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Feb. 7th, 2005 09:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
apocalypsosTitle: I Seek A Silent Fortress
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
trollprincess
Fandom: Shawshank Redemption
Rating: PG-13 (for bad language)
Disclaimer: I don't own The Shawshank Redemption, although I'd be damn proud if I did.
Author's note: This fic is yet another entry on my part forphoenixchilde's Everyday Superheroes Fanfic Challenge, because it's just that goddamn addictive. (The title comes from what I thought a Pinback lyric sounded like at first. So ... heck, it sounded good at the time. ;)) I had to screw around with the original storyline and some of the dialogue to get where I wanted in the AU, and it really helps if you've seen the movie, but it all worked out in the end, I hope. *crosses fingers*
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I Seek A Silent Fortess
****
Andy Dufresne once told me that the only reason he sat through that mockery of a murder trial was because he was hoping he could at least salvage his life out of it. His wife might be dead, her corpse found next to the golf pro she'd been nailing on the side, but he still had his work at the bank to keep him sane.
He could keep telling himself that, I thought, but it wasn't like he'd had much choice at the time. "Lawyer fucked you, remember?" I'd said, not able to resist a smile.
All he did was smile at me in return. But something about it, some mischievous undercurrent in it, made me curious.
Back then, Andy was a tall, elegant thing shoved into prison grays, the same guy who could turn a walk around the prison into a Sunday stroll. His first night in the joint was spent, as far as I knew, listening to the others coaxing their fish into hysteria. My fish -- seeing as how I'd had the misfortune of placing a bet on Andy's head -- was ominously quiet. In retrospect, it was almost as if he weren't there at all.
The next morning, he walked out of his cell fearful and curious, but not twitchy like the rest of them. The man simply stared the place down, settled his shoulders just so, and that was the end of that.
It looked to me like a man adjusting to a bad day job he could get over as soon as he got home at the end of the day. Even then, it got me to wondering.
When the sisters started chasing after Andy, there wasn't much any of us could do about it. Not because we didn't have any clout against them, but because we didn't see it coming. Andy made sure of that.
Oh, I knew well enough that Bogs had his eye on Andy. He'd watch him like a hawk from across the grounds, staring at him like a predator studying prime meat. Andy shrugged it off, even going so far once as to tell me none of the sisters were going to get very far with him.
"Why?" I gave him a surprised look. "You got a shotgun hidden somewhere you haven't told me about?"
He grinned up at me from where he sat with his back against the stone prison wall. "Something like that."
Bogs went missing one night while the rest of us were watching Rita Hayworth do that shit with her hair. The only people who missed him were the guards, mostly because they're prison guards and that's their job. But the rest of us nearly threw a party about his disappearance, and the sisters, friends though they might have been to the poor departed Bogs, were too busy walking the grounds looking shifty and spooked.
Nobody seemed to notice the black eye and broken nose that Andy Dufresne was suddenly sporting, or the secretive grin he couldn't wipe off of his face. Except me, of course, but that's what friends do.
"You going to explain those battle scars of yours to me or not?" I cocked an eyebrow at Andy as I tossed Heywood the baseball in the yard.
Andy looked up at me. His nose didn't look so bad anymore, but his eye was still ringed in that sickly shade of yellow. "Didn't figure you'd care as long as I was still in one piece," he said.
"It's just curiosity, is all." I threw the ball back to Heywood, then blurted out, "Was it Bogs?"
Andy shrugged, but didn't answer.
That was the night Bogs reappeared in his own cell.
Wherever Bogs had gone off gallivanting to, he'd come back with a broken arm, a severely sprained back, and a chunk out of his hip that the doctor in the infirmary swore looked like a shark bite. They questioned Bogs at the end of a nightstick for a good six hours before they figured out he didn't know what the hell was going on, either inside of his head or out of it. He didn't know his name, or where he was, or why the hell he'd up and gone and then reappeared days later. All he knew, from what I heard from the inmates pulling infirmary duty, was how to whimper.
I could blame Andy all I liked in my head, but that didn't mean he'd done anything to Bogs. It didn't make a damn bit of sense any way you looked at it, and besides, Bogs wasn't exactly beloved enough to bother caring.
A day later, Bogs got carted off to the nearest asylum with barely enough sense to do anything other than mewl helplessly like a kitten.
Like the rest of us, Andy watched him go with the same attitude of "Good riddance to bad rubbish." Coming from a bunch of hardened cons, that was saying something. But it didn't change the fact that from that day onward, I knew for certain that my friend Andy was keeping a secret from me.
"Zihuatanejo."
He dropped the name of the town into conversation like it wasn't to be questioned, which is probably why he didn't bother saying it in front of the rest of the guys. He said it once like a magic word, then described the place to me a few months later. The stretch of beaches, the crystal blue of the ocean water.
Andy described it with the zeal of someone who'd just come back from a vacation where he'd met the love of his life. He gave me details that made me doubt the sky was that brilliant, that the ocean was that exact shade of blue. He talked about it like an Eden he visited at night when the guards were gone and the lights were out. I almost would have thought the son of a bitch was losing his damn mind if just hearing about it didn't give me the same warm feeling it seemed to give him.
It wasn't long after that that Tommy Williams came to Shawshank.
Andy took to Tommy the same way he seemed to take to almost everyone at Shawshank. He sized Tommy up and figured out what the kid needed, and he worked to get that kid a diploma like nothing I'd ever seen.
And then Tommy had to go and spill his guts about his goddamn cellmate at Thomaston . . . that Blatch fella.
That Tommy even bothered to tell Andy gave the man a new thread of hope to latch onto, and any man looking back on nineteen years in the same desolate place will tell you that you'll take any thread of hope people dangle in front of you. With Andy, though, it wasn't like the rest of us, like a way of life we were trying to shed like an old skin. With Andy, you had a man trying desperately to shed himself of a bad marriage, a man getting rid of the last tiresome responsibility he had.
He had to have known talking to the warden wasn't going to do him a lick of good, but that didn't stop him from trying. The warden couldn't very well keep his kickbacks and his extortion going on without Andy, after all.
A day later, Tommy was dead and Andy was in solitary.
None of us really wanted to know what Andy was going to be like when he came out of the hole. Looking back on it, if we'd known the way he would come out of there, we probably would have been validated in that desire. Whatever had happened to him in there . . . well, hell, it scared the rest of us damn near worse than anything we'd ever seen.
Andy Dufresne didn't make any goddamn sense.
That was the only way to put it, we all agreed later on, after some of us had seen him led out of solitary up to Warden Norton's office. The guards might not have said anything, but the looks on their faces were answer enough that they were on the same wavelength as we were when it came to the matter of Andy Dufresne, who'd gone into the hole for a month and come out looking like he'd just spent the month on a tropical vacation with a defiant expression on his face.
I found him later on in the yard after his meeting with the warden, and took a good long moment to stare at him and wonder. Andy hadn't bothered to clean up, but the fact was that he didn't have to. His face was as clean-shaven as the day he'd been tossed into the hole, his clothes so clean you'd think he'd shipped them out for dry-cleaning when nobody was looking. He hadn't lost weight. His hair wasn't overgrown. Shit, the man even had a tan, for Christ's sake.
How the hell does a man ... any man ... get a tan in solitary confinement?
"I didn't have to come here, you know," he said.
I couldn't say anything to that.
I awkwardly slumped down beside Andy as he went on, choosing his words so carefully I almost expected him never to speak again. "There are a thousand places on this earth I could have gone to before I'd ever had to come here. But I was raised better than that," he said.
I frowned. That wasn't an answer to a single one of the dozens of questions rolling through my head at that moment. But I got the impression I wouldn't be getting an answer to those anytime soon.
Abruptly, he changed course. "Did I ever tell you I once took my wife to Greece?"
"No shit," I said, not able to contain a smile.
He glanced over at me. "You know where Buxton is?"
My brow furrowed. "In Greece?"
"No, here in Maine. There was this hayfield up there, with a long rock wall and a big oak at the north end. Like something out of a Robert Frost poem. It's where I asked my wife to marry me. We'd gone for a picnic. We made love under that tree. I asked and she said yes." His expression was dreamy and serious all at once, like someone mired in a daydream. Then that mischievous thread I'd seen before in him passed through his gaze once again. "And then I took her to Greece. It pretty much surprised the life out of her, but she got over it soon enough."
I had no idea what he was getting at -- well, aside from the usual innuendo, anyway -- but I grinned just the same. "I'll bet she did, Andy."
We shared a moment then, quiet and thoughtful, before Andy said softly, "Promise me, Red. If you ever get out, find that spot. In the base of that wall you'll find a rock that has no earthly business in a Maine hayfield. A piece of black volcanic glass. You'll find something buried under it I want you to have."
He got to his feet as I blurted out, "What? What's buried there?"
"You'll just have to pry up that rock and see," he said. Then he walked away.
That was the last time I saw Andy Dufresne in Shawshank.
The rest of that night passed by with heavy worries between claps of thunder and flashes of lightning. My thoughts centered on Andy and what he might be doing in his cell now that his last hope of getting out of here was gone. Sleep was never an option.
The next morning, I practically sprang from my cell like a wound toy for roll call, not able to tear my gaze away from Andy's cell at the end of the row.
He didn't emerge. I wasn't surprised.
Haig was on the case immediately, calling for Andy to come out as he stalked down to the cell with fists pumping. "I'll thump your skull for you!" he yelled.
Still no answer from Andy.
Soon enough, he and his men reached the cell and stared inside in stunned silence. "Oh, my God," Haig whispered.
I was tempted to turn around, go right back into my cell, and never come out again. Some questions, you just didn't want an answer for.
The answer, however, came sooner than I would have liked. Andy wasn't dead, hanging from the rafters like the tassel on a ceiling fan.
Andy was just gone. Well and truly gone.
Warden Norton came down in a temper, ordering every man on the block questioned. And the first man he pointed to when they asked for specifics was yours truly. Call me crazy, but I didn't think I could give them any more of an answer than they could have given me.
The guards hauled me into Andy's empty cell, Norton still working over Haig for the fact that while Andy had been on the count for the night before, he wasn't exactly present and accounted for this morning. Haig scurried off to do what he could to find Andy Dufresne, which gave Norton plenty of opportunity to turn on me. "I see you two all the time, you're thick as thieves, you are! He must'a said something!"
Somehow, I didn't think telling him that Andy hadn't told me shit would have gone over so well, so I tried for a vaguely more polite approach. "No, sir, he didn't," I said.
The look on Norton's face clearly said he didn't believe me. Not that I could blame him for that. "Lord! It's a miracle! Man up and vanished like a fart in the wind! Nothin' left but some damn rocks on the windowsill and that cupcake on the wall!" He gifted Raquel Welch with a grand gesture and a sarcastic smile. "Let's ask her! Maybe she knows! What say there, Fuzzy-Britches? Feel like talking?"
Everybody in the room stared at the poster, half-expecting it to responded.
Norton snorted in contempt. "Guess not. Why should you be different?" He grabbed a handful of Andy's chess pieces from the windowsill, staring down at them with disdain. "It's a conspiracy!" He hurled one of the rock chess pieces against the wall, and all of us, me and the guards, flinched as he did. "That's what this is!" He threw another one. "It's one big damn conspiracy!" And another one. "And everyone's in on it!" He gave the rock in his hand a dirty look before glaring at Raquel.
"Including her," he said with a sneer, and flung the last rock chess piece at the poster.
It bounced off the wall and shattered against the cement floor of the cell.
All of us stared at the rock shards scattered across the floor, then turned to look at Norton. He scowled back at the rest of us, then stalked out of the cell, barking orders like a drill sergeant on the march.
And all I was left to do was look around the cell and wondered what the hell had happened to my friend.
No one ever figured out how Andy Dufresne had escaped from Shawshank. There were no secret passages, no holes in the wall, no soap keys or questionable guards. One minute, Andy had been in his cell, and the next minute, he hadn't been. Just vanished like Norton had said, like a fart in the wind. Not exactly a poetic description, I'll give you that, but still pretty apt.
What only a few people were certain of later on was that a man who had never existed before that day walked into nearly a dozen banks the day after the escape and cleared the Warden out of about $370,000. But the best part came a few days later, when the headline "CORRUPTION AND MURDER AT SHAWSHANK" was splashed across the front page of Portland Daily Bugle. You could almost hear Warden Norton piss himself from the other side of the prison.
Of course, it was nothing compared to the sound of the bullet going through his brain. That sound, none of us could miss.
It didn't take long before I got a postcard that could only have come from Andy. The back of it was blank except for a postmark from Fort Hancock, Texas.
The postmark was for the exact same day that Andy escaped from Shawshank and visited all those banks. It didn't make a bit of sense, but that was Andy for you.
Somehow, God help me, I got paroled. Looking back on it now, I still can't figure out how I did it. I just said exactly what was on my mind and the next thing I knew, I was riding the bus to town with a battered old suitcase at my side.
You'd think an old con like me would be happy for what little of freedom he could get, but I'd be walking home from work at the store and my eye would catch on the window display at the pawn shop. The only thing that kept stopping me from walking inside was the memory of Andy and a hayfield in Buxton.
One day, when the memory weighed too heavily on me, I hitched a ride with a man in a red truck, got out in Buxton, and started walking.
The field wasn't as hard to find as I'd thought, and the rocks Andy had told me to find were even less so. A few minutes of rummaging in the dirt, and I leaned back against the stone wall with a rusted old tin in my hands. Inside were two envelopes. One held twenty crisp fifty-dollar bills. The other held a letter from Andy.
The next day, I was violating parole and buying a bus ticket to Fort Hancock, Texas.
Andy hadn't bothered with an alias in Zihuatanejo. It didn't even take me an hour's worth of asking around town before somebody pointed me in the direction of the beach.
I don't think it needs to be said that I hadn't expected to find a luxury hotel where they sent me. I especially hadn't expected the staff to perk up when I mentioned Andy's name and bustle around like I was an honored guest, then show me the office of the owner, with Andy's name in proud display on the door. They took my coat and hat and offered me a room, then sent me to the beach to find Andy.
I found him crouched on top of a ragged-looking old boat, sanding the wood wearing loose white clothes and a pair of comfy sandals. His tan was heavy, and his five o'clock shadow almost equally so. I could almost believe he'd been a beach rat for years, splitting his time between a Mexican beach and the confines of a Maine jail cell.
As soon as he spotted me, a smile spread wide across Andy's face, and he tossed aside his sandpaper. "You look like a man who knows how to get things," he called out.
I shrugged, my own smile unstoppable. "I've been known to locate things, from time to time."
We hugged, and it felt good, hugging my best friend on a beach in the most beautiful place I'd ever seen. But the questions hung in my eyes, hard to miss even in that joyous moment, and after removing a couple of beers from a cooler on the boat, Andy sat me down and told me exactly how he'd escaped from Shawshank and come to Zihuatanejo.
At first, I thought Andy was crazy. Then he showed me how he'd done it.
Then, I was pretty sure I was the one who'd gone crazy. Andy just laughed and handed me another beer. "You're probably going to need it," he said with that mysterious grin.
It turned into a quirky bar trick in the years that followed, not that Andy was dumb enough to do it in public. He'd come down to the lobby or the beach, wherever I was at the time, and he'd say the magic words, which were usually, "Let's take the afternoon off." The next thing I knew, we were wandering the streets of Rio de Janeiro or drinking in a bar in Prague. And no matter the language, Andy always knew how to order.
"I've got a lot of practice," he'd say when I asked him how he knew Turkish or Mandarin, Russian or Portuguese. He didn't have to give me a more detailed explanation, but the rest of the night was spent telling stories about where he'd been and what he'd seen.
In the first month I stayed in the hotel, I'd been more places than I'd been in my entire life before I ever went to Shawshank.
Andy called it teleporting, whatever that meant. I only knew it meant that one minute we'd be walking down the halls of a hotel in Zihuatanejo, and the next moment, we'd be walking through the Louvre, with Andy explaining the art in a way even an old man like me could fathom. Every time he did it, took me someplace just by thinking about it like that, I got the same stunned look on my face, and Andy would just laugh easily, slide an arm around my shoulder, and steer me towards the nearest commotion, whatever it might be.
I once asked Andy why anybody with the power he had would ever put up with staying in jail, and ever since, he's spouted off a parade of reasons but never seems to settle on just one. At first, he'd thought he could go back to his old life, and then one year became nineteen and that was that. Even when he was breaking the law, he was still helping a lot of guys at Shawshank, with learning to read and getting their diplomas ... that sort of thing. It was the first chance he'd ever gotten in his life to be well and truly smug about his abilities. He had to atone for his wife, hiding the warden's money, for flaunting his abilities like he had been for years now ... whichever pulled most heavily on his conscience at the time. It kept his life in perspective, casually lounging on the beach and constantly checking his watch to figure out when to head back to his cell.
Dozens of reasons, and not a one of them felt right.
Not that I cared, of course. Whatever reason Andy really had for letting himself suffer like that for two decades, he was still my friend. Doesn't matter whether he was convincing Byron Hadley to give me and the rest of the guys cold beer on a roof half-covered with tar or taking me to Carnival in Rio on the weight of a thought.
Although I had to admit, I thought as I settled in on the beach with a smile, I definitely preferred the latter.
Author:
trollprincessFandom: Shawshank Redemption
Rating: PG-13 (for bad language)
Disclaimer: I don't own The Shawshank Redemption, although I'd be damn proud if I did.
Author's note: This fic is yet another entry on my part for
phoenixchilde's Everyday Superheroes Fanfic Challenge, because it's just that goddamn addictive. (The title comes from what I thought a Pinback lyric sounded like at first. So ... heck, it sounded good at the time. ;)) I had to screw around with the original storyline and some of the dialogue to get where I wanted in the AU, and it really helps if you've seen the movie, but it all worked out in the end, I hope. *crosses fingers*I Seek A Silent Fortess
****
Andy Dufresne once told me that the only reason he sat through that mockery of a murder trial was because he was hoping he could at least salvage his life out of it. His wife might be dead, her corpse found next to the golf pro she'd been nailing on the side, but he still had his work at the bank to keep him sane.
He could keep telling himself that, I thought, but it wasn't like he'd had much choice at the time. "Lawyer fucked you, remember?" I'd said, not able to resist a smile.
All he did was smile at me in return. But something about it, some mischievous undercurrent in it, made me curious.
Back then, Andy was a tall, elegant thing shoved into prison grays, the same guy who could turn a walk around the prison into a Sunday stroll. His first night in the joint was spent, as far as I knew, listening to the others coaxing their fish into hysteria. My fish -- seeing as how I'd had the misfortune of placing a bet on Andy's head -- was ominously quiet. In retrospect, it was almost as if he weren't there at all.
The next morning, he walked out of his cell fearful and curious, but not twitchy like the rest of them. The man simply stared the place down, settled his shoulders just so, and that was the end of that.
It looked to me like a man adjusting to a bad day job he could get over as soon as he got home at the end of the day. Even then, it got me to wondering.
When the sisters started chasing after Andy, there wasn't much any of us could do about it. Not because we didn't have any clout against them, but because we didn't see it coming. Andy made sure of that.
Oh, I knew well enough that Bogs had his eye on Andy. He'd watch him like a hawk from across the grounds, staring at him like a predator studying prime meat. Andy shrugged it off, even going so far once as to tell me none of the sisters were going to get very far with him.
"Why?" I gave him a surprised look. "You got a shotgun hidden somewhere you haven't told me about?"
He grinned up at me from where he sat with his back against the stone prison wall. "Something like that."
Bogs went missing one night while the rest of us were watching Rita Hayworth do that shit with her hair. The only people who missed him were the guards, mostly because they're prison guards and that's their job. But the rest of us nearly threw a party about his disappearance, and the sisters, friends though they might have been to the poor departed Bogs, were too busy walking the grounds looking shifty and spooked.
Nobody seemed to notice the black eye and broken nose that Andy Dufresne was suddenly sporting, or the secretive grin he couldn't wipe off of his face. Except me, of course, but that's what friends do.
"You going to explain those battle scars of yours to me or not?" I cocked an eyebrow at Andy as I tossed Heywood the baseball in the yard.
Andy looked up at me. His nose didn't look so bad anymore, but his eye was still ringed in that sickly shade of yellow. "Didn't figure you'd care as long as I was still in one piece," he said.
"It's just curiosity, is all." I threw the ball back to Heywood, then blurted out, "Was it Bogs?"
Andy shrugged, but didn't answer.
That was the night Bogs reappeared in his own cell.
Wherever Bogs had gone off gallivanting to, he'd come back with a broken arm, a severely sprained back, and a chunk out of his hip that the doctor in the infirmary swore looked like a shark bite. They questioned Bogs at the end of a nightstick for a good six hours before they figured out he didn't know what the hell was going on, either inside of his head or out of it. He didn't know his name, or where he was, or why the hell he'd up and gone and then reappeared days later. All he knew, from what I heard from the inmates pulling infirmary duty, was how to whimper.
I could blame Andy all I liked in my head, but that didn't mean he'd done anything to Bogs. It didn't make a damn bit of sense any way you looked at it, and besides, Bogs wasn't exactly beloved enough to bother caring.
A day later, Bogs got carted off to the nearest asylum with barely enough sense to do anything other than mewl helplessly like a kitten.
Like the rest of us, Andy watched him go with the same attitude of "Good riddance to bad rubbish." Coming from a bunch of hardened cons, that was saying something. But it didn't change the fact that from that day onward, I knew for certain that my friend Andy was keeping a secret from me.
"Zihuatanejo."
He dropped the name of the town into conversation like it wasn't to be questioned, which is probably why he didn't bother saying it in front of the rest of the guys. He said it once like a magic word, then described the place to me a few months later. The stretch of beaches, the crystal blue of the ocean water.
Andy described it with the zeal of someone who'd just come back from a vacation where he'd met the love of his life. He gave me details that made me doubt the sky was that brilliant, that the ocean was that exact shade of blue. He talked about it like an Eden he visited at night when the guards were gone and the lights were out. I almost would have thought the son of a bitch was losing his damn mind if just hearing about it didn't give me the same warm feeling it seemed to give him.
It wasn't long after that that Tommy Williams came to Shawshank.
Andy took to Tommy the same way he seemed to take to almost everyone at Shawshank. He sized Tommy up and figured out what the kid needed, and he worked to get that kid a diploma like nothing I'd ever seen.
And then Tommy had to go and spill his guts about his goddamn cellmate at Thomaston . . . that Blatch fella.
That Tommy even bothered to tell Andy gave the man a new thread of hope to latch onto, and any man looking back on nineteen years in the same desolate place will tell you that you'll take any thread of hope people dangle in front of you. With Andy, though, it wasn't like the rest of us, like a way of life we were trying to shed like an old skin. With Andy, you had a man trying desperately to shed himself of a bad marriage, a man getting rid of the last tiresome responsibility he had.
He had to have known talking to the warden wasn't going to do him a lick of good, but that didn't stop him from trying. The warden couldn't very well keep his kickbacks and his extortion going on without Andy, after all.
A day later, Tommy was dead and Andy was in solitary.
None of us really wanted to know what Andy was going to be like when he came out of the hole. Looking back on it, if we'd known the way he would come out of there, we probably would have been validated in that desire. Whatever had happened to him in there . . . well, hell, it scared the rest of us damn near worse than anything we'd ever seen.
Andy Dufresne didn't make any goddamn sense.
That was the only way to put it, we all agreed later on, after some of us had seen him led out of solitary up to Warden Norton's office. The guards might not have said anything, but the looks on their faces were answer enough that they were on the same wavelength as we were when it came to the matter of Andy Dufresne, who'd gone into the hole for a month and come out looking like he'd just spent the month on a tropical vacation with a defiant expression on his face.
I found him later on in the yard after his meeting with the warden, and took a good long moment to stare at him and wonder. Andy hadn't bothered to clean up, but the fact was that he didn't have to. His face was as clean-shaven as the day he'd been tossed into the hole, his clothes so clean you'd think he'd shipped them out for dry-cleaning when nobody was looking. He hadn't lost weight. His hair wasn't overgrown. Shit, the man even had a tan, for Christ's sake.
How the hell does a man ... any man ... get a tan in solitary confinement?
"I didn't have to come here, you know," he said.
I couldn't say anything to that.
I awkwardly slumped down beside Andy as he went on, choosing his words so carefully I almost expected him never to speak again. "There are a thousand places on this earth I could have gone to before I'd ever had to come here. But I was raised better than that," he said.
I frowned. That wasn't an answer to a single one of the dozens of questions rolling through my head at that moment. But I got the impression I wouldn't be getting an answer to those anytime soon.
Abruptly, he changed course. "Did I ever tell you I once took my wife to Greece?"
"No shit," I said, not able to contain a smile.
He glanced over at me. "You know where Buxton is?"
My brow furrowed. "In Greece?"
"No, here in Maine. There was this hayfield up there, with a long rock wall and a big oak at the north end. Like something out of a Robert Frost poem. It's where I asked my wife to marry me. We'd gone for a picnic. We made love under that tree. I asked and she said yes." His expression was dreamy and serious all at once, like someone mired in a daydream. Then that mischievous thread I'd seen before in him passed through his gaze once again. "And then I took her to Greece. It pretty much surprised the life out of her, but she got over it soon enough."
I had no idea what he was getting at -- well, aside from the usual innuendo, anyway -- but I grinned just the same. "I'll bet she did, Andy."
We shared a moment then, quiet and thoughtful, before Andy said softly, "Promise me, Red. If you ever get out, find that spot. In the base of that wall you'll find a rock that has no earthly business in a Maine hayfield. A piece of black volcanic glass. You'll find something buried under it I want you to have."
He got to his feet as I blurted out, "What? What's buried there?"
"You'll just have to pry up that rock and see," he said. Then he walked away.
That was the last time I saw Andy Dufresne in Shawshank.
The rest of that night passed by with heavy worries between claps of thunder and flashes of lightning. My thoughts centered on Andy and what he might be doing in his cell now that his last hope of getting out of here was gone. Sleep was never an option.
The next morning, I practically sprang from my cell like a wound toy for roll call, not able to tear my gaze away from Andy's cell at the end of the row.
He didn't emerge. I wasn't surprised.
Haig was on the case immediately, calling for Andy to come out as he stalked down to the cell with fists pumping. "I'll thump your skull for you!" he yelled.
Still no answer from Andy.
Soon enough, he and his men reached the cell and stared inside in stunned silence. "Oh, my God," Haig whispered.
I was tempted to turn around, go right back into my cell, and never come out again. Some questions, you just didn't want an answer for.
The answer, however, came sooner than I would have liked. Andy wasn't dead, hanging from the rafters like the tassel on a ceiling fan.
Andy was just gone. Well and truly gone.
Warden Norton came down in a temper, ordering every man on the block questioned. And the first man he pointed to when they asked for specifics was yours truly. Call me crazy, but I didn't think I could give them any more of an answer than they could have given me.
The guards hauled me into Andy's empty cell, Norton still working over Haig for the fact that while Andy had been on the count for the night before, he wasn't exactly present and accounted for this morning. Haig scurried off to do what he could to find Andy Dufresne, which gave Norton plenty of opportunity to turn on me. "I see you two all the time, you're thick as thieves, you are! He must'a said something!"
Somehow, I didn't think telling him that Andy hadn't told me shit would have gone over so well, so I tried for a vaguely more polite approach. "No, sir, he didn't," I said.
The look on Norton's face clearly said he didn't believe me. Not that I could blame him for that. "Lord! It's a miracle! Man up and vanished like a fart in the wind! Nothin' left but some damn rocks on the windowsill and that cupcake on the wall!" He gifted Raquel Welch with a grand gesture and a sarcastic smile. "Let's ask her! Maybe she knows! What say there, Fuzzy-Britches? Feel like talking?"
Everybody in the room stared at the poster, half-expecting it to responded.
Norton snorted in contempt. "Guess not. Why should you be different?" He grabbed a handful of Andy's chess pieces from the windowsill, staring down at them with disdain. "It's a conspiracy!" He hurled one of the rock chess pieces against the wall, and all of us, me and the guards, flinched as he did. "That's what this is!" He threw another one. "It's one big damn conspiracy!" And another one. "And everyone's in on it!" He gave the rock in his hand a dirty look before glaring at Raquel.
"Including her," he said with a sneer, and flung the last rock chess piece at the poster.
It bounced off the wall and shattered against the cement floor of the cell.
All of us stared at the rock shards scattered across the floor, then turned to look at Norton. He scowled back at the rest of us, then stalked out of the cell, barking orders like a drill sergeant on the march.
And all I was left to do was look around the cell and wondered what the hell had happened to my friend.
No one ever figured out how Andy Dufresne had escaped from Shawshank. There were no secret passages, no holes in the wall, no soap keys or questionable guards. One minute, Andy had been in his cell, and the next minute, he hadn't been. Just vanished like Norton had said, like a fart in the wind. Not exactly a poetic description, I'll give you that, but still pretty apt.
What only a few people were certain of later on was that a man who had never existed before that day walked into nearly a dozen banks the day after the escape and cleared the Warden out of about $370,000. But the best part came a few days later, when the headline "CORRUPTION AND MURDER AT SHAWSHANK" was splashed across the front page of Portland Daily Bugle. You could almost hear Warden Norton piss himself from the other side of the prison.
Of course, it was nothing compared to the sound of the bullet going through his brain. That sound, none of us could miss.
It didn't take long before I got a postcard that could only have come from Andy. The back of it was blank except for a postmark from Fort Hancock, Texas.
The postmark was for the exact same day that Andy escaped from Shawshank and visited all those banks. It didn't make a bit of sense, but that was Andy for you.
Somehow, God help me, I got paroled. Looking back on it now, I still can't figure out how I did it. I just said exactly what was on my mind and the next thing I knew, I was riding the bus to town with a battered old suitcase at my side.
You'd think an old con like me would be happy for what little of freedom he could get, but I'd be walking home from work at the store and my eye would catch on the window display at the pawn shop. The only thing that kept stopping me from walking inside was the memory of Andy and a hayfield in Buxton.
One day, when the memory weighed too heavily on me, I hitched a ride with a man in a red truck, got out in Buxton, and started walking.
The field wasn't as hard to find as I'd thought, and the rocks Andy had told me to find were even less so. A few minutes of rummaging in the dirt, and I leaned back against the stone wall with a rusted old tin in my hands. Inside were two envelopes. One held twenty crisp fifty-dollar bills. The other held a letter from Andy.
The next day, I was violating parole and buying a bus ticket to Fort Hancock, Texas.
Andy hadn't bothered with an alias in Zihuatanejo. It didn't even take me an hour's worth of asking around town before somebody pointed me in the direction of the beach.
I don't think it needs to be said that I hadn't expected to find a luxury hotel where they sent me. I especially hadn't expected the staff to perk up when I mentioned Andy's name and bustle around like I was an honored guest, then show me the office of the owner, with Andy's name in proud display on the door. They took my coat and hat and offered me a room, then sent me to the beach to find Andy.
I found him crouched on top of a ragged-looking old boat, sanding the wood wearing loose white clothes and a pair of comfy sandals. His tan was heavy, and his five o'clock shadow almost equally so. I could almost believe he'd been a beach rat for years, splitting his time between a Mexican beach and the confines of a Maine jail cell.
As soon as he spotted me, a smile spread wide across Andy's face, and he tossed aside his sandpaper. "You look like a man who knows how to get things," he called out.
I shrugged, my own smile unstoppable. "I've been known to locate things, from time to time."
We hugged, and it felt good, hugging my best friend on a beach in the most beautiful place I'd ever seen. But the questions hung in my eyes, hard to miss even in that joyous moment, and after removing a couple of beers from a cooler on the boat, Andy sat me down and told me exactly how he'd escaped from Shawshank and come to Zihuatanejo.
At first, I thought Andy was crazy. Then he showed me how he'd done it.
Then, I was pretty sure I was the one who'd gone crazy. Andy just laughed and handed me another beer. "You're probably going to need it," he said with that mysterious grin.
It turned into a quirky bar trick in the years that followed, not that Andy was dumb enough to do it in public. He'd come down to the lobby or the beach, wherever I was at the time, and he'd say the magic words, which were usually, "Let's take the afternoon off." The next thing I knew, we were wandering the streets of Rio de Janeiro or drinking in a bar in Prague. And no matter the language, Andy always knew how to order.
"I've got a lot of practice," he'd say when I asked him how he knew Turkish or Mandarin, Russian or Portuguese. He didn't have to give me a more detailed explanation, but the rest of the night was spent telling stories about where he'd been and what he'd seen.
In the first month I stayed in the hotel, I'd been more places than I'd been in my entire life before I ever went to Shawshank.
Andy called it teleporting, whatever that meant. I only knew it meant that one minute we'd be walking down the halls of a hotel in Zihuatanejo, and the next moment, we'd be walking through the Louvre, with Andy explaining the art in a way even an old man like me could fathom. Every time he did it, took me someplace just by thinking about it like that, I got the same stunned look on my face, and Andy would just laugh easily, slide an arm around my shoulder, and steer me towards the nearest commotion, whatever it might be.
I once asked Andy why anybody with the power he had would ever put up with staying in jail, and ever since, he's spouted off a parade of reasons but never seems to settle on just one. At first, he'd thought he could go back to his old life, and then one year became nineteen and that was that. Even when he was breaking the law, he was still helping a lot of guys at Shawshank, with learning to read and getting their diplomas ... that sort of thing. It was the first chance he'd ever gotten in his life to be well and truly smug about his abilities. He had to atone for his wife, hiding the warden's money, for flaunting his abilities like he had been for years now ... whichever pulled most heavily on his conscience at the time. It kept his life in perspective, casually lounging on the beach and constantly checking his watch to figure out when to head back to his cell.
Dozens of reasons, and not a one of them felt right.
Not that I cared, of course. Whatever reason Andy really had for letting himself suffer like that for two decades, he was still my friend. Doesn't matter whether he was convincing Byron Hadley to give me and the rest of the guys cold beer on a roof half-covered with tar or taking me to Carnival in Rio on the weight of a thought.
Although I had to admit, I thought as I settled in on the beach with a smile, I definitely preferred the latter.
