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with his shoulders squared and his step was always light, as if he was heading home to a
good home-cooked meal and a good woman instead of to a tasteless mess of soggy
vegetables, lumpy mashed potato, and a slice or two of that fatty, gristly stuff most of the
cons called mystery meat ... that, and a picture of Raquel Welch on the wall.
But for those four years, although he never became exactly like the others, he did become
silent, introspective, and brooding. Who could blame him? So maybe it was Warden
Norton who was pleased ... at least, for a while.
His dark mood broke around the time of the 1967 World Series. That was the dream year,
the year the Red Sox won the pennant instead of placing ninth, as the Las Vegas bookies
had predicted. When it happened - when they won the American League pennant - a kind
of ebullience engulfed the whole prison. There was a goofy sort of feeling that if the
Dead Sox could come to life, then maybe anybody could do it I can't explain that feeling
now, any more than an ex-Beatlemaniac could explain that madness, I suppose. But it
was real. Every radio in the place was tuned to the games as the Red Sox pounded down
the stretch. There was gloom when the Sox dropped a pair in Cleveland near the end, and
a nearly riotous joy when Rico Petrocelli put away the pop fly that clinched it And then
there was the gloom that came when Lonborg was beaten in the seventh game of the
Series to end the dream just short of complete fruition. It probably pleased Norton to no
end, the son of a bitch. He liked his prison wearing sackcloth and ashes.
But for Andy, there was no tumble back down into gloom. He wasn't much of a baseball
fan anyway, and maybe that was why. Nevertheless, he seemed to have caught the
current of good feeling, and for him it didn't peter out again after the last game of the
Series. He had taken that invisible coat out of the closet and put it on again.
I remember one bright-gold fall day in very late October, a couple of weeks after the
World Series had ended. It must have been a Sunday, because the exercise yard was full
of men 'walking off the week' - tossing a Frisbee or two, passing around a football,
bartering what they had to barter. Others would be at the long table in the Visitors' Hall,
under the watchful eyes of the screws, talking with their relatives, smoking cigarettes,
telling sincere lies, receiving their picked-over care packages.
Andy was squatting Indian-fashion against the wall, chunking two small rocks together in
his hands, his face turned up into the sunlight. It was surprisingly warm, that sun, for a
day so late in the year.
'Hello, Red,' he called. 'Come on and sit a spell.'
I did.
'You want this?' he asked, and handed me one of the two carefully polished 'millennium
sandwiches' I just told you about
'I sure do,' I said. 'It's very pretty. Thank you.'
He shrugged and changed the subject 'Big anniversary coming up for you next year.'
I nodded. Next year would make me a thirty-year man. Sixty per cent of my life spent in
Shawshank Prison.
Think you'll ever get out?'
'Sure. When I have a long white beard and just about three marbles left rolling around
upstairs.'