In those days, you were taken care of in terms of absolute black and white. You were either guilty or innocent. If you were guilty, you were either hung or put in gaol. And if you were sentenced to gaol, you did not go to an institution. No, you dug your own gaol with a spade provided by the Province of Maine. You dug it as wide and as deep as you could during the period between sunup and sundown. Then they gave you a couple of skins and a bucket, and down you went. Once down, the gaoler would bar the top of your hole, throw down some grain or maybe a piece of maggoty meat once or twice a week, and maybe there would be a dipperful of barley soup on Sunday night. You pissed in the bucket, and you held up the same bucket for water when the gaoler came around at six in the morning. When it rained, you used the bucket to bail out your gaolcell... unless, that is, you wanted to drown like a rat in a rainbarrel. No one spent a long time in the hole as it was called; thirty months was an unusually long term, and so far as Ive been able to tell, the longest term ever spent from which an inmate actually emerged alive was served by the socalled Durham Boy, a fourteenyearold psychopath who castrated a schoolmate with a piece of rusty metal. He did seven years, but of course he went in young and strong. You have to remember that for a crime that was more serious than petty theft or blasphemy or forgetting to put a snotrag in your pocket when out of doors on the Sabbath, you were hung. For low crimes such as those just mentioned and for others like them, youd do your three or six or nine months in the hole and come out fishbelly white, cringing from the wideopen spaces, your eyes halfblind, your teeth more than likely rocking and rolling in their sockets from the scurvy, your feet crawling with fungus. Jolly old Province of Maine. Yohoho and a bottle of rum. Shawshanks Solitary Wing was nowhere as bad as that... I guess. Things come in three major degrees in the human experience, I think. Theres good, bad, and terrible. And as you go down into progressive darkness toward terrible, it gets harder and harder to make subdivisions. To get to Solitary Wing you were led down twentythree steps to a basement level where the only sound was the drip of water. The only light was supplied by a series of dangling sixtywatt bulbs. The cells were kegshaped, like those wallsafes rich people sometimes hide behind a picture. Like a safe, the round doorways were hinged, and solid instead of barred. You got ventilation from above, but no light except for your own sixtywatt bulb, which was turned off from a masterswitch promptly at 800 P.M., an hour before lightsout in the rest of the prison. The lightbulb wasnt in a wire mesh cage or anything like that. The feeling was that if you wanted to exist down there in the dark, you were welcome to it. Not many did ... but after eight, of course, you had no choice. You had a bunk bolted to the wall and a can with no toilet seat. You had three ways to spend your time sitting, shitting, or sleeping. Big choice. Twenty days could get to seem like a year. Thirty days could seem like two, and forty days like ten. Sometimes you could hear rats in the ventilation system. In a situation like that, subdivisions of terrible tend to get lost. If anything at all can be said in favor of solitary, its just that you get time to think. Andy had twenty days in which to think while he enjoyed his grain and drain, and when he got out he requested another meeting with the warden. Request denied. Such a meeting, the warden told him, would be counterproductive. Thats another of those phrases you have to master before you can go to work in the prisons and corrections field. Patiently, Andy renewed his request. And renewed it. And renewed it. He had changed, had Andy Dufresne. Suddenly, as that spring of 1963 bloomed around us, there were lines in his face and sprigs of gray showing in his hair. He had lost that little trace of a smile that always seemed to linger around his mouth. His eyes stared out into space more often, and you get to know that when a man stares that way, he is counting up the years served, the months, the weeks, the days. He renewed his request and renewed it. He was patient. He had nothing but time. It got to be summer. In Washington, President Kennedy was promising a fresh assault on poverty and on civil rights inequalities, not knowing he had only half a year to live. In Liverpool, a musical group called The Beatles was emerging as a force to be reckoned with in British music, but I guess that no one Stateside had yet heard of them. The Boston Red Sox, still four years away from what New England folks call The Miracle of 67, were languishing in the cellar of the American League. All of those things were going on out in a larger world where people walked free. Norton saw him near the end of June, and this conversation I heard about from Andy himself some seven years later. If its the squeeze, you dont have to worry, Andy told Norton in a low voice. Do you think Id talk that up? Id be cutting my own throat. Id be just as indictable as Thats enough, Norton interrupted. His face was as long and cold as a slate gravestone. He leaned back in his office chair until the back of his head almost touched the sampler reading HIS JUDGMENT COMETH AND THAT RIGHT EARLY. But Dont you ever mention money to me again, Norton said. Not in this office, not anywhere. Not unless you want to see that library turned back into a storage room and paintlocker again. Do you understand? I was trying to set your mind at ease, thats all. Wellnow, when I need a sorry son of a bitch like you to set my mind at ease, Ill retire. I agreed to this appointment because I got tired of being pestered, Dufresne. I want it to stop. If you want to buy this particular Brooklyn Bridge, thats your affair. Dont make it mine. I could hear crazy stories like yours twice a week if I wanted to lay myself open to them. Every sinner in this place would be using me for a crying towel. I had more respect for you. But this is the end. The end. Have we got an understanding? Yes, Andy said. But Ill be hiring a lawyer, you know. Whats in Gods name for? I think we can put it together, Andy said. With Tommy Williams and with my testimony and corroborative testimony from records and employees at the country club, I think we can put it together. Tommy Williams is no longer an inmate of this facility. What? Hes been transferred. Transferred where? Cashman. At that, Andy fell silent. He was an intelligent man, but it would have taken an extraordinarily stupid man not to smell deal all over that. Cashman was a minimumsecurity prison far up north in Aroostook County. The inmates pick a lot of potatoes, and thats hard work, but they are paid a decent wage for their labor and they can attend classes at CVI, a pretty decent vocationaltechnical institute, if they so desire. More important to a fellow like Tommy, a fellow with a young wife and a child, Cashman had a furlough program... which meant a chance to live like a normal man, at least on the weekends. A chance to build a model plane with his kid, have sex with his wife, maybe go on a picnic. Norton had almost surely dangled all of that under Tommys nose with only one string attached not one more word about Elwood Blatch, not now, not ever. Or youll end up doing hard time in Thomaston down there on scenic Route 1 with the real hard guys, and instead of having sex with your wife youll be having it with some old bull queer. But why? Andy said. Why would As a favor to you, Norton said calmly, I checked with Rhode Island. They did have an inmate named Elwood Blatch. He was given what they call a PPprovisional parole, another one of these crazy liberal programs to put criminals out on the streets. Hes since disappeared. Andy said The warden down there... is he a friend of yours? Sam Norton gave Andy a smile as cold as a deacons watchchain. We are acquainted, he said. Why? Andy repeated. Cant you tell me why you did it? You knew I wasnt going to talk about... about anything you might have had going. You knew that. So why? Because people like you make me sick, Norton said deliberately. I like you right where you are, Mr. Dufresne, and as long as I am warden here at Shawshank, you are going to be right here. You see, you used to think that you were better than anyone else. I have gotten pretty good at seeing that on a mans face. I marked it on yours the first time I walked into the library. It might as well have been written on your forehead in capital letters. That look is gone now, and I like that just fine. It is not just that you are a useful vessel, never think that. It is simply that men like you need to learn humility. Why, you used to walk around that exercise yard as if it was a living room and you were at one of those cocktail parties where the hellbound walk around coveting each others wives and husbands and getting swinishly drunk. But you dont walk around that way anymore. And Ill be watching to see if you should start to walk that way again. Over a period of years, Ill be watching you with great pleasure. Now get the hell out of here. Okay. But all the extracurricular activities stop now, Norton. The investment counseling, the scams, the free tax advice. It all stops. Get H and R Block to tell you how to declare your income. Warden Nortons face first went brickred... and then all the color fell out of it. Youre going back into solitary for that. Thirty days. Bread and water. Another black mark. And while youre in, think about this if anything thats been going on should stop, the library goes. I will make it my personal business to see that it goes back to what it was before you came here. And I will make your life... very hard. Very difficult. Youll do the hardest time its possible to do. Youll lose that onebunk Hilton down in Cellblock Five, for starters, and youll lose those rocks on the windowsill, and youll lose any protection the guards have given you against the sodomites. You will ... lose everything. Clear? I guess it was clear enough. Time continued to passthe oldest trick in the world, and maybe the only one that really is magic. But Andy Dufresne had changed. He had grown harder. Thats the only way I can think of to put it. He went on doing Warden Nortons dirty work and he held onto the library, so outwardly things were about the same. He continued to have his birthday drinks and his yearend holiday drinks; he continued to share out the rest of each bottle. I got him fresh rockpolishing cloths from time to time, and in 1967 I got him a new rockhammerthe one Id gotten him nineteen years ago had, as I told you, plumb worn out. Nineteen years! When you say it sudden like that, those three syllables sound like the thud and doublelocking of a tomb door. The rockhammer, which had been a tendollar item back then, went for twentytwo by 67. He and I had a sad little grin over that. Andy continued to shape and polish the rocks he found in the exercise yard, but the yard was smaller by then; half of what had been there in 1950 had been asphalted over in 1962. Nonetheless, he found enough to keep him occupied, I guess. When he had finished with each rock he would put it carefully on his window ledge, which faced east. He told me he liked to look at them in the sun, the pieces of the planet he had taken up from the dirt and shaped. Schists, quartzes, granites. Funny little micasculptures that were held together with airplane glue. Various sedimentary conglomerates that were polished and cut in such a way that you could see why Andy called them millennium sandwichesthe layers of different material that had built up over a period of decades and centuries. Andy would give his stones and his rocksculptures away from time to time in order to make room for new ones. He gave me the greatest number, I thinkcounting the stones that looked like matched cufflinks, I had five. There was one of the micasculptures I told you about, carefully crafted to look like a man throwing a javelin, and two of the sedimentary conglomerates, all the levels showing in smoothly polished crosssection. Ive still got them, and I take them down every so often and think about what a man can do, if he has time enough and the will to use it, a drop at a time. So, on the outside, at least, things were about the same. If Norton had wanted to break Andy as badly as he had said, he would have had to look below the surface to see the change. But if he had seen how different Andy had become, I think Norton would have been wellsatisfied with the four years following his clash with Andy. He had told Andy that Andy walked around the exercise yard as if he were at a cocktail party. That isnt the way I would have put it, but I know what he meant. It goes back to what I said about Andy wearing his freedom like an invisible coat, about how he never really developed a prison mentality. His eyes never got that dull look. He never developed the walk that men get when the day is over and they are going back to their cells for another endless nightthat flatfooted, humpshouldered walk. Andy walked with his shoulders squared, and his step was always light, as if he were heading home to a good homecooked meal and a good woman instead of to a tasteless mess of soggy vegetables, lumpy mashed potato, and a slice or two of that fatty, gristly stuff most of the cons called mystery meat... that, and a picture of Raquel Welch on the wall. But for those four years, although he never became exactly like the others, he did become silent, introspective, and brooding. Who could blame him? So maybe it was Warden Norton who was pleased... at least, for awhile. His dark mood broke around the time of the 1967 World Series. That was the dream year, the year the Red Sox won the pennant instead of placing ninth, as the Las Vegas bookies had predicted. When it happenedwhen they won the American League pennanta 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 cant explain that feeling now, any more than an exBeatlemaniac 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 wasnt 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 didnt 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 brightgold 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 weektossing 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 pickedover carepackages. 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. Its 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 thirtyyear man. Sixty per cent of my life spent in Shawshank State Prison. Think youll ever get out? Sure. When I have a long white beard and just about three marbles left rolling around upstairs. 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 winters almost right on top of you. He nodded, and we were silent for awhile. When I get out of here, Andy said finally, Im going where its 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 Im goin, Red? Nope. Zihuatanejo, he said, rolling the word softly from his tongue like music. Down in Mexico. Its a little place maybe twenty miles from Playa Azul and Mexico Highway Thirtyseven. Its a hundred miles northwest of Acapulco on the Pacific Ocean. You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific? I told him I didnt. They say it has no memory. And thats 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 diamonds dirt infield, which would be under a foot of snow before long. Zihuatanejo. Im going to have a little hotel down there. Six cabanas along the beach, and six more set further back, for the highway trade. Ill have a guy wholl take my guests out charterfishing. Therell be a trophy for the guy who catches the biggest marlin of the season, and Ill put his picture up in the lobby. It wont be a family place. Itll 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. Thats 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 rightthinking hurricane would ever dare wipe out all these Rembrandts, my two Degas horses, my Grant Woods, and my Bentons. Furthermore, God wouldnt allow it. And if worse comes to worst, theyre insured. Thats 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 itll change back in order to put his house on groundzero again. This second type of guy knows theres no harm in hoping for the best as long as youre 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 didnt have much time, but in the time I had, I operated. I had a friendjust about the only person who stood by mewho 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. Didnt cut any corners. Didnt they freeze your estate? I was charged with murder, Red, not dead! You cant freeze the assets of an innocent manthank God. And it was awhile before they even got brave enough to charge me with the crime. Jimmy friendand 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, Id say you did. But when I came to Shawshank it was all safe. Its still safe. Outside these walls, Red, theres a man that no living soul has ever seen face to face. He has a Social Security card and a Maine drivers license. Hes 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 couldnt believe it. Me. Youre 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, Im 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 believeda 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 thats 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 moneymy money with all the taxes on it paid so the IRS wouldnt get too interestedand 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 theyd invested in since 1950 or so, and two or three of them will be things Peter Stevens was into. If I hadnt ended up in here, Id probably be worth seven or eight million bucks by now. Id 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. It was hoping for the best and expecting the worstnothing 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 didnt say anything for awhile. I guess I was trying to absorb the idea that this small, spare man in prison gray 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 werent kidding, I said at last. For that kind of dough you could have hired Clarence Darrow, or whoevers passing for him these days. Why didnt 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 hed 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 Stevenss money from inside here, Ill lose every cent of it. My friend Jim could have arranged it, but Jims dead. You see the problem? I saw it. For all the good that 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 stocksandbonds page of the PressHerald. Its a tough life if you dont weaken, I guess. Ill tell you how it is, Red. Theres a big hayfield in the town of Buxton. You know where Buxton is at, dont you? I said I did. It lies right next door to Scarborough. Thats right. And at the north end of this particular hayfield theres 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. Its a piece of volcanic glass, and until 1947 it was a paperweight on my office desk. My friend Jim put it in that wall. Theres a key underneath it. The key opens a safe deposit box in the Portland branch of the Casco Bank. I guess youre in a peck of trouble, I said. When your friend Jim died, the IRS must have opened all of his safe deposit boxes. Along with the executor of his will, of course. Andy smiled and tapped the side of my head. Not bad. Theres 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 Jims 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 Social Security card, and his drivers license. The license is six years out of date because Jim died six years ago, true, but its still perfectly renewable for a fivedollar fee. His stock certificates are there, the taxfree 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 Ill tell you something else, Redfor the last twenty years, give or take, I have been watching the papers with a more than usual interest for news of any construction project in Buxton. I keep thinking that someday soon Im going to read that theyre putting a highway through there, or erecting a new community hospital, or building a shopping center. 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 its going to be. I just cant afford to wait that long. I keep thinking about Zihuatanejo and that small hotel. Thats all I want from my life now, Red, and I dont think thats too much to want. I didnt kill Glenn Quentin and I didnt kill my wife, and that hotel... its not too much to want. To swim and get a tan and sleep in a room with open windows and space... thats not too much to want. He slung the stones away. You know, Red, he said in an offhand voice. A place like that... Id 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 wasnt 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 couldnt do it, I said. I couldnt get along on the outside. Im what they call an institutional man now. In here Im 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 rockhammers or one particular record or a boatinabottle model kit, you can use the fucking Yellow Pages. In here, Im the fucking Yellow Pages. I wouldnt know how to begin. Or where. You underestimate yourself, he said. Youre a selfeducated man, a selfmade man. A rather remarkable man, I think. Hell, I dont even have a high school diploma. I know that, he said. But it isnt just a piece of paper that makes a man. And it isnt just prison that breaks one, either. I couldnt 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 hardass parole board and a psalmsinging warden who liked Andy Dufresne right where he was. After all, Andy was a lapdog who could do taxreturns. 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 foolishit dragged at my brain like a fishhook. I just couldnt 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 blacksmiths anvil. I was trying to rock the stone up so I could get the key that was underneath. It wouldnt 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 dont go over the wall, though, not at Shawshank, not if youre 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 bestmaybe oddly, maybe not so oddlyare 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 Nortons famous InsideOut 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 InsideOuters were picking potatoes in Sabbatus. It was the third of November and the work was almost done. There was a guard named Henry Pughand he is no longer a member of our happy little family, believe mesitting 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) tenpoint 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 oclock inside whistle blew, signalling the 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 and the guards coming on duty and those going off mingle. Theres a lot of backslapping 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 threeinch baseline all the way from home plate 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. Dont ask me how he did it. He was dressed in his prison uniform, he stood sixfeettwo, and he was billowing clouds of limedust 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 Nedeaus 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. Coopers 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 potatofield 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 thirtyone 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 favorite was the tale of Beaver Morrison, a be convict who tried to build a glider from scratch in the platefactory basement. The plans he was working from were in a circa1900 book called The Modern Boys 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 dozenno, two dozenalmost as funny. When it came to detailing Shawshank bustouts, 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 EscapeAttemptoftheMonth Club. Of course most of them were pretty slipshod affairs, the sort of thing that ends up with a guard grabbing some poor, sidling slobs arm and growling, Where do you think youre going, you happy asshole? Henley said hed 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 its headlightpinned to the highway with a big truck bearing down on it. Not one of those fourteen got away. Two of them were shot deadby civilians, not police officers or prison personnelbut 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 Henleys together, Id say ten. Ten that got away clean. And although it isnt the kind of thing you can know for sure, Id 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 mans freedom and teach him to live in a cell, he seems to lose his ability to think in dimensions. Hes 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 whos just out will pull some dumb job that hasnt a chance in hell of succeeding... and why? Because itll get him back inside. Back where he understands how things work. Andy wasnt 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 deaththe 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 wouldnt have bet money on his chances of succeeding. Warden Norton, you see, was watching Andy with a special close eye. Andy wasnt just another deadhead with a number to Norton; they had a working relationship, you might say. Also, Andy had brains and he had heart. Norton was determined to use the one and crush the other. As there are honest politicians on the outsideones who stay boughtthere are honest prison guards, and if you are a good judge of character and if you have some loot to spread around, I suppose its possible that you could buy enough looktheotherway to make a break. Im not the man to tell you such a thing has never been done, but Andy Dufresne wasnt the man who could do it. Because, as Ive said, Norton was watching. Andy knew it, and the screws knew it, too. Nobody was going to nominate Andy for the InsideOut program, 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 get out from under Nortons thumb. Maybe Tommy Williams could be shut up by nothing more than a cushy furlough program, but I wasnt entirely sure. Maybe a good old Mississippi hardass lawyer could crack him ... and maybe that lawyer wouldnt even have to work that hard. Williams had honestly liked Andy. Every now and then Id bring these points up to Andy, who would only smile, his eyes far away, and say he was thinking about it. Apparently hed been thinking about a lot of other things, as well. In 1975, Andy Dufresne escaped from Shawshank. He hasnt been recaptured, and I dont think he ever will be. In fact, I dont think Andy Dufresne even exists anymore. But I think theres a man down in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, named Peter Stevens. Probably running a very new small hotel in this year of our Lord 1976. Ill tell you what I know and what I think; thats about all I can do, isnt it? On March 12th, 1975, the cell doors in Cellblock 5 opened at 630 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 of oatmeal, scrambled eggs, and fatty bacon. All of this went according to routine until the count at the cellblock gate. There should have been twentyseven. Instead, there were twentysix. After a call to the Captain of the Guards, Cellblock 5 was allowed to go to breakfast. The Captain of the Guards, a not halfbad fellow named Richard Gonyar, and his assistant, a jolly prick named Dave Burkes, came down to Cellblock 5 right away. Gonyar reopened the cell doors and he and Burkes went down the corridor together, dragging their sticks over the bars, their guns out. In a case like that what you usually have is someone who has been taken sick in the night, so sick he cant even step out of his cell in the morning. More rarely, someone has died... or committed suicide. But this time, they found a mystery instead of a sick man or a dead man. They found no man at all. There were fourteen cells in Cellblock 5, seven to a side, all fairly neatrestriction of visiting privileges is the penalty for a sloppy cell at Shawshankand all very empty. Gonyars first assumption was that there had been a miscount or a practical joke. So instead of going off to work after breakfast, the inmates of Cellblock 5 were sent back to their cells, joking and happy. Any break in the routine was always welcome. Cell doors opened; prisoners stepped in; cell doors closed. Some clown shouting, I want my lawyer, I want my lawyer, you guys run this place just like a frigging prison. Burkes Shut up in there, or Ill rank you. The clown I ranked your wife, Burkie. Gonyar Shut up, all of you, or youll spend the day in there. He and Burkes went up the line again, counting noses. They didnt have to go far. Who belongs in this cell? Gonyar asked the rightside night guard. Andrew Dufresne, the rightside answered, and that was all it took. Everything stopped being routine right then. The balloon went up. In all the prison movies Ive seen, this wailing horn goes off when theres been a break. That never happens at Shawshank. The first thing Gonyar did was to get in touch with the warden. The second thing was to get a search of the prison going. The third was to alert the state police in Scarborough to the possibility of a breakout. That was the routine. It didnt call for them to search the suspected escapees cell, and so no one did. Not then. Why would they? It was a case of what you see is what you get. It was a small square room, bars on the window and bars on the sliding door. There was a toilet and an empty cot. Some pretty rocks on the windowsill. And the poster, of course. It was Linda Ronstadt by then. The poster was right over his bunk. There had been a poster there, in that exact same place, for twentysix years. And when someoneit was Warden Norton himself, as it turned out, poetic justice if there ever was anylooked behind it, they got one hell of a shock. But that didnt happen until sixthirty that night, almost twelve hours after Andy had been reported missing, probably twenty hours after he had actually made his escape. Norton hit the roof. I have it on good authorityChester, the trusty, who was waxing the hall floor in the Admin Wing that day. He didnt have to polish any keyplates with his ear that day; he said you could hear the warden clear down to Records  Files as he chewed on Rich Gonyars ass. What do you mean, youre satisfied hes not on the prison grounds? What does that mean? It means you didnt find him! You better find him! You better! Because I want him! Do you hear me? I want him! Gonyar said something. Didnt happen on your shift? Thats what you say. So far as I can tell, no one knows when it happened. Or how. Or if it really did. Now, I want him in my office by three oclock this afternoon, or some heads are going to roll. I can promise you that, and I always keep my promises. Something else from Gonyar, something that seemed to provoke Norton to even greater rage. No? Then look at this! Look at this! You recognize it? Last nights tally for Cellblock Five. Every prisoner accounted for! Dufresne was locked up last night at nine and it is impossible for him to be gone now! It is impossible! Now you find him! But at three that afternoon Andy was still among the missing. Norton himself stormed down to Cellblock 5 a few hours later, where the rest of us had been locked up all of that day. Had we been questioned? We had spent most of that long day being questioned by harried screws who were feeling the breath of the dragon on the backs of their necks. We all said the same thing we had seen nothing, heard nothing. And so far as I know, we were all telling the truth. I know that I was. All we could say was that Andy had indeed been in his cell at the time of the lockin, and at lightsout an hour later. One wit suggested that Andy had poured himself out through the keyhole. The suggestion earned the guy four days in solitary. They were uptight. So Norton came downstalked downglaring at us with blue eyes nearly hot enough to strike sparks from the tempered steel bars of our cages. He looked at us as if he believed we were all in on it. Probably he did believe it. He went into Andys cell and looked around. It was just as Andy had left it, the sheets on his bunk turned back but without looking sleptin. Rocks on the windowsill... but not all of them. The ones he liked best he took with him. Rocks, Norton hissed, and swept them off the window ledge with a clatter. Gonyar, who was now on overtime, winced but said nothing. Nortons eyes fell on the Linda Ronstadt poster. Linda was looking back over her shoulder, her hands tucked into the back pockets of a very tight pair of fawncolored slacks. She was wearing a halter and she had a deep California tan. It must have offended the hell out of Nortons Baptist sensibilities, that poster. Watching him glare at it, I remembered what Andy had once said about feeling he could almost step through the picture and be with the girl. In a very real way, that was exactly what he didas Norton was only seconds from discovering. Wretched thing! he grunted, and ripped the poster from the wall with a single swipe of his hand. And revealed the gaping, crumbled hole in the concrete behind it. Gonyar wouldnt go in. Norton ordered himGod, they must have heard Norton ordering Rich Gonyar to go in there all over the prisonand Gonyar just refused him, point blank. Ill have your job for this! Norton screamed. He was as hysterical as a woman having a hotflash. He had utterly blown his cool. His neck had turned a rich, dark red, and two veins stood out, throbbing, on his forehead. You can count on it, you... you Frenchman! Ill have your job and Ill see to it that you never get another one in any prison system in New England! Gonyar silently held out his service pistol to Norton, butt first. Hed had enough. He was then two hours overtime, going on three, and hed just had enough. It was as if Andys defection from our happy little family had driven Norton right over the edge of some private irrationality that had been there for a long time... certainly he was crazy that night. I dont know what that private irrationality might have been, of course. But I do know that there were twentysix cons listening to Nortons little dustup with Rich Gonyar that evening as the last of the light faded from a dull latewinter sky, all of us hardtimers and longline riders who had seen the administrators come and go, the hardasses and the candyasses alike, and we all knew that Warden Samuel Norton had just passed what the engineers like to call the breaking strain. And by God, it almost seemed to me that somewhere I could hear Andy Dufresne laughing. Norton finally got a skinny drink of water on the night shift to go into the hole that had been behind Andys poster of Linda Ronstadt. The skinny guards name was Rory Tremont, and he was not exactly a ball of fire in the brains department. Maybe he thought he was going to win a Bronze Star or something. As it turned out, it was fortunate that Norton got someone of Andys approximate height and build to go in there; if they had sent a bigassed fellowas most prison guards seem to bethe guy would have stuck in there as sure as God made green grass... and he might be there still. Tremont went in with a nylon filament rope, which someone had found in the trunk of his car, tied around his waist and a big sixbattery flashlight in one hand. By then Gonyar, who had changed his mind about quitting and who seemed to be the only one there still able to think clearly, had dug out a set of blueprints. I knew well enough what they showed hima wall which looked, in crosssection, like a sandwich. The entire wall was ten feet thick. The inner and outer sections were each about four feet thick. In the center was two feet of pipespace, and you want to believe that was the meat of the thing... in more ways than one. Tremonts voice came out of the hole, sounding hollow and dead. Something smells awful in here, Warden. Never mind that! Keep going. Tremonts lower legs disappeared into the hole. A moment later his feet were gone, too. His light flashed dimly back and forth. Warden, it smells pretty damn bad. Never mind, I said! Norton cried. Dolorously, Tremonts voice floated back Smells like shit. Oh God, thats what it is, its shit, oh my God lemme outta here Im gonna blow my groceries oh shit its shit oh my Gawwwwwd And then came the unmistakable sound of Rory Tremont losing his last couple of meals. Well, that was it for me. I couldnt help myself. The whole dayhell no, the last thirty yearsall came up on me at once and I started laughing fit to split, a laugh such as Id never had since I was a free man, the kind of laugh I never expected to have inside these gray walls. And oh dear God didnt it feel good! Get that man out of here! Warden Norton was screaming, and I was laughing so hard I didnt know if he meant me or Tremont. I just went on laughing and kicking my feet and holding onto my belly. I couldnt have stopped if Norton had threatened to shoot me deadbang on the spot. Get him OUT! Well, friends and neighbors, I was the one who went. Straight down to solitary, and there I stayed for fifteen days. A long shot. But every now and then Id think about poor old nottoobright Rory Tremont bellowing oh shit its shit, and then Id think about Andy Dufresne heading south in his own car, dressed in a nice suit, and Id just have to laugh. I did that fifteen days in solitary practically standing on my head. Maybe because half of me was with Andy Dufresne, Andy Dufresne who had waded in shit and came out clean on the other side, Andy Dufresne, headed for the Pacific. I heard the rest of what went on that night from half a dozen sources. There wasnt all that much, anyway. I guess that Rory Tremont decided he didnt have much left to lose after hed lost his lunch and dinner, because he did go on. There was no danger of falling down the pipeshaft between the inner and outer segments of the cellblock wall; it was so narrow that Tremont actually had to wedge himself down. He said later that he could only take halfbreaths and that he knew what it would be like to be buried alive. What he found at the bottom of the shaft was a master sewerpipe which served the fourteen toilets in Cellblock 5, a porcelain pipe that had been laid thirtythree years before. It had been broken into. Beside the jagged hole in the pipe, Tremont found Andys rockhammer. Andy had gotten free, but it hadnt been easy. The pipe was even narrower than the shaft Tremont had just descended. Rory Tremont didnt go in, and so far as I know, no one else did, either. It must have been damn near unspeakable. A rat jumped out of the pipe as Tremont was examining the hole and the rockhammer, and he swore later that it was nearly as big as a cocker spaniel pup. He went back up the crawlspace to Andys cell like a monkey on a stick. Andy had gone into that pipe. Maybe he knew that it emptied into a stream five hundred yards beyond the prison on the marshy western side. I think he did. The prison blueprints were around, and Andy would have found a way to look at them. He was a methodical cuss. He would have known or found out that the sewerpipe running out of Cellblock 5 was the last one in Shawshank not hooked into the new wastetreatment plant, and he would have known it was do it by mid1975 or do it never, because in August they were going to switch us over to the new wastetreatment plant, too. Five hundred yards. The length of five football fields. Just shy of half a mile. He crawled that distance, maybe with one of those small Penlites in his hand, maybe with nothing but a couple of books of matches. He crawled through foulness that I either cant imagine or dont want to imagine. Maybe the rats scattered in front of him, or maybe they went for him the way such animals sometimes will when theyve had a chance to grow bold in the dark. He must have had just enough clearance at the shoulders to keep moving, and he probably had to shove himself through the places where the lengths of pipe were joined. If it had been me, the claustrophobia would have driven me mad a dozen times over. But he did it. At the far end of the pipe they found a set of muddy footprints leading out of the sluggish, polluted creek the pipe fed into. Two miles from there a search party found his prison uniformthat was a day later. The story broke big in the papers, as you might guess, but no one within a fifteenmile radius of the prison stepped forward to report a stolen car, stolen clothes, or a naked man in the moonlight. There was not so much as a barking dog in a farmyard. He came out of the sewerpipe and he disappeared like smoke. But I am betting he disappeared in the direction of Buxton. Three months after that memorable day, Warden Norton resigned. He was a broken man, it gives me great pleasure to report. The spring was gone from his step. On his last day he shuffled out with his head down like an old con shuffling down to the infirmary for his codeine pills. It was Gonyar who took over, and to Norton that must have seemed like the unkindest cut of all. For all I know, Sam Norton is down there in Eliot now, attending services at the Baptist church every Sunday, and wondering how the hell Andy Dufresne ever could have gotten the better of him. I could have told him; the answer to the question is simplicity itself. Some have got it, Sam. And some dont, and never will. Thats what I know; now Im going to tell you what I think. I may have it wrong on some of the specifics, but Id be willing to bet my watch and chain that Ive got the general outline down pretty well. Because, with Andy being the sort of man that he was, theres only one or two ways that it could have been. And every now and then, when I think it out, I think of Normaden, that halfcrazy Indian. Nice fella, Normaden had said after celling with Andy for eight months. I was glad to go, me. Bad draft in that cell. All the time cold. He dont let nobody touch his things. Thats okay. Nice man, never made fun. But big draft. Poor crazy Normaden. He knew more than all the rest of us, and he knew it sooner. And it was eight long months before Andy could get him out of there and have the cell to himself again. If it hadnt been for the eight months Normaden had spent with him after Warden Norton first came in, I do believe that Andy would have been free before Nixon resigned. I believe now that it began in 1949, way back thennot with the rockhammer, but with the Rita Hayworth poster. I told you how nervous he seemed when he asked for that, nervous and filled with suppressed excitement. At the time I thought it was just embarrassment, that Andy was the sort of guy whod never want someone else to know that he had feet of clay and wanted a woman... especially if it was a fantasywoman. But I think now that I was wrong. I think now that Andys excitement came from something else altogether. What was responsible for the hole that Warden Norton eventually found behind the poster of a girl that hadnt even been born when that photo of Rita Hayworth was taken? Andy Dufresnes perseverance and hard work, yeahI dont take any of that away from him. But there were two other elements in the equation a lot of luck, and WPA concrete. You dont need me to explain the luck, I guess. The WPA concrete I checked out for myself. I invested some time and a couple of stamps and wrote first to the University of Maine History Department and then to a fellow whose address they were able to give me. This fellow had been foreman of the WPA project that built the Shawshank Max Security Wing. The wing, which contains Cellblocks 3, 4, and 5, was built in the years 193437. Now, most people dont think of cement and concrete as technological developments, the way we think of cars and old furnaces and rocketships, but they really are. There was no modern cement until 1870 or so, and no modern concrete until after the turn of the century. Mixing concrete is as delicate a business as making bread. You can get it too watery or not watery enough. You can get the sandmix too thick or too thin, and the same is true of the gravelmix. And back in 1934, the science of mixing the stuff was a lot less sophisticated than it is today. The walls of Cellblock 5 were solid enough, but they werent exactly dry and toasty. As a matter of fact, they were and are pretty damned dank. After a long wet spell they would sweat and sometimes even drip. Cracks had a way of appearing, some an inch deep. They were routinely mortared over. Now here comes Andy Dufresne into Cellblock 5. Hes a man who graduated from the University of Maines school of business, but hes also a man who took two or three geology courses along the way. Geology had, in fact, become his chief hobby. I imagine it appealed to his patient, meticulous nature. A tenthousandyear ice age here. A million years of mountainbuilding there. Plates of bedrock grinding against each other deep under the earths skin over the millennia. Pressure. Andy told me once that all of geology is the study of pressure. And time, of course. He had time to study those walls. Plenty of time. When the cell door slams and the lights go out, theres nothing else to look at. Firsttimers usually have a hard time adjusting to the confinement of prison life. They get screwfever. Sometimes they have to be hauled down to the infirmary and sedated a couple of times before they get on the beam. Its not unusual to hear some new member of our happy little family banging on the bars of his cell and screaming to be let out... and before the cries have gone on for long, the chant starts up along the cellblock Fresh fish, hey little fishie, fresh fish, fresh fish, got fresh fish today! Andy didnt flip out like that when he came to The Shank in 1948, but thats not to say that he didnt feel many of the same things. He may have come close to madness; some do, and some go sailing right over the edge. Old life blown away in the wink of an eye, indeterminate nightmare stretching out ahead, a long season in hell. So what did he do, I ask you? He searched almost desperately for something to divert his restless mind. Oh, there are all sorts of ways to divert yourself, even in prison; it seems like the human mind is full of an infinite number of possibilities when it comes to diversion. I told you about the sculptor and his Three Ages of Jesus. There were coin collectors who were always losing their collections to thieves, stamp collectors, one fellow who had postcards from thirtyfive different countriesand let me tell you, he would have turned out your lights if hed caught you diddling with his postcards. Andy got interested in rocks. And the walls of his cell. I think that his initial intention might have been to do no more than to carve his initials into the wall where the poster of Rita Hayworth would soon be hanging. His initials, or maybe a few lines from some poem. Instead, what he found was that interestingly weak concrete. Maybe he started to carve his initials and a big chunk of the wall just fell out. I can see him, lying there on his bunk, looking at that broken chunk of concrete, turning it over in his hands. Never mind the wreck of your whole life, never mind that you got railroaded into this place by a whole trainload of bad luck. Lets forget all that and look at this piece of concrete. Some months further along he might have decided it would be fun to see how much of that wall he could take out. But you cant just start digging into your wall and then, when the weekly inspection (or one of the surprise inspections that are always turning up interesting caches of booze, drugs, dirty pictures, and weapons) comes around, say to the guard This? Just excavating a little hole in my cell wall. Not to worry, my good man. No, he couldnt have that. So he came to me and asked if I could get him a Rita Hayworth poster. Not a little one but a big one. And, of course, he had the rockhammer. I remember thinking when I got him that gadget back in 48 that it would take a man six hundred years to burrow through the wall with it. True enough. But Andy only had to go through half the walland even with the soft concrete, it took him two rockhammers and twentyseven years to do it. Of course he lost most of one of those years to Normaden, and he could only work at night, preferably late at night, when almost everybody is asteepincluding the guards who work the night shift. But I suspect the thing which slowed him down the most was getting rid of the wall as he took it out. He could muffle the sound of his work by wrapping the head of his hammer in rockpolishing cloths, but what to do with the pulverized concrete and the occasional chunks that came out whole? I think he must have broken up the chunks into pebbles and ... I remember the Sunday after I had gotten him the rockhammer. I remember watching him walk across the exercise yard, his face puffy from his latest goround with the sisters. I saw him stoop, pick up a pebble... and it disappeared up his sleeve. That inside sleevepocket is an old prison trick. Up your sleeve or just inside the cuff of your pants. And I have another memory, very strong but unfocused, maybe something I saw more than once. This memory is of Andy Dufresne walking across the exercise yard on a hot summer day when the air was utterly still. Still, yeah ... except for the little breeze that seemed to be blowing sand around Andy Dufresnes feet. So maybe he had a couple of cheaters in his pants below the knees. You loaded the cheaters up with fill and then just strolled around, your hands in your pockets, and when you felt safe and unobserved, you gave the pockets a little twitch. The pockets, of course, are attached by string or strong thread to the cheaters. The fill goes cascading out of your pantslegs as you walk. The World War II POWs who were trying to tunnel out used the dodge. The years went past and Andy brought his wall out to the exercise yard cupful by cupful. He played the game with administrator after administrator, and they thought it was because he wanted to keep the library growing. I have no doubt that was part of it, but the main thing Andy wanted was to keep Cell 14 in Cellblock 5 a single occupancy. I doubt if he had any real plans or hopes of breaking out, at least not at first. He probably assumed the wall was ten feet of solid concrete, and that if he succeeded in boring all the way through it, hed come out thirty feet over the exercise yard. But like I say, I dont think he was worried overmuch about breaking through. His assumption could have run this way Im only making a foot of progress every seven years or so; therefore, it would take me seventy years to break through; that would make me one hundred and one years old. Heres a second assumption I would have made, had I been Andy that eventually I would be caught and get a lot of solitary time, not to mention a very large black mark on my record.


After all, there was the regular weekly inspection and a surprise tosswhich usually came at nightevery second week or so. He must have decided that things couldnt go on for long. Sooner or later, some screw was going to peek behind Rita Hayworth just to make sure Andy didnt have a sharpened spoonhandle or some marijuana reefers Scotchtaped to the wall. And his response to that second assumption must have been To hell with it. Maybe he even made a game out of it. How far in can I get before they find out? Prison is a goddam boring place, and the chance of being surprised by an unscheduled inspection in the middle of the night while he had his poster unstuck probably added some spice to his life during the early years. And I do believe it would have been impossible for him to get away with it just on dumb luck. Not for twentyseven years. Nevertheless, I have to believe that for the first two yearsuntil midMay of 1950, when he helped Byron Hadley get around the tax on his windfall inheritancethats exactly what he did get by on. Or maybe he had something more than dumb luck going for him even back then. He had money, and he might have been slipping someone a little squeeze every week to take it easy on him. Most guards will go along with that if the price is right; its money in their pockets and the prisoner gets to keep his whackoff pictures or his tailormade cigarettes. Also, Andy was a model prisonerquiet, wellspoken, respectful, nonviolent. Its the crazies and the stampeders that get their cells turned upsidedown at least once every six months, their mattresses unzipped, their pillows taken away and cut open, the outflow pipe from their toilets carefully probed. Then, in 1950, Andy became something more than a model prisoner. In 1950, he became a valuable commodity, a murderer who did taxreturns better than H  R Block. He gave gratis estateplanning advice, set up taxshelters, filled out loan applications (sometimes creatively). I can remember him sitting behind his desk in the library, patiently going over a carloan agreement paragraph by paragraph with a screwhead who wanted to buy a used DeSoto, telling the guy what was good about the agreement and what was bad about it, explaining to him that it was possible to shop for a loan and not get hit quite so bad, steering him away from the finance companies, which in those days were sometimes little better than legal loansharks. When hed finished, the screwhead started to put out his hand... and then drew it back to himself quickly. Hed forgotten for a moment, you see, that he was dealing with a mascot, not a man. Andy kept up on the tax laws and the changes in the stock market, and so his usefulness didnt end after hed been in cold storage for awhile, as it might have done. He began to get his library money, his running war with the sisters had ended, and nobody tossed his cell very hard. He was a good nigger. Then one day, very late in the goingperhaps around October of 1967the longtime hobby suddenly turned into something else. One night while he was in the hole up to his waist with Raquel Welch hanging down over his ass, the pick end of his rockhammer must have suddenly sunk into concrete past the hilt. He would have dragged some chunks of concrete back, but maybe he heard others falling down into that shaft, bouncing back and forth, clinking off that standpipe. Did he know by then that he was going to come upon that shaft, or was he totally surprised? I dont know. He might have seen the prison blueprints by then or he might not have. If not, you can be damned sure he found a way to look at them not long after. All at once he must have realized that, instead of just playing a game, he was playing for high stakes... in terms of his own life and his own future, the highest. Even then he couldnt have known for sure, but he must have had a pretty good idea because it was right around then that he talked to me about Zihuatanejo for the first time. All of a sudden, instead of just being a toy, that stupid hole in the wall became his masterif he knew about the sewerpipe at the bottom, and that it led under the outer wall, it did, anyway. Hed had the key under the rock in Buxton to worry about for years. Now he had to worry that some eagerbeaver new guard would look behind his poster and expose the whole thing, or that he would get another cellmate, or that he would, after all those years, suddenly be transferred. He had all those things on his mind for the next eight years. All I can say is that he must have been one of the coolest men who ever lived. I would have gone completely nuts after awhile, living with all that uncertainty. But Andy just went on playing the game. He had to carry the possibility of discovery for another eight yearsthe probability of it, you might say, because no matter how carefully he stacked the cards in his favor, as an inmate of a state prison, he just didnt have that many to stack ... and the gods had been kind to him for a very long time; some nineteen years. The most ghastly irony I can think of would have been if he had been offered a parole. Can you imagine it? Three days before the parolee is actually released, he is transferred into the light security wing to undergo a complete physical and a battery of vocational tests. While hes there, his old cell is completely cleaned out. Instead of getting his parole, Andy would have gotten a long turn downstairs in solitary, followed by some more time upstairs ... but in a different cell. If he broke into the shaft in 1967, how come he didnt escape until 1975? I dont know for surebut I can advance some pretty good guesses. First, he would have become more careful than ever. He was too smart to just push ahead at flank speed and try to get out in eight months, or even in eighteen. He must have gone on widening the opening on the crawlspace a little at a time. A hole as big as a teacup by the time he took his New Years Eve drink that year. A hole as big as a dinnerplate by the time he took his birthday drink in 1968. As big as a servingtray by the time the 1969 baseball season opened. For a time I thought it should have gone much faster than it apparently didafter he broke through, I mean. It seemed to me that, instead of having to pulverize the crap and take it out of his cell in the cheater gadgets I have described, he could simply let it drop down the shaft. The length of time he took makes me believe that he didnt dare do that. He might have decided that the noise would arouse someones suspicions. Or, if he knew about the sewerpipe, as I believe he must have, he would have been afraid that a falling chunk of concrete would break it before he was ready, screwing up the cellblock sewage system and leading to an investigation. And an investigation, needless to say, would lead to ruin. Still and all, Id guess that, by the time Nixon was sworn in for his second term, the hole would have been wide enough for him to wriggle through... and probably sooner than that. Andy was a small guy. Why didnt he go then? Thats where my educated guesses run out, folks; from this point they become progressively wilder. One possibility is that the crawlspace itself was clogged with crap and he had to clear it out. But that wouldnt account for all the time. So what was it? I think that maybe Andy got scared. Ive told you as well as I can how it is to be an institutional man. At first you cant stand those four walls, then you get so you can abide them, then you get so you accept them... and then, as your body and your mind and your spirit adjust to live on an HO scale, you get to love them. You are told when to eat, when you can write letters, when you can smoke. If youre at work in the laundry or the plateshop, youre assigned five minutes of each hour when you can go to the bathroom. For thirtyfive years, my time was twentyfive minutes after the hour, and after thirtyfive years, thats the only time I ever felt the need to take a piss or have a crap; twentyfive minutes past the hour. And if for some reason I couldnt go, the need would pass at thirty after, and come back at twentyfive past the next hour. I think Andy may have been wrestling with that tigerthat institutional syndromeand also with the bulking fears that all of it might have been for nothing. How many nights must he have lain awake under his poster, thinking about that sewer line, knowing that the one chance was all hed ever get? The blueprints might have told him how big the pipes bore was, but a blueprint couldnt tell him what it would be like inside that pipeif he would be able to breathe without choking, if the rats were big enough and mean enough to fight instead of retreating... and a blueprint couldntve told him what hed find at the end of the pipe, when and if he got there. Heres a joke even funnier than the parole would have been Andy breaks into the sewer line, crawls through five hundred yards of choking, shitsmelling darkness, and comes up against a heavygauge mesh screen at the end of it. Ha, ha, very funny. That would have been on his mind. And if the long shot actually came in and he was able to get out, would he be able to get some civilian clothes and get away from the vicinity of the prison undetected? Last of all, suppose he got out of the pipe, got away from Shawshank before the alarm was raised, got to Buxton, overturned the right rock... and found nothing beneath? Not necessarily something so dramatic as arriving at the right field and discovering that a highrise apartment building had been erected on the spot, or that it had been turned into a supermarket parking lot. It could have been that some little kid who liked rocks noticed that piece of volcanic glass, turned it over, saw the depositbox key, and took both it and the rock back to his room as souvenirs. Maybe a November hunter kicked the rock, left the key exposed, and a squirrel or a crow with a liking for bright shiny things had taken it away. Maybe there had been spring floods one year, breeching the wall, washing the key away. Maybe anything. So I thinkwild guess or notthat Andy just froze in place for awhile. After all, you cant lose if you dont bet. What did he have to lose, you ask? His library, for one thing. The poison peace of institutional life, for another. Any future chance to grab his safe identity. But he finally did it, just as I have told you. He tried ... and, my! Didnt he succeed in spectacular fashion? You tell me! But did he get away, you ask? What happened after? What happened when he got to that meadow and turned over that rock ... always assuming the rock was still there? I cant describe that scene for you, because this institutional man is still in this institution, and expects to be for years to come. But Ill tell you this. Very late in the summer of 1975, on September 15th, to be exact, I got a postcard which had been mailed from the tiny town of McNary, Texas. That town is on the American side of the border, directly across from El Porvenir. The message side of the card was totally blank. But I know. I know it in my heart as surely as I know that were all going to die someday. McNary was where he crossed. McNary, Texas. So thats my story, Jack. I never believed how long it would take to write it all down, or how many pages it would take. I started writing just after I got that postcard, and here I am finishing up on January 14th, 1976. Ive used three pencils right down to knucklestubs, and a whole tablet of paper. Ive kept the pages carefully hidden ... not that many could read my hentracks, anyway. It stirred up more memories than I ever would have believed. Writing about yourself seems to be a lot like sticking a branch into clear riverwater and roiling up the muddy bottom. Well, you werent writing about yourself, I hear someone in the peanutgallery saying. You were writing about Andy Dufresne.Youre nothing but a minor character in your own story. But you know, thats just not so. Its all about me, every damned word of it. Andy was the part of me they could never lock up, the part of me that will rejoice when the gates finally open for me and I walk out in my cheap suit with my twenty dollars of madmoney in my pocket. That part of me will rejoice no matter how old and broken and scared the rest of me is. I guess its just that Andy had more of that part than me, and used it better. There are others here like me, others who remember Andy. Were glad hes gone, but a little sad, too. Some birds are not meant to be caged, thats all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure. Thats the story and Im glad I told it, even if it is a bit inconclusive and even though some of the memories the pencil prodded up (like that branch poking up the rivermud) made me feel a little sad and even older than I am. Thank you for listening. And Andy, if youre really down there, as I believe you are, look at the stars for me just after sunset, and touch the sand, and wade in the water, and feel free. I never expected to take up this narrative again, but here I am with the dogeared, folded pages open on the desk in front of me. Here I am adding another three or four pages, writing in a brandnew tablet. A tablet I bought in a storeI just walked into a store on Portlands Congress Street and bought it. I thought I had put finish to my story in a Shawshank prison cell on a bleak January day in 1976. Now its May of 1977 and I am sitting in a small, cheap room of the Brewster Hotel in Portland, adding to it. The window is open, and the sound of the traffic floating in seems huge, exciting, and intimidating. I have to look constantly over at the window and reassure myself that there are no bars on it. I sleep poorly at night because the bed in this room, as cheap as the room is, seems much too big and luxurious. I snap awake every morning promptly at sixthirty, feeling disoriented and frightened. My dreams are bad. I have a crazy feeling of free fall. The sensation is as terrifying as it is exhilarating. What has happened in my life? Cant you guess? I was paroled. After thirtyeight years of routine hearings and routine denials (in the course of those thirtyeight years, three lawyers died on me), my parole was granted. I suppose they decided that, at the age of fiftyeight, I was finally used up enough to be deemed safe. I came very close to burning the document you have just read. They search outgoing parolees almost as carefully as they search incoming new fish. And beyond containing enough dynamite to assure me of a quick turnaround and another six or eight years inside, my memoirs contained something else the name of the town where I believe Andy Dufresne to be. Mexican police gladly cooperate with the American police, and I didnt want my freedomor my unwillingness to give up the story Id worked so long and hard to writeto cost Andy his. Then I remembered how Andy had brought in his five hundred dollars back in 1948, and I took out my story of him the same way. Just to be on the safe side, I carefully rewrote each page which mentioned Zihuatanejo. If the papers had been found during my outside search, as they call it at The Shank, I would have gone back in on turnaround... but the cops would have been looking for Andy in a Peruvian seacoast town named Las Intrudres. The Parole Committee got me a job as a stockroom assistant at the big FoodWay Market at the Spruce Mall in South Portlandwhich means I became just one more ageing bagboy. Theres only two kinds of bagboys, you know; the old ones and the young ones. No one ever looks at either kind. If you shop at the Spruce Mall FoodWay, I may have even taken your groceries out to your car ... but youd have had to have shopped there between March and April of 1977, because thats as long as I worked there. At first I didnt think I was going to be able to make it on the outside at all. Ive described prison society as a scaleddown model of your outside world, but I had no idea of how fast things moved on the outside; the raw speed people move at. They even talk faster. And louder. It was the toughest adjustment Ive ever had to make, and I havent finished making it yet... not by a long way. Women, for instance. After hardly knowing that they were half of the human race for forty years, I was suddenly working in a store filled with them. Old women, pregnant women wearing teeshirts with arrows pointing downward and a printed motto reading BABY HERE, skinny women with their nipples poking out at their shirtsa woman wearing something like that when I went in would have gotten arrested and then had a sanity hearingwomen of every shape and size. I found myself going around with a semihard almost all the time and cursing myself for being a dirty old man. Going to the bathroom, that was another thing. When I had to go (and the urge always came on me at twentyfive past the hour), I had to fight the almost overwhelming need to check it with my boss. Knowing that was something I could just go and do in this toobright outside world was one thing; adjusting my inner self to that knowledge after all those years of checking it with the nearest screwhead or facing two days in solitary for the oversight... that was something else. My boss didnt like me. He was a young guy, twentysix or seven, and I could see that I sort of disgusted him, the way a cringing, servile old dog that crawls up to you on its belly to be petted will disgust a man. Christ, I disgusted myself. But... I couldnt make myself stop. I wanted to tell him Thats what a whole life in prison does for you, young man. It turns everyone in a position of authority into a master, and you into every masters dog. Maybe you know youve become a dog, even in prison, but since everyone else in gray is a dog, too, it doesnt seem to matter so much. Outside, it does. But I couldnt tell a young guy like him. He would never understand. Neither would my PO, a big, bluff exNavy man with a huge red beard and a large stock of Polish jokes. He saw me for about five minutes every week. Are you staying out of the bars, Red? hed ask when hed run out of Polish jokes. Id say yeah, and that would be the end of it until next week. Music on the radio. When I went in, the big bands were just getting up a good head of steam. Now every song sounds like its about fucking. So many cars. At first I felt like I was taking my life into my hands every time I crossed the street. There was moreeverything was strange and frighteningbut maybe you get the idea, or can at least grasp a comer of it. I began to think about doing something to get back in. When youre on parole, almost anything will serve. Im ashamed to say it, but I began to think about stealing some money or shoplifting stuff from the FoodWay, anything, to get back in where it was quiet and you knew everything that was going to come up in the course of the day. If I had never known Andy, I probably would have done that. But I kept thinking of him, spending all those years chipping patiently away at the cement with his rockhammer so he could be free. I thought of that and it made me ashamed and Id drop the idea again. Oh, you can say he had more reason to be free than I didhe had a new identity and a lot of money. But thats not really true, you know. Because he didnt know for sure that the new identity was still there, and without the new identity, the money would always be out of reach. No, what he needed was just to be free, and if I kicked away what I had, it would be like spitting in the face of everything he had worked so hard to win back. So what I started to do on my time off was to hitchhike rides down to the little town of Buxton. This was in the early April of 1977, the snow just starting to melt off the fields, the air just beginning to be warm, the baseball teams coming north to start a new season playing the only game Im sure God approves of. When I went on these trips, I carried a Silva compass in my pocket. Theres a big hayfield in Buxton, Andy had said, and at the north end of that hayfield theres a rock wall, right out of a Robert Frost poem. And somewhere along the base of that wall is a rock that has no earthly business in a Maine hayfield. A fools errand, you say. How many hayfields are there in a small rural town like Buxton? Fifty? A hundred? Speaking from personal experience, Id put it at even higher than that, if you add in the fields now cultivated which might have been haygrass when Andy went in. And if I did find the right one, I might never know it. Because I might overlook that black piece of volcanic glass, or, much more likely, Andy put it into his pocket and took it with him. So Id agree with you. A fools errand, no doubt about it. Worse, a dangerous one for a man on parole, because some of those fields were clearly marked with NO TRESPASSING signs. And, as Ive said, theyre more than happy to slam your ass back inside if you get out of line. A fools errand . . . but so is chipping at a blank concrete wall for twentyseven years. And when youre no longer the man who can get it for you and just an old bagboy, its nice to have a hobby to take your mind off your new life. My hobby was looking for Andys rock. So Id hitchhike to Buxton and walk the roads. Id listen to the birds, to the spring runoff in the culverts, examine the bottles the retreating snows had revealedall useless nonreturnables, I am sorry to say; the world seems to have gotten awfully spendthrift since I went into the slamand looking for hayfields. Most of them could be eliminated right off. No rock walls. Others had rock walls, but my compass told me they were facing the wrong direction. I walked these wrong ones anyway. It was a comfortable thing to be doing, and on those outings I really felt free, at peace. An old dog walked with me one Saturday. And one day I saw a winterskinny deer. Then came April 23rd, a day Ill not forget even if I live another fiftyeight years. It was a balmy Saturday afternoon, and I was walking up what a little boy fishing from a bridge told me was called The Old Smith Road. I had taken a lunch in a brown FoodWay bag, and had eaten it sitting on a rock by the road. When I was done I carefully buried my leavings, as my dad taught me before he died, when I was a sprat no older than the fisherman who had named the road for me. Around two oclock I came to a big field on my left. There was a stone wall at the far end of it, running roughly northwest. I walked back to it, squelching over the wet ground, and began to walk the wall. A squirrel scolded me from an oak tree. Threequarters of the way to the end, I saw the rock. No mistake. Black glass and as smooth as silk. A rock with no earthly business in a Maine hayfield. For a long time I just looked at it, feeling that I might cry, for whatever reason. The squirrel had followed me, and it was still chattering away. My heart was beating madly. When I felt I had myself under control, I went to the rock, squatted beside itthe joints in my knees went off like a doublebarrelled shotgunand let my hand touch it. It was real. I didnt pick it up because I thought there would be anything under it; I could just as easily have walked away without finding what was beneath. I certainly had no plans to take it away with me, because I didnt feel it was mine to takeI had a feeling that taking that rock from the field would have been the worst kind of theft. No, I only picked it up to feel it better, to get the heft of the thing, and, I suppose, to prove its reality by feeling its satiny texture against my skin. I had to look at what was underneath for a long time. My eyes saw it, but it took awhile for my mind to catch up. It was an envelope, carefully wrapped in a plastic bag to keep away the damp. My name was written across the front in Andys clear script. I took the envelope and left the rock where Andy had left it, and Andys friend before him. Dear Red, If youre reading this, then youre out. One way or another, youre out. And if youve followed along this far, you might be willing to come a little further. I think you remember the name of the town, dont you? I could use a good man to help me get my project on wheels. Meantime, have a drink on meand do think it over. I will be keeping an eye out for you. Remember that hope is a good thing, Red, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies. I will be hoping that this letter finds you, and finds you well. Your friend, Peter Stevens I didnt read that letter in the field. A kind of terror had come over me, a need to get away from there before I was seen. To make what may be an appropriate pun, I was in terror of being apprehended. I went back to my room and read it there, with the smell of old mens dinners drifting up the stairwell to meBeefaroni, RiceaRoni, Noodle Roni. You can bet that whatever the old folks of America, the ones on fixed incomes, are eating tonight, it almost certainly ends in roni. I opened the envelope and read the letter and then I put my head in my arms and cried. With the letter there were twenty new fiftydollar bills. And here I am in the Brewster Hotel, technically a fugitive from justice againparole violation is my crime. No ones going to throw up any roadblocks to catch a criminal wanted on that charge, I guesswondering what I should do now. I have this manuscript. I have a small piece of luggage about the size of a doctors bag that holds everything I own. I have nineteen fifties, four tens, a five, three ones, and assorted change. I broke one of the fifties to buy this tablet of paper and a deck of smokes. Wondering what I should do. But theres really no question. It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living or get busy dying. First Im going to put this manuscript back in my bag. Then Im going to buckle it up, grab my coat, go downstairs, and check out of this fleabag. Then Im going to walk uptown to a bar and put that fivedollar bill down in front of the bartender and ask him to bring me two straight shots of Jack Danielsone for me and one for Andy Dufresne. Other than a beer or two, theyll be the first drinks Ive taken as a free man since 1938. Then I am going to tip the bartender a dollar and thank him kindly. I will leave the bar and walk up Spring Street to the Greyhound terminal there and buy a bus ticket to El Paso by way of New York City. When I get to El Paso, Im going to buy a ticket to McNary. And when I get to McNary, I guess Ill have a chance to find out if an old crook like me can find a way to float across the border and into Mexico. Sure I remember the name. Zihuatanejo. A name like that is just too pretty to forget. I find I am excited, so excited I can hardly hold the pencil in my trembling hand. I think it is the excitement that only a free man can feel, a free man starting a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope Andy is down there. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope. SUMMER OF CORRUPTION For Elaine Koster and Herbert Schnall Apt Pupil 1 He looked like the total allAmerican kid as he pedaled his twentysixinch Schwinn with the apehanger handlebars up the residential suburban street, and thats just what he was Todd Bowden, thirteen years old, fivefeeteight and a healthy one hundred and forty pounds, hair the color of ripe corn, blue eyes, white even teeth, lightly tanned skin marred by not even the first shadow of adolescent acne. He was smiling a summer vacation smile as he pedaled through the sun and shade not too far from his own house. He looked like the kind of kid who might have a paper route, and as a matter of fact, he didhe delivered the Santo Donato Clarion. He also looked like the kind of kid who might sell greeting cards for premiums, and he had done that, too. They were the kind that come with your name printed insideJACK AND MARY BURKE, or DON AND SALLY, or THE MURCHISONS. He looked like the sort of boy who might whistle while he worked, and he often did so. He whistled quite prettily, in fact. His dad was an architectural engineer who made forty thousand dollars a year. His mom had majored in French in college and had met Todds father when he desperately needed a tutor. She typed manuscripts in her spare time. She had kept all of Todds old school report cards in a folder. Her favorite was his final fourthgrade card, on which Mrs. Upshaw had scratched Todd is an extremely apt pupil. He was, too. Straight As and Bs all the way up the line. If hed done any betterstraight As, for examplehis friends might have begun to think he was weird. Now he brought his bike to a halt in front of 963 Claremont Street and stepped off it. The house was a small bungalow set discreetly back on its lot. It was white with green shutters and green trim. A hedge ran around the front. The hedge was wellwatered and wellclipped. Todd brushed his blonde hair out of his eyes and walked the Schwinn up the cement path to the steps. He was still smiling, and his smile was open and expectant and beautiful. He pushed down the bikes kickstand with the toe of one Nike runningshoe and then picked the folded newspaper off the bottom step. It wasnt the Clarion; it was the L.A. Times.He put it under his arm and mounted the steps. At the top was a heavy wooden door with no window inside of a latched screen door. There was a doorbell on the righthand doorframe, and below the bell were two small signs, each neatly screwed into the wood and covered with protective plastic so they wouldnt yellow or waterspot. German efficiency, Todd thought, and his smile widened a little. It was an adult thought, and he always mentally congratulated himself when he had one of those. The top sign said ARTHUR DENKER. The bottom one said NO SOLICITORS, NO PEDDLERS, NO SALESMEN. Smiling still, Todd rang the bell. He could barely hear its muted burring, somewhere far off inside the small house. He took his finger off the bell and cocked his head a little, listening for footsteps. There were none. He looked at his Timex watch (one of the premiums he had gotten for selling personalized greeting cards) and saw that it was twelve past ten. The guy should be up by now. Todd himself was always up by seventhirty at the latest, even during summer vacation. The early bird catches the worm. He listened for another thirty seconds and when the house remained silent he leaned on the bell, watching the sweep second hand on his Timex as he did so. He had been pressing the doorbell for exactly seventyone seconds when he finally heard shuffling footsteps. Slippers, he deduced from the soft wishwish sound. Todd was into. deductions. His current ambition was to become a private detective when he grew up. All right! All right! the man who was pretending to be Arthur Denker called querulously. Im coming! Let it go! Im coming! Todd stopped pushing the doorbell button. A chain and bolt rattled on the far side of the windowless inner door. Then it was pulled open. An old man, hunched inside a bathrobe, stood looking out through the screen. A cigarette smouldered between his fingers. Todd thought the man looked like a cross between Albert Einstein and Boris Karloff. His hair was long and white but beginning to yellow in an unpleasant way that was more nicotine than ivory. His face was wrinkled and pouched and puffy with sleep, and Todd saw with some distaste that he hadnt bothered shaving for the last couple of days. Todds father was fond of saying, A shave puts a shine on the morning. Todds father shaved every day, whether he had to work or not. The eyes looking out at Todd were watchful but deeply sunken, laced with snaps of red.