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
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

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