Chapter 26

In 1969, the Inside-Outers were picking potatoes in Sabbatus. It was the third of November and the work was almost done. There was a guard named Henry Pugh - and he is no longer a member of our happy little family, believe me -sitting on the back bumper of one of the potato trucks and having his lunch with his carbine across his knees when a beautiful (or so it was told to me, but sometimes these things get exaggerated) ten-point buck strolled out of the cold early afternoon mist Pugh went after it with visions of just how that trophy would look mounted in his rec room, and while he was doing it, three of his charges just walked away. Two were recaptured in a Lisbon Falls pinball parlour. The third has not been found to this day.
I suppose the most famous case of all was that of Sid Nedeau. This goes back to 1958, and I guess it will never be topped. Sid was out lining the ball-field for a Saturday intramural baseball game when the three o'clock inside whistle blew, signalling the shiftchange for the guards. The parking lot is just beyond the exercise yard, on the other side of the electrically-operated main gate. At three the gate opens and the guards coming on duty and those going off mingle. There's a lot of back-slapping and bullyragging, comparison of league bowling scores and the usual number of tired old ethnic jokes.
Sid just trundled his lining machine right out through the gate, leaving a three-inch baseline all the way from third base in the exercise yard to the ditch on the far side of Route 6, where they found the machine overturned in a pile of lime. Don't ask me how he did it. He was dressed in his prison uniform, he stood six-feet-two, and he was billowing clouds of lime-dust behind him. All I can figure is that, it being Friday afternoon and all, the guards going off were so happy to be going off, and the guards coming on were so downhearted to be coming on, that the members of the former group never got their heads out of the clouds and those in the latter never got their noses off their shoetops ... and old Sid Nedeau just sort of slipped out between the two. So far as I know, Sid is still at large. Over the years, Andy Dufresne and I had a good many laughs over Sid Nedeau's great escape, and when we heard about that airline hijacking for ransom, the one where the guy parachuted from the back door of the airplane, Andy swore up and down that D B Cooper's real name was Sid Nedeau.
'And he probably had a pocketful of baseline lime in his pocket for good luck,' Andy said. 'That lucky son of a bitch.'
But you should understand that a case like Sid Nedeau, or the fellow who got away clean from the Sabbatus potato-field crew, guys like that are winning the prison version of the Irish Sweepstakes. Purely a case of six different kinds of luck somehow jelling together all at the same moment. A stiff like Andy could wait ninety years and not get a similar break.
Maybe you remember, a ways back, I mentioned a guy named Henley Backus, the washroom foreman in the laundry. He came to Shawshank in 1922 and died in the prison infirmary thirty-one years later. Escapes and escape attempts were a hobby of his, maybe because he never quite dared to take the plunge himself. He could tell you a hundred different schemes, all of them crackpot, and all of them had been tried in the Shank at one time or another. My favourite was the tale of Beaver Morrison, a convict who tried to build a glider from scratch in the plate-factory basement. The plans he was working from were in a circa-1900 book called The Modern Boy's Guide to Fun and Adventure. Beaver got it built without being discovered, or so the story goes, only to discover there was no door from the basement big enough to get the damned thing out. When Henley told that story, you could bust a gut laughing, and he knew a dozen - no, two dozen -just as funny.
When it came to detailing Shawshank bust-outs, Henley had it down chapter and verse. He told me once that during his time there had been better than four hundred escape attempts that he knew of. Really think about that for a moment before you just nod your head and read on. Four hundred escape attempts! That comes out to 12.9 escape attempts for every year Henley Backus was in Shawshank and keeping track of them. The Escape Attempt of the Month Club. Of course most of them were pretty slipshod affairs, the sort of thing that ends up with a guard grabbing some poor, sidling slob's arm and growling, 'Where do you think you're going, you happy asshole?'
Henley said he'd class maybe sixty of them as more serious attempts, and he included the 'prison break' of 1937, the year before I arrived at the Shank. The new administration wing was under construction then and fourteen cons got out, using construction equipment in a poorly locked shed. The whole of southern Maine got into a panic over those fourteen 'hardened criminals', most of whom were scared to death and had no more idea of where they should go than a jackrabbit does when it's headlight-pinned to the highway with a big truck bearing down on it. Not one of those fourteen got away. Two of them were shot dead - by civilians, not police officers or prison personnel -but none got away.
How many had gotten away between 1938, when I came here, and that day in October when Andy first mentioned Zihuatanejo to me? Putting my information and Henley's together, I'd say ten. Ten that got away clean. And although it isn't the kind of thing you can know for sure, I'd guess that at least half of those ten are doing time in other institutions of lower learning like the Shank. Because you do get institutionalized. When you take away a man's freedom and teach him to live in a cell, he seems to lose his ability to think in dimensions. He's like that jackrabbit I mentioned, frozen in the oncoming lights of the truck that is bound to kill it. More often than not a con who's just out will pull some dumb job that hasn't a chance in hell of succeeding ... and why? Because it'll get him back inside. Back where he understands how things work.
Andy wasn't that way, but I was. The idea of seeing the Pacific sounded good, but I was afraid that actually being there would scare me to death - the bigness of it.

　　一九六九年，外役监计划的内容是去沙巴塔斯挖马铃薯，那天是十一月三日，工作几乎快做完了。有个名叫亨利·浦格的警卫（他现在已不是我们这个快乐家庭的一员了）坐在马铃薯货车的后挡泥板上吃午餐，把卡宾枪放在膝上，这时候，一头漂亮的雄鹿（他们是这样告诉我的，但有时这些事情会加油添醋）从雾中缓缓走出来，浦格追过去，想象着战利品摆在家里康乐室的样子，结果他看守的三个囚犯乘机溜走，其中有两个人在另一个镇的弹子房被逮着，另外一个始终没找到。
　　我想最有名的越狱犯是锡德·尼都。他在一九五八年越狱，我猜以后很难有人超越他。由于星期六监狱将举行球赛，因此锡德当时正在球场划界线。三点钟一到，哨声响起，代表警卫要换班了。运动场再过去一点就是停车场，和电动大门恰好位于监狱的两端。三点钟一到，大门开了，来换班的警卫和下班的警卫混在一起，互相拍肩膀，打招呼，比较保龄球赛的战绩，开开玩笑。
　　而锡德推着他的划线机，不动声色地从大门走出去，三英寸宽的白线一路从棒球场的本垒板一直画到公路旁的水沟边，他们后来发现划线机翻倒在那里。别问我他是怎么出去的，他有六英尺二英寸高，穿着囚衣，推着划线机走过去时，还会扬起阵阵白灰，竟然就堂而皇之地从大门走出去了。只能说，大概因为正逢星期五下午，要下班的警卫因为即将下班太过兴奋，而来换班的警卫又因为要来换班而太过沮丧，前者得意地把头抬得高高的，后者则垂头丧气，视线始终没离开过鞋尖……锡德就这么趁隙逃跑了。
　　就我所知，锡德到现在还逍遥法外。多年来，安迪和我还常常拿锡德的逃亡过程来当笑话讲。后来当我们听说了古柏一九七一年十一月，一个自称古柏的人登上了从波特兰到西雅图的客机，威胁要炸掉飞机，向航空公司勒赎二十万美元。他在西雅图机场拿到赎金，于飞机再度起飞后，从高空跳伞逃脱，从此不见踪影，成为美国历史上一大谜团。劫机勒赎的事，也就是劫机犯从飞机后舱门跳伞逃走的故事，安迪坚持那个叫古柏的劫机犯真名一定叫锡德·尼都。
　　“好个幸运的龟儿子，”安迪说。“搞不好他为了讨个吉利，整个口袋都装满了用来划线的白灰粉呢。”
　　但是你应该明白，锡德和那个在沙巴塔斯马铃薯田逃走的家伙只是少数中了头彩的幸运儿，仿佛所有的运气刹那间全聚集在他们身上。像安迪这么一板一眼的人，可能等上九十年也逃不出去。
　　也许你还记得，我曾经提过有个洗衣房工头名叫韩利·巴克斯，他在一九二二年被关到肖申克来，三十一年后死于监狱的医务室。他简直把研究越狱当作嗜好，或许原因就在于他自己从来不敢亲身尝试。他可以告诉你一百种不同的越狱方法，每一种都很疯狂，而且肖申克的犯人都尝试过。我最喜欢的是毕佛·莫里森的故事，这家伙竟然试图在车牌工厂的地下室建造一架滑翔机。他是照着一九〇〇年出版的《现代男孩玩乐与冒险指南》上面的说明来造飞机，而且一直没有被发现，只是直到最后他才发现地下室的门都太小了，根本没法子把那架该死的滑翔机搬出去。每次韩利说这个故事时，都会引起一阵爆笑，而他还知道一二十个同样好笑的故事。
　　有一次韩利告诉我，在他服刑期间，他知道的企图越狱案就有四百多件。在你点点头往下读之前，先停下来好好想一想。四百多次越狱尝试！等于韩利在肖申克监狱服刑期间，每年平均有十二点九次企图越狱事件。当然，大多数越狱行动都还满随便的，结局不外乎某个鬼鬼祟祟的可怜虫、糊涂蛋被警卫一把抓住，痛骂：“你以为你要上哪儿去呀，混蛋！”
　　韩利说，比较认真策划的越狱行动大概只有六十件，其中包括一九三七年的“大逃亡”，那是我入狱前一年发生的事情。当时肖申克正在盖新的行政大楼，有十四名囚犯从没有锁好的仓库中拿了施工的工具，越狱逃跑。整个缅因州南部都因为这十四个“顽强的罪犯”陷入恐慌，但其实这十四个人大都吓得半死，完全不知该往哪儿逃，就好像误闯公路的野兔，被迎面而来的大卡车车头灯一照，就动弹不得。结果，十四个犯人没有一个真正逃脱，有两个人被枪射死——但他们是死在老百姓的枪下，而不是被警官或监狱警卫逮着，没有一个人成功逃脱。
　　从一九三八年我入狱以来，到安迪第一次和我提到齐华坦尼荷那天为止，究竟有多少人逃离肖申克？把我和韩利听说的加起来，大概十个左右。只有十个人彻彻底底逃脱了。虽然我没有办法确定，但是我猜十个人当中，至少有五个人目前在其他监狱服刑。因为一个人的确会受到监狱环境制约，当你剥夺了某人的自由、教他如何在牢里生存后，他似乎就失去了多面思考的能力，变得好像我刚刚提到的野兔，看着迎面而来、快撞上它的卡车灯光，却僵在那里动弹不得。许多刚出狱的囚犯往往会做一些绝不可能成功的蠢罪案，为什么呢？因为如此一来，他就可以回到牢里，回到他所熟悉了解的地方。
　　安迪不是这样的人，但我是。眺望太平洋的念头听起来很棒，但是我害怕有朝一日，我真的到了那里时，浩瀚的太平洋会把我吓得半死。