And the key that unlocks the box and the money and the new life is under a hunk of
black glass in a Buxton hayfield. Told you this much, so I’ll tell you something else, Red–for the last twenty years, give or take, I have been watching the papers with a
more than usual interest for news of any construction projects in Buxton. I keep
thinking that someday soon I’m going to read that they’re putting a highway through
there, or erecting a new community hospital, or building a shopping centre. Burying
my new life under ten feet of concrete, or spitting it into a swamp somewhere with a
big load of fill.’ I blurted, ‘Jesus Christ, Andy, if all of this is true, how do you keep from going crazy?’ He smiled. ‘So far, all quiet on the Western front.’
‘But it could be years -‘
‘It will be. But maybe not as many as the state and Warden Norton think it’s
going to be. I just can’t afford to wait that long. I keep thinking about Zihuatanejo and that small hotel. That’s all I want from my life now, Red, and I don’t think that’s too much to want. I didn’t kill Glenn Quentin and I didn’t kill my wife, and that hotel… it’s not too much to want To swim and get a tan and sleep in a room with open windows
and space… that’s not too much to want.’ He slung the stones away.
‘You know, Red,’ he said in an offhand voice, ‘a place like that… I’d have to
have a man who knows how to get things.’
I thought about it for a long time. And the biggest drawback in my mind
wasn’t even that we were talking pipedreams in a shitty little prison exercise yard with armed guards looking down at us from their sentry posts. ‘I couldn’t do it,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t get along on the outside. I’m what they call an institutional man now. In here I’m the man who can get it for you, yeah. But out there, anyone can get it for you. Out there, if you want posters or rock-hammers or one particular record or a boat-in-a-bottle model kit, you can use the fucking Yellow Pages. In here, I’m the fucking
Yellow Pages. I wouldn’t know how to begin. Or where.’
‘You underestimate yourself,’ he said. ‘You’re a selfeducated man, a self-made
man. A rather remarkable man, I think.’
‘Hell, I don’t even have a high school diploma.’
‘I know that,’ he said. ‘But it isn’t just a piece of paper that makes a man. And it
isn’t just prison that breaks one, either.’
‘I couldn’t hack it outside, Andy. I know that.’ He got up. ‘You think it over,’ he
said casually, just as the inside whistle blew. And he strolled off, as if he was a free man who had just made another free man a proposition. And for a while just that was
enough to make me feel free. Andy could do that. He could make me forget for a time
that we were both lifers, at the mercy of a hard-ass parole board and a psalm-singing
warden who liked Andy Dufresne right where he was. After all, Andy was a lap-dog
who could do tax-returns. What a wonderful animal! But by that night in my cell I felt like a prisoner again. The whole idea seemed absurd, and that mental image of blue
water and white beaches seemed more cruel than foolish -it dragged at my brain like a
fishhook. I just couldn’t wear that invisible coat the way Andy did. I fell asleep that
night and dreamed of a great glassy black stone in the middle of a hayfield; a stone shaped like a giant blacksmith’s anvil. I was trying to rock the stone up so I could get the key that was underneath. It wouldn’t budge; it was just too damned big.
And in the background, but getting closer, I could hear the baying of
bloodhounds. Which leads us, I guess, to the subject of jailbreaks.
Sure, they happen from time to time in our happy little family. You don’t go
over the wall, though, not at Shawshank, not if you’re smart. The searchlight beams