘ll remember him! They will rememberBlotch! If I‘ve got Tommy to testify to what Blatch told him, and Briggs to testify thatBlatch was there, actually working at the country club, I can get a new trial! I can -‘‘Guard! Guardl Take this man away!‘‘What‘s the matter with you?‘ Andy said, and Chester told me he was very nearlyscreaming by then. ‘It‘s my life, my chance to get out, don‘t you see that? And you won‘tmake a single long-distance call to at least verify Tommy‘s story? Listen, I‘ll pay for thecall! I‘ll pay for -‘Then there was a sound of thrashing as the guards grabbed him and started to drag himout‘Solitary,‘ Warden Norton said dryly. He was probably - gering his thirty-year pin as hesaid it ‘Bread and water.‘And so they dragged Andy away, totally out of control now, still screaming at thewarden; Chester said you could hear him even after the door was shut: ‘It‘s my life! It‘smy life, don‘t you understand it‘s my life?‘Twenty days on the grain and drain train for Andy down there in solitary. It was hissecond jolt in solitary, and his dust-up with Norton was his first real black mark since hehad joined our happy little family.
I‘ll tell you a little bit about Shawshank‘s solitary while we‘re on the subject It‘ssomething of a throwback to those hardy pioneer days of the early-to-mid-1700s inMaine. In ..those days no one wasted much time with such things as penalogy‘ and‘rehabilitation‘ and ‘selective perception‘. In ,those days, you were taken care of in termsof absolute black and white. You were either guilty or innocent. If you were guilty, youwere either hung or put in gaol. And if you were sentenced to gaol, you did not go to aninstitution. No, you dug your own gaol with a spade provided to you by the Province ofMaine. You dug it as wide and as deep as you could during the period between sunup andsundown. Then ,they gave you a couple of skins and a bucket, and down you went Oncedown, the gaoler would bar the top of your hole, -.row down some grain or maybe a pieceof maggoty meat once or twice a week, and maybe there would be a dipperful ; barleysoup on Sunday night You pissed in the bucket, and you held up the same bucket forwater when the gaoler came around at six in the morning. When it rained, you used liebucket to bail out your gaol-cell ... unless, that is, you wanted to drown like a rat in arainbarrel.
No one spent a long time ‘in the hole‘, as it was called; thirty months was an unusuallylong term, and so far as I‘ve been able to tell, the longest term ever spent from which aninmate actually emerged alive was served by the so-called Durham Boy‘, a fourteen-yearoldpsychopath who castrated a schoolmate with a piece of rusty metal. He did sevenyears, but of course he went in young and strong.
You have to remember that for a crime that was more serious than petty theft orblasphemy or forgetting to put a snotrag in your pocket when out of doors on theSabbath, you were hung. For low crimes such as those just mentioned and for others likethem, you‘d do your three or six or nine months in the hole and come out fishbelly white,cringing from the wide-open spaces, your eyes half-blind, your teeth more than likelyrocking and rolling in their sockets from the scurvy, your feet crawling with fungus. Jollyold Province of Maine. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.
Shawshank‘s Solitary Wing was nowhere as bad as that... I guess. Things come in threemajor degrees in the human experience, I think. There‘s good, bad, and terrible. And asyou go down into progressive darkness towards terrible, it gets harder and harder to makesubdivisions.
To get to Solitary Wing you were led down twenty-three steps to a basement level wherethe only sound was the drip of water. The only light was supplied by a series of danglingsixty-watt bulbs. The cells were keg-shaped, like those wall-safes rich people sometimeshide behind a picture. Like a safe, the round doorways were hinged, and solid instead ofbarred. You get ventilation from above, but no light except for your own sixty-watt bulb,which was turned off from a master-switch promptly at eight p.m., an hour before lightsoutin the rest of the prison. The wire wasn‘t in a wire mesh cage or anything like that.
The feeling was that if you wanted to exist down there in the dark, you were welcome toit. Not many did ... but after eight, of course, you had no choice. You had a bunk boltedto the wall and a can with no toilet seat. You had three ways to spend your time: sitting,shitting, or sleeping. Big choice. Twenty days could get to seem like a year. Thirty dayscould seem like two, and forty days like ten. Sometimes you could hear rats in theventilation system. In a situation like that, subdivisions of terrible tend to get lost.
If anything at all can be said in favour of solitary, it‘s just that you get time to think. Andyhad twenty days in which to think while he enjoyed his grain and drain, and when he gotout he requested another meeting with the warden. Request denied. Such a meeting, thewarden told him, would be ‘counter-productive‘. That‘s another of those phrases you haveto master before you can go to work in the prisons and corrections field.
Patiently, Andy renewed his request And renewed it And renewed it He had changed, hadAndy Dufresne. Suddenly, as that spring of 1963 bloomed around us, there were lines inhis face and sprigs of grey showing in his hair. He had lost that little trace of a smile thatalways seemed to linger around his mouth. His eyes stared out into space more often, andyou get to know that when a man stares that way, he is counting up the years served, themonths, the weeks, the days.
He renewed his request and renewed it He was patient He had nothing but time. It got tobe summer. In Washington, President Kennedy was promising a fresh assault on povertyand on civil rights inequalities, not knowing he had only half a year to live. In Liverpool,a musical group called The Beatles was emerging as a force to be reckoned with inBritish music, but I guess that no one Stateside had yet heard of them. The Boston RedSox, still four years away from what New England folks call The Miracle of ‘67, werelanguishing in the cellar of the American League. All of those things were going on outin a larger world where people walked free.
Norton saw him near the end of June, and this conversation I heard about from Andyhimself some seven years later.
‘If it‘s the money, you don‘t have to worry,‘ Andy told Norton in a low voice. ‘Do youthink I‘d talk that up? I‘d be cutting my own throat I‘d be just as indictable as -‘That‘s enough,‘ Norton interrupted. His face was as long and cold as a slate gravestone.
He leaned back in his office chair until the back of his head almost touched the samplerreading HIS JUDGMENT COMETH AND THAT RIGHT EARLY.
‘But-‘‘Don‘t you ever mention money to me again,‘ Norton said. ‘Not in this office, notanywhere. Not unless you want to see that library turned back into a storage room andpaint-locker again. Do you understand?‘‘I was trying to set your mind at ease, that‘s all.‘‘Well now, when I need a sorry son of a bitch like you to set my mind at ease, I‘ll retire. Iagreed to this appointment because I got tired of being pestered, Dufresne. I want it tostop. If you want to buy this particular Brooklyn Bridge, that‘s your affair. Don‘t make itmine. I could hear crazy stories like yours twice a week if I wanted to lay myself open tothem. Every sinner in this place would be using me for a crying towel. I had more respectfor you. But this is the end. The end. Have we got an understanding?‘‘Yes,‘ Andy said. ‘But I‘ll be hiring a lawyer, you know.‘‘What in God‘s name for?‘‘I think we can put it together,‘ Andy said. ‘With Tommy Williams and with my testimonyand corroborative testimony from records and employees at the country club, I think wecan put it together.‘‘Tommy Williams is no longer an inmate of this facility.‘‘What?‘‘He‘s been transferred.‘‘Transferred where?‘‘Cashman.‘At that, Andy fell silent. He was an intelligent man, but it would have taken anextraordinarily stupid man not to smelt deal all over that. Cashman was a minimumsecurityprison far up north in Aroostook County. The inmates pick a lot of potatoes, andthat‘s hard work, but they are paid a decent wage for their labour and they can attendclasses at CVI, a pretty decent vocational-technical institute, if they so desire. Moreimportant to a fellow like Tommy, a fellow with a young wife and a child, Cashman hada furlough programme ... which meant a chance to live like a normal man, at least on theweekends. A chance to build a model plane with his kid, have sex with his wife, maybego on a picnic.
Norton had almost surely dangled all of that under Tommy‘s nose with only one stringattached: not one more word about Elwood Blatch, not now, not ever. Or you‘ll end updoing hard time in Thomaston down there on scenic Route 1 with the real hard guys, andinstead of having sex with your wife you‘ll be having it with some old bull queer.
‘But why?‘ Andy said. ‘Why would -‘‘As a favour to you,‘ Norton said calmly, ‘I checked with Rhode Island. They did have aninmate named Elwood Blatch. He was given what they call a PP - provisional parole,another one of these crazy liberal programmes to put criminals out on the streets. He‘ssince disappeared.‘Andy said: ‘The warden down there ... is he a friend of yours?‘Sam Norton gave Andy a smile as cold as a deacon‘s watchchain. ‘We are acquainted,‘ hesaid.
‘ Why?‘ Andy repeated. ‘Can‘t you tell me why you did it? You knew I wasn‘t going totalk about ... about anything you might have had going. You knew that. So why?
‘Because people like you make me sick,‘ Norton said deliberately. ‘I like you right whereyou are, Mr Dufresne, and as long as I am warden here at Shawshank, you are going to beright here. You see, you used to think that you were better than anyone else. I have gottenpretty good at seeing that on a man‘s face. I marked it on yours the first time I walkedinto the library. It might as well have been written on your forehead in capital letters.
That look is gone now, and I like that just fine. It is not just that you are a useful vessel,never think that. It is simply that men like you need to learn humility. Why, you used towalk around that exercise yard as if it was a living room and you were at one of thosecocktail parties where the hellhound walk around coveting each others‘ wives andhusbands and getting swinishly drunk. But you don‘t walk around that way anymore. AndI‘ll be watching to see if you should start to walk that way again. Over a period of years,I‘ll be watching you with great pleasure. Now get the hell out of here.‘‘Okay. But all the extracurricular activities stop now, Norton. The investmentcounselling, the scams, the free tax advice. It all stops. Get H & R Block to tell you howto declare your extortionate income.‘Warden Norton‘s face first went brick-red ... and then all the colour fell out of it ‘You‘regoing back into solitary for that Thirty days. Bread and water. Another black mark. Andwhile you‘re in, think about this: if anything that‘s been going on should stop, the librarygoes. I will make it my personal business to see that it goes back to what it was beforeyou came here. And I will make your life... very hard. Very difficult You‘ll do the hardesttime it‘s possible to do. You‘ll lose that one-bunk Hilton down in Cellblock 5, for starters,and you‘ll lose those rocks on the windowsill, and you‘ll lose any protection the guardshave given you against the sodomites. You will... lose everything. Clear?‘I guess it was clear enough.
Time continued to pass - the oldest trick in the world, and maybe the only one that reallyis magic. But Andy Dufresne had changed. He had grown harder. That‘s the only way Ican think of to put it He went on doing Warden Norton‘s dirty work and he held onto thelibrary, so outwardly things were about the same. He continued to have his birthdaydrinks and his New Year‘s Eve drinks; he continued to share out the rest of each bottle. Igot him fresh rock-polishing cloths from time to time, and in 1967 I got him a new rockhammer- the one I‘d gotten him nineteen years ago had plumb worn out Nineteen years!
When you say it sudden like that, those three syllables sound like the thud and doublelockingof a tomb door. The rock-hammer, which had been a ten-dollar item back then,went for twenty-two by ‘67. He and I had a sad little grin over thatAndy continued to shape and polish the rocks he found in the exercise yard, but the yardwas smaller by then; half of what had been there in 1950 had been asphalted over in1962. Nonetheless, he found enough to keep him occupied, I guess. When he had finishedwith each rock he would put it carefully on his window ledge, which faced east He toldme he liked to look at them in the sun, the pieces of the planet he had taken up from thedirt and shaped. Schists, quartzes, granites. Funny little mica sculptures that were heldtogether with airplane glue. Various sedimentary conglomerates that were polished andcut in such a way that you could see why Andy called them ‘millennium sandwiches‘ - thelayers of different material that had built up over a period of decades and centuries.
Andy would give his stones and his rock-sculptures away from time to time in order tomake room for new ones. He gave me the greatest number, I think - counting the stonesthat looked like matched cufflinks, I had five. There was one of the mica sculptures I toldyou about, carefully crafted to look like a man throwing a javelin, and two of thesedimentary conglomerates, all the levels showing in smoothly polished cross-section.
I‘ve still got them, and I take them down every so often and think about what a man cando, if he has time enough and the will to use it, a drop at a time.
So, on the outside, at least, things were about the same. If Norton had wanted to breakAndy as badly as he had said, he would have had to look below the surface to see thechange. But if he had seen how different Andy had become, I think Norton would havebeen well-satisfied with the four years following his clash with Andy.
He had told Andy that Andy walked around the exercise yard as if he were at a cocktailparty. That isn‘t the way I would have put it, but I know what he meant. It goes back towhat I said about Andy wearing his freedom like an invisible coat, about how he neverreally developed a prison mentality. His eyes never got that dull look. He neverdeveloped the walk that men get when the day is over and they are going back to theircells for another endless night - that flat-footed, hump-shouldered walk. Andy walkedwith his shoulders squared and his step was always light, as if he was heading home to agood home-cooked meal and a good woman instead of to a tasteless mess of soggyvegetables, lumpy mashed potato, and a slice or two of that fatty, gristly stuff most of thecons called mystery meat ... that, and a picture of Raquel Welch on the wall.
But for those four years, although he never became exactly like the others, he did becomesilent, introspective, and brooding. Who could blame him? So maybe it was WardenNorton who was pleased ... at least, for a while.
His dark mood broke around the time of the 1967 World Series. That was the dream year,the year the Red Sox won the pennant instead of placing ninth, as the Las Vegas bookieshad predicted. When it happened - when they won the American League pennant - a kindof ebullience engulfed the whole prison. There was a goofy sort of feeling that if theDead Sox could come to life, then maybe anybody could do it I can‘t explain that feelingnow, any more than an ex-Beatlemaniac could explain that madness, I suppose. But itwas real. Every radio in the place was tuned to the games as the Red Sox pounded downthe stretch. There was gloom when the Sox dropped a pair in Cleveland near the end, anda nearly riotous joy when Rico Petrocelli put away the pop fly that clinched it And thenthere was the gloom that came when Lonborg was beaten in the seventh game of theSeries to end the dream just short of complete fruition. It probably pleased Norton to noend, the son of a bitch. He liked his prison wearing sackcloth and ashes.
But for Andy, there was no tumble back down into gloom. He wasn‘t much of a baseballfan anyway, and maybe that was why. Nevertheless, he seemed to have caught thecurrent of good feeling, and for him it didn‘t peter out again after the last game of theSeries. He had taken that invisible coat out of the closet and put it on again.
I remember one bright-gold fall day in very late October, a couple of weeks after theWorld Series had ended. It must have been a Sunday, because the exercise yard was fullof men ‘walking off the week‘ - tossing a Frisbee or two, passing around a football,bartering what they had to barter. Others would be at the long table in the Visitors‘ Hall,under the watchful eyes of the screws, talking with their relatives, smoking cigarettes,telling sincere lies, receiving their picked-over care packages.
Andy was squatting Indian-fashion against the wall, chunking two small rocks together inhis hands, his face turned up into the sunlight. It was surprisingly warm, that sun, for aday so late in the year.
‘Hello, Red,‘ he called. ‘Come on and sit a spell.‘I did.
‘You want this?‘ he asked, and handed me one of the two carefully polished ‘millenniumsandwiches‘ I just told you about‘I sure do,‘ I said. ‘It‘s very pretty. Thank you.‘He shrugged and changed the subject ‘Big anniversary coming up for you next year.‘I nodded. Next year would make me a thirty-year man. Sixty per cent of my life spent inShawshank Prison.
Think you‘ll ever get out?‘‘Sure. When I have a long white beard and just about three marbles left rolling aroundupstairs.‘He smiled a little and then turned his face up into the sun again, his eyes closed. ‘Feelsgood.‘‘I think it always does when you know the damn winter‘s almost right on top of you.‘He nodded, and we were silent for a while.
‘When I get out of here,‘ Andy said finally, ‘I‘m going where it‘s warm all the time.‘ Hespoke with such calm assurance you would have thought he had only a month or so left toserve. ‘You know where I‘m goin‘, Red?‘‘Nope.‘‘Zihuatcnejo,‘ he said, rolling the word softly from his tongue like music. ‘Down inMexico. It‘s a little place maybe twenty miles from Playa Azul and Mexico Highway 37.
It‘s a hundred miles north-west of Acapulco on the Pacific Ocean. You know what theMexicans say about the Pacific?‘I told him I didn‘tThey say it has no memory. And that‘s where I want to finish out my life, Red. In a warmplace that has no memory.‘He had picked up a handful of pebbles as he spoke; now he tossed them, one by one, andwatched them bounce and roll across the baseball diamond‘s dirt infield, which would beunder a foot of snow before long.
‘Zihuatanejo. I‘m going to have a little hotel down there. Six cabanas along the beach, andsix more set further back, for the highway trade. I‘ll have a guy who‘ll take my guests outcharter fishing. There‘ll be a trophy for the guy who catches the biggest marlin of theseason, and I‘ll put his picture up in the lobby. It won‘t be a family place. It‘ll be a placefor people on their honeymoons ... first or second varieties.‘‘And where are you going to get the money to buy this fabulous place?‘ I asked. ‘Yourstock account?‘He looked at me and smiled. ‘That‘s not so far wrong,‘ he said. ‘Sometimes you startle me,Red.‘‘What are you talking about?‘There are really only two types of men in the world when it comes to bad trouble,‘ Andysaid, cupping a match between his hands and lighting a cigarette. ‘Suppose there was ahouse full of rare paintings and sculptures and fine old antiques, Red? And suppose theguy who owned the house heard that there was a monster of a hurricane headed right at it.
One of those two kinds of men just hopes for the best The hurricane will change course,he says to himself. No right-thinking hurricane would ever dare wipe out all theseRembrandts, my two Degas horses, my Jackson Pollocks and my Paul Klees.
Furthermore, God wouldn‘t allow it. And if worst comes to worst, they‘re insured. That‘sone sort of man. The other sort just assumes that hurricane is going to tear right throughthe middle of his house. If the weather bureau says the hurricane just changed course, thisguy assumes it‘ll change back in order to put his house on ground zero again. This secondtype of guy knows there‘s no harm in hoping for the best as long as you‘re prepared forthe worst.‘I lit a cigarette of my own. ‘Are you saying you prepared for the eventuality?‘‘Yes. I prepared for the hurricane. I knew how bad it looked. I didn‘t have much time, butin the time I had, I operated. I had a friend - just about the only person who stood by me -who worked for an investment company in Portland. He died about six years ago.‘‘Sorry.‘‘Yeah.‘ Andy tossed his butt away. ‘Linda and I had about fourteen thousand dollars. Nota big bundle, but hell, we were young. We had our whole lives ahead of us.‘ He grimaceda little, then laughed. ‘When the shit hit the fan, I started lugging my Rembrandts out ofthe path of the hurricane. I sold my stocks and paid the capital gains tax just like a goodlittle boy. Declared everything. Didn‘t cut any corners.‘‘Didn‘t they freeze your estate?‘‘I was charged with murder, Red, not dead! You can‘t freeze the assets of an innocentman - thank God. And it was a while before they even got brave enough to charge mewith the crime. Jim - my friend - and I, we had some time. I got hit pretty good, justdumping everything like that. Got my nose skinned. But at the time I had worse things toworry about than a small skinning on the stock market.‘‘Yeah, I‘d say you did.‘‘But when I came to Shawshank it was all safe. It‘s still safe. Outside these walls, Red,there‘s a man that no living soul has ever seen face to face. He has a Social Security cardand a Maine driver‘s license. He‘s got a birth certificate. Name of Peter Stevens. Nice,anonymous name, huh?‘‘Who is he?‘ I asked. I thought I knew what he was going to say, but I couldn‘t believe it.
‘Me.‘‘You‘re not going to tell me that you had time to set up a false identity while the bullswere sweating you,‘ I said, ‘or that you finished the job while you were on trial for -‘‘No, I‘m not going to tell you that. My friend Jim was the one who set up the falseidentity. He started after my appeal was turned down, and the major pieces ofidentification were in his hands by the spring of 1950.‘‘He must have been a pretty close friend,‘ I said. I was not sure how much of this Ibelieved - a little, a lot, or none. But the day was warm and the sun was out, and it wasone hell of a good story. ‘All of that‘s one hundred per cent illegal, setting up a false IDlike that.‘‘He was a close friend,‘ Andy said. ‘We were in the war together. France, Germany, theoccupation. He was a good friend. He knew it was illegal, but he also knew that settingup a false identity in this country is very easy and very safe. He took my money - mymoney with all the taxes on it paid so the IRS wouldn‘t get too interested - and invested itfor Peter Stevens. He did that in 1950 and 1951. Today it amounts to three hundred andseventy thousand dollars, plus change.‘I guess my jaw made a thump when it dropped against my chest, because he smiled.
‘Think of all the things people wish they‘d invested in since 1950 or so, and two or threeof them will be things Peter Stevens was into. If I hadn‘t ended up in here, I‘d probably beworth seven or eight million bucks by now. I‘d have a Rolls ... and probably an ulcer asbig as a portable radio.‘His hands went to the dirt and began sifting out more pebbles. They moved gracefully,restlessly.
‘I was hoping for the best and expecting the worst -nothing but that The false name wasjust to keep what little capital I had untainted. It was lugging the paintings out of the pathof the hurricane. But I had no idea that the hurricane ... that it could go on as long as ithas.‘I didn‘t say anything for a while. I guess I was trying to absorb the idea that this small,spare man in prison grey next to me could be worth more money than Warden Nortonwould make in the rest of his miserable life, even with the scams thrown in.
‘When you said you could get a lawyer, you sure weren‘t kidding,‘ I said at last ‘For thatkind of dough you could have hired Clarence Darrow, or whoever‘s passing for him thesedays. Why didn‘t you, Andy? Christ! You could have been out of here like a rocket.‘He smiled. It was the same smile that had been on his face when he‘d told me he and hiswife had had their whole lives ahead of them. ‘No,‘ he said.
‘A good lawyer would have sprung the Williams kid from Cashman whether he wanted togo or not,‘ I said. I was getting carried away now. ‘You could have gotten your new trial,hired private detectives to look for that guy Blatch, and blown Norton out of the water toboot. Why not, Andy?‘‘Because I outsmarted myself. If I ever try to put my hands on Peter Stevens‘s moneyfrom inside here, I‘d lose every cent of it My friend Jim could have arranged it, but Jim‘sdead. You see the problem?‘I saw it For all the good the money could do Andy, it might as well have really belongedto another person. In a way, it did. And if the stuff it was invested in suddenly turned bad,all Andy could do would be to watch the plunge, to trace it day after day on the stocksand-bonds page of the Press-Herald. It‘s a tough life if you don‘t weaken, I guess.
‘I‘ll tell you how it is, Red. There‘s a big hayfield in the town of Buxton. You know whereBuxton is at, don‘t you?‘I said I did. It lies right next door to Scarborough.
"That‘s right And at the north end of this particular hayfield there‘s a rock wall, right outof a Robert Frost poem. And somewhere along the base of that wall is a rock that has nobusiness in a Maine hayfield. It‘s a piece of volcanic glass, and until 1947 it was apaperweight on my office desk. My friend Jim put it in that wall. There‘s a keyunderneath it. The key opens a safe deposit box in the Portland branch of the CascoBank.‘‘I guess you‘re in a pack of trouble,‘ I said. ‘When your friend Jim died, the IRS must haveopened all of his safety deposit boxes. Along with the executor of his will, of course.‘Andy smiled and tapped the side of my head. ‘Not bad. There‘s more up there thanmarshmallows, I guess. But we took care of the possibility that Jim might die while I wasin the slam. The box is in the Peter Stevens name, and once a year the firm of lawyersthat served as Jim‘s executors sends a check to the Casco to cover the rental of theStevens box.
‘Peter Stevens is inside that box, just waiting to get out His birth certificate, his S.S. card,and his driver‘s license. The license is six years out of date because Jim died six yearsago, true, but it‘s still perfectly renewable for a five-dollar fee. His stock certificates arethere, the tax-free municipals, and about eighteen bearer bonds in the amount of tenthousand dollars each.‘I whistled.
‘Peter Stevens is locked in a safe deposit box at the Casco Bank in Portland and AndyDufresne is locked in a safe deposit box at Shawshank,‘ he said. Tit for tat And the keythat unlocks the box and the money and the new life is under a hunk of black glass in aBuxton hayfield. Told you this much, so I‘ll tell you something else, Red - for the lasttwenty years, give or take, I have been watching the papers with a more than usualinterest for news of any construction projects in Buxton. I keep thinking that somedaysoon I‘m going to read that they‘re putting a highway through there, or erecting a newcommunity hospital, or building a shopping centre. Burying my new life under ten feet ofconcrete, or spitting it into a swamp somewhere with a big load of fill.‘I blurted, ‘Jesus Christ, Andy, if all of this is true, how do you keep from going crazy?‘He smiled. ‘So far, all quiet on the Western front.‘‘But it could be years -‘‘It will be. But maybe not as many as the state and Warden Norton think it‘s going to be. Ijust can‘t afford to wait that long. I keep thinking about Zihuatanejo and that small hotel.
That‘s all I want from my life now, Red, and I don‘t think that‘s too much to want. I didn‘tkill Glenn Quentin and I didn‘t kill my wife, and that hotel ... it‘s not too much to want Toswim and get a tan and sleep in a room with open windows and space... that‘s not toomuch to want.‘He slung the stones away.
‘You know, Red,‘ he said in an offhand voice, ‘a place like that... I‘d have to have a manwho knows how to get things.‘I thought about it for a long time. And the biggest drawback in my mind wasn‘t even thatwe were talking pipedreams in a shitty little prison exercise yard with armed guardslooking down at us from their sentry posts. ‘I couldn‘t do it,‘ I said. ‘I couldn‘t get along onthe outside. I‘m what they call an institutional man now. In here I‘m the man who can getit for you, yeah. But out there, anyone can get it for you. Out there, if you want posters orrock-hammers or one particular record or a boat-in-a-bottle model kit, you can use thefucking Yellow Pages. In here, I‘m the fucking Yellow Pages. I wouldn‘t know how tobegin. Or where.‘‘You underestimate yourself,‘ he said. ‘You‘re a self-educated man, a self-made man. Arather remarkable man, I think.‘‘Hell, I don‘t even have a high school diploma.‘‘I know that,‘ he said. ‘But it isn‘t just a piece of paper that makes a man. And it isn‘t justprison that breaks one, either.‘‘I couldn‘t hack it outside, Andy. I know that.‘ He got up. ‘You think it over,‘ he saidcasually, just as the inside whistle blew. And he strolled off, as if he was a free man whohad just made another free man a proposition. And for a while just that was enough tomake me feel free. Andy could do that. He could make me forget for a time that we wereboth lifers, at the mercy of a hard-ass parole board and a psalm-singing warden who likedAndy Dufresne right where he was. After all, Andy was a lap-dog who could do taxreturns.
What a wonderful animal!
But by that night in my cell I felt like a prisoner again. The whole idea seemed absurd,and that mental image of blue water and white beaches seemed more cruel than foolish -it dragged at my brain like a fishhook. I just couldn‘t wear that invisible coat the wayAndy did. I fell asleep that night and dreamed of a great glassy black stone in the middleof a hayfield; a stone shaped like a giant blacksmith‘s anvil. I was trying to rock the stoneup so I could get the key that was underneath. It wouldn‘t budge; it was just too damnedbig.
And in the background, but getting closer, I could hear the baying of bloodhounds.
Which leads us, I guess, to the subject of jailbreaks.
Sure, they happen from time to time in our happy little family. You don‘t go over thewall, though, not at Shawshank, not if you‘re smart. The searchlight beams go all night,probing long white fingers across the open fields that surround the prison on three sidesand the stinking marshland on the fourth. Cons do go over the wall from time to time, andthe searchlights almost always catch them. If not, they get picked up trying to thumb aride on Highway 6 or Highway 99. If they try to cut across country, some farmer seesthem and just phones the location in to the prison. Cons who go over the wall are stupidcons. Shawshank is no Canon City, but in a rural area a man humping his ass acrosscountry in a grey pyjama suit sticks out like a cockroach on a wedding cake.
Over the years, the guys who have done the best - maybe oddly, maybe not so oddly - arethe guys who did it on the spur of the moment Some of them have gone out in the middleof a cartful of sheets; a convict sandwich on white, you could say. There was a lot of thatwhen I first came in here, but over the years they have more or less closed that loophole.
Warden Norton‘s famous ‘Inside-Out‘ programme produced its share of escapees, too.
They were the guys who decided they liked what lay to the right of the hyphen better thanwhat lay to the left And again, in most cases it was a very casual kind of thing. Drop yourblueberry rake and stroll into the bushes while one of the screws is having a glass ofwater at the truck or when a couple of them get too involved in arguing over yardspassing or rushing on the old Boston Patriots.
In 1969, the Inside-Outers were picking potatoes in Sabbatus. It was the third ofNovember and the work was almost done. There was a guard named Henry Pugh - and heis no longer a member of our happy little family, believe me -sitting on the back bumperof one of the potato trucks and having his lunch with his carbine across his knees when abeautiful (or so it was told to me, but sometimes these things get exaggerated) ten-pointbuck strolled out of the cold early afternoon mist Pugh went after it with visions of justhow that trophy would look mounted in his rec room, and while he was doing it, three ofhis charges just walked away. Two were recaptured in a Lisbon Falls pinball parlour. Thethird has not been found to this day.
I suppose the most famous case of all was that of Sid Nedeau. This goes back to 1958,and I guess it will never be topped. Sid was out lining the ball-field for a Saturdayintramural baseball game when the three o‘clock inside whistle blew, signalling theshiftchange for the guards. The parking lot is just beyond the exercise yard, on the otherside of the electrically-operated main gate. At three the gate opens j and the guardscoming on duty and those going off mingle. There‘s a lot of back-slapping andbullyragging, comparison of league bowling scores and the usual number of tired oldethnic jokes.
Sid just trundled his lining machine right out through the gate, leaving a three-inchbaseline all the way from third base in the exercise yard to the ditch on the far side ofRoute 6, where they found the machine overturned in a pile of lime. Don‘t ask me how hedid it He was dressed in his prison uniform, he stood six-feet-two, and he was billowingclouds of lime-dust behind him. All I can figure is that, it being Friday afternoon and all,the guards going off were so happy to be going off, and the guards coming on were sodownhearted to be coming on, that the members of the former group never got their headsout of the clouds and those in the latter never got their noses off their shoetops ... and oldSid Nedeau just sort of slipped out between the two.
So far as I know, Sid is still at large. Over the years, Andy Dufresne and I had a goodmany laughs over Sid Nedeau‘s great escape, and when we heard about that airlinehijacking for ransom, the one where the guy parachuted from the back door of theairplane, Andy swore up and down that D B Cooper‘s real name was Sid Nedeau.
‘And he probably had a pocketful of baseline lime in his pocket for good luck,‘ Andy said.
‘That lucky son of a bitch.‘But you should understand that a case like Sid Nedeau, or the fellow who got away cleanfrom the Sabbatus potato-field crew, guys like that are winning the prison version of theIrish Sweepstakes. Purely a case of six different kinds of luck somehow jelling togetherall at the same moment A stiff like Andy could wait ninety years and not get a similarbreak.
Maybe you remember, a ways back, I mentioned a guy named Henley Backus, thewashroom foreman in the laundry. He came to Shawshank in 1922 and died in the prisoninfirmary thirty-one years later. Escapes and escape attempts were a hobby of his, maybebecause he never quite dared to take the plunge himself. He could tell you a hundreddifferent schemes, all of them crackpot, and all of them had been tried in the Shank at onetime or another. My favourite was the tale of Beaver Morrison, a b & e convict who triedto build a glider from scratch in the plate-factory basement The plans he was workingfrom were in a circa-1900 book called The Modern Boy‘s Guide to Fun and Adventure.
Beaver got it built without being discovered, or so the story goes, only to discover therewas no door from the basement big enough to get the damned thing out When Henleytold that story, you could bust a gut laughing, and he knew a dozen - no, two dozen -justas funny.
When it came to detailing Shawshank bust-outs, Henley had it down chapter and verse.
He told me once that during his time there had been better than four hundred escapeattempts that he knew of. Really think about that for a moment before you just nod yourhead and read on. Four hundred escape attempts! That comes out to 12.9 escape attemptsfor every year Henley Backus was in Shawshank and keeping track of them. The EscapeAttempt of the Month Club. Of course most of them were pretty slipshod affairs, the sortof thing that ends up with a guard grabbing some poor, sidling slob‘s arm and growling,‘Where do you think you‘re going, you happy asshole?‘Henley said he‘d class maybe sixty of them as more serious attempts, and he included the‘prison break‘ of 1937, the year before I arrived at the Shank. The new administrationwing was under construction then and fourteen cons got out, using constructionequipment in a poorly locked shed. The whole of southern Maine got into a panic overthose fourteen ‘hardened criminals‘, most of whom were scared to death and had no moreidea of where they should go than a jackrabbit does when it‘s headlight-pinned to thehighway with a big truck bearing down on it Not one of those fourteen got away. Two ofthem were shot dead - by civilians, not police officers or prison personnel -but none gotaway.
How many had gotten away between 1938, when I came here, and that day in Octoberwhen Andy first mentioned Zihuatanejo to me? Putting my information and Henley‘stogether, I‘d say ten. Ten that got away clean. And although it isn‘t the kind of thing youcan know for sure, I‘d guess that at least half of those ten are doing time in otherinstitutions of lower learning like the Shank. Because you do get institutionalized. Whenyou take away a man‘s freedom and teach him to live in a cell, he seems to lose his abilityto think in dimensions. He‘s like that jackrabbit I mentioned, frozen in the oncominglights of the truck that is bound to kill it More often than not a con who‘s just out will pullsome dumb job that hasn‘t a chance in hell of succeeding ... and why? Because it‘ll gethim back inside. Back where he understands how things work. |