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 seven years or so; therefore, it would take me seventy years to break through; that would make me one hundred and
seven years old.
Here’s a second assumption I would have made, had I been Andy: that eventually I
would be caught and get a lot of solitary time, not to mention a very large black mark on
my record. After all, there was the regular weekly inspection and a surprise toss – which
usually came at night – every second week or so. He must have decided that things
couldn’t go on for long. Sooner or later, some screw was going to peek behind Rita
Hayworth just to make sure Andy didn’t have a sharpened spoon-handle or some
marijuana reefers Scotch-taped to the wall.
And his response to that second assumption must have been to hell with it. Maybe he
even made a game out of it. How far in can I get before they find out? Prison is a goddam
boring place, and the chance or being surprised by an unscheduled inspection in the
middle of the night while he had his poster unstuck probably added some spice to his life
during the early years.
And I do believe it would have been impossible for him to get away just on dumb luck.
Not for twenty-seven years. Nevertheless, I have to believe that for the first two years –
until mid-May of 1950, when he helped Byron Hadley get around the tax on his windfall
inheritance – that’s exactly what he did get by on.
Or maybe he had something more than dumb luck going for him even back then. He
had money, and he might have been slipping someone a little squeeze every week to take
it easy on him. Most guards will go along with that if the price is right; it’s money in their
pockets and the prisoner gets to keep his whack-off pictures or his tailormade cigarettes.
Also, Andy was a model prisoner – quiet, well-spoken, respectful, non-violent. It’s the
crazies and the stampeders that get their cells turned upside-down at least once every six
months, their mattresses unzipped, their pillows taken away and cut open, the outflow
pipe from their toilets carefully probed.
Then, in 1950, Andy became something more than a model prisoner. In 1950, he
became a valuable commodity, a murderer who did tax returns as well as H & R Block.
He gave gratis estate-planning advice, set up tax-shelters, filled out loan applications
(sometimes creatively). I can remember him sitting behind his desk in the library,
patiently going over a car-loan agreement paragraph by paragraph with a screwhead who
wanted to buy a used DeSoto, telling the guy what was good about the agreement and
what was bad about it, explaining to him that it was possible to shop for a loan and not
get hit quite so bad, steering him away from the finance companies which in those days
were sometimes little better than legal loan-sharks. When he’d finished, the screwhead
started to put out his hand … and then drew it back to himself quickly. He’d forgotten for
a moment, you see, that he was dealing with a mascot, not a man.
Andy kept up on the tax laws and the changes in the stock market, and so his
usefulness didn’t end after he’d been in cold storage for a while, as it might have done. He
began to get his library money, his running war with the sisters had ended, and nobody
tossed his cell very hard. He was a good nigger.
Then one day, very late in the going – perhaps around October of 1967 – the long-time
hobby suddenly turned into something else. One night while he was in the hole up to his
waist with Raquel Welch hanging down over his ass, the pick end of his rock-hammer
must have suddenly sunk into concrete past the hilt.
He would have dragged some chunks of concrete back, but maybe he heard others
falling down into that shaft, bouncing back and forth, clinking off that standpipe. Did he
know by then that he was going to come upon that shaft, or was he totally surprised? I
don’t know. He might have seen the prison blueprints by then or he might not have. If not,
you can be damned sure he found a way to look at them not 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