第68章 肖申克的救赎 (1)

　　The Shawshank Redemption

　　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