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'If you get caught, you'll say you found it. That's about the long and short of it. They'll put
you in solitary for three or four weeks ... plus, of course, you'll lose your toy and you'll
get a black mark on your record. If you give them my name, you and I will never do
business again. Not for so much as a pair of shoelaces or a bag of Bugler. And I'll send
some fellows around to lump you up. I don't like violence, but you'll understand my
position. I can't allow it to get around that I can't handle myself. That would surely finish
me.'
'Yes. I suppose it would, I understand, and you don't need to worry.'
'I never worry,' I said. 'In a place like this there's no percentage in it.'
He nodded and walked away. Three days later he walked up beside me in the exercise
yard during the laundry's morning break. He didn't speak or even look my way, but
pressed a picture of the Hon. Alexander Hamilton into my hand as neatly as a good
magician does a card-trick. He was a man who adapted fast. I got him his rock-hammer. I
had it in my cell for one night, and it was just as he described it It was no tool for escape
(it would have taken a man just about six hundred years to tunnel under the wall using
that rock-hammer, I figured), but I still felt some misgivings. If you planted that pickaxe
end in a man's head, he would surely never listen to Fibber McGee and Molly on the
radio again. And Andy had already begun having trouble with the sisters. I hoped it
wasn't them he was wanting the rock-hammer for.
In the end, I trusted my judgment. Early the next morning, twenty minutes before the
wake-up horn went off, I slipped the rock-hammer and a package of Camels to Ernie, the
old trusty who swept the Cellblock 5 corridors until he was let free in 1956. He slipped it
into his tunic without a word, and I didn't see the rock-hammer again for seven years.
The following Sunday Andy walked over to me in the exercise yard again. He was
nothing to look at that day, I can :"il you. His lower lip was swelled up so big it looked
like a summer sausage, his right eye was swollen half-shut, and ±ere was an ugly
washboard scrape across one cheek. He was having his troubles with the sisters, all right,
but he never mentioned them. 'Thanks for the tool,' he said, and walked nray.
I watched him curiously. He walked a few steps, saw in the dirt, bent over, and picked it
up. It was a small rock. Prison fatigues, except for those worn by mechanics when they're
on the job, have no pockets. But there are ways to get around that. The little pebble
disappeared up Andy's sleeve and didn't come down. I admired that... and I admired him.
In spite of the problems he was having, he was going on with his life. There are
thousands who don't or won't or can't, and plenty of them aren't in prison, either. And I
noticed that, although his face still looked as if a twister had happened to it, his hands
were still neat and clean, the nails well-kept.
I didn't see much of him over the next six months; Andy spent a lot of that time in
solitary.
A few words about the sisters.
In a lot of pens they are known as bull queers or jailhouse susies - just lately the term in
fashion is 'killer queens'. But in they were always the sisters. I don't know why, but other
than the name I guess there was no difference.
It comes as no surprise to most these days that there's a lot of buggery going on inside the