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them once they are in. Mostly it's the screws who do that.' 

'But-' 

'Yeah, I know. There's a fine line there. What it comes down to, Red, is some people 

refuse to get their hands dirty at all. That's called sainthood, and the pigeons land on your 

shoulders and crap all over your shirt. The other extreme is to take a bath in the dirt and 

deal any goddamned thing that will turn a dollar - guns, switchblades, big H, what the 

hell. You ever have a con come up to you and offer you a contract?' 

I nodded. It's happened a lot of times over the years. You're, after all, the man who can 

get it. And they figure if you can get them a nine-bolt battery for their transistor radio or a 

-anon of Luckies or a lid of reefer, you can put them in touch with a guy who'll use a 

knife. 

'Sure you have,' Andy agreed. 'But you don't do it. Because guys like us, Red, we know 

there's a third choice. An alternative to staying simon-pure or bathing in the filth and the 

slime. It's the alternative that grown-ups all over the world pick. You balance off your 

walk through the hog-wallow against what it gains you. You choose the lesser of two 

evils and try to keep your good intentions in front of you. And I guess you judge how 

well you're doing by how well you sleep at night... and what your dreams are like.' 

'Good intentions,' I said, and laughed. 'I know all about that, Andy. A fellow can toddle 

right off to hell on that road.' 

'Don't you believe it,' he said, growing sombre. This is hell right here. Right here in The 

Shank. They sell pills and I tell them what to do with the money. But I've also got the 

library, and I know of over two dozen guys who have used the books in here to help them 

pass their high school equivalency tests. Maybe when they get out of here they'll be able 

to crawl off the shitheap. When we needed that second room back in 1957,1 got it 

Because they want to keep me happy. I work cheap. That's the trade-off.' 

'And you've got your own private quarters.' 

'Sure. That's the way I like it.' 

The prison population had risen slowly all through the fifties, and it damn near exploded 

in the sixties, what with every college-age kid in America wanting to try dope and the 

perfectly ridiculous penalties for the use of a little reefer. But in all that time Andy never 

had a cellmate, except for a big, silent Indian named Normaden (like all Indians in The 

Shank, he was called Chief), and Normaden didn't last long. A lot of the other long- 

timers thought Andy was crazy, but Andy just smiled. He lived alone and he liked it that 

way ... and as he'd said, they liked to keep him happy. He worked cheap. 

Prison time is slow time, sometimes you'd swear it's stop-time, but it passes. It passes. 

George Dunahy departed the scene in a welter of newspaper headlines shouting 

SCANDAL and NEST-FEATHERING. Stammas succeeded him, and for the next six 

years Shawshank was a kind of living hell. During the reign of Greg Stammas, the beds 

in the infirmary and the cells in the solitary wing were always full. 

One day in 1958 I looked at myself in a small shaving mirror I kept in my cell and saw a 

forty-year-old man looking back at me. A kid had come in back in 1938, a kid with a big 

mop of carrotty red hair, half-crazy with remorse, thinking about suicide. That kid was