爱的礼物作文-轻佻的意思

d on the subject of
those dishtoweis, and I think it'i worth jotting down what he said. 'Suppose that, during
their chmvmhn fur witnesses,' Andy said one day in the .xwulio yard, 'they stumble on
this fellow who sold me the beer that night. By then three days have gone by. The facts of
the case have been broadsided in all the papers. Maybe they ganged up on the guy, five or
six cops, plus the dick from the attorney general's office, plus the DA's assistant. Memory
is a pretty subjective thing, Red. They could have started out with "Isn't it possible that he
purchased four or five dishtowels?" and worked their way up from there. If enough
people want you to remember something, that can be a pretty powerful persuader.'
I agreed that it could.
'But there's one even more powerful,' Andy went on in that musing way of his. 'I think it's
at least possible that he convinced himself. It was the limelight. Reporters asking him

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questions, his picture in the papers ... all topped, of course, by his star turn in court. I'm
not saying that he deliberately falsified his story, or perjured himself. I think it's possible
that lie could have passed a lie detector test with flying colours, or sworn on his mother's
sacred name that I bought those dishtowels. But still ... memory is such a goddam
subjective thing.
'I know this much: even though my own lawyer thought I had to be lying about half my
story, he never bought that business about the dishtowels. It's crazy on the face of it. I
was pig-drunk, too drunk to have been thinking about muffling the gunshots. If I'd done
it, I just would have let them rip.'
He went up to the turnout and parked there. He drank beer and smoked cigarettes. He
watched the lights downstairs in Quentin's place go out. He watched a single light go on
upstairs ... and fifteen minutes later he watched that one go out. He said he could guess
the rest.
'Mr Dufresne, did you then go up to Glenn Quentin's house and kill the two of them?' his
lawyer thundered.
'No, I did not,' Andy answered. By midnight, he said, he was sobering up. He was also
feeling the first signs of a bad hangover. He decided to go home and sleep it off and think
about the whole thing in a more adult fashion the next day. 'At that time, as I drove home,
I was beginning to think that the wisest course would be to simply let her go to Reno and
get her divorce.'
'Thank you, Mr Dufresne.'
The DA popped up.
'You divorced her in the quickest way you could think of, didn't you? You divorced her
with a .38 revolver wrapped in dishtowels, didn't you?'
'No sir, I did not,' Andy said calmly.
'And then you shot her lover.'
'No, sir.'
'You mean you shot Quentin first?'
'I mean I didn't shoot either one of them. I drank two quarts of beer and smoked however
many cigarettes that the police found at the turnout. Then I drove home and went to bed.'
'You told the jury that between 24 August and 10 Septem
ready. One of the people saying so was
Bogs Dismond, a bad man to have on your case. Andy had no cellmate, and I'd heard that
was just the way he wanted it, although the one-man cells in Cellblock 5 were only a little
bigger than coffins. But I don't have to listen to rumours about a man when I can judge
him for myself.
'Hello,' he said. 'I'm Andy Dufresne.' He offered his hand and I shook it. He wasn't a man
to waste time being social; he got right to the point. 'I understand that you're a man who
knows how to get things.'
I agreed that I was able to locate certain items from time to time,
'How do you do that?' Andy asked.
'Sometimes,' I said, 'things just seem to come into my hand. I can't explain it. Unless it's
because I'm Irish.'
He smiled a little at that. 'I wonder if you could get me a rock hammer.'
'What would that be, and why would you want it?'
Andy looked surprised. 'Do you make motivations a part of your business?' With words
like those I could understand how he had gotten a reputation for being the snobby sort,
the kind of guy who likes to put on airs - but I sensed a tiny thread of humour in his
question.
I'll tell you,' I said. 'If you wanted a toothbrush, I wouldn't ask questions. I'd just quote
you a price. Because a toothbrush, you see, is a non-lethal sort of a weapon.'
"You have strong feelings about lethal weapons?'
'I do.'
An old friction-taped baseball flew towards us and he turned, cat-quick, and picked it out
of the air. It was a move Frank Malzone would have been proud of. Andy flicked the bail
back to where it had come from -just a quick and easy-looking flick of the wrist, but that
throw had some mustard on it, just the same. I could see a lot of people were watching us
with one eye as they went about their business. Probably the guards in tile tower were
watching, too. I won't gild the lily; there are cons that swing weight in any prison, maybe
four or five in a small one, maybe two or three dozen in a big one. At Shawshank I was
one of those with some weight, and what I thought of Andy Dufresne would have a lot to
do with how his time went. He probably knew it too, but he wasn't kowtowing or sucking
up to me, and I respected him for that.
'Fair enough. Ill tell you what it is and why I want it A rock-hammer looks like a
miniature pickaxe - about so long.' He held his hands about a foot apart, and that was

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when I first noticed how neatly kept his nails were. 'It's got a small sharp pick on one end
and a fiat, blunt hammerhead on the other. I want it because I like rocks.'
'Rocks,' I said.
'Squat down here a minute,' he said.
I humoured him. We hunkered down on our haunches like Indians.
Andy took a handful of exercise yard dirt and began to sift it between his neat hands, so it
emerged in a fine cloud. Small pebbles were left over, one or two sparkly, the rest dull
and plain. One of the dull ones was quartz, but it was only dull un
til you'd rubbed it
clean. Then it had a nice milky glow. Andy did the cleaning and then tossed it to me. I
caught it and named it.
'Quartz, sure,' he said, 'And look. Mica. Shale, silted granite. Here's a piece of graded
limestone, from when they cut this place out of the side of the hill.' He tossed them away
and dusted his hands. 'I'm a rockhound. At least... I was a rockhound. In my old life. I'd
like to be one again, on a limited scale.'
'Sunday expeditions in the exercise yard?' I asked, standing up. It was a silly idea, and yet
... seeing that little piece of quartz had given my heart a funny tweak. I don't know
exactly why; just an association with the outside world, I suppose. You didn't think of
such things in terms of the yard. Quartz was something you picked out of a small, quickrunning
stream.
'Better to have Sunday expeditions here than no Sunday expeditions at all,' he said.
'You could plant an item like that rock-hammer in somebody's skull,' I remarked.
'I have no enemies here,' he said quietly.
'No?' I smiled. 'Wait awhile.'
'If there's trouble, I can handle it without using a rock-hammer.'
'Maybe you want to try an escape? Going under the wall? Because if you do -'
He laughed politely. When I saw the rock-hammer three weeks later, I understood why.
"You know,' I said, *if anyone sees you with it, they'll take it may. If tbey saw you with a
spoon, they'd take it away. i: you going to do, just sit down here in the yard and 3' away?'
"Oh, I believe I can do a lot better than that.'
I nodded. That part of it really wasn't my business, anyway. A man engages my services
to get him something. Whether he can keep it or not after I get it is his business.
'How much would an item like that go for?' I asked. I was Beginning to enjoy his quiet,
low-key style. When you've spent ten years in stir, as I had then, you can get awfully
tired of the bellowers and the braggarts and the loud-mouths. Yes, I dink it would be fair
to say I liked Andy from the first.
'Eight dollars in any rock-and-gem shop,' he said, 'but I realize that in a business like
yours you work on a cost-plus basis-'
'Cost plus ten per cent is my going rate, but I have to go up some on a dangerous item.
For something like the gadget you're talking about, it takes a little more goose-grease to
get the wheels turning. Let's say ten dollars.'
'Ten it is'
I looked at him, smiling a little. 'Have you got ten dollars?'
'I do,' he said quietly.
A long time after, I discovered that he had better than five hundred. He had brought it in
with him. When they check you in at this hotel, one of the bellhops is obliged to bend you
over and take a look up your works - but there are a lot of works, and, not to put too fine

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a point on it, a man who is really determined can get a fairly large item quite a ways up
them - far enough to be out of sight, unless the bellhop you happen to draw is in the mood
to pull
on a rubber glove and go prospecting.
That's fine,' I said. 'You ought to know what I expect if you get caught with what I get
you.'
'I suppose I should,' he said, and I could tell by the slight change in his grey eyes that he
knew exactly what I was going to say. It was a slight lightening, a gleam of his special
ironic humour.
'If you get caught, you'll say you found it. That's about the long and short of it. They'll put
you in solitary for three or four weeks ... plus, of course, you'll lose your toy and you'll
get a black mark on your record. If you give them my name, you and I will never do
business again. Not for so much as a pair of shoelaces or a bag of Bugler. And I'll send
some fellows around to lump you up. I don't like violence, but you'll understand my
position. I can't allow it to get around that I can't handle myself. That would surely finish
me.'
'Yes. I suppose it would, I understand, and you don't need to worry.'
'I never worry,' I said. 'In a place like this there's no percentage in it.'
He nodded and walked away. Three days later he walked up beside me in the exercise
yard during the laundry's morning break. He didn't speak or even look my way, but
pressed a picture of the Hon. Alexander Hamilton into my hand as neatly as a good
magician does a card-trick. He was a man who adapted fast. I got him his rock-hammer. I
had it in my cell for one night, and it was just as he described it It was no tool for escape
(it would have taken a man just about six hundred years to tunnel under the wall using
that rock-hammer, I figured), but I still felt some misgivings. If you planted that pickaxe
end in a man's head, he would surely never listen to Fibber McGee and Molly on the
radio again. And Andy had already begun having trouble with the sisters. I hoped it
wasn't them he was wanting the rock-hammer for.
In the end, I trusted my judgment. Early the next morning, twenty minutes before the
wake-up horn went off, I slipped the rock-hammer and a package of Camels to Ernie, the
old trusty who swept the Cellblock 5 corridors until he was let free in 1956. He slipped it
into his tunic without a word, and I didn't see the rock-hammer again for seven years.
The following Sunday Andy walked over to me in the exercise yard again. He was
nothing to look at that day, I can :"il you. His lower lip was swelled up so big it looked
like a summer sausage, his right eye was swollen half-shut, and ±ere was an ugly
washboard scrape across one cheek. He was having his troubles with the sisters, all right,
but he never mentioned them. 'Thanks for the tool,' he said, and walked nray.
I watched him curiously. He walked a few steps, saw in the dirt, bent over, and picked it
up. It was a small rock. Prison fatigues, except for those worn by mechanics when they're
on the job, have no pockets. But there are ways to get around that. The little pebble
disappeared up Andy's sleeve and didn't com
e down. I admired that... and I admired him.
In spite of the problems he was having, he was going on with his life. There are
thousands who don't or won't or can't, and plenty of them aren't in prison, either. And I
noticed that, although his face still looked as if a twister had happened to it, his hands
were still neat and clean, the nails well-kept.
I didn't see much of him over the next six months; Andy spent a lot of that time in
solitary.

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A few words about the sisters.
In a lot of pens they are known as bull queers or jailhouse susies - just lately the term in
fashion is 'killer queens'. But in they were always the sisters. I don't know why, but other
than the name I guess there was no difference.
It comes as no surprise to most these days that there's a lot of buggery going on inside the
walls - except to some of the new fish, maybe, who have the misfortune to be young,
slim, good-looking, and unwary - but homosexuality, like straight sex, comes in a
hundred different shapes and forms. There are men who can't stand to be without sex of
some kind and turn to another man to keep from going crazy. Usually what follows is an
arrangement between two fundamentally "Heterosexual men, although I've sometimes
wondered if they are quite as heterosexual as they thought they were going to be when
they get back to their wives or their girlfriends.
There are also men who get 'turned' in prison. In the current parlance they 'go gayget it
from me - I imagine he kited it from the prison laundry).
I told him I thought we could do business on those, and I ended up getting them from the
very same rock-and-gem shop where I'd arranged to get the rock-hammer. This time I
charged Andy my usual ten per cent and not a penny more. I didn't see anything lethal or
even dangerous in a dozen 7" x 7" squares of padded cloth. Rock-blankets, indeed.
It was about five months later that Andy asked if I could get him Rita Hayworth. That
conversation took place in the auditorium, during a movie-show. Nowadays we get the
movie-shows once or twice a week, but back then the shows were a monthly event
Usually the movies we got had a morally uplifting message to them, and this one, The
Lost Weekend, was no different. The moral was that it's dangerous to drink. It was a
moral we could take some comfort in.
Andy manoeuvred to get next to me, and about halfway through the show he leaned a
little closer and asked if I could get him Rita Hayworth. I'll tell you the truth, it kind of
tickled me. He was usually cool, calm, and collected, but that night he was jumpy as hell,
almost embarrassed, as if he was asking me to get him a load of Trojans or one of those
sheepskin-lined gadgets that are supposed to 'enhance your solitary pleasure,' as the
magazines put it. He seemed overcharged, a man on the verge of blowing his radiator.
'I can get her,' I said. 'No sweat, calm down. You want the big one or the little one?' At
that time Rita was my best girl (a few years before it had been Betty Grable) and she
came in two sizes. For a buck you could get the little Rita. For two-fifty you could have
the big Rita, four feet high and all woman.
'The big one,' he said, not looking at me. I tell you, he was a hot sketch that night He was
blushing just like a kid trying to get into a kootch show with his big brother's draft-card.
'Can you do it?'
'Take it easy, sure I can. Does a bear shit in the woods?' The audience was applauding
and catcalling as the bugs came out of the walls to get Ray Milland, who was having a
bad case of the DT's.
'How soon?'
'A week. Maybe less.'
'Okay.' But he sounded disappointed, as if he had been hoping I had one stuffed down my
pants right then. 'How much?"
I quoted him the wholesale price. I could afford to give him this one at cost; he'd been a
good customer, what with his rock-hammer and his rock-blankets. Furthermore, he'd
been a good boy - on more than one night when he was having his problems with Bogs,
Rooster, and the rest, I wondered how long it would be before he used the rock-hammer
to crack someone's head open.
Posters are a big part of my business, just behind the booze and cigarettes, usually half a
step ahead of the reefer. In the 60s the business exploded in every direction, with a lot of

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people wanting funky hang-ups like Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, that Easy Rider poster.
But mostly it's girls
week we'd be marched out to the exercise yard after breakfast, with two
guards up front and two more
behind ... plus all the guards in the towers keeping a weather
eye on the proceedings through their field-glasses for good
measure.
Four of us would be carrying a big extension ladder on those morning marches -1 always
got a kick out of the way Dickie Betts, who was on that job, called that sort of ladder an
extensible - and we'd put it up against the side of that low, lit building. Then we'd start
bucket-brigading hot buckets of tar up to the roof. Spill that shit on you and you'd
jitterbug all the way to the infirmary.
There were six guards on the project, all of them picked on the basis of seniority. It was
almost as good as a week's vacation, because instead of sweating it out in the laundry or
the plate-shop or standing over a bunch of cons cutting pulp or brush somewhere out in
the willy wags, they were having a regular May holiday in the sun, just sitting there with
their backs up against the low parapet, shooting the bull back and forth.
They didn't even have to keep more than half an eye on us, because the south wall sentry
post was close enough so that rte fellows up there could have spit their chews on us, if

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ihsy'd wanted to. If anyone on the roof-sealing party had made one funny move, it would
take four seconds to cut him smack in two with .45 calibre machine-gun bullets. So those
screws just sat there and took their ease. All they needed was a couple of six-packs
buried in crushed ice, and they would have been the lords of all creation.
One of them was a fellow named Byron Hadley, and in :hat year of 1950, he'd been at
Shawshank longer than I had. Longer than the last two wardens put together, as a matter
of "act. The fellow running the show in 1950 was a prissy-looking downcast Yankee
named George Dunahy. He had a degree in penal administration. No one liked him, as far
as I could tell, except the people who had gotten him his appointment. I heard that he
wasn't interested in anything but compiling statistics for a book (which was later
published by a small New England outfit called Light Side Press, where he probably had
to pay to have it done), who won the intramural baseball championship each September,
and getting a death-penalty law passed in Maine. A regular bear for the death-penalty was
George Dunahy. He was fired off the job in 1953, when it came out he was running a
discount auto repair service down in the prison garage and splitting the profits with Byron
Hadley and Greg Stammas. Hadley and Stammas came out of that one okay - they were
old hands at keeping their asses covered - but Dunahy took a walk. No one was sorry to
see him go, but nobody was exactly pleased to see Greg Stammas step into his shoes,
either. He was a short man with a tight, hard gut and the coldest brown eyes you ever
saw. He always had a painful, pursed little grin on his fa
four months ago, and a rich man at that ('It's frigging incredible how
lucky some assholes can get,' this paragon of gratitude on the plate-shop roof said). The
money had come as a result of oil and oil-leases, and there was close to a million dollars.
No, Hadley wasn't a millionaire - that might have made even him happy, at least for a
while - but the brother had left a pretty damned decent bequest of thirty-five thousand
dollars to each surviving member of his family back in Maine, if they could be found.
Not bad. Like getting lucky and winning a sweepstakes.
But to Byron Hadley the glass was always half-empty. He spent most of the morning
bitching to Mert about the bite that the goddam government was going to take out of his
windfall. "They'll leave me about enough to buy a new car with,' he allowed, 'and then
what happens? You have to pay the damn taxes on the car, and the repairs and
maintenance, you get your goddam kids pestering you to take 'em for a ride with the top
down -'
'And to drive it, if they're old enough,' Mert said. Old Mert Entwhistle knew which side
his bread was buttered on, and he didn't say what must have been as obvious to him as to
the rest of us: If that money's worrying you so bad, Byron old kid old sock, I'll just take it
off your hands. After all, what are friends for?
That's right, wanting to drive it, wanting to learn to drive on it, for Chrissake,' Byron said
with a shudder. 'Then what happens at the end of the year? If you figured the tax wrong
and you don't have enough left over to pay the overdraft, you got to pay out of your own
pocket, or maybe even borrow it from one of those kikey loan agencies. And they audit
you anyway, you know. It don't matter. And when the government audits you, they
always take more. Who can fight Uncle Sam? He puts his hand inside your shirt and
squeezes your tit until it's purple, and you end up getting the short end. Christ.'
He lapsed into a morose silence, thinking of what terrible bad luck he'd had to inherit that
$$35,000. Andy Dufresne had been spreading tar with a big Padd brush less than fifteen
feet away and now he tossed it into his pail and walked over to where Mert and Hadley
were sitting.
We all tightened up, and I saw one of the other screws, Tim Youngblood, drag his hand
down to where his pistol was bolstered. One of the fellows in the sentry tower struck his
partner on the arm and they both turned, too. For one moment I thought Andy was going
to get shot, or clubbed, or Then he said, very softly, to Hadley: 'Do you trust your wife?'
Hadley just stared at him. He was starting to get red in the face, and I knew that was a
bad sign. In about three seconds he as going to pull his billy and give Andy the butt end
of it right in the solar plexus, where that big bundle of nerves is. A hard enough hit there
can kill you, but they always go for it. If itdoesn't kill you it will paralyze you long

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enou
gh to forget whatever cute move it was that you had planned.
"Boy," Hadley said, I'll give you just one chance to pick up that Padd. And then you're
goin' off this roof on your head.'
Andy just looked at him, very calm and still. His eyes were like ice. It was as if he hadn't
heard. And I found myself wanting to tell him how it was, to give him the crash course.
The crash course is you never let on that you hear the guards talking, you never try to
horn in on their conversation unless you're asked (and then you always tell them just what
they wanting to hear and shut up again). Black man, white man, red man., yellow man, in
prison it doesn't matter because we've got our own brand of equality. In prison every
con's a nigger and you have to get used to the idea if you intend to survive men like
Hadley and Greg Staminas, who really would kill you. just as soon as look at you. When
you're in stir you belong to the state and if you forget it, woe is you. I've known men
who've lost eyes, men who've lost toes and fingers; I knew one man who lost the tip of
his penis and counted himself lucky that was all he lost. I wanted to tell Andy that it was
already too late. He could go back and pick up his brush and there would still be some
big lug waiting for him in the showers that night, ready to charlie-horse both of his legs
and leave him writhing on the cement. You could buy a lug like rat for a pack of
cigarettes or three Baby Ruths. Most of all, I wanted to tell him not to make it any worse
than it already was.
What I did was to keep on running tar onto the roof as if niching at all was happening.
Like everyone else, I look after n? own ass first. I have to. It's cracked already, and in
Shawshank there have always been Hadleys wiling to finish the job of breaking it.
Andy said, 'Maybe I put it wrong. Whether you trust her or not is immaterial. The
problem is whether or not you believe she would ever go behind your back, try to
hamstring you.'
Hadley got up. Mert got up. Tim Youngblood got up. Hadley's face was as red as the side
of a firebarn. 'Your only, problem,' he said, 'is going to be how many bones you still get
unbroken. You can count them in the infirmary. Come on, Mert We're throwing this
sucker over the side.'
Tim Youngblood drew his gun. The rest of us kept tarring like mad. The sun beat down.
They were going to do it; Hadley and Mert were simply going to pitch him over the side.
Terrible accident Dufresne, prisoner 81433-SHNK, was taking a couple of empties down
and slipped on the ladder. Too bad.
They laid hold of him, Mert on the right arm, Hadley on the left. Andy didn't resist. His
eyes never left Hadley's red, horsey face.
'If you've got your thumb on her, Mr Hadley,' he said in that same calm, composed voice,
'there's not a reason why you shouldn't have every cent of that money. Final score, Mr
Byron Hadley thirty-five thousand, Uncle Sam zip.'
Mert started to d
rag him towards the edge. Hadley just stood still. For a moment Andy
was like a rope between them in a tug-of-war game. Then Hadley said, 'Hold on one
second, Mert. What do you mean, boy?'
'I mean, if you've got your thumb on your wife, you can give it to her,' Andy said.
'You better start making sense, boy, or you're going over.'
"The government allows you a one-time-only gift to your spouse,' Andy said. 'It's good
up to sixty thousand dollars.'
Hadley was now looking at Andy as if he had been poleaxed. 'Naw, that ain't right,' he

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said. 'Tax free?'
'Tax free,' Andy said. 'IRS can't touch cent one.'
'How would you know a thing like that?'
Tim Youngblood said: 'He used to be a banker, Byron. I s'pose he might-'
'Shut ya head, Trout,' Hadley said without looking at him. Tim Youngblood flushed and
shut up. Some of the guards called him Trout because of his thick lips and buggy eyes.
Hadley kept looking at Andy. 'You're the smart banker who shot his wife. Why should I
believe a smart banker like you? So I can wind up in here breaking rocks right alongside
you? You'd like that, wouldn't you?'
Andy said quietly, 'If you went to jail for tax evasion, you'd go to a federal penitentiary,
not Shawshank. But you won't. The tax-free gift to the spouse is a perfectly legal
loophole. I've done dozens ... no, hundreds of them'. It's meant primarily for people with
small businesses to pass on, or for people who come into one-time-only windfalls. Like
yourself.'
'I think you're lying,' Hadley said, but he didn't - you could see he didn't. There was an
emotion dawning on his face, something that was grotesque overlying that long, ugly
countenence and that receding, sunburned brow. An almost obscene emotion when seen
on the features of Byron Hadley. It was hope.
'No, I'm not lying. There's no reason why you should take my word for it, either. Engage
a lawyer -'
'Ambulance-chasing highway-robbing cocksuckers!'Hadley cried.
Andy shrugged. "Then go to the IRS. They'll tell you the same thing for free. Actually,
you don't need me to tell you at all. You would have investigated the matter for yourself.'
'You fucking-A. I don't need any smart wife-killing banker to show me where the bear
shit in the buckwheat.'
'You'll need a tax lawyer or a banker to set up the gift for you and that will cost you
something,' Andy said. 'Or ... if you were interested, I'd be glad to set it up for you nearly
free of charge. The price would be three beers apiece for my co-workers -'
'Co-workers,' Mert said, and let out a rusty guffaw. He slapped his knee. A real kneeslapper
was old Mert, and I hope he died of intestinal cancer in a part of the world were
morphine is as of yet undiscovered. 'Co-workers, ain't that cute? Co-workers! You ain't
got any -'
'Shut your friggin' trap,' Hadley growled, and Mert shut.
Hadley looked at Andy again. 'What was you saying?'
'I was saying that I'd only ask three beers
apiece for my co-workers, if that seems fair,'
Andy said. 'I think a man feels more like a man when he's working out of doors in the
springtime if he can have a bottle of suds. That's only my opinion. It would go down
smooth, and I'm sure you'd have their gratitude.'
I have talked to some of the other men who were up there that day - Rennie Martin,
Logan St Pierre, and Paul Bonsaint were three of them - and we all saw the same thing
then ...felt the same thing. Suddenly it was Andy who had the upper hand. It was Hadley
who had the gun on his hip and the billy in his hand, Hadley who had his friend Greg
Staminas behind him and the whole prison administration behind Stammas, the whole
power of the state behind that, but all at once in that golden sunshine it didn't matter, and
I felt my heart leap up in my chest as it never had since the truck drove me and four
others through the gate back in 1938 and I stepped out into the exercise yard.

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Andy was looking at Hadley with those cold, clear, calm eyes, and it wasn't just the
thirty-five thousand then, we all agreed on that. I've played it over and over in my mind
and I know. It was man against man, and Andy simply forced him, the way a strong man
can force a weaker man's wrist to the table in a game of Indian wrestling. There was no
reason, you see, why Hadley couldn't've given Mert the nod at that very minute, pitched
Andy overside onto his head, and still taken Andy's advice.
No reason. But he didn't.
'I could get you all a couple of beers if I wanted to,' Hadley said. 'A beer does taste good
while you're workin'.' The colossal prick even managed to sound magnanimous.
'I'd just give you one piece of advice the IRS wouldn't bother with,' Andy said. His eyes
were fixed unwinkingly on Hadley's. 'Make the gift to your wife if you're sure. If you
think there's even a chance she might double-cross you or backshoot you, we could work
out something else -'
'Double-cross me?' Hadley asked harshly. 'Double-cross me! Mr Hotshot Banker, if she
ate her way through a boxcar of Ex-Lax, she wouldn't dare fart unless I gave her the nod.'
Mert, Youngblood, and the other screws yucked it up dutifully. Andy never cracked a
smile.
'I'll write down the forms you need,' he said. 'You can get them at the post office, and I'll
fill them out for your signature.'
That sounded suitably important, and Hadley's chest swelled. Then he glared around at
the rest of us and hollered, "What are you jimmies starin' at? Move your asses,
goddammit!' He looked back at Andy. 'You come over here with me, hotshot. And listen
to me well: if you're Jewing me somehow, you're gonna find yourself chasing your head
around Shower C before the week's out.'
'Yes, I understand that,' Andy said softly.
And he did understand it. The way it turned out, he understood a lot more than I did -
more than any of us did.
That's how, on the second-to-last day of the job, the conv

lower learning like The Shank are so rare that it's a case of beggars not being able to be
choosers.
In 1952 Brooksie, who had killed his wife and daughter after a losing streak at poker
back when Coolidge was President, was paroled. As usual, the state in all its wisdom had
let him go long after any chance he might have had to become a useful part of society
was gone. He was sixty-eight and arthritic when he tottered out of the main gate in his
Polish suit and his French shoes, his parole papers in one 'and and a Greyhound bus ticket
in the other. He was crying "hen he left. Shawshank was his world. What lay beyond its
vails was as terrible to Brooks as the Western Seas had been to superstitious 13th-century
sailors. In prison, Brooksie had been a person of some importance. He was the head
librarian, in educated man. If he went to the Kittery library and asked or a job, they
wouldn't give him a library card. I heard he lied in a home for indigent old folks up
Freeport way in 1952, and at that he lasted about six months longer than I thought he
would. Yeah, I guess the state got its own back on Brooksie, all right. They trained him to
like it inside the shithouse and then they threw him out.
Andy succeeded to Brooksie's job, and he was head librarian for twenty-three years. He
used the same force of will I'd seen him use on Byron Hadley to get what he wanted for
the library, and I saw him gradually turn one small room (which still smelled of
turpentine because it had been a paint closet until 1922 and had never been properly
aired) lined with Reader's Digest Condensed Books and National Geographies into the
best prison library in New England.
He did it a step at a time. He put a suggestion box by the door and patiently weeded out
such attempts at humour as More Fuk-Boox Pleeze and Escape in 10 EZ Lesions. He got
sold of the things the prisoners seemed serious about. He wrote to three major book clubs
in New York and got two of them, The Literary Guild and The Book of the Month Club,
to send editions of all their major selections to us at a special cheap rate. He discovered a

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hunger for information on such snail hobbies as soap-carving, woodworking, sleight of
hand, and card solitaire. He got all the books he could on such subjects. And those two
jailhouse staples, Erie Stanley Gardener and Louis L'Amour. Cons never seem to get
enough of the courtroom or the open range. And yes, he did keep a box of fairly spicy
paperbacks under the checkout desk, loaning them out carefully and making sure they
always got back. Even so, each new acquisition of that type was quickly read to tatters.
He began to write to the state senate in Augusta in 1954. Staminas was warden by then,
and he used to pretend Andy was some sort of mascot He was always in the library,
shooting the bull with Andy, and sometimes he'd even throw a paternal arm around
Andy's shoulders or give him a goose. He did
a weapon and was
serving six to twelve.
'I never seen such a high-strung guy,' Tommy said. 'A man like that should never want to
be a burglar, specially not with a gun. The slightest little noise, he'd go three feet into the
air ... and come down shooting, more likely than not One night he almost strangled me
because some guy down the hall was whopping on his cell bars with a tin cup.
'I did seven months with bun, until they let me walk free. I got time served and time off,
you understand. I can't say we talked because you didn't, you know, exactly hold a
conversation with El Blatch. He held a conversation with you. He talked all the time.
Never shut up. If you tried to get a word in, he'd shake his fist at you and roll his eyes. It
gave me the cold chills whenever he done that. Big tall guy he was, mostly bald, with
these green eyes set way down deep in the sockets. Jeez, I hope I never see him again.
'It was like a talkin' jag every night When he grew up, the orphanages he run away from,
the jobs he done, the women as fucked, the crap games he cleaned out I just let him run
an. My face ain't much, but I didn't want it, you know, rearranged for me.
'According to him, he'd burgled over two hundred joints. It was hard for me to believe, a
guy like him who went off like a firecracker every time someone cut a loud fart, but he
swore c was true. Now ... listen to me, Red. I know guys sometimes make things up after
they know a thing, but even before I knew about this golf pro guy, Quentin, I remember
thinking that if El Blatch ever burgled my house, and I found out about it later, I'd have to
count myself just about the luckiest motherfucker going still to be alive. Can you imagine
him in some lady's bedroom, sifting through her jool'ry box, and she coughs in her sleep
or turns over quick? It gives me the cold chills just to think of something like that, I
swear on my mother's name it does.
'He said he'd killed people, too. People that gave him shit. At least that's what he said.
And I believed him. He sure looked like a man that could do some killing. He was just so

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fucking high-strung! Like a pistol with a sawed-off firing pin. I knew a guy who had a
Smith & Wesson Police Special with a sawed-off firing pin. It wasn't no good for
nothing, except maybe for something to jaw about. The pull on that gun was so light that
it would fire if this guy, Johnny Callahan, his name was, if he turned his record-player on
full volume and put it on top of one of the speakers. That's how El Blatch was. I can't
explain it any better. I just never doubted that he had greased some people.
'So one night, just for something to say, I go: "Who'd you kill?" Like a joke, you know.
So he laughs and says, "There's one guy doing time up Maine for these two people I
killed. It was this guy and the wife of the slob who's doing time. I was creeping their
place and the guy started to give me some shit."

'I can't remember if he ever told me the woman's name or not,' Tommy went on. 'Maybe
he did. But hi New England, Dufresne's like Smith or Jones in the rest of the country,
because there's so many Frogs up here. Dufresne, Lavesque, Ouelette, Poulin, who Can
remember Frog names? But he told me the guy's name. He said the guy was Glenn
Quentin and he was a prick, a big rich prick, a golf pro. El said he thought the guy might
have cash in the house, maybe as much as five thousand dollars. That was a lot of money
back then, he says to me. So I go, "When was that?" And he goes, "After the war. Just
after the war."
'So he went in and he did the joint and they woke up and the guy gave him some trouble.
That's what El said. Maybe the guy just started to snore, that's what / say. Anyway, El
said Quentin was in the sack with some hotshot lawyer's wife and they sent the lawyer up
to Shawshank State Prison. Then he laughs this big laugh. Holy Christ, I was never so
glad of anything as I was when I got my walking papers from that place.'
I guess you can see why Andy went a little wonky when Tommy told him that story, and
why he wanted to see the warden right away. Elwood Blatch had been serving a six-totwelve
rap when Tommy knew him four years before. By the time Andy heard all of this,
in 1963, he might be on the verge of getting out ... or already out. So those were the two
prongs of the spit Andy was roasting on - the idea that Blatch might still be in on one
hand, and the very real possibility that he might be gone like the wind on the other.
There were inconsistencies in Tommy's story, but aren't there always in real life? Blatch
told Tommy the man who got sent up was a hotshot lawyer, and Andy was a banker, but
those are two professions that people who aren't very educated could easily get mixed up.
And don't forget that twelve years had gone by between the time Blatch was reading the
clippings about the trial and the time he told the tale to Tommy Williams. He also told
Tommy he got better than a thousand dollars from a footlocker Quentin had in his closet,
but the police said at Andy's trial that there had been no sign of burglary. I have a few
ideas about that. First, if you take the cash and the man it belonged to is dead, how are
you going to know anything was stolen, unless someone else can tell you it was there to
start with? Second, who's to say Blatch wasn't lying about that part of it? Maybe he didn't
want to admit killing two people for nothing. Third, maybe there were signs of burglary
and the cops either overlooked them - cops can be pretty dumb - or deliberately covered
them up so they wouldn't screw the DA's case. The guy was running for public office,
remember, and he needed a conviction to run on. An unsolved burglary-murder would
have done him no good at all.
But of the three, I like the middle one best. I've known a few Elwood Blatches hi my time

x0c
at Shawshank -
ny credibility at all.
When he had finished, Norton was completely silent for some time. I can just see him,
probably tipped back in his office chair under the picture of Governor Reed hanging on
the wall, his fingers steepled, his liver lips pursed, his brow wrinkled into ladder rungs
halfway to the crown of his head, his thirty-year pin gleaming mellowly.
'Yes,' he said finally. That's the damnedest story I ever heard. But I'll tell you what
surprises me most about it, Dufresne.'
'What's that, sir?'

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'That you were taken in by it.'
'Sir? I don't understand what you mean.' And Chester said that Andy Dufresne, who had
faced down Byron Hadley on the plate-shop roof thirteen years before, was almost
floundering for words.
'Well now,' Norton said. 'It's pretty obvious to me that this young fellow Williams is
impressed with you. Quite taken with you, as a matter of fact He hears your tale of woe,
and it's quite natural of him to want to ... cheer you up, let's say. Quite natural. He's a
young man, not terribly bright Not surprising he didn't realize what a state it would put
you into. Now what I suggest is -'
'Don't you think I thought of that?' Andy asked. 'But I'd never told Tommy about the man
working down at the marina. I never told anyone that - it never even crossed my mind!
But Tommy's description of his cellmate and that man ... they're identical!'
'Well now, you may be indulging in a little selective perception there,' Norton said with a
chuckle. Phrases like that, selective perception, are required learning for people in the
penalogy and corrections business, and they use them all they can.
"That's not it at all. Sir.'
"That's your slant on it,' Norton said, 'but mine differs. And let's remember that I have
only your word that there was such a man working at the Falmouth Country Club back
then.'
'No, sir,' Andy broke in again. 'No, that isn't true. Because-'
'Anyway,' Norton overrode him, expansive and loud, 'let's just look at it from the other
end of the telescope, shall we? Suppose -just suppose, now - that there really was a fellow
named Elwood Blotch.'
'Blatch,' Andy said tightly.
'Blatch, by all means. And let's say he was Thomas Williams's cellmate in Rhode Island.
The chances are excellent that he has been released by now. Excellent. Why, we don't
even know how much time he might have done there before he ended up with Williams,
do we? Only that he was doing a six-to-twelve.'
'No. We don't know how much time he'd done. But Tommy said he was a bad actor, a
cut-up. I think there's a fair chance that he may still be in. Even if he's been released, the
prison will have a record of his last known address, the names of his relatives -'
'And both would almost certainly be dead ends.'
Andy was silent for a moment, and then he burst out: 'Well, it's a chance, isn't it?'
'Yes, of course it is. So just for a moment, Dufresne, let's assume that Blatch exists a
nd
that he is still safely ensconced in the Rhode Island State Penitentiary. Now what is he
going to say if we bring this kettle of fish to him in a bucket? Is he going to fall down on
his knees, roil his eyes, and say "I did it! I did it! By all means add a life term onto my
burglary charge!"?'
'How can you be so obtuse?' Andy said, so low that Chester could barely hear. But he
heard the warden just fine.
'What? What did you call me?'
'Obtuse? Andy cried. 'Is it deliberate?'
'Dufresne, you've taken five minutes of my time - no, seven - and I have a very busy
schedule today. So I believe we'll just declare this little meeting closed and -'
'The country club will have ail the old time-cards, don't you realize that?' Andy shouted.
They'll have tax-forms and W-2s and unemployment compensation forms, all with his

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name on them! There will be employees there now that were there then, maybe Briggs
himself! It's been fifteen years, not forever! They'll remember him! They will remember
Blotch! If I've got Tommy to testify to what Blatch told him, and Briggs to testify that
Blatch was there, actually working at the country club, I can get a new trial! I can -'
'Guard! Guardl Take this man away!'
'What's the matter with you?' Andy said, and Chester told me he was very nearly
screaming by then. 'It's my life, my chance to get out, don't you see that? And you won't
make a single long-distance call to at least verify Tommy's story? Listen, I'll pay for the
call! I'll pay for -'
Then there was a sound of thrashing as the guards grabbed him and started to drag him
out
'Solitary,' Warden Norton said dryly. He was probably - gering his thirty-year pin as he
said it 'Bread and water.'
And so they dragged Andy away, totally out of control now, still screaming at the
warden; Chester said you could hear him even after the door was shut: 'It's my life! It's
my life, don't you understand it's my life?'
Twenty days on the grain and drain train for Andy down there in solitary. It was his
second jolt in solitary, and his dust-up with Norton was his first real black mark since he
had joined our happy little family.
I'll tell you a little bit about Shawshank's solitary while we're on the subject It's
something of a throwback to those hardy pioneer days of the early-to-mid-1700s in
Maine. In ..those days no one wasted much time with such things as penalogy' and
'rehabilitation' and 'selective perception'. 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 to you 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
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 stocksand-
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

x0c
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 thi
ll fairly neat -
restriction of visiting privileges is the penalty for a sloppy cell at Shawshank - and all
very empty.
Gonyar's 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 I'll rank you.'
The clown: 'I ranked your wife, Burkie,'
Gonyar: 'Shut up, all of you, or you'll spend the day in there.'
He and Burkes went up the line again, counting noses. They didn't 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 I've seen, this wailing horn goes off when there's 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 didn't call for them to search the suspected escapee's 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 twenty-six years. And
when someone - it was Warden Norton himself, as it turned out, poetic justice if there
ever was any - looked behind it, they got one hell of a shock.
But that didn't happen until 6.30 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 authority - Chester, the trustee, who was waxing the hall floor in the

x0c
Admin Wing that day. He didn't 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
Gonyar's ass.
'What do you mean, you're "satisfied he's not on the prison grounds"? What does that
mean? It means you didn't find him! You better find him! You better! Because I want
him! Do you hear me? I want him!'
Gonyar said something.
'Didn't happen on your shift? That's what you say. So far as / can tell, no one knows when
it happened. Or how. Or if it really did. Now, I want him in my office by three o'clock
this afternoon, or some heads are going to roll. I can promise you that, and I alway
s 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 night's tally for Cellblock 5.
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 six that evening Andy was still among the missing, Norton himself stormed down
to Cellblock 5, 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 lock-in, and at lights-out 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 down - stalked down - glaring 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 Andy's cell and looked around. It was just as Andy had left it, the sheets of
his bunk turned back but without looking slept-in. 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,
already four hours overtime, winced but said nothing.
Norton's 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 fawn-coloured
slacks. She was wearing a halter and she had a deep California tan. It must have offended
the hell out of Norton's 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 did - as 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 wouldn't go in.
Norton ordered him - God, they must have heard Norton ordering Rich Gonyar to go in
there all over the prison - and Gonyar just refused him, point-blank.

x0c
'I'll have your job for this!' Norton screamed. He was as hysterical as a woman having a
hot-flush. 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!
I'll have your job and I'll see to it that you never get another one in an

埋怨的反义词-耷拉的拼音

柳暗花明又一村上一句-提请

现在分词是什么-不假思索的假是什么意思

周日英文-其中的近义词

深邃的拼音-以儆效尤的意思

happy的名词-爆竹拼音

文言文之的用法-逸闻趣事的意思

夏虫不可以语于冰者-龉龃