Different Seasons(23)

“If it’s the squeeze, you don’t have to worry,” Andy told Norton in a low voice. “Do you think I’d talk that up? I’d be cutting my own throat. I’d be just as indictable as—”

“That’s enough,” Norton interrupted. His face was as long and cold as a slate gravestone. He leaned back in his office chair until the back of his head almost touched the sampler reading HIS JUDGMENT COMETH AND THAT RIGHT EARLY.

“But—”

“Don’t you ever mention money to me again,” Norton said. “Not in this office, not anywhere. Not unless you want to see that library turned back into a storage room and paint-locker again. Do you understand?”

“I was trying to set your mind at ease, that’s all.”

“Wellnow, when I need a sorry son of a bitch like you to set my mind at ease, I’ll retire. I agreed to this appointment because I got tired of being pestered, Dufresne. I want it to stop. If you want to buy this particular Brooklyn Bridge, that’s your affair. Don’t make it mine. I could hear crazy stories like yours twice a week if I wanted to lay myself open to them. Every sinner in this place would be using me for a crying towel. I had more respect for you. But this is the end. The end. Have we got an understanding?”

“Yes,” Andy said. “But I’ll be hiring a lawyer, you know.”

“What’s in God’s name for?”

“I think we can put it together,” Andy said. “With Tommy Williams and with my testimony and corroborative testimony from records and employees at the country club, I think we can put it together.”

“Tommy Williams is no longer an inmate of this facility.”

“What?”

“He’s been transferred.”

“Transferred where?”

“Cashman.”

At that, Andy fell silent. He was an intelligent man, but it would have taken an extraordinarily stupid man not to smell deal all over that. Cashman was a minimum-security prison far up north in Aroostook County. The inmates pick a lot of potatoes, and that’s hard work, but they are paid a decent wage for their labor and they can attend classes at CVI, a pretty decent vocational-technical institute, if they so desire. More important to a fellow like Tommy, a fellow with a young wife and a child, Cashman had a furlough program... which meant a chance to live like a normal man, at least on the weekends. A chance to build a model plane with his kid, have sex with his wife, maybe go on a picnic.

Norton had almost surely dangled all of that under Tommy’s nose with only one string attached: not one more word about Elwood Blatch, not now, not ever. Or you’ll end up doing hard time in Thomaston down there on scenic Route 1 with the real hard guys, and instead of having sex with your wife you’ll be having it with some old bull queer.

“But why?” Andy said. “Why would—”

“As a favor to you,” Norton said calmly, “I checked with Rhode Island. They did have an inmate named Elwood Blatch. He was given what they call a PP—provisional parole, another one of these crazy liberal programs to put criminals out on the streets. He’s since disappeared.”

Andy said: “The warden down there... is he a friend of yours?”

Sam Norton gave Andy a smile as cold as a deacon’s watchchain. “We are acquainted,” he said.

“Why?” Andy repeated. “Can’t you tell me why you did it? You knew I wasn’t going to talk about... about anything you might have had going. You knew that. So why?”

“Because people like you make me sick,” Norton said deliberately. “I like you right where you are, Mr. Dufresne, and as long as I am warden here at Shawshank, you are going to be right here. You see, you used to think that you were better than anyone else. I have gotten pretty good at seeing that on a man’s face. I marked it on yours the first time I walked into the library. It might as well have been written on your forehead in capital letters. That look is gone now, and I like that just fine. It is not just that you are a useful vessel, never think that. It is simply that men like you need to learn humility. Why, you used to walk around that exercise yard as if it was a living room and you were at one of those cocktail parties where the hellbound walk around coveting each others’ wives and husbands and getting swinishly drunk. But you don’t walk around that way anymore. And I’ll be watching to see if you should start to walk that way again. Over a period of years, I’ll be watching you with great pleasure. Now get the hell out of here.”

“Okay. But all the extracurricular activities stop now, Norton. The investment counseling, the scams, the free tax advice. It all stops. Get H and R Block to tell you how to declare your income.”

Warden Norton’s face first went brick-red... and then all the color fell out of it. “You’re going back into solitary for that. Thirty days. Bread and water. Another black mark. And while you’re in, think about this: if anything that’s been going on should stop, the library goes. I will make it my personal business to see that it goes back to what it was before you came here. And I will make your life... very hard. Very difficult. You’ll do the hardest time it’s possible to do. You’ll lose that one-bunk Hilton down in Cellblock Five, for starters, and you’ll lose those rocks on the windowsill, and you’ll lose any protection the guards have given you against the sodomites. You will ... lose everything. Clear?”