because in August they were going to switch us over to the new waste-treatment plant,
too.
Five hundred yards. The length of five football fields. Just shy of a mile. He
crawled that distance, maybe with one of those small Penlites in his hand, maybe with
nothing but a couple of books of matches. He crawled through foulness that I either
can’t imagine or don’t want to imagine. Maybe the rats scattered in front of him, or
maybe they went for him the way such animals sometimes will when they’ve had a
chance to grow bold in the dark. He must have had just enough clearance at the
shoulders to keep moving, and he probably had to shove himself through the places
where the lengths of pipe were joined.
If it had been me, the claustrophobia would have driven me mad a dozen times
over. But he did it At the far end of the pipe they found a set of muddy footprints
leading out of the sluggish, polluted creek the pipe fed into. Two miles from there a
search party found his prison uniform–that was a day later.
The story broke big in the papers, as you might guess, but no one within a
fifteen-mile radius of the prison stepped forward to report a stolen car, stolen clothes, or a naked man in the moonlight There was not so much as a barking dog in a
farmyard. He came out of the sewerpipe and he disappeared like smoke.
But I am betting he disappeared in the direction of Buxton.
Three months after that memorable day, Warden Norton resigned. He was a
broken man, it gives me great pleasure to report. The spring was gone from his step.
On his last day he shuffled out with his head down like an old con shuffling down to
the infirmary for his codeine pills. It was Gonyar who took over, and to Norton that must have seemed like the unkindest cut of all. For all I know, Sam Norton is down
there in Eliot now, attending services at the Baptist church every Sunday, and
wondering how the hell Andy Dufresne ever could have gotten the better of him.
I could have told him; the answer to the question is simplicity itself. Some
have got it, Sam. And some don’t, and never will.
That’s what I know; now I’m going to tell you what I think. I may have it
wrong on some of the specifics, but I’d be willing to bet my watch and chain that I’ve got the general outline down pretty well. Because, with Andy being the sort of man
that he was, there’s only one or two ways that it could have been. And every now and
then, when I think it out, I think of Normaden, that half-crazy Indian. ‘Nice fella,’
Normaden had said after celling with Andy for six or eight months. ‘I was glad to go,
me. All the time cold. He don’t let nobody touch his things. That’s okay. Nice man,
never make fun. But big draught.’ Poor crazy Normaden. He knew more than all the
rest of us, and he knew it sooner. And it was eight long months before Andy could get
him out of there and have the cell to himself again. If it hadn’t been for the eight
months Normaden had spent with him after Warden Norton first came in, I do believe
that Andy would have been free before Nixon resigned.
I believe now that it began in 1949, way back then–not with the rock-hammer,
but with the Rita Hayworth poster. I told you how nervous he seemed when he asked
for that, nervous and filled with suppressed excitement. At the time I thought it was
just embarrassment, that Andy was the sort of guy who’d never want someone else to
know that he had feet of clay and wanted a woman… even if it was only a fantasy-
woman. But I think now that I was wrong. I think now that Andy’s excitement came
from something else altogether.
What was responsible for the hole that Warden Norton eventually found
behind the poster of a girl that hadn’t even been born when that photo of Rita