I whistled.

  “Peter Stevens is locked in a safe deposit box at the Casco Bank in Portland and Andy Dufresne is locked in a safe deposit box at Shawshank,” he said. “Tit for tat. And the key that unlocks the box and the money and the new life is under a hunk of black glass in a Buxton hayfield. Told you this much, so I’ll tell you something else, Red—for the last twenty years, give or take, I have been watching the papers with a more than usual interest for news of any construction project in Buxton. I keep thinking that someday soon I’m going to read that they’re putting a highway through there, or erecting a new community hospital, or building a shopping center. Burying my new life under ten feet of concrete, or spitting it into a swamp somewhere with a big load of fill.”

  I blurted, “Jesus Christ, Andy, if all of this is true, how do you keep from going crazy?”

  He smiled. “So far, all quiet on the Western front.”

  “But it could be years—”

  “It will be. But maybe not as many as the State and Warden Norton think it’s going to be. I just can’t afford to wait that long. I keep thinking about Zihuatanejo and that small hotel. That’s all I want from my life now, Red, and I don’t think that’s too much to want. I didn’t kill Glenn Quentin and I didn’t kill my wife, and that hotel… it’s not too much to want. To swim and get a tan and sleep in a room with open windows and space… that’s not too much to want.”

  He slung the stones away.

  “You know, Red,” he said in an offhand voice. “A place like that… I’d have to have a man who knows how to get things.”

  I thought about it for a long time. And the biggest drawback in my mind wasn’t even that we were talking pipedreams in a shitty little prison exercise yard with armed guards looking down at us from their sentry posts. “I couldn’t do it,” I said. “I couldn’t get along on the outside. I’m what they call an institutional man now. In here I’m the man who can get it for you, yeah. But out there, anyone can get it for you. Out there, if you want posters or rock-hammers or one particular record or a boat-in-a-bottle model kit, you can use the fucking Yellow Pages. In here, I’m the fucking Yellow Pages. I wouldn’t know how to begin. Or where.”

  “You underestimate yourself,” he said. “You’re a self-educated man, a self-made man. A rather remarkable man, I think.”

  “Hell, I don’t even have a high school diploma.”

  “I know that,” he said. “But it isn’t just a piece of paper that makes a man. And it isn’t just prison that breaks one, either.”

  “I couldn’t hack it outside, Andy. I know that.”

  He got up. “You think it over,” he said casually, just as the inside whistle blew. And he strolled off, as if he were a free man who had just made another free man a proposition. And for awhile just that was enough to make me feel free. Andy could do that. He could make me forget for a time that we were both lifers, at the mercy of a hard-ass parole board and a psalm-singing warden who liked Andy Dufresne right where he was. After all, Andy was a lap-dog who could do tax-returns. What a wonderful animal!

  But by that night in my cell I felt like a prisoner again. The whole idea seemed absurd, and that mental image of blue water and white beaches seemed more cruel than foolish—it dragged at my brain like a fishhook. I just couldn’t wear that invisible coat the way Andy did. I fell asleep that night and dreamed of a great glassy black stone in the middle of a hayfield; a stone shaped like a giant blacksmith’s anvil. I was trying to rock the stone up so I could get the key that was underneath. It wouldn’t budge; it was just too damned big.

  And in the background, but getting closer, I could hear the baying of bloodhounds.

  * * *

  Which leads us, I guess, to the subject of jailbreaks.

  Sure, they happen from time to time in our happy little family. You don’t go over the wall, though, not at Shawshank, not if you’re smart. The searchlight beams go all night, probing long white fingers across the open fields that surround the prison on three sides and the stinking marshland on the fourth. Cons do go over the wall from time to time, and the searchlights almost always catch them. If not, they get picked up trying to thumb a ride on Highway 6 or Highway 99. If they try to cut across country, some farmer sees them and just phones the location in to the prison. Cons who go over the wall are stupid cons. Shawshank is no Canon City, but in a rural area a man humping his ass across country in a gray pajama suit sticks out like a cockroach on a wedding cake.

  Over the years, the guys who have done the best—maybe oddly, maybe not so oddly—are the guys who did it on the spur of the moment. Some of them have gone out in the middle of a cartful of sheets; a convict sandwich on white, you could say. There was a lot of that when I first came in here, but over the years they have more or less closed that loophole.

  Warden Norton’s famous “Inside-Out” program produced its share of escapees, too. They were the guys who decided they liked what lay to the right of the hyphen better than what lay to the left. And again, in most cases it was a very casual kind of thing. Drop your blueberry rake and stroll into the bushes while one of the screws is having a glass of water at the truck or when a couple of them get too involved in arguing over yards passing or rushing on the old Boston Patriots.

  In 1969, the Inside-Outers were picking potatoes in Sabbatus. It was the third of November and the work was almost done. There was a guard named Henry Pugh—and he is no longer a member of our happy little family, believe me—sitting on the back bumper of one of the potato trucks and having his lunch with his carbine across his knees when a beautiful (or so it was told to me, but sometimes these things get exaggerated) ten-point buck strolled out of the cold early afternoon mist. Pugh went after it with visions of just how that trophy would look mounted in his rec room, and while he was doing it, three of his charges just walked away. Two were recaptured in a Lisbon Falls pinball parlor. The third has not been found to this day.

  I suppose the most famous case of all was that of Sid Nedeau. This goes back to 1958, and I guess it will never be topped. Sid was out lining the ballfield for a Saturday intramural baseball game when the three o’clock inside whistle blew, signalling the shift-change for the guards. The parking lot is just beyond the exercise yard, on the other side of the electrically operated main gate. At three the gate opens and the guards coming on duty and those going off mingle. There’s a lot of back-slapping and bullyragging, comparison of league bowling scores and the usual number of tired old ethnic jokes.

  Sid just trundled his lining machine right out through the gate, leaving a three-inch baseline all the way from home plate in the exercise yard to the ditch on the far side of Route 6, where they found the machine overturned in a pile of lime. Don’t ask me how he did it. He was dressed in his prison uniform, he stood six-feet-two, and he was billowing clouds of lime-dust behind him. All I can figure is that, it being Friday afternoon and all, the guards going off were so happy to be going off, and the guards coming on were so downhearted to be coming on, that the members of the former group never got their heads out of the clouds and those in the latter never got their noses off their shoetops… and old Sid Nedeau just sort of slipped out between the two.

  So far as I know, Sid is still at large. Over the years, Andy Dufresne and I had a good many laughs over Sid Nedeau’s great escape, and when we heard about that airline hijacking for ransom, the one where the guy parachuted from the back door of the airplane, Andy swore up and down that D. B. Cooper’s real name was Sid Nedeau.

  “And he probably had a pocketful of baseline lime in his pocket for good luck,” Andy said. “That lucky son of a bitch.”

  * * *

  But you should understand that a case like Sid Nedeau, or the fellow who got away clean from the Sabbatus potato-field crew, guys like that are winning the prison version of the Irish Sweepstakes. Purely a case of six different kinds of luck somehow jelling together all at the same moment. A stiff like Andy could wait ninety years and not get a similar break.

  Maybe you remember, a ways back, I mentioned a guy named Henley Backus, the washroom foreman in the laundry. He came to Shawshank in 1922 and died in the prison infirmary thirty-one years later. Escapes and escape attempts were a hobby of his, maybe because he never quite dared to take the plunge himself. He could tell you a hundred different schemes, all of them crackpot, and all of them had been tried in The Shank at one time or another. My favorite was the tale of Beaver Morrison, a b&e convict who tried to build a glider from scratch in the plate-factory basement. The plans he was working from were in a circa-1900 book called The Modern Boy’s Guide to Fun and Adventure. Beaver got it built without being discovered, or so the story goes, only to discover there was no door from the basement big enough to get the damned thing out. When Henley told that story, you could bust a gut laughing, and he knew a dozen—no, two dozen—almost as funny.

  When it came to detailing Shawshank bust-outs, Henley had it down chapter and verse. He told me once that during his time there had been better than four hundred escape attempts that he knew of. Really think about that for a moment before you just nod your head and read on. Four hundred escape attempts! That comes out to 12.9 escape attempts for every year Henley Backus was in Shawshank and keeping track of them. The Escape-Attempt-of-the-Month Club. Of course most of them were pretty slipshod affairs, the sort of thing that ends up with a guard grabbing some poor, sidling slob’s arm and growling, “Where do you think you’re going, you happy asshole?”

  Henley said he’d class maybe sixty of them as more serious attempts, and he included the “prison break” of 1937, the year before I arrived at The Shank. The new Administration Wing was under construction then and fourteen cons got out, using construction equipment in a poorly locked shed. The whole of southern Maine got into a panic over those fourteen “hardened criminals,” most of whom were scared to death and had no more idea of where they should go than a jackrabbit does when it’s headlight-pinned to the highway with a big truck bearing down on it. Not one of those fourteen got away. Two of them were shot dead—by civilians, not police officers or prison personnel—but none got away.

  How many had gotten away between 1938, when I came here, and that day in October when Andy first mentioned Zihuatanejo to me? Putting my information and Henley’s together, I’d say ten. Ten that got away clean. And although it isn’t the kind of thing you can know for sure, I’d guess that at least half of those ten are doing time in other institutions of lower learning like The Shank. Because you do get institutionalized. When you take away a man’s freedom and teach him to live in a cell, he seems to lose his ability to think in dimensions. He’s like that jackrabbit I mentioned, frozen in the oncoming lights of the truck that is bound to kill it. More often than not a con who’s just out will pull some dumb job that hasn’t a chance in hell of succeeding… and why? Because it’ll get him back inside. Back where he understands how things work.

  Andy wasn’t that way, but I was. The idea of seeing the Pacific sounded good, but I was afraid that actually being there would scare me to death—the bigness of it.

  Anyhow, the day of that conversation about Mexico, and about Mr. Peter Stevens… that was the day I began to believe that Andy had some idea of doing a disappearing act. I hoped to God he would be careful if he did, and still, I wouldn’t have bet money on his chances of succeeding. Warden Norton, you see, was watching Andy with a special close eye. Andy wasn’t just another deadhead with a number to Norton; they had a working relationship, you might say. Also, Andy had brains and he had heart. Norton was determined to use the one and crush the other.

  As there are honest politicians on the outside—ones who stay bought—there are honest prison guards, and if you are a good judge of character and if you have some loot to spread around, I suppose it’s possible that you could buy enough look-the-other-way to make a break. I’m not the man to tell you such a thing has never been done, but Andy Dufresne wasn’t the man who could do it. Because, as I’ve said, Norton was watching. Andy knew it, and the screws knew it, too.

  Nobody was going to nominate Andy for the Inside-Out program, not as long as Warden Norton was evaluating the nominations. And Andy was not the kind of man to try a casual Sid Nedeau type of escape.

  If I had been him, the thought of that key would have tormented me endlessly. I would have been lucky to get two hours’ worth of honest shut-eye a night. Buxton was less than thirty miles from Shawshank. So near and yet so far.

  I still thought his best chance was to engage a lawyer and try for the retrial. Anything to get out from under Norton’s thumb. Maybe Tommy Williams could be shut up by nothing more than a cushy furlough program, but I wasn’t entirely sure. Maybe a good old Mississippi hard-ass lawyer could crack him… and maybe that lawyer wouldn’t even have to work that hard. Williams had honestly liked Andy. Every now and then I’d bring these points up to Andy, who would only smile, his eyes far away, and say he was thinking about it.

  Apparently he’d been thinking about a lot of other things, as well.

  * * *

  In 1975, Andy Dufresne escaped from Shawshank. He hasn’t been recaptured, and I don’t think he ever will be. In fact, I don’t think Andy Dufresne even exists anymore. But I think there’s a man down in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, named Peter Stevens. Probably running a very new small hotel in this year of our Lord 1976.

  I’ll tell you what I know and what I think; that’s about all I can do, isn’t it?

  * * *

  On March 12th, 1975, the cell doors in Cellblock 5 opened at 6:30 a.m., as they do every morning around here except Sunday. And as they do every day except Sunday, the inmates of those cells stepped forward into the corridor and formed two lines as the cell doors slammed shut behind them. They walked up to the main cellblock gate, where they were counted off by two guards before being sent on down to the cafeteria for a breakfast of oatmeal, scrambled eggs, and fatty bacon.

  All of this went according to routine until the count at the cellblock gate. There should have been twenty-seven. Instead, there were twenty-six. After a call to the Captain of the Guards, Cellblock 5 was allowed to go to breakfast.

  The Captain of the Guards, a not half-bad fellow named Richard Gonyar, and his assistant, a jolly prick named Dave Burkes, came down to Cellblock 5 right away. Gonyar reopened the cell doors and he and Burkes went down the corridor together, dragging their sticks over the bars, their guns out. In a case like that what you usually have is someone who has been taken sick in the night, so sick he can’t even step out of his cell in the morning. More rarely, someone has died… or committed suicide.

  But this time, they found a mystery instead of a sick man or a dead man. They found no man at all. There were fourteen cells in Cellblock 5, seven to a side, all fairly neat—restriction of visiting privileges is the penalty for a sloppy cell at Shawshank—and all very empty.

  Gonyar’s first assumption was that there had been a miscount or a practical joke. So instead of going off to work after breakfast, the inmates of Cellblock 5 were sent back to their cells, joking and happy. Any break in the routine was always welcome.

  Cell doors opened; prisoners stepped in; cell doors closed. Some clown shouting, “I want my lawyer, I want my lawyer, you guys run this place just like a frigging prison.”

  Burkes: “Shut up in there, or I’ll rank you.”

  The clown: “I ranked your wife, Burkie.”

  Gonyar: “Shut up, all of you, or you’ll spend the day in there.”

  He and Burkes went up the line again, counting noses. They didn’t have to go far.

  “Who belongs in this cell?” Gonyar asked the rightside night guard.

  “Andrew Dufresne,” the rightside answered, and that was all it took. Everything stopped being routine right then. The balloon went up.

  In all the prison movies I’ve seen, this wailing horn goes off when there’s been a break. That never happens at Shawshank. The first thing Gonyar did was to get in touch with the warden. The second thing was to get a search of the prison going. The third was to alert the state police in Scarborough to the possibility of a breakout.

  That was the routine. It didn’t call for them to search the suspected escapee’s cell, and so no one did. Not then. Why would they? It was a case of what you see is what you get. It was a small square room, bars on the window and bars on the sliding door. There was a toilet and an empty cot. Some pretty rocks on the windowsill.

  And the poster, of course. It was Linda Ronstadt by then. The poster was right over his bunk. There had been a poster there, in that exact same place, for twenty-six years. And when someone—it was Warden Norton himself, as it turned out, poetic justice if there ever was any—looked behind it, they got one hell of a shock.

  But that didn’t happen until six-thirty that night, almost twelve hours after Andy had been reported missing, probably twenty hours after he had actually made his escape.

  * * *

  Norton hit the roof.

  I have it on good authority—Chester, the trusty, who was waxing the hall floor in the Admin Wing that day. He didn’t have to polish any keyplates with his ear that day; he said you could hear the warden clear down to Records & Files as he chewed on Rich Gonyar’s ass.

  “What do you mean, you’re ‘satisfied he’s not on the prison grounds’? What does that mean? It means you didn’t find him! You better find him! You better! Because I want him! Do you hear me? I want him!”

  Gonyar said something.

  “Didn’t happen on your shift? That’s what you say. So far as I can tell, no one knows when it happened. Or how. Or if it really did. Now, I want him in my office by three o’clock this afternoon, or some heads are going to roll. I can promise you that, and I always keep my promises.”