this was an old routine by then. He saw that Tommy got a series of high school
equivalency tests. Tommy would brush up on the subjects he had passed in high-
school -there weren’t many–and then take the test. Andy also saw that he was enrolled in a number of correspondence courses covering the subjects he had failed in school
or just missed by dropping out. He probably wasn’t the best student Andy ever took
over the jumps, and I don’t know if he ever did get his high school diploma, but that
forms no part of my story. The important thing was that he came to like Andy
Dufresne very much, as most people did after a while.
On a couple of occasions he asked Andy ‘what a smart guy like you is doing in
the joint’ -a question which is the rough equivalent of that one that goes ‘What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?’ But Andy wasn’t the type to tell him; he would only smile and turn the conversation into some other channel. Quite normally,
Tommy asked someone else, and when he finally got the story, I guess he also got the
shock of his young life. The person he asked was his partner on the laundry’s steam
ironer and folder. The inmates call this device the mangler, because that’s exactly
what it will do to you if you aren’t paying attention and get your bad self caught in it.
His partner was Charlie Lathrop, who had been in for about twelve years on a murder
charge. He was more than glad to reheat the details of the Dufresne murder trial for
Tommy; it broke the monotony of pulling freshly pressed bedsheets out of the
machine and tucking them into the basket. He was just getting to the jury waiting until after lunch to bring in their guilty verdict when the trouble whistle went off and the mangler grated to a stop. They had been feeding in freshly washed sheets from the
Eliot Nursing Home at the far end; these were spat out dry and neatly pressed at Tommy’s and Charlie’s end at the rate of one every five seconds. Their job was to grab them, fold them, and slap them into the cart, which had already been lined with brown
paper.
But Tommy Williams was just standing there, staring at Charlie Lathrop, his
mouth unhinged all the way to his chest. He was standing in & drift of sheets that had come through dean and which were now sopping up all the wet muck on the floor–
and in a laundry wetwash, there’s plenty of muck.
So the head bull that day, Homer Jessup, comes rushing over, bellowing his
head off and on the prod for trouble. Tommy took no notice of him. He spoke to
Charlie as if old Homer, who had busted more heads than he could probably count,
hadn’t been there. ‘What did you say that golf pro’s name was?’
‘Quentin,’ Charlie answered back, all confused and upset by now. He later said
that the kid was as white as a truce flag, ‘Glenn Quentin, I think. Something like that, anyway -‘
‘Here now, here now,’ Homer Jessup roared, his neck as red as a rooster’s
comb. ‘Get them sheets in cold water! Get quick! Get quick, by Jesus, you -‘
‘Glenn Quentin, oh my God,’ Tommy Williams said, and that was all he got to
say because Homer Jessup, that least peaceable of men, brought his billy down behind
his ear. Tommy hit the floor so hard he broke off three of his front teeth. When he
woke up he was in solitary, and confined to same for a week, riding a boxcar on Sam
Norton’s famous grain and drain train. Plus a black mark on his report card.
That was in early February in 1963, and Tommy Williams went around to six
or seven other long-timers after he got out of solitary and got pretty much the same
story. I know; I was one of them. But when I asked him why he wanted it, he just
clammed up.
Then one day he went to the library and spilled one helluva big budget of