came when Lonborg was beaten in the seventh game of the Series to end the dream
just short of complete fruition. It probably pleased Norton to no end, the son of a bitch.
He liked his prison wearing sackcloth and ashes. But for Andy, there was no tumble
back down into gloom. He wasn’t much of a baseball fan anyway, and maybe that was
why. Nevertheless, he seemed to have caught the current of good feeling, and for him
it didn’t peter out again after the last game of the Series. He had taken that invisible coat out of the closet and put it on again. I remember one bright-gold fall day in very late October, a couple of weeks after the World Series had ended. It must have been a
Sunday, because the exercise yard was full of men ‘walking off the week’–tossing a
Frisbee or two, passing around a football, bartering what they had to barter. Others
would be at the long table in the Visitors’ Hall, under the watchful eyes of the screws, talking with their relatives, smoking cigarettes, telling sincere lies, receiving their picked-over care packages.
Andy was squatting Indian-fashion against the wall, chunking two small rocks together in his hands, his face turned up into the sunlight. It was surprisingly warm, that sun, for a day so late in the year. ‘Hello, Red,’ he called. ‘Come on and sit a spell.’
I did.
‘You want this?’ he asked, and handed me one of the two carefully polished
‘millennium sandwiches’ I just told you about ‘I sure do,’ I said. ‘It’s very pretty. Thank you.’
He shrugged and changed the subject ‘Big anniversary coming up for you next
year.’
I nodded. Next year would make me a thirty-year man. Sixty per cent of my
life spent in Shawshank Prison.
Think you’ll ever get out?’
‘Sure. When I have a long white beard and just about three marbles left rolling
around upstairs.’
He smiled a little and then turned his face up into the sun again, his eyes
closed. ‘Feels good.’
‘I think it always does when you know the damn winter’s almost right on top of
you.’
He nodded, and we were silent for a while.
‘When I get out of here,’ Andy said finally, ‘I’m going where it’s warm all the
time.’ He spoke with such calm assurance you would have thought he had only a
month or so left to serve. ‘You know where I’m goin’, Red?’
‘Nope.’
‘Zihuatanejo,’ he said, rolling the word softly from his tongue like music.
‘Down in Mexico. It’s a little place maybe twenty miles from Playa Azul and Mexico
Highway 37.
It’s a hundred miles north-west of Acapulco on the Pacific Ocean. You know
what the Mexicans say about the Pacific?’
I told him I didn’t.
‘They say it has no memory. And that’s where I want to finish out my life, Red.
In a warm place that has no memory.’
He had picked up a handful of pebbles as he spoke; now he tossed them, one
by one, and watched them bounce and roll across the baseball diamond’s dirt infield,
which would be under a foot of snow before long.
‘Zihuatanejo. I’m going to have a little hotel down there. Six cabanas along the
beach, and six more set further back, for the highway trade. I’ll have a guy who’ll take my guests out charter fishing. There’ll be a trophy for the guy who catches the biggest marlin of the season, and I’ll put his picture up in the lobby. It won’t be a family place.
It’ll be a place for people on their honeymoons… first or second varieties.’
‘And where are you going to get the money to buy this fabulous place?’ I asked.
‘Your stock account?’
He looked at me and smiled. ‘That’s not so far wrong,’ he said. ‘Sometimes you
startle me, Red.’
‘What are you talking about?’
There are really only two types of men in the world when it comes to bad
trouble,’ Andy said, cupping a match between his hands and lighting a cigarette.
‘Suppose there was a house full of rare paintings and sculptures and fine old antiques, Red? And suppose the guy who owned the house heard that there was a monster of a