He funnelled it into stocks, bonds, tax-free municipals, you name it.
He told me once about ten years after that day on the plate-shop roof that his feelings
about what he was doing were pretty clear, and that his conscience was relatively
untroubled. The rackets would have gone on with him or without him. He had not asked
to be sent to Shawshank, he went on; he was an innocent man who had been victimized
by colossal bad luck, not & missionary or a do-gooder.
‘Besides, Red,’ he told me with that same half-grin, ‘what I’m doing in here isn’t all that
different from what I was doing outside. I’ll hand you a pretty cynical axiom: the amount
of expert financial help an individual or company needs rises in direct proportion to how
many people that person or business is screwing.
The people who run this place are stupid, brutal monsters for the most part. The people
who run the straight world are brutal and monstrous, but they happen not to be quite as
stupid, because the standard of competence out there is a little higher. Not much, but a
little.’
‘But the pills,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to tell you your business, but they make me nervous.
Reds, uppers, downers, nembutals – now they’ve got these things they call Phase Fours. I
won’t get anything like that. Never have.’
‘No,’ Andy said. ‘I don’t like the pills either. Never have. But I’m not much of a one for
cigarettes or booze, either. But I don’t push the pills. I don’t bring them in, and I don’t sell
them once they are in. Mostly it’s the screws who do that.’
‘But-‘
‘Yeah, I know. There’s a fine line there. What it comes down to, Red, is some people
refuse to get their hands dirty at all. That’s called sainthood, and the pigeons land on your
shoulders and crap all over your shirt. The other extreme is to take a bath in the dirt and
deal any goddamned thing that will turn a dollar – guns, switchblades, big H, what the
hell. You ever have a con come up to you and offer you a contract?’
I nodded. It’s happened a lot of times over the years. You’re, after all, the man who can
get it. And they figure if you can get them a nine-bolt battery for their transistor radio or a
-anon of Luckies or a lid of reefer, you can put them in touch with a guy who’ll use a
knife.
‘Sure you have,’ Andy agreed. ‘But you don’t do it. Because guys like us, Red, we know
there’s a third choice. An alternative to staying simon-pure or bathing in the filth and the
slime. It’s the alternative that grown-ups all over the world pick. You balance off your
walk through the hog-wallow against what it gains you. You choose the lesser of two
evils and try to keep your good intentions in front of you. And I guess you judge how well
you’re doing by how well you sleep at night… and what your dreams are like.’
‘Good intentions,’ I said, and laughed. ‘I know all about that, Andy. A fellow can toddle
right off to hell on that road.’
‘Don’t you believe it,’ he said, growing sombre. This is hell right here. Right here in The
Shank. They sell pills and I tell them what to do with the money. But I’ve also got the
library, and I know of over two dozen guys who have used the books in here to help them
pass their high school equivalency tests. Maybe when they get out of here they’ll be able
to crawl off the shitheap. When we needed that second room back in 1957,1 got it
Because they want to keep me happy. I work cheap. That’s the trade-off.’
‘And you’ve got your own private quarters.’
‘Sure. That’s the way I like it.’
The prison population had risen slowly all through the fifties, and it damn near
exploded in the sixties, what with every college-age kid in America wanting to try dope
and the perfectly ridiculous penalties for the use of a little reefer. But in all that time
Andy never had a cellmate, except for a big, silent Indian named Normaden (like all
Indians in The Shank, he was called Chief), and Normaden didn’t last long. A lot of the
other long-timers thought Andy was crazy, but Andy just smiled. He lived alone and he
liked it that way … and as he’d said, they liked to keep him happy. He worked cheap.
Prison time is slow time, sometimes you’d swear it’s stop-time, but it passes. It passes.
George Dunahy departed the scene in a welter of newspaper headlines shouting
SCANDAL and NEST-FEATHERING. Stammas succeeded him, and for the next six
years Shawshank was a kind of living hell. During the reign of Greg Stammas, the beds in
the infirmary and the cells in the solitary wing were always full.
One day in 1958 I looked at myself in a small shaving mirror I kept in my cell and saw
a forty-year-old man looking back at me. A kid had come in back in 1938, a kid with a
big mop of carrotty red hair, half-crazy with remorse, thinking about suicide. That kid
was gone. The red hair was half grey and starting to recede. There were crow’s tracks
around the eyes. On that day I could see an old man inside, waiting his time to come out.
It scared me. Nobody wants to grow old in stir.
Stammas went early in 1959. There had been several investigative reporters sniffing
around, and one of them even did four months under an assumed name, for a crime made
up out of whole cloth. They were getting ready to drag out SCANDAL and NEST-
FEATHERING again, but before they could bring the hammer down on him, Stammas
ran. I can understand that; boy, can I ever. If he had been tried and convicted, he could
have ended up right in here. If so, he might have lasted all of five hours. Byron Hadley
had gone two years earlier. The sucker had a heart attack and took an early retirement.
Andy never got touched by the Stammas affair. In early 1959 a new warden was
appointed, and a new assistant warden, and a new chief of guards. For the next eight
months or so, Andy was just another con again. It was during that period that Normaden,
the big half-breed Passamaquoddy, shared Andy’s cell with him. Then everything just
started up again. Normaden was moved out, and Andy was living in solitary splendour
again. The names at the top change, but die rackets never do.
I talked to Normaden once about Andy. ‘Nice fella,’ Normaden said. It was hard to make
out anything he said because he had & harelip and a cleft palate; his words all came out in a slush. ‘I liked it there. He never made fun. But he didn’t want me there. I could tell.’ Big shrug. ‘I was glad to go, me. Bad draught in that cell. All the time cold. He don’t let
nobody touch his things. That’s okay. Nice man, never made fun. But big draught.’
Rita Hay worth hung in Andy’s cell until 1955, if I remember right Then it was Marilyn
Monroe, that picture from The Seven Year Itch where she’s standing over a subway
grating and the warm air is flipping her skirt up. Marilyn lasted until i960, and she was
considerably tattered about the edges when Andy replaced her with Jayne Mansfield.
Jayne was, you should pardon the expression, a bust. After only a year or so she was
replaced with an English actress – might have been Hazel Court, but I’m not sure. In 1966
that one came down and Raquel Welch went up for a record-breaking six-year
engagement in Andy’s ceil. The last poster to hang there was a pretty country-rock singer
whose name was Linda Ronstadt
I asked him once what the posters meant to him, and he gave me a peculiar, surprised
sort of look. ‘Why, they mean the same thing to me as they do to most cons, I guess,’ he
said. ‘Freedom. You look at those pretty women and you feel like you could almost … not quite but almost step right through and be beside them. Be free. I guess that’s why I
always liked Raquel Welch the best It wasn’t just her; it was that beach she was standing
on. Looked like she was down in Mexico somewhere. Someplace quiet, where a man
would be able to hear himself think. Didn’t you ever feel that way about a picture, Red?
That you could almost step right through it?’
I said I’d never really thought of it that way.
‘Maybe someday you’ll see what I mean,’ he said, and he was right Years later I saw
exactly what he meant … and when I did, the first thing I thought of was Normaden, and