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ago, true, but it's still perfectly renewable for a five-dollar fee. His stock certificates are 

there, the tax-free municipals, and about eighteen bearer bonds in the amount of ten 

thousand dollars each.' 

I whistled. 

'Peter Stevens is locked in a safe deposit box at the Casco Bank in Portland and Andy 

Dufresne is locked in a safe deposit box at Shawshank,' he said. Tit for tat And the key 

that unlocks the box and the money and the new life is under a hunk of black glass in a 

Buxton hayfield. Told you this much, so I'll tell you something else, Red - for the last 

twenty years, give or take, I have been watching the papers with a more than usual 

interest for news of any construction projects in Buxton. I keep thinking that someday 

soon I'm going to read that they're putting a highway through there, or erecting a new 

community hospital, or building a shopping centre. Burying my new life under ten feet of 

concrete, or spitting it into a swamp somewhere with a big load of fill.' 

I blurted, 'Jesus Christ, Andy, if all of this is true, how do you keep from going crazy?' 

He smiled. 'So far, all quiet on the Western front.' 

'But it could be years -' 

'It will be. But maybe not as many as the state and Warden Norton think it's going to be. I 

just can't afford to wait that long. I keep thinking about Zihuatanejo and that small hotel. 

That's all I want from my life now, Red, and I don't think that's too much to want. I didn't 

kill Glenn Quentin and I didn't kill my wife, and that hotel ... it's not too much to want To 

swim and get a tan and sleep in a room with open windows and space... that's not too 

much to want.' 

He slung the stones away. 

'You know, Red,' he said in an offhand voice, 'a place like that... I'd have to have a man 

who knows how to get things.' 

I thought about it for a long time. And the biggest drawback in my mind wasn't even that 

we were talking pipedreams in a shitty little prison exercise yard with armed guards 

looking down at us from their sentry posts. 'I couldn't do it,' I said. 'I couldn't get along on 

the outside. I'm what they call an institutional man now. In here I'm the man who can get 

it for you, yeah. But out there, anyone can get it for you. Out there, if you want posters or 

rock-hammers or one particular record or a boat-in-a-bottle model kit, you can use the 

fucking Yellow Pages. In here, I'm the fucking Yellow Pages. I wouldn't know how to 

begin. Or where.' 

'You underestimate yourself,' he said. 'You're a self-educated man, a self-made man. A 

rather remarkable man, I think.' 

'Hell, I don't even have a high school diploma.' 

'I know that,' he said. 'But it isn't just a piece of paper that makes a man. And it isn't just 

prison that breaks one, either.' 

'I couldn't hack it outside, Andy. I know that.' He got up. 'You think it over,' he said 

casually, just as the inside whistle blew. And he strolled off, as if he was a free man who 

had just made another free man a proposition. And for a while just that was enough to 

make me feel free. Andy could do that. He could make me forget for a time that we were