Alcatraz; he just had this pigeon. Jake, he called him. He set Jake free a day before he, Sherwood, that is, was to walk, and Jake flew away just as pretty as you could want.
But about a week after Sherwood Bolton left our happy little family, a friend of mine
called me over to the west corner of the exercise yard, where Sherwood used to hang
out, and my friend said: ‘Isn’t that Jake, Red?’ It was. That pigeon was just as dead as a turd.
I remember the first time Andy Dufresne got in touch with me for something; I
remember like it was yesterday. That wasn’t the time he wanted Rita Hayworth,
though. That came later. In that summer of 1948 he came around for something else.
Most of my deals are done right there in the exercise yard, and that’s where this one
went down. Our yard is big, much bigger than most. It’s a perfect square, ninety yards on a side. The north side is the outer wall, with a guardtower at either end. The guards up there are armed with binoculars and riot guns. The main gate is in that north side.
The truck loading-bays are on the south side of the yard. There are five of them.
Shawshank is a busy place during the work-week–deliveries in, deliveries out. We
have the license-plate factory, and a big industrial laundry that does all the prison
wetwash, plus that of Kittery Receiving Hospital and the Eliot Sanatorium. There’s
also a big automotive garage where mechanic inmates fix prison, state, and municipal
vehicles–not to mention the private cars of the screws, the administration officers…
and, on more than one occasion, those of the parole board.
The east side is a thick stone wall full of tiny slit windows. Cellblock 5 is on
the other side of that wail. The west side is Administration and the infirmary.
Shawshank has never been as overcrowded as most prisons, and back in ’48 it was
only filled to something like two-thirds capacity, but at any given time there might be eighty to a hundred and twenty cons on the yard–playing toss with a football or a
baseball, shooting craps, jawing at each other, making deals. On Sunday the place was
even more crowded; on Sunday the place would have looked like a country holiday…
if there had been any women.
It was on a Sunday that Andy first came to me. I had just finished talking to
Elmore Armitage, a fellow who often came in handy to me, about a radio when Andy
walked up.
I knew who he was, of course; he had a reputation for being a snob and a cold
fish.
People were saying he was marked for trouble already. One of the people
saying so was Bogs Dismond, a bad man to have on your case. Andy had no cellmate,
and I’d heard that was just the way he wanted it, although the one-man cells in
Cellblock 5 were only a little bigger than coffins. But I don’t have to listen to rumours about a man when I can judge him for myself.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’m Andy Dufresne.’ He offered his hand and I shook it. He
wasn’t a man to waste time being social; he got right to the point. ‘I understand that you’re a man who knows how to get things.’
I agreed that I was able to locate certain items from time to time, ‘How do you
do that?’ Andy asked.
‘Sometimes,’ I said, ‘things just seem to come into my hand. I can’t explain it.
Unless it’s because I’m Irish.’
He smiled a little at that. ‘I wonder if you could get me a rock hammer.’
‘What would that be, and why would you want it?’
Andy looked surprised. ‘Do you make motivations a part of your business?’
With words like those I could understand how he had gotten a reputation for being the
snobby sort, the kind of guy who likes to put on airs–but I sensed a tiny thread of
humour in his question.
I’ll tell you,’ I said. ‘If you wanted a toothbrush, I wouldn’t ask questions. I’d
just quote you a price. Because a toothbrush, you see, is a non-lethal sort of a