uldn't say who had done
it, or how they had gotten to him, but being in my business, I know that a screw can be
bribed to do almost anything accept get a gun for an inmate. They didn't make big
salaries then, and they don't now. And in those days there was no electronic locking
system, no closed-circuit TV, no master-switches which controlled whole areas of the
prison. Back in 1948, each cellblock had its own turnkey. A guard could have been
bribed real easy to let someone - maybe two or three someones - into the block, and, yes,
even into Diamond's cell.
Of course a job like that would have cost a lot of money. Not by outside standards, no.
Prison economics are on a smaller scale. When you've been in here a while, a dollar bill
in your hand looks like a twenty did outside. My guess is, that if Bogs was done, it cost
someone a serious piece of change - fifteen bucks, well say, for the turnkey, and two or
store apiece for each of the lump-up guys.
I'm not saying it was Andy Dufresne, but I do know that he brought in five hundred
dollars when he came, and he was a banker in the straight world - a man who understands
better than the rest of us the ways in which money can become power.
And I know this: After the beating - the three broken ribs, the haemorrhaged eye, the
sprained back and the dislocated hip - Bogs Diamond left Andy alone. In fact, after that
he left everyone pretty much alone. He got to be like a high wind in the summertime, all
bluster and no bite. You could say, in fact, that he turned into a 'weak sister'.
That was the end of Bogs Diamond, a man who might eventually have killed Andy if
Andy hadn't taken steps to prevent it (if it was him who took the steps). But it wasn't the
end of Andy's trouble with the sisters. There was a little hiatus, and then it began again,
although not so hard nor so often. Jackals like easy prey, and there were easier pickings
around than Andy Dufresne.
He always fought them, that's what I remember. He knew, I guess, that if you let them
have at you even once, without fighting it, it got that much easier to let them have their
way without fighting next time. So Andy would turn up with bruises on his face every
once in a while, and there was the matter of the two broken fingers six or eight months
after Diamond's beating. Oh yes - and sometime in late 1949, the man landed in the
infirmary with a broken cheekbone that was probably the result of someone swinging a
nice chunk of pipe with the business-end wrapped in flannel. He always fought back, and
as a result, he did his time in solitary. But don't think solitary was the hardship for Andy
that it was for some men. He got along with himself.
The sisters was something he adjusted himself to - and then, in 1950, it stopped almost
completely. That is a part of my story that 111 get to in due time.
In the fall of 1948, Andy met me one morning in the exercise yard and asked me if I
could get him half a dozen rock-blankets.
'What the hell are those?' I asked.
He told me that was just what rockhounds called them; they were polishing cloths about
the size of dishtowels. They were heavily padded, with a smooth side and a rough side -
the smooth side like fine-grained sandpaper, the rough side almost as abrasive as
industrial steel wool (Andy also kept a box of that in his cell, although he didn't get 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 p

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