interestingly weak concrete. Maybe he started to carve his initials and a big chunk of the wall fell out I can see him, lying there on his bunk, looking at that broken chunk of concrete, turning it over in his hands. Never mind the wreck of your whole life,
never mind that you got railroaded into this place by a whole trainload of bad luck.
Let’s forget all that and look at this piece of concrete. Some months further along he might have decided it would be fun to see how much of that wall he could take out.
But you can’t just start digging into your wall and then, when the weekly inspection
(or one of the surprise inspections that are always turning up interesting caches of
booze, drugs, dirty pictures, and weapons) comes around, say to the guard: This? Just
excavating a little hole in my cell wall. Not to worry, my good man.’
No, he couldn’t have that. So he came to me and asked if I could get him a
Rita Hayworth poster. Not a little one but a big one.
And, of course, he had the rock-hammer. I remember thinking when I got him
that gadget back in ’48 that it would take a man six hundred years to burrow through
the wall with it. True enough. But Andy went right through the wall -even with the
soft concrete, it took him two rock-hammers and twenty-seven years to hack a hole
big enough to get his slim body through four feet of it Of course he lost most of one
of those years to Normaden, and he could only work at night, preferably late at night,
when almost everybody is asleep–including the guards who work the night shift. But I suspect the thing which slowed him down the most was getting rid of the wall as he
took it out He could muffle the sound of his work by wrapping the head of his
hammer in rock-polishing cloths, but what to do with the pulverized concrete and the
occasional chunks that came out whole? I think he must have broken up the chunks
into pebbles and…
I remembered the Sunday after I had gotten him the rock-hammer. I remember
watching him walk across the exercise yard, his face puffy from his latest go-round
with the sisters. I saw him stoop, pick up a pebble… and it disappeared up his sleeve.
That inside sleeve-pocket is an old prison trick. Up your sleeve or just inside the cuff of your pants. And I have another memory, very strong but unfocused, maybe
something I saw more than once. This memory is of Andy Dufresne walking across
the exercise yard on a hot summer day when the air was utterly still. Still, yeah…
except for the little breeze that seemed to be blowing sand around Andy Dufresne’s
feet.
So maybe he had a couple of cheaters in his pants below the knees. You
loaded the cheaters up with fill and then just strolled around, your hands in your
pockets, and when you feel safe and unobserved, you gave the pockets a little twitch.
The pockets, of course, are attached by string or strong thread to the cheaters. The fill goes cascading out of your pantslegs as you walk. The World War II POWS who
were trying to tunnel out used the dodge.
The years went past and Andy brought his wall out to the exercise yard cupful
by cupful. He played the game with administrator after administrator, and they
thought it was because he wanted to keep the library growing. I have no doubt that
was part of it, but the main thing Andy wanted was to keep cell 14 in Cellblock 5 a
single occupancy. I doubt if he had any real plans or hopes of breaking out, at least
not at first. He probably assumed the wall was ten feet of solid concrete, and that if he succeeded in boring all the way through it, he’d come out thirty feet over the exercise yard. But like I say, I don’t think he was worried overmuch about breaking through.
His assumption could have run this way: I’m only making a foot of progress every