with all the taxes on it paid so the IRS wouldn’t get too interested – and invested it for
Peter Stevens. He did that in 1950 and 1951. Today it amounts to three hundred and
seventy thousand dollars, plus change.’
I guess my jaw made a thump when it dropped against my chest, because he smiled.
‘Think of all the things people wish they’d invested in since 1950 or so, and two or three of them will be things Peter Stevens was into. If I hadn’t ended up in here, I’d
probably be worth seven or eight million bucks by now. I’d have a Rolls … and probably
an ulcer as big as a portable radio.’
His hands went to the dirt and began sifting out more pebbles. They moved gracefully,
restlessly.
‘I was hoping for the best and expecting the worst -nothing but that The false name was
just to keep what little capital I had untainted. It was lugging the paintings out of the path
of the hurricane. But I had no idea that the hurricane … that it could go on as long as it
has.’
I didn’t say anything for a while. I guess I was trying to absorb the idea that this small,
spare man in prison grey next to me could be worth more money than Warden Norton
would make in the rest of his miserable life, even with the scams thrown in.
‘When you said you could get a lawyer, you sure weren’t kidding,’ I said at last ‘For
that kind of dough you could have hired Clarence Darrow, or whoever’s passing for him
these days. Why didn’t you, Andy? Christ! You could have been out of here like a rocket.’
He smiled. It was the same smile that had been on his face when he’d told me he and
his wife had had their whole lives ahead of them. ‘No,’ he said.
‘A good lawyer would have sprung the Williams kid from Cashman whether he wanted
to go or not,’ I said. I was getting carried away now. ‘You could have gotten your new
trial, hired private detectives to look for that guy Blatch, and blown Norton out of the
water to boot. Why not, Andy?’
‘Because I outsmarted myself. If I ever try to put my hands on Peter Stevens’s money
from inside here, I’d lose every cent of it My friend Jim could have arranged it, but Jim’s
dead. You see the problem?’
I saw it For all the good the money could do Andy, it might as well have really
belonged to another person. In a way, it did. And if the stuff it was invested in suddenly
turned bad, all Andy could do would be to watch the plunge, to trace it day after day on
the stocks-and-bonds page of the Press-Herald. It’s a tough life if you don’t weaken, I
guess.
‘I’ll tell you how it is, Red. There’s a big hayfield in the town of Buxton. You know
where Buxton is at, don’t you?’
I said I did. It lies right next door to Scarborough.
“That’s right And at the north end of this particular hayfield there’s a rock wall, right
out of a Robert Frost poem. And somewhere along the base of that wall is a rock that has
no business in a Maine hayfield. It’s a piece of volcanic glass, and until 1947 it was a
paperweight on my office desk. My friend Jim put it in that wall. There’s a key
underneath it. The key opens a safe deposit box in the Portland branch of the Casco
Bank.’
‘I guess you’re in a pack of trouble,’ I said. ‘When your friend Jim died, the IRS must
have opened all of his safety deposit boxes. Along with the executor of his will, of
course.’
Andy smiled and tapped the side of my head. ‘Not bad. There’s more up there than
marshmallows, I guess. But we took care of the possibility that Jim might die while I was
in the slam. The box is in the Peter Stevens name, and once a year the firm of lawyers that
served as Jim’s executors sends a check to the Casco to cover the rental of the Stevens
box.
‘Peter Stevens is inside that box, just waiting to get out His birth certificate, his S.S.
card, and his driver’s license. The license is six years out of date because Jim died six
years ago, true, but it’s still perfectly renewable for a five-dollar fee. His stock certificates are there, the tax-free municipals, and about eighteen bearer bonds in the amount of ten
thousand dollars each.’
I whistled.
‘Peter Stevens is locked in a safe deposit box at the Casco Bank in Portland and Andy
Dufresne is locked in a safe deposit box at Shawshank,’ he said. Tit for tat And the key
that unlocks the box and the money and the new life is under a hunk of black glass in a
Buxton hayfield. Told you this much, so I’ll tell you something else, Red – for the last
twenty years, give or take, I have been watching the papers with a more than usual
interest for news of any construction projects in Buxton. I keep thinking that someday
soon I’m going to read that they’re putting a highway through there, or erecting a new
community hospital, or building a shopping centre. Burying my new life under ten feet of
concrete, or spitting it into a swamp somewhere with a big load of fill.’
I blurted, ‘Jesus Christ, Andy, if all of this is true, how do you keep from going crazy?’
He smiled. ‘So far, all quiet on the Western front.’
‘But it could be years -‘
‘It will be. But maybe not as many as the state and Warden Norton think it’s going to
be. I just can’t afford to wait that long. I keep thinking about Zihuatanejo and that small
hotel. That’s all I want from my life now, Red, and I don’t think that’s too much to want. I
didn’t kill Glenn Quentin and I didn’t kill my wife, and that hotel … it’s not too much to
want To swim and get a tan and sleep in a room with open windows and space. .. that’s not too much to want.’
He slung the stones away.
‘You know, Red,’ he said in an offhand voice, ‘a place like that… I’d have to have a man
who knows how to get things.’
I thought about it for a long time. And the biggest drawback in my mind wasn’t even
that we were talking pipedreams in a shitty little prison exercise yard with armed guards
looking down at us from their sentry posts. ‘I couldn’t do it,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t get along on
the outside. I’m what they call an institutional man now. In here I’m the man who can get
it for you, yeah. But out there, anyone can get it for you. Out there, if you want posters or
rock-hammers or one particular record or a boat-in-a-bottle model kit, you can use the
fucking Yellow Pages. In here, I’m the fucking Yellow Pages. I wouldn’t know how to
begin. Or where.’
‘You underestimate yourself,’ he said. ‘You’re a self-educated man, a self-made man. A
rather remarkable man, I think.’
‘Hell, I don’t even have a high school diploma.’
‘I know that,’ he said. ‘But it isn’t just a piece of paper that makes a man. And it isn’t
just prison that breaks one, either.’
‘I couldn’t hack it outside, Andy. I know that.’ He got up. ‘You think it over,’ he said
casually, just as the inside whistle blew. And he strolled off, as if he was a free man who
had just made another free man a proposition. And for a while just that was enough to
make me feel free. Andy could do that. He could make me forget for a time that we were
both lifers, at the mercy of a hard-ass parole board and a psalm-singing warden who liked
Andy Dufresne right where he was. After all, Andy was a lap-dog who could do tax-
returns. What a wonderful animal!
But by that night in my cell I felt like a prisoner again. The whole idea seemed absurd,
and that mental image of blue water and white beaches seemed more cruel than foolish –
it dragged at my brain like a fishhook. I just couldn’t wear that invisible coat the way
Andy did. I fell asleep that night and dreamed of a great glassy black stone in the middle
of a hayfield; a stone shaped like a giant blacksmith’s anvil. I was trying to rock the stone
up so I could get the key that was underneath. It wouldn’t budge; it was just too damned
big.
And in the background, but getting closer, I could hear the baying of bloodhounds.
Which leads us, I guess, to the subject of jailbreaks.