was worried overmuch about breaking through. His assumption could have run
this way: I‘m 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 seven
years old.
Here‘s 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 toss - which
usually came at night - every second week or so. He must have decided that things
couldn‘t go on for long. Sooner or later, some screw was going to peek behind Rita
Hayworth just to make sure Andy didn‘t have a sharpened spoon-handle or some
marijuana reefers Scotch-taped 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 or 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 just on dumb luck.
Not for twenty-seven years. Nevertheless, I have to believe that for the first two years -
until mid-May of 1950, when he helped Byron Hadley get around the tax on his windfall
inheritance - that‘s 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; it‘s money in their
pockets and the prisoner gets to keep his whack-off pictures or his tailormade cigarettes.
Also, Andy was a model prisoner - quiet, well-spoken, respectful, non-violent. It‘s the
crazies and the stampeders that get their cells turned upside-down 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 tax returns as well as H & R Block. He gave
gratis estate-planning advice, set up tax-shelters, filled out loan applications (sometimes
creatively). I can remember him sitting behind his desk in the library, patiently going
over a car-loan 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 loan-sharks. When he‘d finished, the screwhead started to put out his
hand ... and then drew it back to himself quickly. He‘d 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
didn‘t end after he‘d been in cold storage for a while, 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 going - perhaps around October of 1967 - the long-time
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 rock-hammer
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.

上一页  [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]  ... 下一页  >>