he had this pigeon in his cell. From 1945 until 1953, when they let him out, he had that
pigeon. He wasn't any Birdman of Alcatraz; he just had this pigeon. Jake, he called him.
He set Jake free a day before he, Sherwood, that is, was to walk, and Jake flew away just
as pretty as you could want. But about a week after Sherwood Bolton left our happy little
family, a friend of mine called me over to the west corner of the exercise yard, where
Sherwood used to hang out, and my friend said: 'Isn't that Jake, Red?' It was. That pigeon
was just as dead as a turd.
I remember the first time Andy Dufresne got in touch with me for something; I remember
like it was yesterday. That wasn't the time he wanted Rita Hayworth, though. That came
question.
I'll tell you,' I said. 'If you wanted a toothbrush, I wouldn't ask questions. I'd just quote
you a price. Because a toothbrush, you see, is a non-lethal sort of a weapon.'
"You have strong feelings about lethal weapons?'
'I do.'
An old friction-taped baseball flew towards us and he turned, cat-quick, and picked it out
of the air. It was a move Frank Malzone would have been proud of. Andy flicked the bail
back to where it had come from -just a quick and easy-looking flick of the wrist, but that
throw had some mustard on it, just the same. I could see a lot of people were watching us
with one eye as they went about their business. Probably the guards in tile tower were
watching, too. I won't gild the lily; there are cons that swing weight in any prison, maybe
four or five in a small one, maybe two or three dozen in a big one. At Shawshank I was
one of those with some weight, and what I thought of Andy Dufresne would have a lot to
do with how his time went. He probably knew it too, but he wasn't kowtowing or sucking
up to me, and I respected him for that.
'Fair enough. Ill tell you what it is and why I want it A rock-hammer looks like a
miniature pickaxe - about so long.' He held his hands about a foot apart, and that was
when I first noticed how neatly kept his nails were. 'It's got a small sharp pick on one end
and a fiat, blunt hammerhead on the other. I want it because I like rocks.'
'Rocks,' I said.
'Squat down here a minute,' he said.
I humoured him. We hunkered down on our haunches like Indians.
Andy took a handful of exercise yard dirt and began to sift it between his neat hands, so it
emerged in a fine cloud. Small pebbles were left over, one or two sparkly, the rest dull
and plain. One of the dull ones was quartz, but it was only dull until you'd rubbed it
clean. Then it had a nice milky glow. Andy did the cleaning and then tossed it to me. I
caught it and named it.
'Quartz, sure,' he said, 'And look. Mica. Shale, silted granite. Here's a piece of graded
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limestone, from when they cut this place out of the side of the hill.' He tossed them away
and dusted his hands. 'I'm a rockhound. At least... I was a rockhound. In my old life. I'd
like to be one again, on a limited scale.'
'Sunday expeditions in the exercise yard?' I asked, standing up. It was a silly idea, and yet
... seeing that little piece of quartz had given my heart a funny tweak. I don't know
exactly why; just an association with the outside world, I suppose. You didn't think of
such things in terms of the yard. Quartz was something you picked out of a small, quick-
running stream.
'Better to have Sunday expeditions here than no Sunday expeditions at all,' he said.
'You could plant an item like that rock-hammer in somebody's skull,' I remarked.
'I have no enemies here,' he said quietly.
'No?' I smiled. 'Wait awhile.'
'If there's trouble, I can handle it without using a rock-hammer.'
'Maybe you want to try an escape? Going under the wall? Because if you do -'
He laughed politely. When I saw the rock-hammer three weeks later, I understood why.
"You know,' I said, *if anyone sees you with it, they'll take it may. If tbey saw you with a
spoon, they'd take it away. i: you going to do, just sit down here in the yard and 3' away?'
"Oh, I believe I can do a lot better than that.'
I nodded. That part of it really wasn't my business, anyway. A man engages my services
to get him something. Whether he can keep it or not after I get it is his business.
'How much would an item like that go for?' I asked. I was Beginning to enjoy his quiet,
low-key style. When you've spent ten years in stir, as I had then, you can get awfully
tired of the bellowers and the braggarts and the loud-mouths. Yes, I dink it would be fair
to say I liked Andy from the first.
'Eight dollars in any rock-and-gem shop,' he said, 'but I realize that in a business like
yours you work on a cost-plus basis-'
'Cost plus ten per cent is my going rate, but I have to go up some on a dangerous item.
For something like the gadget you're talking about, it takes a little more goose-grease to
get the wheels turning. Let's say ten dollars.'
'Ten it is'
I looked at him, smiling a little. 'Have you got ten dollars?'
'I do,' he said quietly.
A long time after, I discovered that he had better than five hundred. He had brought it in
with him. When they check you in at this hotel, one of the bellhops is obliged to bend you
over and take a look up your works - but there are a lot of works, and, not to put too fine
a point on it, a man who is really determined can get a fairly large item quite a ways up
them - far enough to be out of sight, unless the bellhop you happen to draw is in the mood
to pull on a rubber glove and go prospecting.
That's fine,' I said. 'You ought to know what I expect if you get caught with what I get
you.'
'I suppose I should,' he said, and I could tell by the slight change in his grey eyes that he
knew exactly what I was going to say. It was a slight lightening, a gleam of his special
ironic humour.
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'If you get caught, you'll say you found it. That's about the long and short of it. They'll put
you in solitary for three or four weeks ... plus, of course, you'll lose your toy and you'll
get a black mark on your record. If you give them my name, you and I will never do
business again. Not for so much as a pair of shoelaces or a bag of Bugler. And I'll send
some fellows around to lump you up. I don't like violence, but you'll understand my
position. I can't allow it to get around that I can't handle myself. That would surely finish
me.'
'Yes. I suppose it would, I understand, and you don't need to worry.'
'I never worry,' I said. 'In a place like this there's no percentage in it.'
He nodded and walked away. Three days later he walked up beside me in the exercise
yard during the laundry's morning break. He didn't speak or even look my way, but
pressed a picture of the Hon. Alexander Hamilton into my hand as neatly as a good
magician does a card-trick. He was a man who adapted fast. I got him his rock-hammer. I
had it in my cell for one night, and it was just as he described it It was no tool for escape
(it would have taken a man just about six hundred years to tunnel under the wall using
that rock-hammer, I figured), but I still felt some misgivings. If you planted that pickaxe
end in a man's head, he would surely never listen to Fibber McGee and Molly on the
radio again. And Andy had already begun having trouble with the sisters. I hoped it
wasn't them he was wanting the rock-hammer for.
In the end, I trusted my judgment. Early the next morning, twenty minutes before the
wake-up horn went off, I slipped the rock-hammer and a package of Camels to Ernie, the
old trusty who swept the Cellblock 5 corridors until he was let free in 1956. He slipped it
into his tunic without a word, and I didn't see the rock-hammer again for seven years.
The following Sunday Andy walked over to me in the exercise yard again. He was
nothing to look at that day, I can :"il you. His lower lip was swelled up so big it looked
like a summer sausage, his right eye was swollen half-shut, and ±ere was an ugly
washboard scrape across one cheek. He was having his troubles with the sisters, all right,
but he never mentioned them. 'Thanks for the tool,' he said, and walked nray.
I watched him curiously. He walked a few steps, saw in the dirt, bent over, and picked it
up. It was a small rock. Prison fatigues, except for those worn by mechanics when they're
on the job, have no pockets. But there are ways to get around that. The little pebble
disappeared up Andy's sleeve and didn't come down. I admired that... and I admired him.
In spite of the problems he was having, he was going on with his life. There are
thousands who don't or won't or can't, and plenty of them aren't in prison, either. And I
noticed that, although his face still looked as if a twister had happened to it, his hands
were still neat and clean, the nails well-kept.
I didn't see much of him over the next six months; Andy spent a lot of that time in
solitary.
A few words about the sisters.
In a lot of pens they are known as bull queers or jailhouse susies - just lately the term in
fashion is 'killer queens'. But in they were always the sisters. I don't know why, but other
than the name I guess there was no difference.
It comes as no surprise to most these days that there's a lot of buggery going on inside the
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walls - except to some of the new fish, maybe, who have the misfortune to be young,
slim, good-looking, and unwary - but homosexuality, like straight sex, comes in a
hundred different shapes and forms. There are men who can't stand to be without sex of
some kind and turn to another man to keep from going crazy. Usually what follows is an
arrangement between two fundamentally "Heterosexual men, although I've sometimes
wondered if they are quite as heterosexual as they thought they were going to be when
they get back to their wives or their girlfriends.
There are also men who get 'turned' in prison. In the current parlance they 'go gay', or
'come out of the closet'. Mostly (but not always) they play the female, and their favours
are competed for fiercely.
And then there are the sisters.
They are to prison society what the rapist is to the society outside the walls. They're
usually long-timers, doing hard bullets for brutal crimes. Their prey is the young, the
weak, and the inexperienced ... or, as in the case of Andy Dufresne, the weak-looking.
Their hunting grounds are the showers, the cramped, tunnel-like area way behind the
industrial washers in the laundry, sometimes the infirmary. On more than one occasion
rape has occurred in the closet-sized projection booth behind the auditorium. Most often
what the sisters take by force they could have had for free, if they wanted it; those who
have been turned always seem to have 'crushes' on one sister or another, like teenage girls
with their Sinatras, Presleys, or Redfords. But for the sisters, the joy has always been in
taking it by force... and I guess it always will be.
Because of his small size and fair good looks (and maybe also because of that very
quality of self-possession I had admired), the sisters were after Andy from the day he
walked in. If this was some kind of fairy story, I'd tell you that Andy fought the good
fight until they left him alone. I wish I could say that, but I can't. Prison is no fairy-tale
world.
The first time for him was in the shower less than three days after he joined our happy
Shawshank family. Just a lot of slap and tickle that time, I understand. They like to size
you up before they make their real move, like jackals finding out if the prey is as weak
and hamstrung as it looks.
Andy punched back and bloodied the lip of a big, hulking sister named Bogs Diamond -
gone these many years since to who knows where. A guard broke it up before it could go
any further, but Bogs promised to get him - and Bogs did.
The second time was behind the washers in the laundry. A lot has gone on in that long,
dusty, and narrow space over the years; the guards know about it and just let it be. It's
dim and littered with bags of washing and bleaching compound, drums of Hexlite
catalyst, as harmless as salt if your hands are dry, murderous as battery acid if they're
wet. The guards don't like to go back there. There's no room to manoeuvre, and one of the
first things they teach them when they come to work in a place like this is to never let the
cons get you in a place where you can't back up.
Bogs wasn't there that day, but Henry Backus, who had been washroom foreman down
there since 1922, told me that four of his friends were. Andy held them at bay for a while
with a scoop of Hexlite, threatening to throw it in their eyes if they came any closer, but
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he tripped trying to back around one of the big Washex four-pockets. That was ail it took.
They were on him.
I guess the phrase gang-rape is one that doesn't change much from one generation to the
next. That's what they did to him, those four sisters. They bent him over a gearbox and
one of them held a Phillips screwdriver to his temple while they gave him the business. It
rips you up some, but not bad - am I speaking from personal experience, you ask? - I only
wish I weren't. You bleed for a while. If you don't want some clown asking you if you
just started your period, you wad up a bunch of toilet paper and keep it down the back of
