The entire wall was ten feet thick. The inner and outer sections were each about four
feet thick. In the centre was two feet of pipe-space, and you want to believe that was the meat of the thing… in more ways than one.
Tremont’s voice came out of the hole, sounding hollow and dead. ‘Something
smells awful in here, Warden.’
‘Never mind that! Keep going.’
Tremont’s lower legs disappeared into the hole. A moment iater his feet were
gone, too.
His light flashed dimly back and forth.
‘Warden, it smells pretty damn bad.’
‘Never mind, I said!’ Norton cried.
Dolorously, Tremont’s voice floated back: ‘Smells like shit. Oh God, that’s
what it is, it’s shit, oh my God lemme outta here I’m gonna blow my groceries oh shit
it’s shit oh my Gawwwwwd–And then came the unmistakable sound of Rory Tremont
losing his last couple of meals.
Well, that was it for me. I couldn’t help myself. The whole day–hell no, the
last thirty years–all came up on me at once and I started laughing fit to split, a laugh such as I’d never had since I was a free man, the kind of laugh I never expected to
have inside these grey walls. And oh dear God didn’t it feel good!
‘Get that man out of here!’ Warden Norton was screaming, and I was laughing
so hard I didn’t know if he meant me or Tremont I just went on laughing and kicking
my feet and holding onto my belly. I couldn’t have stopped if Norton had threatened
to shoot me dead-bang on the spot. ‘Get him OUT!’
Well, friends and neighbours, I was the one who went Straight down to
solitary, and there I stayed for fifteen days. A long shot. But every now and then I’d think about poor old not-too-bright Rory Tremont bellowing oh shit it’s shit, and then I’d think about Andy Dufresne heading south in his own car, dressed in a nice suit,
and I’d just have to laugh. I did that fifteen days in solitary practically standing on my head Maybe because half of me was with Andy Dufresne, Andy Dufresne who had
waded in shit and came out clean on the other side, Andy Dufresne, headed for the
Pacific.
I heard the rest of what went on that night from half a dozen sources. There
wasn’t all that much, anyway. I guess that Rory Tremont decided he didn’t have much
left to lose after he’d lost his lunch and dinner, because he did go on. There was no
danger of falling down the pipe-shaft between the inner and outer segments of the
cellblock wall; it was so narrow that Tremont actually had to wedge himself down. He
said later that he could only take half-breaths and that he knew what it would be like to be buried alive.
What he found at the bottom of the shaft was a master sewer-pipe which
served the fourteen toilets in Cellblock 5, a porcelain pipe that had been laid thirty-three years before. It had been broken into. Beside the jagged hole in the pipe,
Tremont found Andy’s rock-hammer.
Andy had gotten free, but it hadn’t been easy.
The pipe was even narrower than the shaft Tremont had just descended; it had
a two-foot bore. Rory Tremont didn’t go in, and so far as I know, no one else did,
either. It must have been damn near unspeakable. A rat jumped out of the pipe as
Tremont was examining the hole and the rock-hammer, and he swore later that it was
nearly as big as a cocker spaniel pup. He went back up the crawlspace to Andy’s cell
like a monkey on a stick.
Andy had gone into that pipe. Maybe he knew that it emptied into a stream
five hundred yards beyond the prison on the marshy western side. I think he did. The
prison blueprints were around, and Andy would have found a way to look at them. He
was a methodical cuss. He would have known or found out that the sewerpipe running
out of Cellblock 5 was the last one in Shawshank not hooked into the new waste-
treatment plant, and he would have known it was do it by mid-1975 or do it never,