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Red doesn't speak Spanish.
It's a bit of an oversight on his part. It doesn't hinder him quite as much as he expects once he crosses the border. The warm muggy weight of summer trails after him for what feels like forever, bounding after him along his illicit trip through the country into a world of drier heat, enticing helpful English-speaking folks to assist a delightfully bewildered old man in a second-hand suit.
In Mexico, as he winds his way towards Zihuatanejo on a rickety bus that creaks and shudders, the wizened elderly matron sitting next to him offers him an apple and pats his arm. She calls him "child," or at least he thinks she does in the wisps of Spanish he's pickpocketed from other folks' conversations, and out of politeness he keeps a quiet comment on his shaky old bones to himself.
In Zihuatanejo, he doesn't even have to ask, really. You show up in a town like Zihuatanejo strolling about quiet and dazed and wondrous at the world around you, appear to all the world as an odd American man fascinated by just about everything he stumbles upon, and sooner or later someone will simply point you towards the other one in town, that strange fellow planing flaky strips of old paint off a lost cause of a boat out on the beach while barely breaking his smile.
Andy knows Spanish, of course.
Nothing surprises Red anymore about Andy, not the way the Spanish words roll past his tongue as though he were born and raised here, not the way he tunneled out of Shawshank with a measly rock hammer and birthed himself into the world again with a jailhouse baptism of pure criminal shit. Andy orders them tequila and a dozen different foods Red couldn't identify in a million years, and he laughs at the face Red makes over the blessed heat tucked away in those tortillas.
Red's never heard anything that made him lighter inside, shining and weightless.
In a few short weeks Red learns to move through life on a lyrical undercurrent of lived-in Spanish grammar, words that roll and curve around the edges. He picks the language up bit by bit, can order a beer or ask for directions if Andy isn't around to do it for him, but chunks of the language refuse to stick.
It's sensory overload on so many levels, the salty tang of the sea constantly seasoning the air, the happy patter of everyday conversation twirling around him. Some mornings he gets up from the bungalow Andy bought with his ill-begotten riches – if you can even call them that, really – and wanders out onto the porch that faces the ocean, blinding himself with the pearly blue of the sea.
He closes his eyes and tunes out the breaking of the waves.
Somehow it's just not freedom until he can pick out the rise of cheerful morning greetings from the nearby streets, as far from the familiar clanks and bangs of Shawshank as can be.