Stephen King - Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption

There were inconsistencies in Tommy’s story, but aren’t there always in real life? Blatch told Tommy the man who got sent up was a hotshot lawyer, and Andy was a banker, but those are two professions that people who aren’t very educated could easily get mixed up. And don’t forget that twelve years had gone by between the time Blatch was reading the clippings about the trial and the time he told the tale to Tommy Williams. He also told Tommy he got better than a thousand dollars from a footlocker Quentin had in his closet, but the police said at Andy’s trial that there had been no sign of burglary. I have a few ideas about that. First, if you take the cash and the man it belonged to is dead, how are you going to know anything was stolen, unless someone else can tell you it was there to start with? Second, who’s to say Blatch wasn’t lying about that part of it? Maybe he didn’t want to admit killing two people for nothing. Third, maybe there were signs of burglary and the cops either overlooked them — cops can be pretty dumb — or deliberately covered them up so they wouldn’t screw the DA’s case. The guy was running for public office, remember, and he needed a conviction to run on. An unsolved burglary-murder would have done him no good at all.

But of the three, I like the middle one best. I’ve known a few Elwood Blatches hi my time at Shawshank — the trigger-pullers with the crazy eyes. Such fellows want you to think they got away with die equivalent of the Hope Diamond on every caper, even if they got caught with a two-dollar Timex and nine bucks on the one they’re doing time for.

And there was one thing in Tommy’s story that convinced Andy beyond a shadow of a doubt. Blatch hadn’t hit Quentin at random. He had called Quentin ‘a big rich prick’, and he had known Quentin was a golf pro. Well, Andy and his wife had been going out to that country club for drinks and dinner once or twice a week for a couple of years, and Andy had done a considerable amount of drinking there once he found out about his wife’s affair. There was a marina with the country club, and for a while in 1947 there had been a part-time grease-and-gas jockey working there who matched Tommy’s description of Elwood Blatch. A big tall man, mostly bald, with deep-set green eyes. A man who had an unpleasant way of looking at you, as though he was sizing you up. He wasn’t there long, Andy said. Either he quit or Briggs, the fellow in charge of the marina, fired him. But he wasn’t a man you forgot. He was too striking for that.

So Andy went to see Warden Norton on a rainy, windy day with big grey clouds scudding across the sky above the grey walls, a day when the last of the snow was starting to melt away and show lifeless patches of last year’s grass in the fields beyond the prison. The warden has a good-sized office in the administration wing, and behind the warden’s desk there’s a door which connects with the assistant warden’s office. The assistant warden was out that day, but a trustee was there. He was a half-lame fellow whose real name I have forgotten; all the inmates, me included, called him Chester, after Marshall Dillon’s sidekick. Chester was supposed to be watering the plants and dusting and waxing the floor. My guess is that the plants went thirsty that day and the only waxing that was done happened because of Chester’s dirty ear polishing the keyhole plate of that connecting door.

He heard the warden’s main door open and close and then Norton saying, ‘Good morning, Dufresne, how can I help you?’

‘Warden,’ Andy began, and old Chester told us that he could hardly recognize Andy’s voice it was so changed. ‘Warden … there’s something … something’s happened to me that’s … that’s so … so … I hardly know where to begin.’

‘Well, why don’t you just begin at the beginning?’ the warden said, probably in his sweetest let’s-all-turn-to-the-23rd-psalm-and-read-in-unison voice. ‘That usually works the best.’

And so Andy did. He began by refreshing Norton of the details of the crime he had been imprisoned for. Then he told the warden exactly what Tommy Williams had told him. He also gave out Tommy’s name, which you may think wasn’t so wise in light of later developments, but I’d just ask you what else he could have done, if his story was to have any credibility at all.

When he had finished, Norton was completely silent for some time. I can just see him, probably tipped back in his office chair under the picture of Governor Reed hanging on the wall, his fingers steepled, his liver lips pursed, his brow wrinkled into ladder rungs halfway to the crown of his head, his thirty-year pin gleaming mellowly.

‘Yes,’ he said finally. That’s the damnedest story I ever heard. But I’ll tell you what surprises me most about it, Dufresne.’

‘What’s that, sir?’

‘That you were taken in by it.’

‘Sir? I don’t understand what you mean.’ And Chester said that Andy Dufresne, who had faced down Byron Hadley on the plate-shop roof thirteen years before, was almost floundering for words.

‘Well now,’ Norton said. ‘It’s pretty obvious to me that this young fellow Williams is impressed with you. Quite taken with you, as a matter of fact. He hears your tale of woe, and it’s quite natural of him to want to … cheer you up, let’s say. Quite natural. He’s a young man, not terribly bright. Not surprising he didn’t realize what a state it would put you into. Now what I suggest is —’

‘Don’t you think I thought of that?’ Andy asked. ‘But I’d never told Tommy about the man working down at the marina. I never told anyone that — it never even crossed my mind! But Tommy’s description of his cellmate and that man … they’re identical!’

‘Well now, you may be indulging in a little selective perception there,’ Norton said with a chuckle. Phrases like that, selective perception, are required learning for people in the penalogy and corrections business, and they use them all they can.

‘That’s not it at all. Sir.’

‘That’s your slant on it,’ Norton said, ‘but mine differs. And let’s remember that I have only your word that there was such a man working at the Falmouth Country Club back then.’

‘No, sir,’ Andy broke in again. ‘No, that isn’t true. Because—’

‘Anyway,’ Norton overrode him, expansive and loud, ‘let’s just look at it from the other end of the telescope, shall we? Suppose — just suppose, now — that there really was a fellow named Elwood Blotch.’

‘Blatch,’ Andy said tightly.

‘Blatch, by all means. And let’s say he was Thomas Williams’s cellmate in Rhode Island. The chances are excellent that he has been released by now. Excellent. Why, we don’t even know how much time he might have done there before he ended up with Williams, do we? Only that he was doing a six-to-twelve.’

‘No. We don’t know how much time he’d done. But Tommy said he was a bad actor, a cut-up. I think there’s a fair chance that he may still be in. Even if he’s been released, the prison will have a record of his last known address, the names of his relatives —’

‘And both would almost certainly be dead ends.’

Andy was silent for a moment, and then he burst out: ‘Well, it’s a chance, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, of course it is. So just for a moment, Dufresne, let’s assume that Blatch exists and that he is still safely ensconced in the Rhode Island State Penitentiary. Now what is he going to say if we bring this kettle of fish to him in a bucket? Is he going to fall down on his knees, roll his eyes, and say “I did it! I did it! By all means add a life term onto my burglary charge!”?’

‘How can you be so obtuse?’ Andy said, so low that Chester could barely hear. But he heard the warden just fine.