Their hunting grounds are the showers, the cramped, tunnel-like area way behind the
industrial washers in the laundry, sometimes the infirmary. On more than one occasion
rape has occurred in the closet-sized projection booth behind the auditorium. Most often
what the sisters take by force they could have had for free, if they wanted it; those who
have been turned always seem to have ‘crushes’ on one sister or another, like teenage girls
with their Sinatras, Presleys, or Redfords. But for the sisters, the joy has always been in
taking it by force… and I guess it always will be.
Because of his small size and fair good looks (and maybe also because of that very
quality of self-possession I had admired), the sisters were after Andy from the day he
walked in. If this was some kind of fairy story, I’d tell you that Andy fought the good fight
until they left him alone. I wish I could say that, but I can’t. Prison is no fairy-tale world.
The first time for him was in the shower less than three days after he joined our happy
Shawshank family. Just a lot of slap and tickle that time, I understand. They like to size
you up before they make their real move, like jackals finding out if the prey is as weak
and hamstrung as it looks.
Andy punched back and bloodied the lip of a big, hulking sister named Bogs Diamond –
gone these many years since to who knows where. A guard broke it up before it could go
any further, but Bogs promised to get him – and Bogs did.
The second time was behind the washers in the laundry. A lot has gone on in that long,
dusty, and narrow space over the years; the guards know about it and just let it be. It’s dim
and littered with bags of washing and bleaching compound, drums of Hexlite catalyst, as
harmless as salt if your hands are dry, murderous as battery acid if they’re wet. The guards
don’t like to go back there. There’s no room to manoeuvre, and one of the first things they
teach them when they come to work in a place like this is to never let the cons get you in
a place where you can’t back up.
Bogs wasn’t there that day, but Henry Backus, who had been washroom foreman down
there since 1922, told me that four of his friends were. Andy held them at bay for a while
with a scoop of Hexlite, threatening to throw it in their eyes if they came any closer, but
he tripped trying to back around one of the big Washex four-pockets. That was ail it took.
They were on him.
I guess the phrase gang-rape is one that doesn’t change much from one generation to the
next. That’s what they did to him, those four sisters. They bent him over a gearbox and
one of them held a Phillips screwdriver to his temple while they gave him the business. It
rips you up some, but not bad – am I speaking from personal experience, you ask? — I
only wish I weren’t. You bleed for a while. If you don’t want some clown asking you if
you just started your period, you wad up a bunch of toilet paper and keep it down the back
of your underwear until it stops. The bleeding really is like a menstrual flow; it keeps up
for two, maybe three days, a slow trickle. Then it stops. No harm done, unless they’ve
done something even more unnatural to you. No physical harm done – but rape is rape,
and eventually you have to look at your face in the mirror again and decide what to make
of yourself.
Andy went through that alone, the way he went through everything alone in those days.
He must have come to the conclusion that others before him had come to, namely, that
there are only two ways to deal with the sisters: fight them and get taken, or just get
taken.
He decided to fight When Bogs and two of his buddies came after him a week or so
after the laundry incident (‘I heard ya got broke in,’ Bogs said, according to Ernie, who was around at the time), Andy slugged it out with them. He broke the nose of a fellow
named Rooster MacBride, a heavy-gutted farmer who was in for beating his step-daughter
to death. Rooster died in here, I’m happy to add.
They took him, all three of them. When it was done, Rooster and the other egg – it
might have been Pete Verness, but I’m not completely sure – forced Andy down to his
knees. Bogs Diamond stepped in front of him. He had a pearl-handled razor in those days
with the words Diamond Pearl engraved on both sides of the grip. He opened it and said,
I’m gonna open my fly now, mister man, and you’re going to swallow what I give you to
swallow. And when you done swallowed mine, you’re gonna swallow Rooster’s. I guess
you done broke his nose and I think he ought to have something to pay for it’
Andy said, ‘Anything of yours that you stick in my mouth, you’re going to lose it.’
Bogs looked at Andy like he was crazy, Ernie said.
‘No,’ he told Andy, talking to him slowly, like Andy was a stupid kid. ‘You didn’t
understand what I said. You do anything like that and I’ll put all eight inches of this steel
into your ear. Get it?’
‘I understand what you said. I don’t think you understand me. I’m going to bite whatever you stick into my mouth. You can put that razor in my brain, I guess, but you should
know that a sudden serious brain injury causes the victim to simultaneously urinate,
defecate… and bite down.’
He looked up at Bogs, smiling that little smile of his, old Ernie said, as if the three of
them had been discussing stocks and bonds with him instead of throwing it to him just as
hard as they could. Just as if he was wearing one of his three-piece bankers’ suits instead
of kneeling on a dirty broom-closet floor with his pants around his ankles and blood
trickling down the insides of his thighs.
‘In fact,’ he went on, ‘I understand that the bite-reflex is sometimes so strong that the
victim’s jaws have to be pried open with a crowbar or a jackhandle.’
Bogs didn’t put anything in Andy’s mouth that night in late February of 1948, and
neither did Rooster MacBride, and so far as I know, no one else ever did, either. What the
three of them did was to beat Andy within an inch of his life, and all four of them ended
up doing a jolt in solitary. Andy and Rooster MacBride went by way of the infirmary.
How many times did that particular crew have at him? I don’t know. I think Rooster lost
his taste fairly early on -being in nose-splints for a month can do that to a fellow -and
Bogs Diamond left off that summer, all at once.
That was a strange thing. Bogs was found in his cell, badly beaten, one morning in early
June, when he didn’t show up in the breakfast nose-count He wouldn’t say who had done
it, or how they had gotten to him, but being in my business, I know that a screw can be bribed to do almost anything accept get a gun for an inmate. They didn’t make big salaries
then, and they don’t now. And in those days there was no electronic locking system, no
closed-circuit TV, no master-switches which controlled whole areas of the prison. Back
in 1948, each cellblock had its own turnkey. A guard could have been bribed real easy to
let someone – maybe two or three someones – into the block, and, yes, even into
Diamond’s cell.
Of course a job like that would have cost a lot of money. Not by outside standards, no.
Prison economics are on a smaller scale. When you’ve been in here a while, a dollar bill
in your hand looks like a twenty did outside. My guess is, that if Bogs was done, it cost
someone a serious piece of change – fifteen bucks, well say, for the turnkey, and two or
store apiece for each of the lump-up guys.
I’m not saying it was Andy Dufresne, but I do know that he brought in five hundred dollars when he came, and he was a banker in the straight world – a man who understands
better than the rest of us the ways in which money can become power.
And I know this: After the beating – the three broken ribs, the haemorrhaged eye, the
sprained back and the dislocated hip – Bogs Diamond left Andy alone. In fact, after that
he left everyone pretty much alone. He got to be like a high wind in the summertime, all