but I never felt really close to Andy until 1960 or so, and I believe I was the only one who
ever did get really close to him. Both being long-timers, we were in the same cellblock
from beginning to end, although I was halfway down the corridor from him.
‘What do I think?’ He laughed — but there was no humour in the sound. ‘I think there
was a lot of bad luck floating around that night. More than could ever get together in the
same short span of time again. I think it must have been some stranger, just passing
through. Maybe someone who had a flat tyre on that road after I went home. Maybe a
burglar. Maybe a psychopath. He killed them, that’s all. And I’m here.’
As simple as that. And he was condemned to spend the rest of his life in Shawshank –
or the part of it that mattered. Five years later he began to have parole hearings, and he
was turned down just as regular as clockwork in spite of being a model prisoner. Getting
a pass out of Shawshank when you’ve got murder stamped on your admittance-slip is
slow work, as slow as a river eroding a rock. Seven men sit on the board, two more than
at most state prisons, and every one of those seven has an ass as hard as the water drawn
up from a mineral-spring well You can’t buy those guys, you can’t no, you can’t cry for them. As far as the board concerned, money don’t talk, and nobody walks. pc other
reasons in Andy’s case as well … but that belongs a little further along in my story.
There was a trusty, name of Kendricks, who was into me for some pretty heavy money
back in the fifties, and it was four years before he got it all paid off. Most of the interest
he paid me was information – in my line of work, you’re dead if you can’t find ways of
keeping your ear to the ground. This Kendricks, for instance, had access to records I was
never going to see running a stamper down in the goddam plate-shop.
Kendricks told me that the parole board vote was 7-0 against Andy Dufresne through
1957,6-1 in ’58, 7-0 again in ’59, and 5-2 in ’60. After that I don’t know, but I do know
that sixteen years later he was still in Cell 14 of Cellblock 5. By tben, 1976, he was fifty-
eight. They probably would have fatten big-hearted and let him out around 1983. They
give you fife, and that’s what they take – all of it that counts, anyway. Maybe they set you
loose someday, but … well, Listen: I knew this guy, Sherwood Bolton, his name was, and
he had this pigeon in his cell. From 1945 until 1953, when they let him out, he had that
pigeon. He wasn’t any Birdman of Alcatraz; he just had this pigeon. Jake, he called him.
He set Jake free a day before he, Sherwood, that is, was to walk, and Jake flew away just
as pretty as you could want. But about a week after Sherwood Bolton left our happy little
family, a friend of mine called me over to the west corner of the exercise yard, where
Sherwood used to hang out, and my friend said: ‘Isn’t that Jake, Red?’ It was. That pigeon
was just as dead as a turd.
I remember the first time Andy Dufresne got in touch with me for something; I
remember like it was yesterday. That wasn’t the time he wanted Rita Hayworth, though.
That came later. In that summer of 1948 he came around for something else.
Most of my deals are done right there in the exercise yard, and that’s where this one
went down. Our yard is big, much bigger than most. It’s a perfect square, ninety yards on
a side. The north side is the outer wall, with a guardtower at either end. The guards up
there are armed with binoculars and riot guns. The main gate is in that north side. The
truck loading-bays are on the south side of the yard. There are five of them. Shawshank is
a busy place during the work-week – deliveries in, deliveries out. We have the license-
plate factory, and a big industrial laundry that does all the prison wetwash, plus that of
Kittery Receiving Hospital and the Eliot Sanatorium. There’s also a big automotive
garage where mechanic inmates fix prison, state, and municipal vehicles – not to mention
the private cars of the screws, the administration officers … and, on more than one
occasion, those of the parole board.
The east side is a thick stone wall full of tiny slit windows. Cellblock 5 is on the other
side of that wail. The west side is Administration and the infirmary. Shawshank has never
been as overcrowded as most prisons, and back in ’48 it was only filled to something like
two-thirds capacity, but at any given time there might be eighty to a hundred and twenty
cons on the yard – playing toss with a football or a baseball, shooting craps, jawing at
each other, making deals. On Sunday the place was even more crowded; on Sunday the
place would have looked like a country holiday … if there had been any women.
It was on a Sunday that Andy first came to me. I had just finished talking to Elmore
Armitage, a fellow who often came in handy to me, about a radio when Andy walked up.
I knew who he was, of course; he had a reputation for being a snob and a cold fish.
People were saying he was marked for trouble already. One of the people saying so was
Bogs Dismond, a bad man to have on your case. Andy had no cellmate, and I’d heard that
was just the way he wanted it, although the one-man cells in Cellblock 5 were only a little bigger than coffins. But I don’t have to listen to rumours about a man when I can judge
him for myself.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’m Andy Dufresne.’ He offered his hand and I shook it. He wasn’t a
man to waste time being social; he got right to the point. ‘I understand that you’re a man
who knows how to get things.’
I agreed that I was able to locate certain items from time to time,
‘How do you do that?’ Andy asked.
‘Sometimes,’ I said, ‘things just seem to come into my hand. I can’t explain it. Unless it’s
because I’m Irish.’
He smiled a little at that. ‘I wonder if you could get me a rock hammer.’
‘What would that be, and why would you want it?’
Andy looked surprised. ‘Do you make motivations a part of your business?’ With words
like those I could understand how he had gotten a reputation for being the snobby sort,
the kind of guy who likes to put on airs – but I sensed a tiny thread of humour in his
question.
I’ll tell you,’ I said. ‘If you wanted a toothbrush, I wouldn’t ask questions. I’d just quote
you a price. Because a toothbrush, you see, is a non-lethal sort of a 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