go all night, probing long white fingers across the open fields that surround the prison on three sides and the stinking marshland on the fourth. Cons do go over the wall
from time to time, and the searchlights almost always catch them. If not, they get
picked up trying to thumb a ride on Highway 6 or Highway 99. If they try to cut
across country, some farmer sees them and just phones the location in to the prison.
Cons who go over the wall are stupid cons. Shawshank is no Canon City, but in a
rural area a man humping his ass across country in a grey pyjama suit sticks out like a cockroach on a wedding cake. Over the years, the guys who have done the best–
maybe oddly, maybe not so oddly–are the guys who did it on the spur of the moment.
Some of them have gone out in the middle of a cartful of sheets; a convict sandwich
on white, you could say. There was a lot of that when I first came in here, but over the years they have more or less closed that loophole. Warden Norton’s famous ‘Inside-Out’ program produced its share of escapees, too. They were the guys who decided
they liked what lay to the right of the hyphen better than what lay to the left And
again, in most cases it was a very casual kind of thing. Drop your blueberry rake and
stroll into the bushes while one of the screws is having a glass of water at the truck or when a couple of them get too involved in arguing over yards passing or rushing on
the old Boston Patriots.
In 1969, the Inside-Outers were picking potatoes in Sabbatus. It was the third
of November and the work was almost done. There was a guard named Henry Pugh–
and he is no longer a member of our happy little family, believe me -sitting on the
back bumper of one of the potato trucks and having his lunch with his carbine across
his knees when a beautiful (or so it was told to me, but sometimes these things get
exaggerated) ten-point buck strolled out of the cold early afternoon mist Pugh went
after it with visions of just how that trophy would look mounted in his rec room, and
while he was doing it, three of his charges just walked away. Two were recaptured in
a Lisbon Falls pinball parlour. The third has not been found to this day.
I suppose the most famous case of all was that of Sid Nedeau. This goes back
to 1958, and I guess it will never be topped. Sid was out lining the ball-field for a
Saturday intramural baseball game when the three o’clock inside whistle blew,
signalling the shiftchange for the guards. The parking lot is just beyond the exercise yard, on the other side of the electrically-operated main gate. At three the gate opens and the guards coming on duty and those going off mingle. There’s a lot of back-slapping and bullyragging, comparison of league bowling scores and the usual
number of tired old ethnic jokes.
Sid just trundled his lining machine right out through the gate, leaving a three-
inch baseline all the way from third base in the exercise yard to the ditch on the far side of Route 6, where they found the machine overturned in a pile of lime. Don’t ask
me how he did it He was dressed in his prison uniform, he stood six-feet-two, and he
was billowing clouds of lime-dust behind him. All I can figure is that, it being Friday afternoon and all, the guards going off were so happy to be going off, and the guards
coming on were so downhearted to be coming on, that the members of the former
group never got their heads out of the clouds and those in the latter never got their noses off their shoetops… and old Sid Nedeau just sort of slipped out between the two.
So far as I know, Sid is still at large. Over the years, Andy Dufresne and I had
a good many laughs over Sid Nedeau’s great escape, and when we heard about that