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
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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.
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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.
I've told you as well as I can how it is to be an institutional man. At first you can't stand
those four walls, then you get so you can abide them, then you get so you accept them ...
and then, as your body and your mind and your spirit adjust to life on an HO scale, you
get to love them. You are told when to eat, when you can write letters, when you can
smoke. If you're at work in the laundry or the plate-shop, you're assigned five minutes of
each hour when you can go to the bathroom. For thirty-five years, my time was twenty-
five minutes after the hour, and after thirty-five years, that's the only time I ever felt the
need to take a piss or have a crap: twenty-five minutes past the hour. And if for some
reason I couldn't go, the need would pass at thirty after, and come back at twenty-five
past the next hour.
I think Andy may have been wrestling with that tiger - that institutional syndrome - and
also with the bulking fears that all of it might have been for nothing.
How many nights must he have lain awake under his poster, thinking about that sewer
line, knowing that the one chance was all he'd ever get? The blueprints might have told
him how big the pipe's bore was, but a blueprint couldn't tell him what it would be like
inside that pipe - if he would be able to breathe without choking, if the rats were big
enough and mean enough to fight instead of retreating ... and a blueprint couldn't've told
him what he'd find at the end of the pipe, when and if he got there. Here's a joke even
funnier than the parole would have been: Andy breaks into the sewer line, crawls through
five hundred yards of choking, shit-smelling darkness, and comes up against a heavy-
gauge mesh screen at the end of it all. Ha, ha, very funny.
That would have been on his mind. And if the long shot actually came in and he was able
to get out, would he be able to get some civilian clothes and get away from the vicinity of
the prison undetected? Last of all, suppose he got out of the pipe, got away from
Shawshank before the alarm was raised, got to Buxton, overturned the right rock ... and
found nothing beneath? Not necessarily something so dramatic as arriving at the right
field and discovering that a high-rise apartment building had been erected on the spot, or
that it had turned into a supermarket parking lot. It could have been that some little kid
who liked rocks noticed that piece of volcanic glass, turned it over, saw the deposit-box
key, and took both it and the rock back to his room as souvenirs. Maybe a November
hunter kicked the rock, left the key exposed, and a squirrel or a crow with a liking for
bright shiny things had taken it away. Maybe there had been spring floods one year,
breaching the wall, washing the key away. Maybe anything.
So I think - wild guess or not - that Andy just froze in place for a while. After all, you
can't lose if you don't bet. What did he have to lose, you ask? His library, for one thing.
The poison peace of institutional life, for another. Any future chance to grab his safe
identity.
But he finally did it, just as I have told you. He tried ... and, my! Didn't he succeed in
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spectacular fashion? You tell me!
But did he get away, you ask? What happened after? What happened when he got to that
meadow and turned over the rock ... always assuming the rock was still there?
I can't describe that scene for you, because this institutional man is still in this institution,
and expects to be for years to come.
But I'll tell you this. Very late in the summer of 1975, on 15 September to be exact, I got
a postcard which had been mailed from the tiny town of McNary, Texas. That town is on
the American side of the border, directly across from El Porvenir. The message side of
the card was totally blank. But I know. I know it in my heart as surely as I know that
we're all going to die someday.
McNary was where he crossed. McNary, Texas.
So that's my story, Jack. I never believed how long it would take to write it all down, or
how many pages it would take. I started writing just after I got that postcard, and here I
am finishing up on 14 January 1976. I've used three pencils right down to knuckle-stubs,
and a whole tablet of paper. I've kept the pages carefully hidden ... not that many could
read my. hen-tracks, anyway.
It stirred up more memories than I ever would have believed. Writing about yourself
seems to be a lot like sticking a branch into clear river-water and roiling up the muddy
bottom.
Well, you weren't writing about yourself, I hear someone in the peanut-gallery saying.
You were writing about Andy Dufresne. You're nothing but a minor character in your
own story. But you know, that's just not so. It's all about me, every damned word of it
Andy was the part of me they could never lock up, the part of me that will rejoice when
the gates finally open for me and I walk out in my cheap suit with my twenty dollars of
mad-money in my pocket That part of me will rejoice no matter how old and broken and
scared the rest of me is. I guess it's just that Andy had more of that part than me, and used
it better.
There are others here like me, others who remember Andy. We're glad he's gone, but a
little sad, too. Some birds are not meant to be caged, that's all. Their feathers are too
bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to
feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to
imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much
more drab and empty for their departure.
That's the story and I'm glad I told it, even if it is a bit inconclusive and even though
some of the memories the pencil prodded up (like that branch poking up the river-mud)
made me feel a little sad and even older than I am. Thank you for listening. And Andy: If
you're really down there, as I believe you are, look at the stars for me just after sunset,
and touch the sand, and wade in the water, and feel free.
I never expected to take up this narrative again, but here I am with the dog-eared, folded
pages open on the desk in front of me. Here I am adding another three or four pages,
writing in a brand-new tablet. A tablet I bought in a store - I just walked into a store on
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Portland's Congress Street and bought it.
I thought I had put finish to my story in a Shawshank prison cell on a bleak January day
in 1976. Now it's late June of 1977 and I am sitting in a small, cheap room of the
Brewster Hotel in Portland, adding to it
The window is open, and the sound of the traffic floating in seems huge, exciting, and
intimidating. I have to look constantly over at the window and reassure myself that there
are no bars on it I sleep poorly at night because the bed in this room, as cheap as the room
is, seems much too big and luxurious. I snap awake every morning promptly at six-thirty,
feeling disorientated and frightened. My dreams are bad. I have a crazy feeling of free
fall. The sensation is as terrifying as it is exhilarating.
What has happened in my life? Can't you guess? I was paroled. After thirty-eight years of
routine hearings and routine details (in the course of those thirty-eight years, three
lawyers died on me), my parole was granted. I suppose they decided that, at the age of
fifty-eight, I was finally used up enough to be deemed safe.
I came very close to burning the document you have just read. They search outgoing
parolees just as carefully as they search incoming 'new fish'. And beyond containing
enough dynamite to assure me of a quick turnaround and another six or eight years inside,
my 'memoirs' contained something else: the name of the town where I believe Andy
Dufresne to be. Mexican police gladly cooperate with the American police, and I didn't
want my freedom - or my unwillingness to give up the story I'd worked so long and hard
to write - to cost Andy his.
Then I remembered how Andy had brought in his five hundred dollars back in 1948, and
I took out my story of him the same way. Just to be on the safe side, I carefully rewrote
each page which mentioned Zihuatanejo. If the papers had been found during my 'outside
search', as they call it at the Shank, I would have gone back in on turnaround ... but the
cops would have been looking for Andy in a Peruvian seacoast town named Las
Intrudres.
The Parole Committee got me a job as a 'stock-room assistant' at the big FoodWay
Market at the Spruce Mall in South Portland - which means I became just one more
ageing bag-boy. There's only two kinds of bag-boys, you know; the old ones and the
young ones. No one ever looks at either kind. If you shop at the Spruce Mall FoodWay, I
may have even taken your groceries out to your car ... but you'd have had to have
shopped there between March and April of 1977, because that's as long as I worked there.
At first I didn't think I was going to be able to make it on the outside at all. I've described
