Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption

‘When you said you could get a lawyer, you sure weren’t kidding,’ I said at last ‘For that kind of dough you could have hired Clarence Darrow, or whoever’s passing for him these days. Why didn’t 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 he’d 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 Stevens’s money from inside here, I’d lose every cent of it. My friend Jim could have arranged it, but Jim’s dead. You see the problem?’
I saw it. For all the good the 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 stocks-and-bonds page of the Press-Herald. It’s a tough life if you don’t weaken, I guess.
‘I’ll tell you how it is, Red. There’s a big hayfield in the town of Buxton. You know where Buxton is at, don’t you?’
I said I did. It lies right next door to Scarborough.
‘That’s right. And at the north end of this particular hayfield there’s 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. It’s a piece of volcanic glass, and until 1947 it was a paperweight on my office desk. My friend Jim put it in that wall. There’s a key underneath it. The key opens a safe deposit box in the Portland branch of the Casco Bank.’
‘I guess you’re in a pack of trouble,’ I said. ‘When your friend Jim died, the IRS must have opened all of his safety deposit boxes. Along with the executor of his will, of course.’
Andy smiled and tapped the side of my head. ‘Not bad. There’s 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 Jim’s 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 S.S. card, and his driver’s license. The license is six years out of date because Jim died six years ago, true, but it’s still perfectly renewable for a five-dollar fee. His stock certificates are there, the tax-free 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 I’ll tell you something else, Red — for the last twenty years, give or take, I have been watching the papers with a more than usual interest for news of any construction projects in Buxton. I keep thinking that someday soon I’m going to read that they’re putting a highway through there, or erecting a new community hospital, or building a shopping centre. 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 it’s going to be. I just can’t afford to wait that long. I keep thinking about Zihuatanejo and that small hotel. That’s all I want from my life now, Red, and I don’t think that’s too much to want. I didn’t kill Glenn Quentin and I didn’t kill my wife, and that hotel … it’s not too much to want. To swim and get a tan and sleep in a room with open windows and space… that’s not too much to want.’
He slung the stones away.
‘You know, Red,’ he said in an offhand voice, ‘a place like that… I’d have to have a man who knows how to get things.’
I thought about it for a long time. And the biggest drawback in my mind wasn’t even that we were talking pipedreams in a shitty little prison exercise yard with armed guards looking down at us from their sentry posts. ‘I couldn’t do it,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t get along on the outside. I’m what they call an institutional man now. In here I’m the man who can get it for you, yeah. But out there, anyone can get it for you. Out there, if you want posters or rock-hammers or one particular record or a boat-in-a-bottle model kit, you can use the fucking Yellow Pages. In here, I’m the fucking Yellow Pages. I wouldn’t know how to begin. Or where.’
‘You underestimate yourself,’ he said. ‘You’re a self-educated man, a self-made man. A rather remarkable man, I think.’
‘Hell, I don’t even have a high school diploma.’
‘I know that,’ he said. ‘But it isn’t just a piece of paper that makes a man. And it isn’t just prison that breaks one, either.’
‘I couldn’t hack it outside, Andy. I know that.’ He got up. ‘You think it over,’ he said casually, just as the inside whistle blew. And he strolled off, as if he was a free man who had just made another free man a proposition. And for a while just that was enough to make me feel free. Andy could do that. He could make me forget for a time that we were both lifers, at the mercy of a hard-ass parole board and a psalm-singing warden who liked Andy Dufresne right where he was. After all, Andy was a lap-dog who could do tax-returns. What a wonderful animal!
But by that night in my cell I felt like a prisoner again. The whole idea seemed absurd, and that mental image of blue water and white beaches seemed more cruel than foolish — it dragged at my brain like a fishhook. I just couldn’t wear that invisible coat the way Andy did. I fell asleep that night and dreamed of a great glassy black stone in the middle of a hayfield; a stone shaped like a giant blacksmith’s anvil. I was trying to rock the stone up so I could get the key that was underneath. It wouldn’t budge; it was just too damned big.
And in the background, but getting closer, I could hear the baying of bloodhounds.
Which leads us, I guess, to the subject of jailbreaks.
Sure, they happen from time to time in our happy little family. You don’t go over the wall, though, not at Shawshank, not if you’re smart. The searchlight beams go all night, probing long white fingers across the open fields that surround the prison on three sides and the stinking marshland on the fourth. Cons do go over the wall from time to time, and the searchlights almost always catch them. If not, they get picked up trying to thumb a ride on Highway 6 or Highway 99. If they try to cut across country, some farmer sees them and just phones the location in to the prison. Cons who go over the wall are stupid cons. Shawshank is no Canon City, but in a rural area a man humping his ass across country in a grey pyjama suit sticks out like a cockroach on a wedding cake.
Over the years, the guys who have done the best — maybe oddly, maybe not so oddly — are the guys who did it on the spur of the moment. Some of them have gone out in the middle of a cartful of sheets; a convict sandwich on white, you could say. There was a lot of that when I first came in here, but over the years they have more or less closed that loophole.
Warden Norton’s famous ‘Inside-Out’ programme produced its share of escapees, too. They were the guys who decided they liked what lay to the right of the hyphen better than what lay to the left. And again, in most cases it was a very casual kind of thing. Drop your blueberry rake and stroll into the bushes while one of the screws is having a glass of water at the truck or when a couple of them get too involved in arguing over yards passing or rushing on the old Boston Patriots.