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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 j 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 b & e 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