Sure, they happen from time to time in our happy little family. You don’t go over the
wall, though, not at Shawshank, not if you’re smart. The searchlight beams go all night,
probing long white fingers across the open fields that surround the prison on three sides
and the stinking marshland on the fourth. Cons do go over the wall from time to time, and
the searchlights almost always catch them. If not, they get picked up trying to thumb a
ride on Highway 6 or Highway 99. If they try to cut across country, some farmer sees
them and just phones the location in to the prison. Cons who go over the wall are stupid
cons. Shawshank is no Canon City, but in a rural area a man humping his ass across
country in a grey pyjama suit sticks out like a cockroach on a wedding cake.
Over the years, the guys who have done the best – maybe oddly, maybe not so oddly –
are the guys who did it on the spur of the moment Some of them have gone out in the
middle of a cartful of sheets; a convict sandwich on white, you could say. There was a lot
of that when I first came in here, but over the years they have more or less closed that
loophole.
Warden Norton’s famous ‘Inside-Out’ programme produced its share of escapees, too.
They were the guys who decided they liked what lay to the right of the hyphen better than
what lay to the left And again, in most cases it was a very casual kind of thing. Drop your
blueberry rake and stroll into the bushes while one of the screws is having a glass of
water at the truck or when a couple of them get too involved in arguing over yards
passing or rushing on the old Boston Patriots.
In 1969, the Inside-Outers were picking potatoes in Sabbatus. It was the third of
November and the work was almost done. There was a guard named Henry Pugh – and he
is no longer a member of our happy little family, believe me -sitting on the back bumper
of one of the potato trucks and having his lunch with his carbine across his knees when a
beautiful (or so it was told to me, but sometimes these things get exaggerated) ten-point
buck strolled out of the cold early afternoon mist Pugh went after it with visions of just
how that trophy would look mounted in his rec room, and while he was doing it, three of
his charges just walked away. Two were recaptured in a Lisbon Falls pinball parlour. The
third has not been found to this day.
I suppose the most famous case of all was that of Sid Nedeau. This goes back to 1958,
and I guess it will never be topped. Sid was out lining the ball-field for a Saturday
intramural baseball game when the three o’clock inside whistle blew, signalling the
shiftchange for the guards. The parking lot is just beyond the exercise yard, on the other
side of the electrically-operated main gate. At three the gate opens j and the guards
coming on duty and those going off mingle. There’s a lot of back-slapping and
bullyragging, comparison of league bowling scores and the usual number of tired old
ethnic jokes.
Sid just trundled his lining machine right out through the gate, leaving a three-inch
baseline all the way from third base in the exercise yard to the ditch on the far side of
Route 6, where they found the machine overturned in a pile of lime. Don’t ask me how he
did it He was dressed in his prison uniform, he stood six-feet-two, and he was billowing
clouds of lime-dust behind him. All I can figure is that, it being Friday afternoon and all,
the guards going off were so happy to be going off, and the guards coming on were so
downhearted to be coming on, that the members of the former group never got their heads
out of the clouds and those in the latter never got their noses off their shoetops … and old
Sid Nedeau just sort of slipped out between the two.
So far as I know, Sid is still at large. Over the years, Andy Dufresne and I had a good
many laughs over Sid Nedeau’s great escape, and when we heard about that airline
hijacking for ransom, the one where the guy parachuted from the back door of the
airplane, Andy swore up and down that D B Cooper’s real name was Sid Nedeau.
‘And he probably had a pocketful of baseline lime in his pocket for good luck,’ Andy said. ‘That lucky son of a bitch.’
But you should understand that a case like Sid Nedeau, or the fellow who got away
clean from the Sabbatus potato-field crew, guys like that are winning the prison version
of the Irish Sweepstakes. Purely a case of six different kinds of luck somehow jelling
together all at the same moment A stiff like Andy could wait ninety years and not get a
similar break.
Maybe you remember, a ways back, I mentioned a guy named Henley Backus, the
washroom foreman in the laundry. He came to Shawshank in 1922 and died in the prison
infirmary thirty-one years later. Escapes and escape attempts were a hobby of his, maybe
because he never quite dared to take the plunge himself. He could tell you a hundred
different schemes, all of them crackpot, and all of them had been tried in the Shank at one
time or another. My favourite was the tale of Beaver Morrison, a b & e convict who tried
to build a glider from scratch in the plate-factory basement The plans he was working
from were in a circa-1900 book called The Modern Boy’s Guide to Fun and Adventure.
Beaver got it built without being discovered, or so the story goes, only to discover there
was no door from the basement big enough to get the damned thing out When Henley
told that story, you could bust a gut laughing, and he knew a dozen – no, two dozen -just
as funny.
When it came to detailing Shawshank bust-outs, Henley had it down chapter and verse.
He told me once that during his time there had been better than four hundred escape
attempts that he knew of. Really think about that for a moment before you just nod your
head and read on. Four hundred escape attempts! That comes out to 12.9 escape attempts
for every year Henley Backus was in Shawshank and keeping track of them. The Escape
Attempt of the Month Club. Of course most of them were pretty slipshod affairs, the sort
of thing that ends up with a guard grabbing some poor, sidling slob’s arm and growling,
‘Where do you think you’re going, you happy asshole?’
Henley said he’d class maybe sixty of them as more serious attempts, and he included
the ‘prison break’ of 1937, the year before I arrived at the Shank. The new administration
wing was under construction then and fourteen cons got out, using construction
equipment in a poorly locked shed. The whole of southern Maine got into a panic over
those fourteen ‘hardened criminals’, most of whom were scared to death and had no more
idea of where they should go than a jackrabbit does when it’s headlight-pinned to the
highway with a big truck bearing down on it Not one of those fourteen got away. Two of
them were shot dead – by civilians, not police officers or prison personnel -but none got
away.
How many had gotten away between 1938, when I came here, and that day in October
when Andy first mentioned Zihuatanejo to me? Putting my information and Henley’s
together, I’d say ten. Ten that got away clean. And although it isn’t the kind of thing you
can know for sure, I’d guess that at least half of those ten are doing time in other
institutions of lower learning like the Shank. Because you do get institutionalized. When you take away a man’s freedom and teach him to live in a cell, he seems to lose his ability
to think in dimensions. He’s like that jackrabbit I mentioned, frozen in the oncoming
lights of the truck that is bound to kill it More often than not a con who’s just out will pull
some dumb job that hasn’t a chance in hell of succeeding … and why? Because it’ll get
him back inside. Back where he understands how things work.
Andy wasn’t that way, but I was. The idea of seeing the Pacific sounded good, but I
was afraid that actually being there would scare me to death – the bigness of it
Anyhow, the day of that conversation about Mexico, and about Mr Peter Stevens …
that was the day I began to believe that Andy had some idea of doing a disappearing act. I