n 1951 he tried to rob the First Mercantile Bank of Mechanic Falls, and the
hold-up turned into a bloodbath - six dead in the end, two of them members of the gang,
three of them hostages, one of them a young state cop who put his head up at the wrong
time and got a bullet in the eye. Cote had a penny collection. Naturally they weren‘t going
to let him have it in here, but with a little help from his mother and a middleman who
used to drive a laundry truck, I was able to get it to him. I told him, Bobby, you must be
crazy, wanting to have a coin collection in a stone hotel full of thieves. He looked at me
and smiled and said, I know where to keep them. They‘ll be safe enough. Don‘t you
worry. And he was right. Bobby Cote died of a brain tumour in 1967, but that coin
collection has never turned up.
I‘ve gotten men chocolates on Valentine‘s Day; I got three of those green milkshakes they
serve at McDonald‘s around St Paddy‘s Day for a crazy Irishman named O‘Malley; I even
arranged for a midnight showing of Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones for a party
of twenty men who had pooled their resources to rent the films ... although I ended up
doing a week in solitary for that little escapade. It‘s the risk you run when you‘re the guy
who can get it.
I‘ve gotten reference books and fuck-books, joke novelties like handbuzzers and itching
powder, and on more than one occasion I‘ve seen that a long-timer has gotten a pair of
panties from his wife or his girlfriend ... and I guess you‘ll know what guys in here do
with such items during the long nights when time draws out like a blade. I don‘t get all
those things gratis, and for some items the price comes high. But I don‘t do it just for the
money; what good is money to me? I‘m never going to own a Cadillac car or fly off to
Jamaica for two weeks in February. I do it for the same reason that a good butcher will
only sell you fresh meat: I got a reputation and I want to keep it. The only two things I
refuse to handle are guns and heavy drugs. I won‘t help anyone kill himself or anyone
else. I have enough killing on my mind to last me a lifetime.
Yeah, I‘m a regular Neiman-Marcus. And so when Andy Dufresne came to me in 1949
and asked if I could smuggle Rita Hayworth into the prison for him, I said it would be no
problem at all. And it wasn‘t.
When Andy came to Shawshank in 1948, he was thirty years old. He was a short neat
little man with sandy hair and small, clever hands. He wore gold-rimmed spectacles. His
fingernails were always clipped, and they were always clean. That‘s a funny thing to
remember about a man, I suppose, but it seems to sum Andy up for me. He always looked
as if he should have been wearing a tie. On the outside he had been a vice-president in the
trust department of a large Portland bank. Good work for a man as young as he was,
especially when you consider how conservative most banks are ... and you have to
multiply that conservatism by ten when you get up into New England, where folks don‘t
like to trust a man with their money unless he‘s bald, limping, and constantly plucking at
his pants to get his truss around straight Andy was in for murdering his wife and her
lover.
As I believe I have said, everyone in prison is an innocent man. Oh, they read that
scripture the way those holy rollers on TV read the Book of Revelations. They were the
victims of judges with hearts of stone and balls to match, or incompetent lawyers, or
police frame-ups, or bad luck. They read the scripture, but you can see a different
scripture in their faces. Most cons are a low sort, no good to themselves or anyone else,
and their worst luck was that their mothers carried them to term.
In all my years at Shawshank, there have been less than ten men whom I believed when
they told me they were innocent Andy Dufresne was one of them, although I only became

上一页  [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]  ... 下一页  >>