Different Seasons(13)

Tim Youngblood drew his gun. The rest of us kept tarring like mad. The sun beat down. They were going to do it; Hadley and Mert were simply going to pitch him over the side. Terrible accident. Dufresne, prisoner 81433-SHNK, was taking a couple of empties down and slipped on the ladder. Too bad.

They laid hold of him, Mert on the right arm, Hadley on the left. Andy didn’t resist. His eyes never left Hadley’s red, horsey face.

“If you’ve got your thumb on her, Mr. Hadley,” he said in that same calm, composed voice, “there’s not a reason why you shouldn’t have every cent of that money. Final score, Mr. Byron Hadley thirty-five thousand, Uncle Sam zip.”

Mert started to drag him toward the edge. Hadley just stood there. For a moment Andy was like a rope between them in a tug-of-war game. Then Hadley said, “Hold on one second, Mert. What do you mean, boy?”

“I mean, if you’ve got your thumb on your wife, you can give it to her,” Andy said.

“You better start making sense, boy, or you’re going over.”

“The IRS allows you a one-time-only gift to your spouse,” Andy said. “It’s good up to sixty thousand dollars.”

Hadley was now looking at Andy as if he had been poleaxed. “Naw, that ain’t right,” he said. “Tax free?”

“Tax free,” Andy said. “IRS can’t touch one cent.”

“How would you know a thing like that?”

Tim Youngblood said: “He used to be a banker, Byron. I s’pose he might—”

“Shut ya head, Trout,” Hadley said without looking at him. Tim Youngblood flushed and shut up. Some of the guards called him Trout because of his thick lips and buggy eyes. Hadley kept looking at Andy. “You’re the smart banker who shot his wife. Why should I believe a smart banker like you? So I can wind up in here breaking rocks right alongside you? You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

Andy said quietly: “If you went to jail for tax evasion, you’d go to a federal penitentiary, not Shawshank. But you won’t. The tax-free gift to the spouse is a perfectly legal loophole. I’ve done dozens ... no, hundreds of them. It’s meant primarily for people with small businesses to pass on, for people who come into one-time-only windfalls. Like yourself.”

“I think you’re lying,” Hadley said, but he didn’t—you could see he didn’t. There was an emotion dawning on his face, something that was grotesque overlying that long, ugly countenance and that receding, sunburned brow. An almost obscene emotion when seen on the features of Byron Hadley. It was hope.

“No, I’m not lying. There’s no reason why you should take my word for it, either. Engage a lawyer—”

“Ambulance-chasing highway-robbing cocksuckers!” Hadley cried.

Andy shrugged. “Then go to the IRS. They’ll tell you the same thing for free. Actually, you don’t need me to tell you at all. You would have investigated the matter for yourself.”

“You’re f**king-A. I don’t need any smart wife-killing banker to show me where the bear shit in the buckwheat.”

“You’ll need a tax lawyer or a banker to set up the gift for you and that will cost you something,” Andy said. “Or ... if you were interested, I’d be glad to set it up for you nearly free of charge. The price would be three beers apiece for my co-workers—”

“Co-workers,” Mert said, and let out a rusty guffaw. He slapped his knee. A real knee-slapper was old Mert, and I hope he died of intestinal cancer in a part of the world where morphine is as of yet undiscovered. “Co-workers, ain’t that cute? Co-workers? You ain’t got any—”

“Shut your friggin trap,” Hadley growled, and Mert shut. Hadley looked at Andy again. “What was you sayin?”

“I was saying that I’d only ask three beers apiece for my co-workers, if that seems fair,” Andy said. “I think a man feels more like a man when he’s working out of doors in the springtime if he can have a bottle of suds. That’s only my opinion. It would go down smooth, and I’m sure you’d have their gratitude.”

I have talked to some of the other men who were up there that day—Rennie Martin, Logan St. Pierre, and Paul Bonsaint were three of them—and we all saw the same thing then ... felt the same thing. Suddenly it was Andy who had the upper hand. It was Hadley who had the gun on his hip and the billy in his hand, Hadley who had his friend Greg Stammas behind him and the whole prison administration behind Stammas, the whole power of the State behind that, but all at once in that golden sunshine it didn’t matter, and I felt my heart leap up in my chest as it never had since the truck drove me and four others through the gate back in 1938 and I stepped out into the exercise yard.

Andy was looking at Hadley with those cold, clear, calm eyes, and it wasn’t just the thirty-five thousand then, we all agreed on that. I’ve played it over and over in my mind and I know. It was man against man, and Andy simply forced him, the way a strong man can force a weaker man’s wrist to the table in a game of Indian rasseling. There was no reason, you see, why Hadley couldn’t’ve given Mert the nod at that very minute, pitched Andy overside onto his head, and still taken Andy’s advice.

No reason. But he didn’t.

“I could get you all a couple of beers if I wanted to,” Hadley said. “A beer does taste good while you’re workin.” The colossal prick even managed to sound magnanimous.