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
fucking Yellow Pages. In here, I'm the fucking 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 was a free man who
had just made another free man a proposition. And for a while just that was enough to
make me feel free. Andy could do that. He could make me forget for a time that we were
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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 grey pyjama 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' programme 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 parlour. 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 ball-field for a Saturday
intramural baseball game when the three o'clock inside whistle blew, signalling the
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shiftchange 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 j 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.
Sid just trundled his lining machine right out through the gate, leaving a three-inch
baseline all the way from third base in the exercise yard to the ditch on the far side of
Route 6, where they found the machine overturned in a pile of lime. Don't ask me how he
did it He was dressed in his prison uniform, he stood six-feet-two, and he was billowing
clouds of lime-dust behind him. All I can figure is that, it being Friday afternoon and all,
the guards going off were so happy to be going off, and the guards coming on were so
downhearted to be coming on, that the members of the former group never got their heads
out of the clouds and those in the latter never got their noses off their shoetops ... and old
Sid Nedeau just sort of slipped out between the two.
So far as I know, Sid is still at large. Over the years, Andy Dufresne and I had a good
many laughs over Sid Nedeau's great escape, and when we heard about that airline
hijacking for ransom, the one where the guy parachuted from the back door of the
airplane, Andy swore up and down that D B Cooper's real name was Sid Nedeau.
'And he probably had a pocketful of baseline lime in his pocket for good luck,' Andy said.
'That lucky son of a bitch.'
But you should understand that a case like Sid Nedeau, or the fellow who got away clean
from the Sabbatus potato-field crew, guys like that are winning the prison version of the
Irish Sweepstakes. Purely a case of six different kinds of luck somehow jelling together
all at the same moment A stiff like Andy could wait ninety years and not get a similar
break.
Maybe you remember, a ways back, I mentioned a guy named Henley Backus, the
washroom foreman in the laundry. He came to Shawshank in 1922 and died in the prison
infirmary thirty-one years later. Escapes and escape attempts were a hobby of his, maybe
because he never quite dared to take the plunge himself. He could tell you a hundred
different schemes, all of them crackpot, and all of them had been tried in the Shank at one
time or another. My favourite was the tale of Beaver Morrison, a b & e convict who tried
to build a glider from scratch in the plate-factory basement The plans he was working
from were in a circa-1900 book called The Modern Boy's Guide to Fun and Adventure.
Beaver got it built without being discovered, or so the story goes, only to discover there
was no door from the basement big enough to get the damned thing out When Henley
told that story, you could bust a gut laughing, and he knew a dozen - no, two dozen -just
as funny.
When it came to detailing Shawshank bust-outs, Henley had it down chapter and verse.
He told me once that during his time there had been better than four hundred escape
attempts that he knew of. Really think about that for a moment before you just nod your
head and read on. Four hundred escape attempts! That comes out to 12.9 escape attempts
for every year Henley Backus was in Shawshank and keeping track of them. The Escape
Attempt of the Month Club. Of course most of them were pretty slipshod affairs, the sort
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of thing that ends up with a guard grabbing some poor, sidling slob's arm and growling,
'Where do you think you're going, you happy asshole?'
Henley said he'd class maybe sixty of them as more serious attempts, and he included the
'prison break' of 1937, the year before I arrived at the Shank. The new administration
wing was under construction then and fourteen cons got out, using construction
equipment in a poorly locked shed. The whole of southern Maine got into a panic over
those fourteen 'hardened criminals', most of whom were scared to death and had no more
idea of where they should go than a jackrabbit does when it's headlight-pinned to the
highway with a big truck bearing down on it Not one of those fourteen got away. Two of
them were shot dead - by civilians, not police officers or prison personnel -but none got
away.
How many had gotten away between 1938, when I came here, and that day in October
when Andy first mentioned Zihuatanejo to me? Putting my information and Henley's
together, I'd say ten. Ten that got away clean. And although it isn't the kind of thing you
can know for sure, I'd guess that at least half of those ten are doing time in other
institutions of lower learning like the Shank. Because you do get institutionalized. When
you take away a man's freedom and teach him to live in a cell, he seems to lose his ability
to think in dimensions. He's like that jackrabbit I mentioned, frozen in the oncoming
lights of the truck that is bound to kill it More often than not a con who's just out will pull
some dumb job that hasn't a chance in hell of succeeding ... and why? Because it'll get
him back inside. Back where he understands how things work.
Andy wasn't that way, but I was. The idea of seeing the Pacific sounded good, but I was
afraid that actually being there would scare me to death - the bigness of it
Anyhow, the day of that conversation about Mexico, and about Mr Peter Stevens ... that
was the day I began to believe that Andy had some idea of doing a disappearing act. I
hoped to God he would be careful if he did, and still, I wouldn't have bet money on his
chances of succeeding. Warden Norton, you see, was watching Andy with a special close
eye. Andy wasn't just another deadhead with a number to Norton; they had a working
relationship, you might say. Also, he had brains and he had heart Norton was determined
to use the one and crush the other.
As there are honest politicians on the outside - ones who stay bought - there are honest
prison guards, and if you are a good judge of character and if you have some loot to
spread around, I suppose it's possible that you could buy enough look-the-other-way to
make a break. I'm not the man to tell you such a thing has never been done, but Andy
Dufresne wasn't the man who could do it Because, as I've said, Norton was watching.
Andy knew it, and the screws knew it, too.
Nobody was going to nominate Andy for the Inside-Out programme, not as long as
Warden Norton was evaluating the nominations. And Andy was not the kind of man to
try a casual Sid Nedeau type of escape.
If I had been him, the thought of that key would have tormented me endlessly. I would
have been lucky to get two hours' worth of honest shuteye a night Buxton was less than
thirty miles from Shawshank. So near and yet so far.
I still thought his best chance was to engage a lawyer and try for the retrial Anything to
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get out from under Norton's thumb. Maybe Tommy Williams could be shut up by nothing
more than a cushy furlough programme, but I wasn't entirely sure. Maybe a good old
Mississippi hardass lawyer could crack him ... and maybe that lawyer wouldn't even have
to work that hard. Williams had honestly liked Andy. Every now and then I'd bring these
points up to Andy, who would only smile, his eyes far away, and say he was thinking
about it.
Apparently he'd been thinking about a lot of other things, as well.
In 1975, Andy Dufresne escaped from Shawshank. He hasn't been recaptured, and I don't
think he ever will be. In fact, I don't think Andy Dufresne even exists anymore. But I
think there's a man down in Zihuatanejo, Mexico named Peter Stevens. Probably running
a very new small hotel in this year of our Lord 1977.
I'll tell you what I know and what I think; that's about all I can do, isn't it?
On 12 March 1975, the cell doors in Cellblock 5 opened at 6.30 a.m., as they do every
morning around here except Sunday. And as they do every day except Sunday, the
inmates of those cells stepped forward into the corridor and formed two lines as the cell
doors slammed shut behind them. They walked up to the main cellblock gate, where they
were counted off by two guards before being sent on down to the cafeteria for a breakfast
