shirt. The other extreme is to take a bath in the dirt and
deal any goddamned thing that will turn a dollar - guns, switchblades, big H, what the
hell. You ever have a con come up to you and offer you a contract?‘
I nodded. It‘s happened a lot of times over the years. You‘re, after all, the man who can
get it. And they figure if you can get them a nine-bolt battery for their transistor radio or a
-anon of Luckies or a lid of reefer, you can put them in touch with a guy who‘ll use a
knife.
‘Sure you have,‘ Andy agreed. ‘But you don‘t do it. Because guys like us, Red, we know
there‘s a third choice. An alternative to staying simon-pure or bathing in the filth and the
slime. It‘s the alternative that grown-ups all over the world pick. You balance off your
walk through the hog-wallow against what it gains you. You choose the lesser of two
evils and try to keep your good intentions in front of you. And I guess you judge how
well you‘re doing by how well you sleep at night... and what your dreams are like.‘
‘Good intentions,‘ I said, and laughed. ‘I know all about that, Andy. A fellow can toddle
right off to hell on that road.‘
‘Don‘t you believe it,‘ he said, growing sombre. This is hell right here. Right here in The
Shank. They sell pills and I tell them what to do with the money. But I‘ve also got the
library, and I know of over two dozen guys who have used the books in here to help them
pass their high school equivalency tests. Maybe when they get out of here they‘ll be able
to crawl off the shitheap. When we needed that second room back in 1957,1 got it
Because they want to keep me happy. I work cheap. That‘s the trade-off.‘
‘And you‘ve got your own private quarters.‘
‘Sure. That‘s the way I like it.‘
The prison population had risen slowly all through the fifties, and it damn near exploded
in the sixties, what with every college-age kid in America wanting to try dope and the
perfectly ridiculous penalties for the use of a little reefer. But in all that time Andy never
had a cellmate, except for a big, silent Indian named Normaden (like all Indians in The
Shank, he was called Chief), and Normaden didn‘t last long. A lot of the other longtimers
thought Andy was crazy, but Andy just smiled. He lived alone and he liked it that
way ... and as he‘d said, they liked to keep him happy. He worked cheap.
Prison time is slow time, sometimes you‘d swear it‘s stop-time, but it passes. It passes.
George Dunahy departed the scene in a welter of newspaper headlines shouting
SCANDAL and NEST-FEATHERING. Stammas succeeded him, and for the next six
years Shawshank was a kind of living hell. During the reign of Greg Stammas, the beds
in the infirmary and the cells in the solitary wing were always full.
One day in 1958 I looked at myself in a small shaving mirror I kept in my cell and saw a
forty-year-old man looking back at me. A kid had come in back in 1938, a kid with a big
mop of carrotty red hair, half-crazy with remorse, thinking about suicide. That kid was
gone. The red hair washalf grey and starting to recede. There were crow‘s tracks around
the eyes. On that day I could see an old man inside, waiting his time to come out. It
scared me. Nobody wants to grow old in stir.
Stammas went early in 1959. There had been several investigative reporters sniffing
around, and one of them even did four months under an assumed name, for a crime made
up out of whole cloth. They were getting ready to drag out SCANDAL and NESTFEATHERING
again, but before they could bring the hammer down on him, Stammas
ran. I can understand that; boy, can I ever. If he had been tried and convicted, he could
have ended up right in here. If so, he might have lasted all of five hours. Byron Hadley
had gone two years earlier. The sucker had a heart attack and took an early retirement.
Andy never got touched by the Stammas affair. In ea

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