as soon as look at you. When you’re in stir you belong to the state and if you forget it, woe is you. I’ve known men who’ve lost eyes, men who’ve lost toes and fingers; I
knew one man who lost the tip of his penis and counted himself lucky that was all he
lost. I wanted to tell Andy that it was already too late. He could go back and pick up his brush and there would still be some big lug waiting for him in the showers that
night, ready to charlie-horse both of his legs and leave him writhing on the cement.
You could buy a lug like rat for a pack of cigarettes or three Baby Ruths. Most of all, I wanted to tell him not to make it any worse than it already was.
What I did was to keep on running tar onto the roof as if nothing at all was
happening.
Like everyone else, I look after my own ass first. I have to. It’s cracked already,
and in Shawshank there have always been Hadleys wiling to finish the job of breaking
it.
Andy said, ‘Maybe I put it wrong. Whether you trust her or not is immaterial.
The problem is whether or not you believe she would ever go behind your back, try to
hamstring you.’
Hadley got up. Mert got up. Tim Youngblood got up. Hadley’s face was as red
as the side of a firebarn. ‘Your only, problem,’ he said, ‘is going to be how many bones you still get unbroken. You can count them in the infirmary. Come on, Mert We’re
throwing this sucker over the side.’
Tim Youngblood drew his gun. The rest of us kept tarring like mad. The sun
beat down.
They were going to do it; Hadley and Mert were simply going to pitch him
over the side.
Terrible accident Dufresne, prisoner 81433-SHNK, was taking a couple of
empties down and slipped on the ladder. Too bad.
They laid hold of him, Mert on the right arm, Hadley on the left. Andy didn’t
resist. His eyes never left Hadley’s red, horsey face.
‘If you’ve got your thumb on her, Mr Hadley,’ he said in that same calm,
composed voice, ‘there’s not a reason why you shouldn’t have every cent of that
money. Final score, Mr Byron Hadley thirty-five thousand, Uncle Sam zip.’
Mert started to drag him towards the edge. Hadley just stood still. For a
moment Andy was like a rope between them in a tug-of-war game. Then Hadley said,
‘Hold on one second, Mert. What do you mean, boy?’
‘I mean, if you’ve got your thumb on your wife, you can give it to her,’ Andy said.
‘You better start making sense, boy, or you’re going over.’
“The government allows you a one-time-only gift to your spouse,’ Andy said.
‘It’s good up to sixty thousand dollars.’
Hadley was now looking at Andy as if he had been poleaxed. ‘Naw, that ain’t
right,’ he said. ‘Tax free?’
‘Tax free,’ Andy said. ‘IRS can’t touch cent one.’
‘How would you know a thing like that?’
Tim Youngblood said: ‘He used to be a banker, Byron. I s’pose he might-‘
‘Shut ya head, Trout,’ Hadley said without looking at him. Tim Youngblood
flushed and shut up. Some of the guards called him Trout because of his thick lips and buggy eyes. Hadley kept looking at Andy. ‘You’re the smart banker who shot his wife.
Why should I believe a smart banker like you? So I can wind up in here breaking
rocks right alongside you? You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’
Andy said quietly, ‘If you went to jail for tax evasion, you’d go to a federal
penitentiary, not Shawshank. But you won’t. The tax-free gift to the spouse is a
perfectly legal loophole. I’ve done dozens… no, hundreds of them. It’s meant primarily for people with small businesses to pass on, or for people who come into one-time-only windfalls. Like yourself.’
‘I think you’re lying,’ Hadley said, but he didn’t–you could see he didn’t. There
was an emotion dawning on his face, something that was grotesque overlying that
long, ugly countenence and that receding, sunburned brow. An almost obscene