Different Seasons(27)
I blurted, “Jesus Christ, Andy, if all of this is true, how do you keep from going crazy?”
He smiled. “So far, all quiet on the Western front.”
“But it could be years—”
“It will be. But maybe not as many as the State and Warden Norton think it’s going to be. I just can’t afford to wait that long. I keep thinking about Zihuatanejo and that small hotel. That’s all I want from my life now, Red, and I don’t think that’s too much to want. I didn’t kill Glenn Quentin and I didn’t kill my wife, and that hotel... it’s not too much to want. To swim and get a tan and sleep in a room with open windows and space... that’s not too much to want.”
He slung the stones away.
“You know, Red,” he said in an offhand voice. “A place like that... I’d have to have a man who knows how to get things.”
I thought about it for a long time. And the biggest drawback in my mind wasn’t even that we were talking pipedreams in a shitty little prison exercise yard with armed guards looking down at us from their sentry posts. “I couldn’t do it,” I said. “I couldn’t get along on the outside. I’m what they call an institutional man now. In here I’m the man who can get it for you, yeah. But out there, anyone can get it for you. Out there, if you want posters or rock-hammers or one particular record or a boat-in-a-bottle model kit, you can use the f**king Yellow Pages. In here, I’m the f**king Yellow Pages. I wouldn’t know how to begin. Or where.”
“You underestimate yourself,” he said. “You’re a self-educated man, a self-made man. A rather remarkable man, I think.”
“Hell, I don’t even have a high school diploma.”
“I know that,” he said. “But it isn’t just a piece of paper that makes a man. And it isn’t just prison that breaks one, either.”
“I couldn’t hack it outside, Andy. I know that.”
He got up. “You think it over,” he said casually, just as the inside whistle blew. And he strolled off, as if he were a free man who had just made another free man a proposition. And for awhile just that was enough to make me feel free. Andy could do that. He could make me forget for a time that we were both lifers, at the mercy of a hard-ass parole board and a psalm-singing warden who liked Andy Dufresne right where he was. After all, Andy was a lap-dog who could do tax-returns. What a wonderful animal!
But by that night in my cell I felt like a prisoner again. The whole idea seemed absurd, and that mental image of blue water and white beaches seemed more cruel than foolish—it dragged at my brain like a fishhook. I just couldn’t wear that invisible coat the way Andy did. I fell asleep that night and dreamed of a great glassy black stone in the middle of a hayfield; a stone shaped like a giant blacksmith’s anvil. I was trying to rock the stone up so I could get the key that was underneath. It wouldn’t budge; it was just too damned big.
And in the background, but getting closer, I could hear the baying of bloodhounds.
Which leads us, I guess, to the subject of jailbreaks. Sure, they happen from time to time in our happy little family. You don’t go over the wall, though, not at Shawshank, not if you’re smart. The searchlight beams go all night, probing long white fingers across the open fields that surround the prison on three sides and the stinking marshland on the fourth. Cons do go over the wall from time to time, and the searchlights almost always catch them. If not, they get picked up trying to thumb a ride on Highway 6 or Highway 99. If they try to cut across country, some farmer sees them and just phones the location in to the prison. Cons who go over the wall are stupid cons. Shawshank is no Canon City, but in a rural area a man humping his ass across country in a gray pajama suit sticks out like a cockroach on a wedding cake.
Over the years, the guys who have done the best—maybe oddly, maybe not so oddly—are the guys who did it on the spur of the moment. Some of them have gone out in the middle of a cartful of sheets; a convict sandwich on white, you could say. There was a lot of that when I first came in here, but over the years they have more or less closed that loophole.
Warden Norton’s famous “Inside-Out” program produced its share of escapees, too. They were the guys who decided they liked what lay to the right of the hyphen better than what lay to the left. And again, in most cases it was a very casual kind of thing. Drop your blueberry rake and stroll into the bushes while one of the screws is having a glass of water at the truck or when a couple of them get too involved in arguing over yards passing or rushing on the old Boston Patriots.
In 1969, the Inside-Outers were picking potatoes in Sabbatus. It was the third of November and the work was almost done. There was a guard named Henry Pugh—and he is no longer a member of our happy little family, believe me—sitting on the back bumper of one of the potato trucks and having his lunch with his carbine across his knees when a beautiful (or so it was told to me, but sometimes these things get exaggerated) ten-point buck strolled out of the cold early afternoon mist. Pugh went after it with visions of just how that trophy would look mounted in his rec room, and while he was doing it, three of his charges just walked away. Two were recaptured in a Lisbon Falls pinball parlor. The third has not been found to this day.
I suppose the most famous case of all was that of Sid Nedeau. This goes back to 1958, and I guess it will never be topped. Sid was out lining the ballfield for a Saturday intramural baseball game when the three o’clock inside whistle blew, signalling the shift-change for the guards. The parking lot is just beyond the exercise yard, on the other side of the electrically operated main gate. At three the gate opens and the guards coming on duty and those going off mingle. There’s a lot of back-slapping and bullyragging, comparison of league bowling scores and the usual number of tired old ethnic jokes.