and neither did Rooster MacBride, and so far as I know, no one else ever did, either.
What the three of them did was to beat Andy within an inch of his life, and all four of them ended up doing a jolt in solitary. Andy and Rooster MacBride went by way of
the infirmary.
How many times did that particular crew have at him? I don’t know. I think
Rooster lost his taste fairly early on -being in nose-splints for a month can do that to a fellow -and Bogs Diamond left off that summer, all at once.
That was a strange thing. Bogs was found in his cell, badly beaten, one
morning in early June, when he didn’t show up in the breakfast nose-count He
wouldn’t say who had done it, or how they had gotten to him, but being in my
business, I know that a screw can be bribed to do almost anything except get a gun for an inmate. They didn’t make big salaries then, and they don’t now. And in those days
there was no electronic locking system, no closed-circuit TV, no master-switches
which controlled whole areas of the prison. Back in 1948, each cellblock had its own
turnkey. A guard could have been bribed real easy to let someone–maybe two or
three someones–into the block, and, yes, even into Diamond’s cell.
Of course a job like that would have cost a lot of money. Not by outside
standards, no.
Prison economics are on a smaller scale. When you’ve been in here a while, a
dollar bill in your hand looks like a twenty did outside. My guess is, that if Bogs was done, it cost someone a serious piece of change–fifteen bucks, well say, for the
turnkey, and two or store apiece for each of the lump-up guys.
I’m not saying it was Andy Dufresne, but I do know that he brought in five
hundred dollars when he came, and he was a banker in the straight world–a man who
understands better than the rest of us the ways in which money can become power.
And I know this: After the beating–the three broken ribs, the haemorrhaged
eye, the sprained back and the dislocated hip–Bogs Diamond left Andy alone. In fact,
after that he left everyone pretty much alone. He got to be like a high wind in the
summertime, all bluster and no bite. You could say, in fact, that he turned into a ‘weak sister’.
That was the end of Bogs Diamond, a man who might eventually have killed
Andy if Andy hadn’t taken steps to prevent it (if it was him who took the steps). But it
wasn’t the end of Andy’s trouble with the sisters. There was a little hiatus, and then it began again, although not so hard nor so often. Jackals like easy prey, and there were easier pickings around than Andy Dufresne.
He always fought them, that’s what I remember. He knew, I guess, that if you
let them have at you even once, without fighting it, it got that much easier to let them have their way without fighting next time. So Andy would turn up with bruises on his
face every once in a while, and there was the matter of the two broken fingers six or
eight months after Diamond’s beating. Oh yes–and sometime in late 1949, the man
landed in the infirmary with a broken cheekbone that was probably the result of
someone swinging a nice chunk of pipe with the business-end wrapped in flannel. He
always fought back, and as a result, he did his time in solitary. But don’t think solitary was the hardship for Andy that it was for some men. He got along with himself.
The sisters was something he adjusted himself to–and then, in 1950, it stopped
almost completely. That is a part of my story that I’ll get to in due time.
In the fall of 1948, Andy met me one morning in the exercise yard and asked
me if I could get him half a dozen rock-blankets.
‘What the hell are those?’ I asked.
He told me that was just what rockhounds called them; they were polishing