Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption

He had told Andy that Andy walked around the exercise yard as if he were at a cocktail party. That isn’t the way I would have put it, but I know what he meant. It goes back to what I said about Andy wearing his freedom like an invisible coat, about how he never really developed a prison mentality. His eyes never got that dull look. He never developed the walk that men get when the day is over and they are going back to their cells for another endless night — that flat-footed, hump-shouldered walk. Andy walked with his shoulders squared and his step was always light, as if he was heading home to a good home-cooked meal and a good woman instead of to a tasteless mess of soggy vegetables, lumpy mashed potato, and a slice or two of that fatty, gristly stuff most of the cons called mystery meat … that, and a picture of Raquel Welch on the wall.

But for those four years, although he never became exactly like the others, he did become silent, introspective, and brooding. Who could blame him? So maybe it was Warden Norton who was pleased … at least, for a while.

His dark mood broke around the time of the 1967 World Series. That was the dream year, the year the Red Sox won the pennant instead of placing ninth, as the Las Vegas bookies had predicted. When it happened — when they won the American League pennant — a kind of ebullience engulfed the whole prison. There was a goofy sort of feeling that if the Dead Sox could come to life, then maybe anybody could do it. I can’t explain that feeling now, any more than an ex-Beatlemaniac could explain that madness, I suppose. But it was real. Every radio in the place was tuned to the games as the Red Sox pounded down the stretch. There was gloom when the Sox dropped a pair in Cleveland near the end, and a nearly riotous joy when Rico Petrocelli put away the pop fly that clinched it. And then there was the gloom that came when Lonborg was beaten in the seventh game of the Series to end the dream just short of complete fruition. It probably pleased Norton to no end, the son of a bitch. He liked his prison wearing sackcloth and ashes.

But for Andy, there was no tumble back down into gloom. He wasn’t much of a baseball fan anyway, and maybe that was why. Nevertheless, he seemed to have caught the current of good feeling, and for him it didn’t peter out again after the last game of the Series. He had taken that invisible coat out of the closet and put it on again.

I remember one bright-gold fall day in very late October, a couple of weeks after the World Series had ended. It must have been a Sunday, because the exercise yard was full of men ‘walking off the week’ — tossing a Frisbee or two, passing around a football, bartering what they had to barter. Others would be at the long table in the Visitors’ Hall, under the watchful eyes of the screws, talking with their relatives, smoking cigarettes, telling sincere lies, receiving their picked-over care packages.

Andy was squatting Indian-fashion against the wall, chunking two small rocks together in his hands, his face turned up into the sunlight. It was surprisingly warm, that sun, for a day so late in the year.

‘Hello, Red,’ he called. ‘Come on and sit a spell.’

I did.

‘You want this?’ he asked, and handed me one of the two carefully polished ‘millennium sandwiches’ I just told you about. ‘I sure do,’ I said. ‘It’s very pretty. Thank you.’

He shrugged and changed the subject ‘Big anniversary coming up for you next year.’

I nodded. Next year would make me a thirty-year man. Sixty per cent of my life spent in Shawshank Prison.

‘Think you’ll ever get out?’

‘Sure. When I have a long white beard and just about three marbles left rolling around upstairs.’

He smiled a little and then turned his face up into the sun again, his eyes closed. ‘Feels good.’

‘I think it always does when you know the damn winter’s almost right on top of you.’

He nodded, and we were silent for a while.

‘When I get out of here,’ Andy said finally, ‘I’m going where it’s warm all the time.’ He spoke with such calm assurance you would have thought he had only a month or so left to serve. ‘You know where I’m goin’, Red?’

‘Nope.’

‘Zihuatanejo,’ he said, rolling the word softly from his tongue like music. ‘Down in Mexico. It’s a little place maybe twenty miles from Playa Azul and Mexico Highway 37. It’s a hundred miles north-west of Acapulco on the Pacific Ocean. You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific?’

I told him I didn’t. ‘They say it has no memory. And that’s where I want to finish out my life, Red. In a warm place that has no memory.’

He had picked up a handful of pebbles as he spoke; now he tossed them, one by one, and watched them bounce and roll across the baseball diamond’s dirt infield, which would be under a foot of snow before long.