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that things might go better with Tommy - and consequently better with their three-year- 

old mi and herself - if he got his high school degree. She talked him into it, and so 

Tommy Williams started visiting the library on a regular basis. 

For Andy, this was an old routine by then. He saw that Tommy got a series of high school 

equivalency tests. Tommy would brush up on the subjects he had passed in high-school - 

there weren't many - and then take the test Andy also saw that he was enrolled in a 

number of correspondence courses covering the subjects he had failed in school or just 

missed by dropping out 

He probably wasn't the best student Andy ever took over the jumps, and I don't know if 

he ever did get his high school diploma, but that forms no part of my story. The important 

thing was that he came to like Andy Dufresne very much, as most people did after a 

while. 

On a couple of occasions he asked Andy 'what a smart guy like you is doing in the joint' - 

a question which is the rough equivalent of that one that goes 'What's a nice girl like you 

doing in a place like this?' But Andy wasn't the type to tell him; he would only smile and 

turn the conversation into some other channel. Quite normally, Tommy asked someone 

else, and when he finally got the story, I guess he also got the shock of his young life. 

The person he asked was his partner on the laundry's steam ironer and folder. The 

inmates call this device the mangier, because that's exactly what it will do to you if you 

aren't paying attention and get your bad self caught in it. His j partner was Charlie 

Lathrop, who had been in for about twelve years on a murder charge. He was more than 

glad to reheat the details of the Dufresne murder trial for Tommy; it broke the monotony 

of pulling freshly pressed bedsheets out of the machine and tucking them into the basket. 

He was just getting to the jury waiting until after lunch to bring in their guilty verdict 

when the trouble whistle went off and the mangle grated to a stop. They had been feeding 

in freshly washed sheets from the Eliot Nursing Home at the far end; these were spat out 

dry and neatly pressed at Tommy's and Charlie's end at the rate of one every five seconds. 

Their job was to grab them, fold them, and slap them into the cart, which had already 

been lined with brown paper. 

But Tommy Williams was just standing there, staring at Charlie Lathrop, his mouth 

unhinged all the way to his chest. He was standing in & drift of sheets that had come 

through dean and which were now sopping up all the wet muck on the floor - and in a 

laundry wetwash, there's plenty of muck. 

So the head bull that day, Homer Jessup, comes rushing over, bellowing his head off and 

on the prod for trouble. Tommy took no notice of him. He spoke to Charlie as if old 

Homer, who had busted more heads than he could probably count, hadn't been there. 

'What did you say that golf pro's name was?' 

'Quentin,' Charlie answered back, all confused and upset by now. He later said that the 

kid was as white as a truce flag, *Glenn Quentin, I think. Something like that, anyway -' 

'Here now, here now,' Homer Jessup roared, his neck as red as a rooster's comb. 'Get 

them sheets in cold water! Get quick! Get quick, by Jesus, you -' 

'Glenn Quentin, oh my God,' Tommy Williams said, and that was all he got to say 

because Homer Jessup, that least peaceable of men, brought his billy down behind his