seven years or so; therefore, it would take me seventy years to break through; that
would make me one hundred and seven years old.
Here’s a second assumption I would have made, had I been Andy: that
eventually I would be caught and get a lot of solitary time, not to mention a very large black mark on my record. After all, there was the regular weekly inspection and a
surprise toss–which usually came at night–every second week or so. He must have
decided that things couldn’t go on for long. Sooner or later, some screw was going to
peek behind Rita Hayworth just to make sure Andy didn’t have a sharpened spoon-
handle or some marijuana reefers Scotch-taped to the wall.
And his response to that second assumption must have been to hell with it.
Maybe he even made a game out of it. How far in can I get before they find out?
Prison is a goddam boring place, and the chance or being surprised by an unscheduled
inspection in the middle of the night while he had his poster unstuck probably added
some spice to his life during the early years.
And I do believe it would have been impossible for him to get away just on
dumb luck. Not for twenty-seven years. Nevertheless, I have to believe that for the
first two years -until mid-May of 1950, when he helped Byron Hadley get around the
tax on his windfall inheritance–that’s exactly what he did get by on.
Or maybe he had something more than dumb luck going for him even back
then. He had money, and he might have been slipping someone a little squeeze every
week to take it easy on him. Most guards will go along with that if the price is right; it’s money in their pockets and the prisoner gets to keep his whack-off pictures or his tailormade cigarettes. Also, Andy was a model prisoner–quiet, well-spoken,
respectful, non-violent. It’s the crazies and the stampeders that get their cells turned upside-down at least once every six months, their mattresses unzipped, their pillows
taken away and cut open, the outflow pipe from their toilets carefully probed.
Then, in 1950, Andy became something more than a model prisoner. In 1950,
he became a valuable commodity, a murderer who did tax returns as well as H & R
Block. He gave gratis estate-planning advice, set up tax-shelters, filled out loan
applications (sometimes creatively). I can remember him sitting behind his desk in the library, patiently going over a car-loan agreement paragraph by paragraph with a
screwhead who wanted to buy a used DeSoto, telling the guy what was good about the
agreement and what was bad about it, explaining to him that it was possible to shop
for a loan and not get hit quite so bad, steering him away from the finance companies
which in those days were sometimes little better than legal loan-sharks. When he’d
finished, the screwhead started to put out his hand… and then drew it back to himself quickly. He’d forgotten for a moment, you see, that he was dealing with a mascot, not
a man.
Andy kept up on the tax laws and the changes in the stock market, and so his
usefulness didn’t end after he’d been in cold storage for a while, as it might have done.
He began to get his library money, his running war with the sisters had ended, and
nobody tossed his cell very hard. He was a good nigger.
Then one day, very late in the going–perhaps around October of 1967–the
long-time hobby suddenly turned into something else. One night while he was in the
hole up to his waist with Raquel Welch hanging down over his ass, the pick end of his
rock-hammer must have suddenly sunk into concrete past the hilt.
He would have dragged some chunks of concrete back, but maybe he heard
others falling down into that shaft, bouncing back and forth, clinking off that
standpipe. Did he know by then that he was going to come upon that shaft, or was he
totally surprised? I don’t know. He might have seen the prison blueprints by then or he might not have. If not, you can be damned sure he found a way to look at them not