肖申克的救赎 The Shawshank Redemption 第一张

RITA HAYWORTH AND SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION
There‘s a guy like me in every state and federal prison in America, I guess - I‘m the guy
who can get it for you. Tailor-made cigarettes, a bag of reefer, if you‘re partial to that, a
bottle of brandy to celebrate your son or daughter‘s high school graduation, or almost
anything else ... within reason, that is. It wasn‘t always that way.
I came to Shawshank when I was just twenty, and I am one of the few people in our
happy little family who is willing to own up to what he did. I committed murder. I put a
large insurance policy on my wife, who was three years older than I was, and then I fixed
the brakes of the Chevrolet coupe her father had given us as a wedding present. It worked
out exactly as I had planned, except I hadn‘t planned on her stopping to pick up the
neighbour woman and the neighbour woman‘s infant son on the way down Castle Hill
and into town. The brakes let go and the car crashed through the bushes at the edge of the
town common, gathering speed. Bystanders said it must have been doing fifty or better
when it hit the base of the Civil War statue and burst into flames.
I also hadn‘t planned on getting caught, but caught I was. I got a season‘s pass into this
place. Maine has no death penalty, but the district attorney saw to it that I was tried for all
three deaths and given three life sentences, to run one after the other. That fixed up any
chance of parole I might have, for a long, long time. The judge called what I had done ‘a
hideous, heinous crime‘, and it was, but it is also in the past now. You can look it up in
the yellowing files of the Castle Rock Call, where the big headlines announcing my
conviction look sort of funny and antique next to the news of Hitler and Mussolini and
FDR‘s alphabet soup agencies.
Have I rehabilitated myself, you ask? I don‘t know what that word means, at least as far
as prisons and corrections go. I think it‘s a politician‘s word. It may have some other
meaning, and it may be that I will have a chance to find out, but that is the future ...
something cons teach themselves not to think about. I was young, good-looking, and
from the poor side of town. I knocked up a pretty, sulky, headstrong girl who lived in one
of the fine old houses on Carbine Street. Her father was agreeable to the marriage if I
would take a job in the optical company he owned and ‘work my way up‘. I found out that
what he really had in mind was keeping me in his house and under his thumb, like a
disagreeable pet that has not quite been housebroken and which may bite. Enough hate
eventually piled up to cause me to do what I did. Given a second chance I would not do it
again, but I‘m not sure that means I am rehabilitated.
Anyway, it‘s not me I want to tell you about; I want to tell you about a guy named Andy
Dufresne. But before I can tell you about Andy, I have to explain a few other things about
myself. It won‘t take long.
As I said, I‘ve been the guy who can get it for you here at Shawshank for damn near forty
years. And that doesn‘t just mean contraband items like extra cigarettes or booze,
although those items always top the list. But I‘ve gotten thousands of other items for men
doing time here, some of them perfectly legal yet hard to come by in a place where
you‘ve supposedly been brought to be punished. There was one fellow who was in for
raping a little girl and exposing himself to dozens of others; I got him three pieces of pink
Vermont marble and he did three lovely sculptures out of them - a baby, a boy of about
twelve, and a bearded young man. He called them The Three Ages of Jesus, and those
pieces of sculpture are now in the parlour of a man who used to be governor of this state.
Or here‘s a name you may remember if you grew up north of Massachusetts - Robert
Alan Cote. I

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