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.
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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
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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 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
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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
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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
