to watch Andy that those six men and six women didn‘t have.
Andy Dufresne took just four drinks a year all the time I knew him. He would meet me in
the exercise yard every year about a week before his birthday and then again about two
weeks before Christmas. On each occasion he would arrange for a bottle of Jack Daniels.
He bought it the way most cons arrange to buy their stuff-the slave‘s wages they pay in
here, plus a little of his own. Up until 1965 what you got for your time was a dime an
hour. In ‘65 they raised it all the way up to a quarter. My commission on liquor was and is
ten per cent, and when you add on that surcharge to the price of a fine sippin‘ whiskey
like the Black Jack, you get an idea of how many hours of Andy Dufresne‘s sweat in the
prison laundry was going to buy his four drinks a year.
On the morning of his birthday, 20 September, he would have himself a big knock, and
then he‘d have another that night after lights out. The following day he‘d give the rest of
the bottle back to me, and I would share it around. As for the other bottle, he dealt
himself one drink Christmas night and another on New Year‘s Eve. Then that one would
also come to me with instructions to pass it on. Four drinks a year -and that is the
behaviour of a man who has been bitten hard by the bottle. Hard enough to draw blood.
He told the jury that on the night of the 10th he had been so drunk he could only
remember what had happened in little isolated snatches. He had gotten drunk that
afternoon - ‘I took on a double helping of Dutch courage‘ is how he put it -before taking
on Linda.
After she left to meet Quentin, he remembered deciding to confront them. On the way to
Quentin‘s bungalow, he swung into the country club for a couple of quick ones. He could
not, he said, remember telling the bartender he could ‘read about the rest of it in the
papers‘, or saying anything to him at all. He remembered buying beer in the Handy-Pik,
but not the dishtowels. ‘Why would I want dishtowels?‘ he asked, and one of the papers
reported that three of the lady jurors shuddered.
Later, much later, he speculated to me about the clerk who had testified on the subject of
those dishtoweis, and I think it‘i worth jotting down what he said. ‘Suppose that, during
their chmvmhn fur witnesses,‘ Andy said one day in the ?xwulio yard, ‘they stumble on
this fellow who sold me the beer that night. By then three days have gone by. The facts of
the case have been broadsided in all the papers. Maybe they ganged up on the guy, five or
six cops, plus the dick from the attorney general‘s office, plus the DA‘s assistant. Memory
is a pretty subjective thing, Red. They could have started out with "Isn‘t it possible that he
purchased four or five dishtowels?" and worked their way up from there. If enough
people want you to remember something, that can be a pretty powerful persuader.‘
I agreed that it could.
‘But there‘s one even more powerful,‘ Andy went on in that musing way of his. ‘I think it‘s
at least possible that he convinced himself. It was the limelight. Reporters asking him
questions, his picture in the papers ... all topped, of course, by his star turn in court. I‘m
not saying that he deliberately falsified his story, or perjured himself. I think it‘s possible
that lie could have passed a lie detector test with flying colours, or sworn on his mother‘s
sacred name that I bought those dishtowels. But still ... memory is such a goddam
subjective thing.
‘I know this much: even though my own lawyer thought I had to be lying about half my
story, he never bought that business about the dishtowels. It‘s crazy on the face of it. I
was pig-drunk, too drunk to have been thinking about muffling the gunshots. If I‘d done
it, I just would have let them rip.‘
He went up to the turnout and parked there. He drank beer and smoked cigarettes. H

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