weapon.’
“You have strong feelings about lethal weapons?’
‘I do.’
An old friction-taped baseball flew towards us and he turned, cat-quick, and
picked it out of the air. It was a move Frank Malzone would have been proud of.
Andy flicked the bail back to where it had come from -just a quick and easy-looking
flick of the wrist, but that throw had some mustard on it, just the same. I could see a lot of people were watching us with one eye as they went about their business.
Probably the guards in tile tower were watching, too. I won’t gild the lily; there are cons that swing weight in any prison, maybe four or five in a small one, maybe two or
three dozen in a big one. At Shawshank I was one of those with some weight, and
what I thought of Andy Dufresne would have a lot to do with how his time went. He
probably knew it too, but he wasn’t kowtowing or sucking up to me, and I respected
him for that.
‘Fair enough. Ill tell you what it is and why I want it A rock-hammer looks like
a miniature pickaxe–about so long.’ He held his hands about a foot apart, and that was when I first noticed how neatly kept his nails were. ‘It’s got a small sharp pick on one end and a fiat, blunt hammerhead on the other. I want it because I like rocks.’
‘Rocks,’ I said.
‘Squat down here a minute,’ he said.
I humoured him. We hunkered down on our haunches like Indians. Andy took
a handful of exercise yard dirt and began to sift it between his neat hands, so it
emerged in a fine cloud. Small pebbles were left over, one or two sparkly, the rest dull and plain. One of the dull ones was quartz, but it was only dull until you’d rubbed it clean. Then it had a nice milky glow. Andy did the cleaning and then tossed it to me. I caught it and named it.
‘Quartz, sure,’ he said, ‘And look. Mica. Shale, silted granite. Here’s a piece of
graded limestone, from when they cut this place out of the side of the hill.’ He tossed them away and dusted his hands. ‘I’m a rockhound. At least… I was a rockhound. In
my old life. I’d like to be one again, on a limited scale.’
‘Sunday expeditions in the exercise yard?’ I asked, standing up. It was a silly
idea, and yet… seeing that little piece of quartz had given my heart a funny tweak. I don’t know exactly why; just an association with the outside world, I suppose. You
didn’t think of such things in terms of the yard. Quartz was something you picked out
of a small, quick-running stream.
‘Better to have Sunday expeditions here than no Sunday expeditions at all,’ he
said. ‘You could plant an item like that rock-hammer in somebody’s skull,’ I remarked.
‘I have no enemies here,’ he said quietly. ‘No?’ I smiled. ‘Wait awhile.’
‘If there’s trouble, I can handle it without using a rock-hammer.’
‘Maybe you want to try an escape? Going under the wall? Because if you do -‘
He laughed politely. When I saw the rock-hammer three weeks later, I understood
why. “You know,’ I said, ‘if anyone sees you with it, they’ll take it away. If they saw
you with a spoon, they’d take it away. What you going to do, just sit down here in the yard and tap away?’ ‘Oh, I believe I can do a lot better than that.’
I nodded. That part of it really wasn’t my business, anyway. A man engages
my services to get him something. Whether he can keep it or not after I get it is his
business. ‘How much would an item like that go for?’ I asked. I was beginning to
enjoy his quiet, low-key style. When you’ve spent ten years in stir, as I had then, you can get awfully tired of the bellowers and the braggarts and the loud-mouths. Yes, I
think it would be fair to say I liked Andy from the first.
‘Eight dollars in any rock-and-gem shop,’ he said, ‘but I realize that in a