hoped to God he would be careful if he did, and still, I wouldn’t have bet money on his
chances of succeeding. Warden Norton, you see, was watching Andy with a special close
eye. Andy wasn’t just another deadhead with a number to Norton; they had a working
relationship, you might say. Also, he had brains and he had heart Norton was determined
to use the one and crush the other.
As there are honest politicians on the outside — ones who stay bought – there are
honest prison guards, and if you are a good judge of character and if you have some loot
to spread around, I suppose it’s possible that you could buy enough look-the-other-way to
make a break. I’m not the man to tell you such a thing has never been done, but Andy
Dufresne wasn’t the man who could do it Because, as I’ve said, Norton was watching.
Andy knew it, and the screws knew it, too.
Nobody was going to nominate Andy for the Inside-Out programme, not as long as
Warden Norton was evaluating the nominations. And Andy was not the kind of man to
try a casual Sid Nedeau type of escape.
If I had been him, the thought of that key would have tormented me endlessly. I would
have been lucky to get two hours’ worth of honest shuteye a night Buxton was less than
thirty miles from Shawshank. So near and yet so far.
I still thought his best chance was to engage a lawyer and try for the retrial Anything to
get out from under Norton’s thumb. Maybe Tommy Williams could be shut up by nothing
more than a cushy furlough programme, but I wasn’t entirely sure. Maybe a good old
Mississippi hardass lawyer could crack him … and maybe that lawyer wouldn’t even have
to work that hard. Williams had honestly liked Andy. Every now and then I’d bring these
points up to Andy, who would only smile, his eyes far away, and say he was thinking
about it.
Apparently he’d been thinking about a lot of other things, as well.
In 1975, Andy Dufresne escaped from Shawshank. He hasn’t been recaptured, and I
don’t think he ever will be. In fact, I don’t think Andy Dufresne even exists anymore. But I
think there’s a man down in Zihuatanejo, Mexico named Peter Stevens. Probably running
a very new small hotel in this year of our Lord 1977.
I’ll tell you what I know and what I think; that’s about all I can do, isn’t it?
On 12 March 1975, the cell doors in Cellblock 5 opened at 6.30 a.m., as they do every
morning around here except Sunday. And as they do every day except Sunday, the
inmates of those cells stepped forward into the corridor and formed two lines as the cell
doors slammed shut behind them. They walked up to the main cellblock gate, where they
were counted off by two guards before being sent on down to the cafeteria for a breakfast
of oatmeal, scrambled eggs, and fatty bacon.
All of this went according to routine until the count at the cellblock gate. There should
have been twenty-nine. Instead, there were twenty-eight. After a call to the Captain of the
Guards, Cellblock 5 was allowed to go to breakfast.
The Captain of the Guards, a not half-bad fellow named Richard Gonyar, and his
assistant, a jolly prick named Dave Burkes, came down to Cellblock 5 right away. Gonyar
reopened the cell doors and he and Burkes went down the corridor together, dragging
their sticks over the bars, their guns out. In a case like that what you usually have is
someone who has been taken sick in the night, so sick he can’t even step out of his cell in
the morning. More rarely, someone has died… or committed suicide.
But this time, they found a mystery instead of a sick man or a dead man. They found
no man at all. There were fourteen cells in Cellblock 5, seven to a side, all fairly neat –
restriction of visiting privileges is the penalty for a sloppy cell at Shawshank – and all
very empty.
Gonyar’s first assumption was that there had been a miscount or a practical joke. So
instead of going off to work after breakfast, the inmates of Cellblock 5 were sent back to
their cells, joking and happy. Any break in the routine was always welcome.
Cell doors opened; prisoners stepped in; cell doors closed. Some clown shouting, ‘I want my lawyer, I want my lawyer, you guys run this place just like a frigging prison.’
Burkes: ‘Shut up in there, or I’ll rank you.’
The clown: ‘I ranked your wife, Burkie,’
Gonyar: ‘Shut up, all of you, or you’ll spend the day in there.’
He and Burkes went up the line again, counting noses. They didn’t have to go far.
‘Who belongs in this cell?’ Gonyar asked the rightside night guard.
‘Andrew Dufresne,’ the rightside answered, and that was all it took. Everything stopped
being routine right then. The balloon went up.
In all the prison movies I’ve seen, this wailing horn goes off when there’s been a break.
That never happens at Shawshank. The first thing Gonyar did was to get in touch with the
warden. The second thing was to get a search of the prison going. The third was to alert
the State Police in Scarborough to the possibility of a breakout
That was the routine. It didn’t call for them to search the suspected escapee’s cell, and
so no one did. Not then. Why would they? It was a case of what you see is what you get It
was a small square room, bars on the window and bars on the sliding door. There was a
toilet and an empty cot. Some pretty rocks on the windowsill.
And the poster, of course. It was Linda Ronstadt by then. The poster was right over his
bunk. There had been a poster there, in that exact same place, for twenty-six years. And
when someone – it was Warden Norton himself, as it turned out, poetic justice if there
ever was any – looked behind it, they got one hell of a shock.
But that didn’t happen until 6.30 that night, almost twelve hours after Andy had been
reported missing, probably twenty hours after he had actually made his escape.
Norton hit the roof.
I have it on good authority – Chester, the trustee, who was waxing the hall floor in the
Admin Wing that day. He didn’t have to polish any keyplates with his ear that day; he said
you could hear the warden clear down to Records & Files as he chewed on Rich Gonyar’s
ass.
‘What do you mean, you’re “satisfied he’s not on the prison grounds”? What does that
mean? It means you didn’t find him! You better find him! You better! Because I want
him! Do you hear me? I want him!’
Gonyar said something.
‘Didn’t happen on your shift? That’s what you say. So far as / can tell, no one knows
when it happened. Or how. Or if it really did. Now, I want him in my office by three
o’clock this afternoon, or some heads are going to roll. I can promise you that, and I
always keep my promises.’
Something else from Gonyar, something that seemed to provoke Norton to even
greater rage.
‘No? Then look at this! Look at this! You recognize it? Last night’s tally for Cellblock 5. Every prisoner accounted for! Dufresne was locked up last night at nine and it is
impossible for him to be gone now! It is impossible! Now you find him!”
But at six that evening Andy was still among the missing, Norton himself stormed
down to Cellblock 5, where the rest of us had been locked up all of that day. Had we been
questioned? We had spent most of that long day being questioned by harried screws who
were feeling the breath of the dragon on the backs of their necks. We all said the same
thing: we had seen nothing, heard nothing. And so far as I know, we were all telling the
truth. I know that I was. All we could say was that Andy had 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