Different Seasons: Four Novellas

by Stephen King

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.

Women, for instance. After hardly knowing that they were half of the human race for forty years, I was suddenly working in a store filled with them. Old women, pregnant women wearing tee-shirts with arrows pointing downward and a printed motto reading BABY HERE, skinny women with their nipples poking out at their shirts—a woman wearing something like that when I went in would have gotten arrested and then had a sanity hearing—women of every shape and size.

That’s what a whole life in prison does for you, young man. It turns everyone in a position of authority into a master, and you into every master’s dog. Maybe you know you’ve become a dog, even in prison, but since everyone else in gray is a dog, too, it doesn’t seem to matter so much. Outside, it does.

Remember that hope is a good thing, Red, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.

Sure I remember the name. Zihuatanejo. A name like that is just too pretty to forget.

“A little General Motors, a little American Telephone and Telegraph, a hundred and fifty shares of Revlon. All this banker’s choices. Dufresne, his name was—I remember, because it sounds a little like mine. It seems he was not so smart at wife-killing as he was at picking growth stocks. The crime passionel, boy. It only proves that all men are donkeys who can read.”

I was given orders and directives, which I followed.” Todd’s smile widened; it was now almost a smirk. “Oh, I know how the Americans have distorted that,” Dussander muttered. “But your own politicians make our Dr. Goebbels look like a child playing with picture books in a kindergarten. They speak of morality while they douse screaming children and old women in burning napalm. Your draft-resisters are called cowards and ‘peaceniks.’ For refusing to follow orders they are either put in jails or scourged from the country. Those who demonstrate against this country’s unfortunate Asian adventure are clubbed down in the streets.