your underwear until it stops. The bleeding really is like a menstrual flow; it keeps up for
two, maybe three days, a slow trickle. Then it stops. No harm done, unless they've done
something even more unnatural to you. No physical harm done - but rape is rape, and
eventually you have to look at your face in the mirror again and decide what to make of
yourself.
Andy went through that alone, the way he went through everything alone in those days.
He must have come to the conclusion that others before him had come to, namely, that
there are only two ways to deal with the sisters: fight them and get taken, or just get
taken.
He decided to fight When Bogs and two of his buddies came after him a week or so after
the laundry incident ('I heard ya got broke in,' Bogs said, according to Ernie, who was
around at the time), Andy slugged it out with them. He broke the nose of a fellow named
Rooster MacBride, a heavy-gutted farmer who was in for beating his step-daughter to
death. Rooster died in here, I'm happy to add.
They took him, all three of them. When it was done, Rooster and the other egg - it might
have been Pete Verness, but I'm not completely sure - forced Andy down to his knees.
Bogs Diamond stepped in front of him. He had a pearl-handled razor in those days with
the words Diamond Pearl engraved on both sides of the grip. He opened it and said, I'm
gonna open my fly now, mister man, and you're going to swallow what I give you to
swallow. And when you done swallowed mine, you're gonna swallow Rooster's. I guess
you done broke his nose and I think he ought to have something to pay for it'
Andy said, 'Anything of yours that you stick in my mouth, you're going to lose it.'
Bogs looked at Andy like he was crazy, Ernie said.
'No,' he told Andy, talking to him slowly, like Andy was a stupid kid. 'You didn't
understand what I said. You do anything like that and I'll put all eight inches of this steel
into your ear. Get it?'
'I understand what you said. I don't think you understand me. I'm going to bite whatever
you stick into my mouth. You can put that razor in my brain, I guess, but you should
know that a sudden serious brain injury causes the victim to simultaneously urinate,
defecate... and bite down.'
He looked up at Bogs, smiling that little smile of his, old Ernie said, as if the three of
them had been discussing stocks and bonds with him instead of throwing it to him just as
hard as they could. Just as if he was wearing one of his three-piece bankers' suits instead
of kneeling on a dirty broom-closet floor with his pants around his ankles and blood
trickling down the insides of his thighs.
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'In fact,' he went on, 'I understand that the bite-reflex is sometimes so strong that the
victim's jaws have to be pried open with a crowbar or a jackhandle.'
Bogs didn't put anything in Andy's mouth that night in late February of 1948, and neither
did Rooster MacBride, and so far as I know, no one else ever did, either. What the three
of them did was to beat Andy within an inch of his life, and all four of them ended up
doing a jolt in solitary. Andy and Rooster MacBride went by way of the infirmary.
How many times did that particular crew have at him? I don't know. I think Rooster lost
his taste fairly early on -being in nose-splints for a month can do that to a fellow -and
Bogs Diamond left off that summer, all at once.
That was a strange thing. Bogs was found in his cell, badly beaten, one morning in early
June, when he didn't show up in the breakfast nose-count He wouldn't say who had done
it, or how they had gotten to him, but being in my business, I know that a screw can be
bribed to do almost anything accept get a gun for an inmate. They didn't make big
salaries then, and they don't now. And in those days there was no electronic locking
system, no closed-circuit TV, no master-switches which controlled whole areas of the
prison. Back in 1948, each cellblock had its own turnkey. A guard could have been
bribed real easy to let someone - maybe two or three someones - into the block, and, yes,
even into Diamond's cell.
Of course a job like that would have cost a lot of money. Not by outside standards, no.
Prison economics are on a smaller scale. When you've been in here a while, a dollar bill
in your hand looks like a twenty did outside. My guess is, that if Bogs was done, it cost
someone a serious piece of change - fifteen bucks, well say, for the turnkey, and two or
store apiece for each of the lump-up guys.
I'm not saying it was Andy Dufresne, but I do know that he brought in five hundred
dollars when he came, and he was a banker in the straight world - a man who understands
better than the rest of us the ways in which money can become power.
And I know this: After the beating - the three broken ribs, the haemorrhaged eye, the
sprained back and the dislocated hip - Bogs Diamond left Andy alone. In fact, after that
he left everyone pretty much alone. He got to be like a high wind in the summertime, all
bluster and no bite. You could say, in fact, that he turned into a 'weak sister'.
That was the end of Bogs Diamond, a man who might eventually have killed Andy if
Andy hadn't taken steps to prevent it (if it was him who took the steps). But it wasn't the
end of Andy's trouble with the sisters. There was a little hiatus, and then it began again,
although not so hard nor so often. Jackals like easy prey, and there were easier pickings
around than Andy Dufresne.
He always fought them, that's what I remember. He knew, I guess, that if you let them
have at you even once, without fighting it, it got that much easier to let them have their
way without fighting next time. So Andy would turn up with bruises on his face every
once in a while, and there was the matter of the two broken fingers six or eight months
after Diamond's beating. Oh yes - and sometime in late 1949, the man landed in the
infirmary with a broken cheekbone that was probably the result of someone swinging a
nice chunk of pipe with the business-end wrapped in flannel. He always fought back, and
as a result, he did his time in solitary. But don't think solitary was the hardship for Andy
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that it was for some men. He got along with himself.
The sisters was something he adjusted himself to - and then, in 1950, it stopped almost
completely. That is a part of my story that 111 get to in due time.
In the fall of 1948, Andy met me one morning in the exercise yard and asked me if I
could get him half a dozen rock-blankets.
'What the hell are those?' I asked.
He told me that was just what rockhounds called them; they were polishing cloths about
the size of dishtowels. They were heavily padded, with a smooth side and a rough side -
the smooth side like fine-grained sandpaper, the rough side almost as abrasive as
industrial steel wool (Andy also kept a box of that in his cell, although he didn't get it
from me - I imagine he kited it from the prison laundry).
I told him I thought we could do business on those, and I ended up getting them from the
very same rock-and-gem shop where I'd arranged to get the rock-hammer. This time I
charged Andy my usual ten per cent and not a penny more. I didn't see anything lethal or
even dangerous in a dozen 7" x 7" squares of padded cloth. Rock-blankets, indeed.
It was about five months later that Andy asked if I could get him Rita Hayworth. That
conversation took place in the auditorium, during a movie-show. Nowadays we get the
movie-shows once or twice a week, but back then the shows were a monthly event
Usually the movies we got had a morally uplifting message to them, and this one, The
Lost Weekend, was no different. The moral was that it's dangerous to drink. It was a
moral we could take some comfort in.
Andy manoeuvred to get next to me, and about halfway through the show he leaned a
little closer and asked if I could get him Rita Hayworth. I'll tell you the truth, it kind of
tickled me. He was usually cool, calm, and collected, but that night he was jumpy as hell,
almost embarrassed, as if he was asking me to get him a load of Trojans or one of those
sheepskin-lined gadgets that are supposed to 'enhance your solitary pleasure,' as the
magazines put it. He seemed overcharged, a man on the verge of blowing his radiator.
'I can get her,' I said. 'No sweat, calm down. You want the big one or the little one?' At
that time Rita was my best girl (a few years before it had been Betty Grable) and she
came in two sizes. For a buck you could get the little Rita. For two-fifty you could have
the big Rita, four feet high and all woman.
'The big one,' he said, not looking at me. I tell you, he was a hot sketch that night He was
blushing just like a kid trying to get into a kootch show with his big brother's draft-card.
'Can you do it?'
'Take it easy, sure I can. Does a bear shit in the woods?' The audience was applauding
and catcalling as the bugs came out of the walls to get Ray Milland, who was having a
bad case of the DT's.
'How soon?'
'A week. Maybe less.'
'Okay.' But he sounded disappointed, as if he had been hoping I had one stuffed down my
pants right then. 'How much?"
I quoted him the wholesale price. I could afford to give him this one at cost; he'd been a
good customer, what with his rock-hammer and his rock-blankets. Furthermore, he'd
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been a good boy - on more than one night when he was having his problems with Bogs,
Rooster, and the rest, I wondered how long it would be before he used the rock-hammer
to crack someone's head open.
Posters are a big part of my business, just behind the booze and cigarettes, usually half a
step ahead of the reefer. In the 60s the business exploded in every direction, with a lot of
people wanting funky hang-ups like Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, that Easy Rider poster.
But mostly it's girls; one pinup queen after another.
A few days after I spoke to Ernie, a laundry driver I did business with back then brought
in better than sixty posters, most of them Rita Hayworths. You may even remember the
picture; I sure do. Rita is dressed - sort of- in a bathing suit, one hand behind her head,
her eyes half closed, those full, sulky red lips parted. They called it Rita Hayworth, but
they might as well have called it Woman in Heat.
The prison administration knows about the black market, in case you were wondering.
Sure they do. They probably know as much about my business as I do myself. They live
with it because they know that a prison is like a big pressure cooker, and there have to be
vents somewhere to let off steam. They make the occasional bust, and I've done time in
solitary a time or three over the years, but when it's something like posters, they wink.
Live and let live. And when a big Rita Hayworth went up in some fishie's cell, the
assumption was that it came in the mail from a friend or a relative. Of course all the care-
packages from friends and relatives are opened and the contents inventoried, but who
goes back and re-checks the inventory sheets for something as harmless as a Rita
Hayworth or an Ava Gardner pin-up? When you're in a pressure-cooker you learn to live
and let live or somebody will carve you a brand-new mouth just above the Adam's apple.
You learn to make allowances.
It was Ernie again who took the poster up to Andy's cell, 14, my own, 6. And it was Ernie
who brought back the written in Andy's careful hand, just one word: Thanks.'
A little while later, as they filed us out for morning chow, I glanced into his ceil and saw
Rita over his bunk in all her swimsuited glory, one hand behind her head, her eyes half-
closed, those soft, satiny lips parted. It was over his bunk when he could look at her
nights, after lights out, in the glow of the arc sodiums in the exercise yard.
But in the bright morning sunlight, there were dark slashes across her face - the shadow
of the bars on his single slit-window.
Now I'm going to tell you what happened in mid-May of 1950 that finally ended Andy's
three-year series of skirmishes with the sisters. It was also the incident which eventually
got him out of the laundry and into the library, where he filled out his work-time until he
left our happy little family earlier this year.
You may have noticed now much of what I've told you Lready is hearsay - someone saw
something and told me and I told you. Well, in some cases I've simplified it even more
than it really was, and have actually repeated (or will repeat) fourth- or fifth-hand
information. That's the way it s here. The grapevine is very real, and you have to use it if
you're going to stay ahead. Also, of course, you have to know how to pick out the grains
of truth from the chaff of lies, rumours, and wish-it-had-beens.
You may also have gotten the idea that I'm describing someone who's more legend than
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man, and I would have to agree that there's some truth to that. To us long-timers who
knew Andy over a space of years, there was an element of fantasy to him, a sense,
almost, of myth-magic, if you get what I mean. That story I passed on about Andy
refusing to give Bogs Diamond a head-job is part of that myth, and how he kept on
fighting the sisters is part of it, and how he got the library job is part of it, too ... but with
one important difference: I was there and I saw what happened, and I swear on my
mother's name that it's all true. The oath of a convicted murderer may not be worth much,
but believe this: I don't lie.
Andy and I were on fair speaking terms by then. The guy fascinated me. Looking back to
