ir 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.
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 convict crew that tarred the platefactory
roof in 1950 ending up sitting in a row at ten o'clock on a spring morning,
drinking Black Label beer supplied by the hardest screw that ever walked a turn at
Shawshank Prison. That beer was piss-warm, but it was still the best I ever had in my life.
We sat and drank it and felt the sun on our shoulders, and not even the expression of half
amusement, half-contempt on Hadley's face - as if he was watching apes drink beer
instead of men -could spoil it. It lasted twenty minutes, that beer-break, and for those
twenty minutes we felt like free men. We could have been drinking beer and tarring the
roof of one of our own houses.
Only Andy didn't drink. I already told you about his -linking habits. He sat hunkered
down in the shade, hands dangling between his knees, watching us and smiling a little.
It's amazing how many men remember him that way, and amazing how many men were
on that work-crew when Andy Dufresne faced down Byron Hadley. I thought there were
nine or ten of us, but by 1955 there must have been two hundred of us, maybe more ... if
you believed what you heard.
So, yeah - if you asked me to give you a flat-out answer to th

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