airline hijacking for ransom, the one where the guy parachuted from the back door of
the airplane, Andy swore up and down that D B Cooper’s real name was Sid Nedeau.
‘And he probably had a pocketful of baseline lime in his pocket for good luck,’ Andy
said. ‘That lucky son of a bitch.’
But you should understand that a case like Sid Nedeau, or the fellow who got
away clean from the Sabbatus potato-field crew, guys like that are winning the prison
version of the Irish Sweepstakes. Purely a case of six different kinds of luck somehow jelling together all at the same moment A stiff like Andy could wait ninety years and
not get a similar break.
Maybe you remember, a ways back, I mentioned a guy named Henley Backus,
the washroom foreman in the laundry. He came to Shawshank in 1922 and died in the
prison infirmary thirty-one years later. Escapes and escape attempts were a hobby of
his, maybe because he never quite dared to take the plunge himself. He could tell you
a hundred different schemes, all of them crackpot, and all of them had been tried in
the Shank at one time or another. My favourite was the tale of Beaver Morrison, a b & e convict who tried to build a glider from scratch in the plate-factory basement The
plans he was working from were in a circa-1900 book called The Modern Boy’s
Guide to Fun and Adventure. Beaver got it built without being discovered, or so the
story goes, only to discover there was no door from the basement big enough to get
the damned thing out When Henley told that story, you could bust a gut laughing, and
he knew a dozen–no, two dozen -just as funny.
When it came to detailing Shawshank bust-outs, Henley had it down chapter
and verse. He told me once that during his time there had been better than four
hundred escape attempts that he knew of. Really think about that for a moment before
you just nod your head and read on. Four hundred escape attempts! That comes out to
12 .9 escape attempts for every year Henley Backus was in Shawshank and keeping
track of them. The Escape Attempt of the Month Club. Of course most of them were
pretty slipshod affairs, the sort of thing that ends up with a guard grabbing some poor, sidling slob’s arm and growling, ‘Where do you think you’re going, you happy
asshole?’
Henley said he’d class maybe sixty of them as more serious attempts, and he
included the ‘prison break’ of 1937, the year before I arrived at the Shank. The new
administration wing was under construction then and fourteen cons got out, using
construction equipment in a poorly locked shed. The whole of southern Maine got
into a panic over those fourteen ‘hardened criminals’, most of whom were scared to
death and had no more idea of where they should go than a jackrabbit does when it’s
headlight-pinned to the highway with a big truck bearing down on it. Not one of those
fourteen got away. Two of them were shot dead–by civilians, not police officers or
prison personnel -but none got away.
How many had gotten away between 1938, when I came here, and that day in
October when Andy first mentioned Zihuatanejo to me? Putting my information and
Henley’s together, I’d say ten. Ten that got away clean. And although it isn’t the kind of thing you can know for sure, I’d guess that at least half of those ten are doing time in other institutions of lower learning like the Shank. Because you do get
institutionalized. When you take away a man’s freedom and teach him to live in a cell, he seems to lose his ability to think in dimensions. He’s like that jackrabbit I
mentioned, frozen in the oncoming lights of the truck that is bound to kill it More often than not a con who’s just out will pull some dumb job that hasn’t a chance in hell of succeeding… and why? Because it’ll get him back inside. Back where he
understands how things work.
Andy wasn’t that way, but I was. The idea of seeing the Pacific sounded good,