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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 grey pyjama 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' programme 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 parlour. 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 ball-field for a Saturday
intramural baseball game when the three o'clock inside whistle blew, signalling the