little pebble disappeared up Andy’s sleeve and didn’t come down. I admired that… and I admired him.
In spite of the problems he was having, he was going on with his life. There
are thousands who don’t or won’t or can’t, and plenty of them aren’t in prison, either.
And I noticed that, although his face still looked as if a twister had happened to it, his hands were still neat and clean, the nails well-kept.
I didn’t see much of him over the next six months; Andy spent a lot of that
time in solitary.
A few words about the sisters.
In a lot of pens they are known as bull queers or jailhouse susies–just lately
the term in fashion is ‘killer queens’. But in Shawshank they were always the sisters. I don’t know why, but other than the name I guess there was no difference.
It comes as no surprise to most these days that there’s a lot of buggery going
on inside the walls–except to some of the new fish, maybe, who have the misfortune
to be young, slim, good-looking, and unwary–but homosexuality, like straight sex,
comes in a hundred different shapes and forms. There are men who can’t stand to be
without sex of some kind and turn to another man to keep from going crazy. Usually
what follows is an arrangement between two fundamentally “Heterosexual men,
although I’ve sometimes wondered if they are quite as heterosexual as they thought
they were going to be when they get back to their wives or their girlfriends.
There are also men who get ‘turned’ in prison. In the current parlance they ‘go
gay’, or ‘come out of the closet’. Mostly (but not always) they play the female, and
their favours are competed for fiercely.
And then there are the sisters.
They are to prison society what the rapist is to the society outside the walls.
They’re usually long-timers, doing hard bullets for brutal crimes. Their prey is the
young, the weak, and the inexperienced… or, as in the case of Andy Dufresne, the
weak-looking.
Their hunting grounds are the showers, the cramped, tunnel-like area way
behind the industrial washers in the laundry, sometimes the infirmary. On more than
one occasion rape has occurred in the closet-sized projection booth behind the
auditorium. Most often what the sisters take by force they could have had for free, if they wanted it; those who have been turned always seem to have ‘crushes’ on one
sister or another, like teenage girls with their Sinatras, Presleys, or Redfords. But for the sisters, the joy has always been in taking it by force… and I guess it always will be.
Because of his small size and fair good looks (and maybe also because of that
very quality of self-possession I had admired), the sisters were after Andy from the
day he walked in. If this was some kind of fairy story, I’d tell you that Andy fought
the good fight until they left him alone. I wish I could say that, but I can’t. Prison is no fairy-tale world.
The first time for him was in the shower less than three days after he joined our happy Shawshank family. Just a lot of slap and tickle that time, I understand.
They like to size you up before they make their real move, like jackals finding out if the prey is as weak and hamstrung as it looks.
Andy punched back and bloodied the lip of a big, hulking sister named Bogs
Diamond–gone these many years since to who knows where. A guard broke it up
before it could go any further, but Bogs promised to get him–and Bogs did.
The second time was behind the washers in the laundry. A lot has gone on in
that long, dusty, and narrow space over the years; the guards know about it and just let it be. It’s dim and littered with bags of washing and bleaching compound, drums of
Hexlite catalyst, as harmless as salt if your hands are dry, murderous as battery acid if they’re wet. The guards don’t like to go back there. There’s no room to manoeuvre,
and one of the first things they teach them when they come to work in a place like this is to never let the cons get you in a place where you can’t back up.