Skeet

Walter Dunn worked the line at Firestone Tire in Akron for eleven years before the company discovered what he'd been doing with the freight manifests. It wasn't ambition that got him into trouble — it was habit. A quiet, persistent habit of redirecting small shipments and pocketing the difference. By the time anyone noticed, Walter had taken enough to buy a house in Cuyahoga Falls. He did. His wife, Lenora, never knew where the money came from. She suspected the cards.

He never once raised his voice, not in the courtroom, not when they read the sentence. He just sat there like he was waiting for a bus.

Walter arrived at Shawshank in the spring of 1958. He was assigned to the laundry, which he preferred — warm, and the work made sense to him. He kept a ledger in his cell that no one confiscated because the guards assumed it was a Bible. He attended chapel not out of belief but out of routine. He sat in the third row, to the left, every Sunday for thirteen years.

Walter was released in 1971. Lenora had remarried. He moved to a rooming house in Sandusky and took a job at a dry cleaner's counting inventory. He died in 1988, of a heart attack while watching the evening news. Among his belongings was a ledger documenting every load of laundry he had processed at Shawshank. 47,312 pounds of linen, over thirteen years. Totaled on the last page, in pencil, underlined twice.