long after. All at once he must have realized that, instead of just playing a game, he was playing for high stakes… in terms of his own life and his own future, the highest.
Even then he couldn’t have known for sure, but he must have had a pretty good idea
because it was right around then that he talked to me about Zihuatanejo for the first
time. All of a sudden, instead of just being a toy, that stupid hole in the wall became his master–if he knew about the sewer-pipe at the bottom, and that it led under the
outer wall, it did, anyway.
He’d had the key under the rock in Buxton to worry about for years. Now he
had to worry that some eager-beaver new guard would look behind his poster and
expose the whole thing, or that he would get another cellmate, or that he would, after all those years, suddenly be transferred. He had all those things on his mind for the
next seven years. All I can say is that he must have been one of the coolest men who
ever lived. I would have gone completely nuts after a while, living with all that
uncertainty. But Andy just went on playing the game.
He had to carry the possibility of discovery for another eight years–the
probability of it, you might say, because no matter how carefully he stacked the cards in his favour, as an inmate of a state prison, he just didn’t have that many to stack…
and the gods had been kind to him for a very long time; some eighteen years.
The most ghastly irony I can think of would have been if he had been offered a parole. Can you imagine it? Three days before the parolee is actually released, he is
transferred into the light security wing to undergo a complete physical and a battery of vocational tests. While he’s there, his old cell is completely cleaned out. Instead of getting his parole, Andy would have gotten a long turn downstairs in solitary,
followed by some more time upstairs… but in a different cell.
If he broke into the shaft in 1967, how come he didn’t escape until 1975? I
don’t know for sure–but I can advance some pretty good guesses. First, he would
have become more careful than ever. He was too smart to just push ahead at flank
speed and try to get out in eight months, or even in eighteen. He must have gone on
widening the opening on the crawlspace a little at a time. A hole as big as a teacup by the time he took his New Year’s Eve drink that year. A hole as big as a dinner-plate by the time he took his birthday drink in 1968. As big as a serving-tray by the time the
1969 baseball season opened.
For a time I thought it should have gone much faster than it apparently did–
after he broke through, I mean. It seemed to me that, instead of having to pulverize
the crap and take it out of his cell in the cheater gadgets I have described, he could simply let it drop down the shaft. The length of time he took makes me believe that he didn’t dare do that. He might have decided that the noise would arouse someone’s
suspicions. Or, if he knew about the sewer-pipe, as I believe he must have, he would
have been afraid that a falling chunk of concrete would break it before he was ready,
screwing up the cellblock sewage system and leading to an investigation. And an
investigation, needless to say, would lead to ruin.
Still and all, I’d guess that, by the time Nixon was sworn in for his second term,
the hole would have been wide enough for him to wriggle through… and probably
sooner than that Andy was a small guy. Why didn’t he go then?
That’s where my educated guesses run out, folks; from this point they become
progressively wilder. One possibility is that the crawlspace itself was clogged with
crap and he had to clear it out But that wouldn’t account for all the time. So what was it? I think that maybe Andy got scared.