Different Seasons - Stephen King [36]
firm of lawyers that served as Jim's executors sends a check to the Casco to cover the rental of the Stevens box.
'Peter Stevens is inside that box, just waiting to get out. His birth certificate, his S. S. card, and his driver's license. The license is six years out of date because Jim died six years ago, true, but it's still perfectly renewable for a five-dollar fee.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 selfeducated 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 both lifers, at the mercy of a hard-ass parole board and a psalm-singing warden who liked Andy Dufresne right where he was. After all, Andy was a lap-dog who could do tax-returns. What a wonderful animal! But by that night in my cell I felt like a prisoner again. The whole idea seemed absurd, and that mental image of blue water and white beaches seemed more cruel than foolish -it dragged at my brain like a fishhook. I just couldn't wear that invisible coat the way Andy did.