bluster and no bite. You could say, in fact, that he turned into a ‘weak sister’.
That was the end of Bogs Diamond, a man who might eventually have killed Andy if
Andy hadn’t taken steps to prevent it (if it was him who took the steps). But it wasn’t the
end of Andy’s trouble with the sisters. There was a little hiatus, and then it began again,
although not so hard nor so often. Jackals like easy prey, and there were easier pickings
around than Andy Dufresne.
He always fought them, that’s what I remember. He knew, I guess, that if you let them
have at you even once, without fighting it, it got that much easier to let them have their
way without fighting next time. So Andy would turn up with bruises on his face every
once in a while, and there was the matter of the two broken fingers six or eight months
after Diamond’s beating. Oh yes – and sometime in late 1949, the man landed in the
infirmary with a broken cheekbone that was probably the result of someone swinging a
nice chunk of pipe with the business-end wrapped in flannel. He always fought back, and
as a result, he did his time in solitary. But don’t think solitary was the hardship for Andy
that it was for some men. He got along with himself.
The sisters was something he adjusted himself to – and then, in 1950, it stopped almost
completely. That is a part of my story that 111 get to in due time.
In the fall of 1948, Andy met me one morning in the exercise yard and asked me if I
could get him half a dozen rock-blankets.
‘What the hell are those?’ I asked.
He told me that was just what rockhounds called them; they were polishing cloths about
the size of dishtowels. They were heavily padded, with a smooth side and a rough side –
the smooth side like fine-grained sandpaper, the rough side almost as abrasive as
industrial steel wool (Andy also kept a box of that in his cell, although he didn’t get it
from me – I imagine he kited it from the prison laundry).
I told him I thought we could do business on those, and I ended up getting them from
the very same rock-and-gem shop where I’d arranged to get the rock-hammer. This time I
charged Andy my usual ten per cent and not a penny more. I didn’t see anything lethal or
even dangerous in a dozen 7” x 7” squares of padded cloth. Rock-blankets, indeed.
It was about five months later that Andy asked if I could get him Rita Hayworth. That
conversation took place in the auditorium, during a movie-show. Nowadays we get the
movie-shows once or twice a week, but back then the shows were a monthly event
Usually the movies we got had a morally uplifting message to them, and this one, The
Lost Weekend, was no different. The moral was that it’s dangerous to drink. It was a moral we could take some comfort in.
Andy manoeuvred to get next to me, and about halfway through the show he leaned a
little closer and asked if I could get him Rita Hayworth. I’ll tell you the truth, it kind of
tickled me. He was usually cool, calm, and collected, but that night he was jumpy as hell,
almost embarrassed, as if he was asking me to get him a load of Trojans or one of those sheepskin-lined gadgets that are supposed to ‘enhance your solitary pleasure,’ as the
magazines put it. He seemed overcharged, a man on the verge of blowing his radiator.
‘I can get her,’ I said. ‘No sweat, calm down. You want the big one or the little one?’ At
that time Rita was my best girl (a few years before it had been Betty Grable) and she
came in two sizes. For a buck you could get the little Rita. For two-fifty you could have
the big Rita, four feet high and all woman.
‘The big one,’ he said, not looking at me. I tell you, he was a hot sketch that night He
was blushing just like a kid trying to get into a kootch show with his big brother’s draft-
card. ‘Can you do it?’
‘Take it easy, sure I can. Does a bear shit in the woods?’ The audience was applauding
and catcalling as the bugs came out of the walls to get Ray Milland, who was having a
bad case of the DT’s.
‘How soon?’
‘A week. Maybe less.’
‘Okay.’ But he sounded disappointed, as if he had been hoping I had one stuffed down
my pants right then. ‘How much?”
I quoted him the wholesale price. I could afford to give him this one at cost; he’d been a
good customer, what with his rock-hammer and his rock-blankets. Furthermore, he’d been
a good boy – on more than one night when he was having his problems with Bogs,
Rooster, and the rest, I wondered how long it would be before he used the rock-hammer
to crack someone’s head open.
Posters are a big part of my business, just behind the booze and cigarettes, usually half a
step ahead of the reefer. In the 60s the business exploded in every direction, with a lot of
people wanting funky hang-ups like Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, that Easy Rider poster. But
mostly it’s girls; one pinup queen after another.
A few days after I spoke to Ernie, a laundry driver I did business with back then brought
in better than sixty posters, most of them Rita Hayworths. You may even remember the
picture; I sure do. Rita is dressed – sort of- in a bathing suit, one hand behind her head,
her eyes half closed, those full, sulky red lips parted. They called it Rita Hayworth, but
they might as well have called it Woman in Heat.
The prison administration knows about the black market, in case you were wondering.
Sure they do. They probably know as much about my business as I do myself. They live
with it because they know that a prison is like a big pressure cooker, and there have to be
vents somewhere to let off steam. They make the occasional bust, and I’ve done time in
solitary a time or three over the years, but when it’s something like posters, they wink.
Live and let live. And when a big Rita Hayworth went up in some fishie’s cell, the
assumption was that it came in the mail from a friend or a relative. Of course all the care-
packages from friends and relatives are opened and the contents inventoried, but who
goes back and re-checks the inventory sheets for something as harmless as a Rita
Hayworth or an Ava Gardner pin-up? When you’re in a pressure-cooker you learn to live
and let live or somebody will carve you a brand-new mouth just above the Adam’s apple.
You learn to make allowances.
It was Ernie again who took the poster up to Andy’s cell, 14, my own, 6. And it was
Ernie who brought back the written in Andy’s careful hand, just one word: Thanks.’
A little while later, as they filed us out for morning chow, I glanced into his ceil and
saw Rita over his bunk in all her swimsuited glory, one hand behind her head, her eyes
half-closed, those soft, satiny lips parted. It was over his bunk when he could look at her
nights, after lights out, in the glow of the arc sodiums in the exercise yard.
But in the bright morning sunlight, there were dark slashes across her face – the shadow
of the bars on his single slit-window.
Now I’m going to tell you what happened in mid-May of 1950 that finally ended Andy’s
three-year series of skirmishes with the sisters. It was also the incident which eventually
got him out of the laundry and into the library, where he filled out his work-time until he
left our happy little family earlier this year.
You may have noticed now much of what I’ve told you Lready is hearsay – someone saw
something and told me and I told you. Well, in some cases I’ve simplified it even more
than it really was, and have actually repeated (or will repeat) fourth- or fifth-hand
information. That’s the way it s here. The grapevine is very real, and you have to use it if
you’re going to stay ahead. Also, of course, you have to know how to pick out the grains
of truth from the chaff of lies , rumours, and wish-it-had-beens.
You may also have gotten the idea that I’m describing someone who’s more legend than
man, and I would have to agree that there’s some truth to that. To us long-timers who
knew Andy over a space of years, there was an element of fantasy to him, a sense, almost,