worn out Nineteen years! When you say it sudden like that, those three syllables
sound like the thud and double-locking of 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 that. Andy continued to shape and polish the rocks he found in the exercise
yard, but the yard was smaller by then; half of what had been there in 1950 had been
asphalted over in 1962. Nonetheless, he found enough to keep him occupied, I guess.
When he had finished with each rock he would put it carefully on his window ledge,
which faced east He told me he liked to look at them in the sun, the pieces of the
planet he had taken up from the dirt and shaped. Schists, quartzes, granites. Funny
little mica sculptures that were held together with airplane glue. Various sedimentary conglomerates that were polished and cut in such a way that you could see why Andy
called them ‘millennium sandwiches’–the layers 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 to make room for new ones. He gave me
the greatest number, I think–counting the stones that looked like matched cufflinks, I had five. There was one of the mica sculptures I told you about, carefully crafted to
look like a man throwing a javelin, and two of the sedimentary 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 can do, 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 break Andy as badly as he had said, he would have had to look below the surface to
see the change. But if he had seen how different Andy had become, I think Norton
would have been 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 cocktail
party. That isn’t the way I would have put it, but I know what he meant. It goes back
to what I said about Andy wearing his freedom like an invisible coat, about how he
never really developed a prison mentality. His eyes never got that dull look. He never developed the walk that men get when the day is over and they are going back to their
cells for another endless night–that flat-footed, hump-shouldered walk. Andy walked
with his shoulders squared and his step was always light, as if he was heading home
to a good home-cooked meal and a good woman instead of to a tasteless mess of
soggy vegetables, lumpy mashed potato, and a slice or two of that fatty, gristly stuff most of the cons 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 become silent, introspective, and brooding. Who could blame him? So maybe it
was Warden Norton 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 bookies had predicted. When it happened–when they won the American
League pennant–a kind of ebullience engulfed the whole prison. There was a goofy
sort of feeling that if the Dead Sox could come to life, then maybe anybody could do
it I can’t explain that feeling now, any more than an ex-Beatlemaniac could explain
that madness, I suppose. But it was real. Every radio in the place was tuned to the
games as the Red Sox pounded down the stretch. There was gloom when the Sox
dropped a pair in Cleveland near the end, and a nearly riotous joy when Rico
Petrocelli put away the pop fly that clinched it And then there was the gloom that