第68章 肖申克的救赎 (1)
银行家安迪，被当做杀害妻子的凶手送上法庭。
妻子的不忠，律师的奸诈，法官的误判，狱警的凶暴、
典狱长的贪心与卑鄙，将正处在而立之年的安迪一
下子从人生的巅峰推向了世间地狱。而狱中发生的
一系列事情迫使忍无可忍的安迪终于在一个雷电交
加的夜晚，越狱而出，重获自由。当翌日典狱长打
开安迪的牢门时，发现他已不翼而飞，预感到末日
来临的典狱长在检察人员收到安迪投寄的罪证之前，
畏罪自杀。
[ 美] 斯蒂芬·金（ Stephen King）
There’s a guy like me in every state and federal prison in
America，I guess— I’m the guy who can get it for you. Tailormade
cigarettes，a bag of reefer，if you’re partial to that，a
bottle of brandy to celebrate your son or daughter’s high school
graduation，or almost anything else... within reason，that is. It
wasn’t always that way.
I came to Shawshank when I was just twenty，and I am one
of the few people in our happy little family who is willing to own
up to what he did. I committed murder. I put a large insurance
policy on my wife，who was three years older than I was，and
then I fixed the brakes of the Chevrolet coupe her father had
given us as a wedding present. It worked out exactly as I had
planned，except I hadn’t planned on her stopping to pick up the
neighbour woman and the neighbour woman’s infant son on the
way down Castle Hill and into town. The brakes let go and the car
crashed through the bushes at the edge of the town common，
gathering speed. Bystanders said it must have been doing fifty or
better when it hit the base of the Civil War statue and burst into
flames.
I also hadn’t planned on getting caught，but caught I was. I
got a season’s pass into this place. Maine has no death penalty，
but the district attorney saw to it that I was tried for all three
deaths and given three life sentences，to run one after the other.
That fixed up any chance of parole I might have，for a long，long
time. The judge called what I had done‘a hideous，heinous crime’，
and it was，but it is also in the past now. You can look it up in the
yellowing files of the Castle Rock Call，where the big headlines
announcing my conviction look sort of funny and antique next
to the news of Hitler and Mussolini and FDR’s alphabet soup
agencies.
Have I rehabilitated myself，you ask? I don’t know what that
word means，at least as far as prisons and corrections go. I think
it’s a politician’s word. It may have some other meaning，and it
may be that I will have a chance to find out，but that is the future
...something cons teach themselves not to think about. I was
young，good-looking，and from the poor side of town. I knocked
up a pretty，sulky，headstrong girl who lived in one of the fine
old houses on Carbine Street. Her father was agreeable to the
marriage if I would take a job in the optical company he owned
and‘work my way up’. I found out that what he really had in
mind was keeping me in his house and under his thumb，like a
disagreeable pet that has not quite been housebroken and which
may bite. Enough hate eventually piled up to cause me to do what
I did. Given a second chance I would not do it again，but I’m not
sure that means I am rehabilitated.
Anyway，it’s not me I want to tell you about ；I want to tell
you about a guy named Andy Dufresne. But before I can tell you
about Andy，I have to explain a few other things about myself. It
won’t take long.
As I said，I’ve been the guy who can get it for you here
at Shawshank for damn near forty years. And that doesn’t just
mean contraband items like extra cigarettes or booze，although
those items always top the list. But I’ve gotten thousands of
other items for men doing time here，some of them perfectly
legal yet hard to come by in a place where you’ve supposedly
been brought to be punished. There was one fellow who was in
for raping a little girl and exposing himself to dozens of others ；
I got him three pieces of pink Vermont marble and he did three
lovely sculptures out of them — a baby，a boy of about twelve，
and a bearded young man. He called them The Three Ages of
Jesus，and those pieces of sculpture are now in the parlour of a
man who used to be governor of this state.
Or here’s a name you may remember if you grew up north
of Massachusetts — Robert Alan Cote. In 1951 he tried to rob the
First Mercantile Bank of Mechanic Falls，and the hold-up turned
into a bloodbath— six dead in the end，two of them members of
the gang，three of them hostages ，one of them a young state
cop who put his head up at the wrong time and got a bullet in
the eye. Cote had a penny collection. Naturally they weren’t
going to let him have it in here，but with a little help from his
mother and a middleman who used to drive a laundry truck，
I was able to get it to him. I told him，Bobby，you must be
crazy，wanting to have a coin collection in a stone hotel full of