the year the Red Sox won the pennant instead of placing ninth, as the Las Vegas bookies
had predicted. When it happened - when they won the American League pennant - a kind
of ebullience engulfed the whole prison. There was a goofy sort of feeling that if the
Dead Sox could come to life, then maybe anybody could do it I can't explain that feeling
now, any more than an ex-Beatlemaniac could explain that madness, I suppose. But it
was real. Every radio in the place was tuned to the games as the Red Sox pounded down
the stretch. There was gloom when the Sox dropped a pair in Cleveland near the end, and
a nearly riotous joy when Rico Petrocelli put away the pop fly that clinched it And then
there was the gloom that came when Lonborg was beaten in the seventh game of the
Series to end the dream just short of complete fruition. It probably pleased Norton to no
end, the son of a bitch. He liked his prison wearing sackcloth and ashes.
But for Andy, there was no tumble back down into gloom. He wasn't much of a baseball
fan anyway, and maybe that was why. Nevertheless, he seemed to have caught the
current of good feeling, and for him it didn't peter out again after the last game of the
Series. He had taken that invisible coat out of the closet and put it on again.
I remember one bright-gold fall day in very late October, a couple of weeks after the
World Series had ended. It must have been a Sunday, because the exercise yard was full
of men 'walking off the week' - tossing a Frisbee or two, passing around a football,
bartering what they had to barter. Others would be at the long table in the Visitors' Hall,
under the watchful eyes of the screws, talking with their relatives, smoking cigarettes,
telling sincere lies, receiving their picked-over care packages.
Andy was squatting Indian-fashion against the wall, chunking two small rocks together in
his hands, his face turned up into the sunlight. It was surprisingly warm, that sun, for a
day so late in the year.
'Hello, Red,' he called. 'Come on and sit a spell.'
I did.
'You want this?' he asked, and handed me one of the two carefully polished 'millennium
sandwiches' I just told you about
'I sure do,' I said. 'It's very pretty. Thank you.'
He shrugged and changed the subject 'Big anniversary coming up for you next year.'
I nodded. Next year would make me a thirty-year man. Sixty per cent of my life spent in
Shawshank Prison.
Think you'll ever get out?'
'Sure. When I have a long white beard and just about three marbles left rolling around
upstairs.'
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He smiled a little and then turned his face up into the sun again, his eyes closed. 'Feels
good.'
'I think it always does when you know the damn winter's almost right on top of you.'
He nodded, and we were silent for a while.
'When I get out of here,' Andy said finally, 'I'm going where it's warm all the time.' He
spoke with such calm assurance you would have thought he had only a month or so left to
serve. 'You know where I'm goin', Red?'
'Nope.'
'Zihuatcnejo,' he said, rolling the word softly from his tongue like music. 'Down in
Mexico. It's a little place maybe twenty miles from Playa Azul and Mexico Highway 37.
It's a hundred miles north-west of Acapulco on the Pacific Ocean. You know what the
Mexicans say about the Pacific?'
I told him I didn't
They say it has no memory. And that's where I want to finish out my life, Red. In a warm
place that has no memory.'
He had picked up a handful of pebbles as he spoke; now he tossed them, one by one, and
watched them bounce and roll across the baseball diamond's dirt infield, which would be
under a foot of snow before long.
'Zihuatanejo. I'm going to have a little hotel down there. Six cabanas along the beach, and
six more set further back, for the highway trade. I'll have a guy who'll take my guests out
charter fishing. There'll be a trophy for the guy who catches the biggest marlin of the
season, and I'll put his picture up in the lobby. It won't be a family place. It'll be a place
for people on their honeymoons ... first or second varieties.'
'And where are you going to get the money to buy this fabulous place?' I asked. 'Your
stock account?'
He looked at me and smiled. 'That's not so far wrong,' he said. 'Sometimes you startle me,
Red.'
'What are you talking about?'
There are really only two types of men in the world when it comes to bad trouble,' Andy
said, cupping a match between his hands and lighting a cigarette. 'Suppose there was a
house full of rare paintings and sculptures and fine old antiques, Red? And suppose the
guy who owned the house heard that there was a monster of a hurricane headed right at it.
One of those two kinds of men just hopes for the best The hurricane will change course,
he says to himself. No right-thinking hurricane would ever dare wipe out all these
Rembrandts, my two Degas horses, my Jackson Pollocks and my Paul Klees.
Furthermore, God wouldn't allow it. And if worst comes to worst, they're insured. That's
one sort of man. The other sort just assumes that hurricane is going to tear right through
the middle of his house. If the weather bureau says the hurricane just changed course, this
guy assumes it'll change back in order to put his house on ground zero again. This second
type of guy knows there's no harm in hoping for the best as long as you're prepared for
the worst.'
I lit a cigarette of my own. 'Are you saying you prepared for the eventuality?'
'Yes. I prepared for the hurricane. I knew how bad it looked. I didn't have much time, but
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in the time I had, I operated. I had a friend - just about the only person who stood by me -
who worked for an investment company in Portland. He died about six years ago.'
'Sorry.'
'Yeah.' Andy tossed his butt away. 'Linda and I had about fourteen thousand dollars. Not
a big bundle, but hell, we were young. We had our whole lives ahead of us.' He grimaced
a little, then laughed. 'When the shit hit the fan, I started lugging my Rembrandts out of
the path of the hurricane. I sold my stocks and paid the capital gains tax just like a good
little boy. Declared everything. Didn't cut any corners.'
'Didn't they freeze your estate?'
'I was charged with murder, Red, not dead! You can't freeze the assets of an innocent
man - thank God. And it was a while before they even got brave enough to charge me
with the crime. Jim - my friend - and I, we had some time. I got hit pretty good, just
dumping everything like that. Got my nose skinned. But at the time I had worse things to
worry about than a small skinning on the stock market.'
'Yeah, I'd say you did.'
'But when I came to Shawshank it was all safe. It's still safe. Outside these walls, Red,
there's a man that no living soul has ever seen face to face. He has a Social Security card
and a Maine driver's license. He's got a birth certificate. Name of Peter Stevens. Nice,
anonymous name, huh?'
'Who is he?' I asked. I thought I knew what he was going to say, but I couldn't believe it.
'Me.'
'You're not going to tell me that you had time to set up a false identity while the bulls
were sweating you,' I said, 'or that you finished the job while you were on trial for -'
'No, I'm not going to tell you that. My friend Jim was the one who set up the false
identity. He started after my appeal was turned down, and the major pieces of
identification were in his hands by the spring of 1950.'
'He must have been a pretty close friend,' I said. I was not sure how much of this I
believed - a little, a lot, or none. But the day was warm and the sun was out, and it was
one hell of a good story. 'All of that's one hundred per cent illegal, setting up a false ID
like that.'
'He was a close friend,' Andy said. 'We were in the war together. France, Germany, the
occupation. He was a good friend. He knew it was illegal, but he also knew that setting
up a false identity in this country is very easy and very safe. He took my money - my
money with all the taxes on it paid so the IRS wouldn't get too interested - and invested it
for Peter Stevens. He did that in 1950 and 1951. Today it amounts to three hundred and
seventy thousand dollars, plus change.'
I guess my jaw made a thump when it dropped against my chest, because he smiled.
'Think of all the things people wish they'd invested in since 1950 or so, and two or three
of them will be things Peter Stevens was into. If I hadn't ended up in here, I'd probably be
worth seven or eight million bucks by now. I'd have a Rolls ... and probably an ulcer as
big as a portable radio.'
His hands went to the dirt and began sifting out more pebbles. They moved gracefully,
restlessly.
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'I was hoping for the best and expecting the worst -nothing but that The false name was
just to keep what little capital I had untainted. It was lugging the paintings out of the path
of the hurricane. But I had no idea that the hurricane ... that it could go on as long as it
has.'
I didn't say anything for a while. I guess I was trying to absorb the idea that this small,
spare man in prison grey next to me could be worth more money than Warden Norton
would make in the rest of his miserable life, even with the scams thrown in.
'When you said you could get a lawyer, you sure weren't kidding,' I said at last 'For that
kind of dough you could have hired Clarence Darrow, or whoever's passing for him these
days. Why didn't you, Andy? Christ! You could have been out of here like a rocket.'
He smiled. It was the same smile that had been on his face when he'd told me he and his
wife had had their whole lives ahead of them. 'No,' he said.
'A good lawyer would have sprung the Williams kid from Cashman whether he wanted to
go or not,' I said. I was getting carried away now. 'You could have gotten your new trial,
hired private detectives to look for that guy Blatch, and blown Norton out of the water to
boot. Why not, Andy?'
'Because I outsmarted myself. If I ever try to put my hands on Peter Stevens's money
from inside here, I'd lose every cent of it My friend Jim could have arranged it, but Jim's
dead. You see the problem?'
I saw it For all the good the money could do Andy, it might as well have really belonged
to another person. In a way, it did. And if the stuff it was invested in suddenly turned bad,
all Andy could do would be to watch the plunge, to trace it day after day on the stocks-
and-bonds page of the Press-Herald. It's a tough life if you don't weaken, I guess.
'I'll tell you how it is, Red. There's a big hayfield in the town of Buxton. You know where
Buxton is at, don't you?'
I said I did. It lies right next door to Scarborough.
"That's right And at the north end of this particular hayfield there's a rock wall, right out
of a Robert Frost poem. And somewhere along the base of that wall is a rock that has no
business in a Maine hayfield. It's a piece of volcanic glass, and until 1947 it was a
paperweight on my office desk. My friend Jim put it in that wall. There's a key
underneath it. The key opens a safe deposit box in the Portland branch of the Casco
Bank.'
'I guess you're in a pack of trouble,' I said. 'When your friend Jim died, the IRS must have
opened all of his safety deposit boxes. Along with the executor of his will, of course.'
Andy smiled and tapped the side of my head. 'Not bad. There's more up there than
marshmallows, I guess. But we took care of the possibility that Jim might die while I was
in the slam. The box is in the Peter Stevens name, and once a year the firm of lawyers
that served as Jim's executors sends a check to the Casco to cover the rental of the
Stevens box.
'Peter Stevens is inside that box, just waiting to get out His birth certificate, his S.S. card,
and his driver's license. The license is six years out of date because Jim died six years
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ago, true, but it's still perfectly renewable for a five-dollar fee. His stock certificates are
there, the tax-free municipals, and about eighteen bearer bonds in the amount of ten
thousand dollars each.'
I whistled.
'Peter Stevens is locked in a safe deposit box at the Casco Bank in Portland and Andy
Dufresne is locked in a safe deposit box at Shawshank,' he said. Tit for tat And the key
that unlocks the box and the money and the new life is under a hunk of black glass in a
Buxton hayfield. Told you this much, so I'll tell you something else, Red - for the last
twenty years, give or take, I have been watching the papers with a more than usual
interest for news of any construction projects in Buxton. I keep thinking that someday
soon I'm going to read that they're putting a highway through there, or erecting a new
community hospital, or building a shopping centre. Burying my new life under ten feet of
concrete, or spitting it into a swamp somewhere with a big load of fill.'
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
