Stephen King – Different season
Contents:
01 RITA HAYWORTH AND SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION
02 APT PUPIL
03 THE BODY
04 THE BREATHING METHOD
05 AFTERWORD
RITA HAYWORTH AND SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION
There’s a guy like me in every state and federal prison in America, I guess – I’m the guy who can get it for you. Tailor-made cigarettes, a bag of reefer, if you’re partial to that, a
bottle of brandy to celebrate your son or daughter’s high school graduation, or almost
anything else … within reason, that is. It wasn’t always that way.
I came to Shawshank when I was just twenty, and I am one of the few people in our
happy little family who is willing to own up to what he did. I committed murder. I put a
large insurance policy on my wife, who was three years older than I was, and then I fixed
the brakes of the Chevrolet coupe her father had given us as a wedding present. It worked
out exactly as I had planned, except I hadn’t planned on her stopping to pick up the
neighbour woman and the neighbour woman’s infant son on the way down Castle Hill and
into town. The brakes let go and the car crashed through the bushes at the edge of the
town common, gathering speed. Bystanders said it must have been doing fifty or better
when it hit the base of the Civil War statue and burst into flames.
I also hadn’t planned on getting caught, but caught I was. I got a season’s pass into this
place. Maine has no death penalty, but the district attorney saw to it that I was tried for all
three deaths and given three life sentences, to run one after the other. That fixed up any
chance of parole I might have, for a long, long time. The judge called what I had done ‘a
hideous, heinous crime’, and it was, but it is also in the past now. You can look it up in
the yellowing files of the Castle Rock Call, where the big headlines announcing my
conviction look sort of funny and antique next to the news of Hitler and Mussolini and
FDR’s alphabet soup agencies.
Have I rehabilitated myself, you ask? I don’t know what that word means, at least as far
as prisons and corrections go. I think it’s a politician’s word. It may have some other
meaning, and it may be that I will have a chance to find out, but that is the future …
something cons teach themselves not to think about. I was young, good-looking, and from
the poor side of town. I knocked up a pretty, sulky, headstrong girl who lived in one of
the fine old houses on Carbine Street. Her father was agreeable to the marriage if I would
take a job in the optical company he owned and ‘work my way up’. I found out that what
he really had in mind was keeping me in his house and under his thumb, like a
disagreeable pet that has not quite been housebroken and which may bite. Enough hate
eventually piled up to cause me to do what I did. Given a second chance I would not do it
again, but I’m not sure that means I am rehabilitated.
Anyway, it’s not me I want to tell you about; I want to tell you about a guy named Andy
Dufresne. But before I can tell you about Andy, I have to explain a few other things about
myself. It won’t take long.
As I said, I’ve been the guy who can get it for you here at Shawshank for damn near
forty years. And that doesn’t just mean contraband items like extra cigarettes or booze,
although those items always top the list. But I’ve gotten thousands of other items for men
doing time here, some of them perfectly legal yet hard to come by in a place where you’ve
supposedly been brought to be punished. There was one fellow who was in for raping a
little girl and exposing himself to dozens of others; I got him three pieces of pink
Vermont marble and he did three lovely sculptures out of them – a baby, a boy of about
twelve, and a bearded young man. He called them The Three Ages of Jesus, and those
pieces of sculpture are now in the parlour of a man who used to be governor of this state.
Or here’s a name you may remember if you grew up north of Massachusetts – Robert
Alan Cote. In 1951 he tried to rob the First Mercantile Bank of Mechanic Falls, and the
hold-up turned into a bloodbath – six dead in the end, two of them members of the gang,
three of them hostages, one of them a young state cop who put his head up at the wrong
time and got a bullet in the eye. Cote had a penny collection. Naturally they weren’t going
to let him have it in here, but with a little help from his mother and a middleman who
used to drive a laundry truck, I was able to get it to him. I told him, Bobby, you must be
crazy, wanting to have a coin collection in a stone hotel full of thieves. He looked at me
and smiled and said, I know where to keep them. They’ll be safe enough. Don’t you worry.
And he was right. Bobby Cote died of a brain tumour in 1967, but that coin collection has
never turned up.
I’ve gotten men chocolates on Valentine’s Day; I got three of those green milkshakes
they serve at McDonald’s around St Paddy’s Day for a crazy Irishman named O’Malley; I
even arranged for a midnight showing of Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones for a party of twenty men who had pooled their resources to rent the films … although I ended
up doing a week in solitary for that little escapade. It’s the risk you run when you’re the
guy who can get it.
I’ve gotten reference books and fuck-books, joke novelties like handbuzzers and itching
powder, and on more than one occasion I’ve seen that a long-timer has gotten a pair of
panties from his wife or his girlfriend … and I guess you’ll know what guys in here do
with such items during the long nights when time draws out like a blade. I don’t get all
those things gratis, and for some items the price comes high. But I don’t do it just for the money; what good is money to me? I’m never going to own a Cadillac car or fly off to
Jamaica for two weeks in February. I do it for the same reason that a good butcher will
only sell you fresh meat: I got a reputation and I want to keep it. The only two things I
refuse to handle are guns and heavy drugs. I won’t help anyone kill himself or anyone
else. I have enough killing on my mind to last me a lifetime.
Yeah, I’m a regular Neiman-Marcus. And so when Andy Dufresne came to me in 1949
and asked if I could smuggle Rita Hayworth into the prison for him, I said it would be no
problem at all. And it wasn’t.
When Andy came to Shawshank in 1948, he was thirty years old. He was a short neat
little man with sandy hair and small, clever hands. He wore gold-rimmed spectacles. His
fingernails were always clipped, and they were always clean. That’s a funny thing to
remember about a man, I suppose, but it seems to sum Andy up for me. He always looked
as if he should have been wearing a tie. On the outside he had been a vice-president in the
trust department of a large Portland bank. Good work for a man as young as he was,
especially when you consider how conservative most banks are … and you have to
multiply that conservatism by ten when you get up into New England, where folks don’t
like to trust a man with their money unless he’s bald, limping, and constantly plucking at
his pants to get his truss around straight Andy was in for murdering his wife and her
lover.
As I believe I have said, everyone in prison is an innocent man. Oh, they read that
scripture the way those holy rollers on TV read the Book of Revelations. They were the
victims of judges with hearts of stone and balls to match, or incompetent lawyers, or
police frame-ups, or bad luck. They read the scripture, but you can see a different
scripture in their faces. Most cons are a low sort, no good to themselves or anyone else,
and their worst luck was that their mothers carried them to term.
In all my years at Shawshank, there have been less than ten men whom I believed when
they told me they were innocent Andy Dufresne was one of them, although I only became