all of them. The ones he liked best he took with him.
‘Rocks,’ Norton hissed, and swept them off the window-ledge with a clatter. Gonyar,
already four hours overtime, winced but said nothing.
Norton’s eyes fell on the Linda Ronstadt poster. Linda was looking back over her
shoulder, her hands tucked into the back pockets of a very tight pair of fawn-coloured
slacks. She was wearing a halter and she had a deep California tan. It must have offended
the hell out of Norton’s Baptist sensibilities, that poster. Watching him glare at it, I
remembered what Andy had once said about feeling he could almost step through the
picture and be with the girl.
In a very real way, that was exactly what he did – as Norton was only seconds from
discovering.
‘Wretched thing!’ he grunted, and ripped the poster from the wall with a single swipe of
his hand.
And revealed the gaping, crumbled hole in the concrete behind it. Gonyar wouldn’t go
in.
Norton ordered him – God, they must have heard Norton ordering Rich Gonyar to go in
there all over the prison – and Gonyar just refused him, point-blank.
‘I’ll have your job for this!’ Norton screamed. He was as hysterical as a woman having
a hot-flush. He had utterly blown his cool. His neck had turned a rich, dark red, and two
veins stood out, throbbing, on his forehead. ‘You can count on it, you … you Frenchman!
I’ll have your job and I’ll see to it that you never get another one in any prison system in
New England!’
Gonyar silently held out his service pistol to Norton, butt first. He’d had enough. He
was four hours overtime, going on five, and he’d just had enough. It was as if Andy’s
defection from our happy little family had driven Norton right over the edge of some
private irrationality that had been there for a long time … certainly he was crazy that
night.
I don’t know what that private irrationality might have been, of course. But I do know
that there were twenty-eight cons listening to Norton’s little dust-up with Rich Gonyar
that evening as the last of the light faded from a dull late winter sky, all of us hard-timers
and long-line riders who had seen the administrators come and go, the hard-asses and the’
candy-asses alike, and we all knew that Warden Samuel Norton had just passed what the
engineers like to call ‘the breaking strain’.
And by God, it almost seemed to me that somewhere I could heard Andy Dufresne
laughing.
Norton finally got a skinny drink, of water on the night shift to go into that hole that
had been behind Andy’s poster of Linda Ronstadt. The skinny guard’s name was Rory
Tremont, and he was not exactly a ball of fire in the brains department. Maybe he thought
he was going to win a Bronze Star or something. As it turned out, it was fortunate that
Norton got someone of Andy’s approximate height and build to go in there; if they had
sent a big-assed fellow – as most prison guards seem to be – the guy would have stuck in
there is sure as God made green grass … and he might be there still.
Tremont went in with a nylon filament rope, which someone had found in the trunk of
his car, tied around his waist and a big six-battery flashlight in one hand. By then Gonyar,
who had changed his mind about quitting and who seemed to be the only one there still
able to think clearly, had dug out a set of blueprints. I knew well enough what they
showed him — a wall which looked, in cross-section, like a sandwich. 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 lsing 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 cllblock 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, 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