indeed been in his cell at the time of the lock-in, and at lights-out an hour later.
One wit suggested that Andy had poured himself out through the keyhole. The
suggestion earned the guy four days in solitary. They were uptight.
So Norton came down–stalked down–glaring at us with blue eyes nearly hot
enough to strike sparks from the tempered steel bars of our cages. He looked at us as
if he believed we were all in on it. Probably he did believe it.
He went into Andy’s cell and looked around. It was just as Andy had left it, the
sheets of his bunk turned back but without looking slept-in. Rocks on the windowsill…
but not all of them. The ones he liked best he took with him.
‘Rocks,’ Norton hissed, and swept them off the window-ledge with a clatter.
Gonyar, already four hours overtime, winced but said nothing.
Norton’s eyes fell on the Linda Ronstadt poster. Linda was looking back over
her shoulder, her hands tucked into the back pockets of a very tight pair of fawn-
coloured slacks. She was wearing a halter and she had a deep California tan. It must
have offended the hell out of Norton’s Baptist sensibilities, that poster. Watching him glare at it, I remembered what Andy had once said about feeling he could almost step
through the picture and be with the girl.
In a very real way, that was exactly what he did–as Norton was only seconds
from discovering.
‘Wretched thing!’ he grunted, and ripped the poster from the wall with a single
swipe of his hand.
And revealed the gaping, crumbled hole in the concrete behind it. Gonyar
wouldn’t go in.
Norton ordered him–God, they must have heard Norton ordering Rich Gonyar
to go in there all over the prison–and Gonyar just refused him, point-blank.
‘I’ll have your job for this!’ Norton screamed. He was as hysterical as a woman
having a hot-flash. He had utterly blown his cool. His neck had turned a rich, dark red, and two veins stood out, throbbing, on his forehead. ‘You can count on it, you… you
Frenchman!
I’ll have your job and I’ll see to it that you never get another one in any prison
system in New England!’
Gonyar silently held out his service pistol to Norton, butt first. He’d had
enough. He was four hours overtime, going on five, and he’d just had enough. It was
as if Andy’s defection from our happy little family had driven Norton right over the
edge of some private irrationality that had been there for a long time… certainly he was crazy that night.
I don’t know what that private irrationality might have been, of course. But I
do know that there were twenty-eight cons listening to Norton’s little dust-up with
Rich Gonyar that evening as the last of the light faded from a dull late winter sky, all of us hard-timers and long-line riders who had seen the administrators come and go,
the hard-asses and the candy-asses alike, and we all knew that Warden Samuel Norton
had just passed what the engineers like to call ‘the breaking strain’.
And by God, it almost seemed to me that somewhere I could heard Andy
Dufresne laughing.
Norton finally got a skinny drink, of water on the night shift to go into that
hole that had been behind Andy’s poster of Linda Ronstadt. The skinny guard’s name
was Rory Tremont, and he was not exactly a ball of fire in the brains department.
Maybe he thought he was going to win a Bronze Star or something. As it turned out, it
was fortunate that Norton got someone of Andy’s approximate height and build to go
in there; if they had sent a big-assed fellow–as most prison guards seem to be–the
guy would have stuck in there is sure as God made green grass… and he might be
there still.
Tremont went in with a nylon filament rope, which someone had found in the
trunk of his car, tied around his waist and a big six-battery flashlight in one hand. By then Gonyar, who had changed his mind about quitting and who seemed to be the
only one there still able to think clearly, had dug out a set of blueprints. I knew well enough what they showed him–a wall which looked, in cross-section, like a sandwich.