Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption

I remember one bright-gold fall day in very late October, a couple of weeks after the World Series had ended. It must have been a Sunday, because the exercise yard was full of men ‘walking off the week’ — tossing a Frisbee or two, passing around a football, bartering what they had to barter. Others would be at the long table in the Visitors’ Hall, under the watchful eyes of the screws, talking with their relatives, smoking cigarettes, telling sincere lies, receiving their picked-over care packages.
Andy was squatting Indian-fashion against the wall, chunking two small rocks together in his hands, his face turned up into the sunlight. It was surprisingly warm, that sun, for a day so late in the year.
‘Hello, Red,’ he called. ‘Come on and sit a spell.’
I did.
‘You want this?’ he asked, and handed me one of the two carefully polished ‘millennium sandwiches’ I just told you about. ‘I sure do,’ I said. ‘It’s very pretty. Thank you.’
He shrugged and changed the subject ‘Big anniversary coming up for you next year.’
I nodded. Next year would make me a thirty-year man. Sixty per cent of my life spent in Shawshank Prison.
Think you’ll ever get out?’
‘Sure. When I have a long white beard and just about three marbles left rolling around upstairs.’
He smiled a little and then turned his face up into the sun again, his eyes closed. ‘Feels good.’
‘I think it always does when you know the damn winter’s almost right on top of you.’
He nodded, and we were silent for a while.
‘When I get out of here,’ Andy said finally, ‘I’m going where it’s warm all the time.’ He spoke with such calm assurance you would have thought he had only a month or so left to serve. ‘You know where I’m goin’, Red?’
‘Nope.’
‘Zihuatanejo,’ he said, rolling the word softly from his tongue like music. ‘Down in Mexico. It’s a little place maybe twenty miles from Playa Azul and Mexico Highway 37. It’s a hundred miles north-west of Acapulco on the Pacific Ocean. You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific?’
I told him I didn’t. They say it has no memory. And that’s where I want to finish out my life, Red. In a warm place that has no memory.’
He had picked up a handful of pebbles as he spoke; now he tossed them, one by one, and watched them bounce and roll across the baseball diamond’s dirt infield, which would be under a foot of snow before long.
‘Zihuatanejo. I’m going to have a little hotel down there. Six cabanas along the beach, and six more set further back, for the highway trade. I’ll have a guy who’ll take my guests out charter fishing. There’ll be a trophy for the guy who catches the biggest marlin of the season, and I’ll put his picture up in the lobby. It won’t be a family place. It’ll be a place for people on their honeymoons … first or second varieties.’
‘And where are you going to get the money to buy this fabulous place?’ I asked. ‘Your stock account?’
He looked at me and smiled. ‘That’s not so far wrong,’ he said. ‘Sometimes you startle me, Red.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘There are really only two types of men in the world when it comes to bad trouble,’ Andy said, cupping a match between his hands and lighting a cigarette. ‘Suppose there was a house full of rare paintings and sculptures and fine old antiques, Red? And suppose the guy who owned the house heard that there was a monster of a hurricane headed right at it. One of those two kinds of men just hopes for the best. The hurricane will change course, he says to himself. No right-thinking hurricane would ever dare wipe out all these Rembrandts, my two Degas horses, my Jackson Pollocks and my Paul Klees. Furthermore, God wouldn’t allow it. And if worst comes to worst, they’re insured. That’s one sort of man. The other sort just assumes that hurricane is going to tear right through the middle of his house. If the weather bureau says the hurricane just changed course, this guy assumes it’ll change back in order to put his house on ground zero again. This second type of guy knows there’s no harm in hoping for the best as long as you’re prepared for the worst.’
I lit a cigarette of my own. ‘Are you saying you prepared for the eventuality?’
‘Yes. I prepared for the hurricane. I knew how bad it looked. I didn’t have much time, but in the time I had, I operated. I had a friend — just about the only person who stood by me — who worked for an investment company in Portland. He died about six years ago.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Yeah.’ Andy tossed his butt away. ‘Linda and I had about fourteen thousand dollars. Not a big bundle, but hell, we were young. We had our whole lives ahead of us.’ He grimaced a little, then laughed. ‘When the shit hit the fan, I started lugging my Rembrandts out of the path of the hurricane. I sold my stocks and paid the capital gains tax just like a good little boy. Declared everything. Didn’t cut any corners.’
‘Didn’t they freeze your estate?’
‘I was charged with murder, Red, not dead! You can’t freeze the assets of an innocent man — thank God. And it was a while before they even got brave enough to charge me with the crime. Jim — my friend — and I, we had some time. I got hit pretty good, just dumping everything like that. Got my nose skinned. But at the time I had worse things to worry about than a small skinning on the stock market.’
‘Yeah, I’d say you did.’
‘But when I came to Shawshank it was all safe. It’s still safe. Outside these walls, Red, there’s a man that no living soul has ever seen face to face. He has a Social Security card and a Maine driver’s license. He’s got a birth certificate. Name of Peter Stevens. Nice, anonymous name, huh?’
‘Who is he?’ I asked. I thought I knew what he was going to say, but I couldn’t believe it.
‘Me.’
‘You’re not going to tell me that you had time to set up a false identity while the bulls were sweating you,’ I said, ‘or that you finished the job while you were on trial for —’
‘No, I’m not going to tell you that. My friend Jim was the one who set up the false identity. He started after my appeal was turned down, and the major pieces of identification were in his hands by the spring of 1950.’
‘He must have been a pretty close friend,’ I said. I was not sure how much of this I believed — a little, a lot, or none. But the day was warm and the sun was out, and it was one hell of a good story. ‘All of that’s one hundred per cent illegal, setting up a false ID like that.’
‘He was a close friend,’ Andy said. ‘We were in the war together. France, Germany, the occupation. He was a good friend. He knew it was illegal, but he also knew that setting up a false identity in this country is very easy and very safe. He took my money — my money with all the taxes on it paid so the IRS wouldn’t get too interested — and invested it for Peter Stevens. He did that in 1950 and 1951. Today it amounts to three hundred and seventy thousand dollars, plus change.’
I guess my jaw made a thump when it dropped against my chest, because he smiled.
‘Think of all the things people wish they’d invested in since 1950 or so, and two or three of them will be things Peter Stevens was into. If I hadn’t ended up in here, I’d probably be worth seven or eight million bucks by now. I’d have a Rolls … and probably an ulcer as big as a portable radio.’
His hands went to the dirt and began sifting out more pebbles. They moved gracefully, restlessly.
‘I was hoping for the best and expecting the worst — nothing but that. The false name was just to keep what little capital I had untainted. It was lugging the paintings out of the path of the hurricane. But I had no idea that the hurricane … that it could go on as long as it has.’
I didn’t say anything for a while. I guess I was trying to absorb the idea that this small, spare man in prison grey next to me could be worth more money than Warden Norton would make in the rest of his miserable life, even with the scams thrown in.