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 awhile.
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 mangler, 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 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 clean 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 a drift of sheets that had come through clean 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 ear. Tommy hit the floor so hard he broke off three of his front teeth. When he woke up he was in solitary, and confined to same for a week, riding a boxcar on Sam Norton’s famous grain and drain train. Plus a black mark on his report card.
That was in early February of 1963, and Tommy Williams went around to six or seven other long-timers after he got out of solitary and got pretty much the same story. I know; I was one of them. But when I asked him why he wanted it, he just clammed up.
Then one day he went to the library and spilled one helluva big budget of information to Andy Dufresne. And for the first and last time, at least since he had approached me about the Rita Hayworth poster like a kid buying his first pack of Trojans, Andy lost his cool... only this time he blew it entirely.
I saw him later that day, and he looked like a man who has stepped on the business end of a rake and given himself a good one, whap between the eyes. His hands were trembling, and when I spoke to him, he didn’t answer. Before that afternoon was out he had caught up with Billy Hanlon, who was the head screw, and set up an appointment with Warden Norton for the following day. He told me later that he didn’t sleep a wink all that night; he just listened to a cold winter wind howling outside, watched the searchlights go around and around, putting long, moving shadows on the cement walls of the cage he had called home since Harry Truman was President, and tried to think it all out. He said it was as if Tommy had produced a key which fit a cage in the back of his mind, a cage like his own cell. Only instead of holding a man, that cage held a tiger, and that tiger’s name was Hope. Williams had produced the key that unlocked the cage and the tiger was out, willy-nilly, to roam his brain.
Four years before, Tommy Williams had been arrested in Rhode Island, driving a stolen car that was full of stolen merchandise. Tommy turned in his accomplice, the DA played ball, and he got a lighter sentence ... two to four, with time served. Eleven months after beginning his term, his old cellmate got a ticket out and Tommy got a new one, a man named Elwood Blatch. Blatch had been busted for burglary with a weapon and was serving six to twelve.
“I never seen such a high-strung guy,” Tommy told me. “A man like that should never want to be a burglar, specially not with a gun. The slightest little noise, he’d go three feet into the air ... and come down shooting, more likely than not. One night he almost strangled me because some guy down the hall was whopping on his cell bars with a tin cup.
“I did seven months with him, until they let me walk free. I got time served and time off, you understand. I can’t say we talked because you didn’t, you know, exactly hold a conversation with El Blatch. He held a conversation with you. He talked all the time. Never shut up. If you tried to get a word in, he’d shake his fist at you and roll his eyes. It gave me the cold chills whenever he done that. Big tall guy he was, mostly bald, with these green eyes set way down deep in the sockets. Jeez, I hope I never see him again.
“It was like a talkin jag every night. Where he grew up, the orphanages he run away from, the jobs he done, the women he fucked, the crap games he cleaned out. I just let him run on. My face ain’t much, but I didn’t want it, you know, rearranged for me.
“According to him, he’d burgled over two hundred joints. It was hard for me to believe, a guy like him who went off like a firecracker every time someone cut a loud fart, but he swore it was true. Now ... listen to me, Red. I know guys sometimes make things up after they know a thing, but even before I knew about this golf pro guy, Quentin, I remember thinking that if El Blatch ever burgled
my
house, and I found out about it later, I’d have to count myself just about the luckiest motherfucker going still to be alive. Can you imagine him in some lady’s bedroom, sifting through her jool’ry box, and she coughs in her sleep or turns over quick? It gives me the cold chills just to think of something like that, I swear on my mother’s name it does.
“He said he’d killed people, too. People that gave him shit. At least that’s what he said. And I believed him. He sure looked like a man that could do some killing. He was just so fucking high-strung! Like a pistol with a sawed-off firing pin. I knew a guy who had a Smith and Wesson Police Special with a sawed-off firing pin. It wasn’t no good for nothing, except maybe for something to jaw about. The pull on that gun was so light that it would fire if this guy, Johnny Callahan, his name was, if he turned his record-player on full volume and put it on top of one of the speakers. That’s how El Blatch was. I can’t explain it any better. I just never doubted that he had greased some people.
“So one night, just for something to say, I go: ‘Who’d you kill?’ Like a joke, you know. So he laughs and says: ‘There’s one guy doing time up-Maine for these two people I killed. It was this guy and the wife of the slob who’s doing the time. I was creeping their place and the guy started to give me some shit.’
“I can’t remember if he ever told me the woman’s name or not,” Tommy went on. “Maybe he did. But in New England, Dufresne’s like Smith or Jones in the rest of the country, because there’s so many Frogs up here. Dufresne, Lavesque, Ouelette, Poulin, who can remember Frog names? But he told me the guy’s name. He said the guy was Glenn Quentin and he was a prick, a big rich prick, a golf pro. El said he thought the guy might have cash in the house, maybe as much as five thousand dollars. That was a lot of money back then, he says to me. So I go: ‘When was that?’ And he goes: ‘After the war. Just after the war.’
“So he went in and he did the joint and they woke up and the guy gave him some trouble. That’s what
El
said. Maybe the guy just started to snore, that’s what
I
say. Anyway, El said Quentin was in the sack with some hotshot lawyer’s wife and they sent the lawyer up to Shawshank State Prison. Then he laughs this big laugh. Holy Christ, I was never so glad of anything as I was when I got my walking papers from that place.”
I guess you can see why Andy went a little wonky when Tommy told him that story, and why he wanted to see the warden right away. Elwood Blatch had been serving a six-to-twelve rap when Tommy knew him four years before. By the time Andy heard all of this, in 1963, he might be on the verge of getting out... or already out. So those were the two prongs of the spit Andy was roasting on—the idea that Blatch might still be in on one hand, and the very real possibility that he might be gone like the wind on the other.
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 in my time at Shawshank—the triggerpullers with the crazy eyes. Such fellows want you to think they got away with the 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 awhile 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 gray clouds scudding across the sky above the gray 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 trusty was there. He was a half-lame fellow whose real name I have forgotten; all the inmates, me included, called him Chester, after Marshal Dillon’s sidekick. Chester was supposed to be watering the plants 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-Twenty-third-Psalm-and-read-in-unison voice. “That usually works the best.”
And so Andy did. He began by refreshing Norton on 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.