Andy had gotten free, but it hadn’t been easy.
The pipe was even narrower than the shaft Tremont had just descended. 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 sewer-pipe 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 half 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 sluggish, polluted creek the pipe fed into. Two miles from there a search party found his prison uniform—that was a day later.
The story broke big in the papers, as you might guess, but no one within a fifteen-mile radius of the prison stepped forward to report a stolen car, stolen clothes, or a naked man in the moonlight. There was not so much as a barking dog in a farmyard. He came out of the sewer-pipe and he disappeared like smoke.
But I am betting he disappeared in the direction of Buxton.
Three months after that memorable day, Warden Norton resigned. He was a broken man, it gives me great pleasure to report. The spring was gone from his step. On his last day he shuffled out with his head down like an old con shuffling down to the infirmary for his codeine pills. It was Gonyar who took over, and to Norton that must have seemed like the unkindest cut of all. For all I know, Sam Norton is down there in Eliot now, attending services at the Baptist church every Sunday, and wondering how the hell Andy Dufresne ever could have gotten the better of him.
I could have told him; the answer to the question is simplicity itself. Some have got it, Sam. And some don’t, and never will.
That’s what I know; now I’m going to tell you what I think. I may have it wrong on some of the specifics, but I’d be willing to bet my watch and chain that I’ve got the general outline down pretty well. Because, with Andy being the sort of man that he was, there’s only one or two ways that it could have been. And every now and then, when I think it out, I think of Normaden, that half-crazy Indian. “Nice fella,” Normaden had said after celling with Andy for eight months. “I was glad to go, me. Bad draft in that cell. All the time cold. He don’t let nobody touch his things. That’s okay. Nice man, never made fun. But big draft.” Poor crazy Normaden. He knew more than all the rest of us, and he knew it sooner. And it was eight long months before Andy could get him out of there and have the cell to himself again. If it hadn’t been for the eight months Normaden had spent with him after Warden Norton first came in, I do believe that Andy would have been free before Nixon resigned.
I believe now that it began in 1949, way back then—not with the rock-hammer, but with the Rita Hayworth poster. I told you how nervous he seemed when he asked for that, nervous and filled with suppressed excitement. At the time I thought it was just embarrassment, that Andy was the sort of guy who’d never want someone else to know that he had feet of clay and wanted a woman... especially if it was a fantasy-woman. But I think now that I was wrong. I think now that Andy’s excitement came from something else altogether.
What was responsible for the hole that Warden Norton eventually found behind the poster of a girl that hadn’t even been born when that photo of Rita Hayworth was taken? Andy Dufresne’s perseverance and hard work, yeah—I don’t take any of that away from him. But there were two other elements in the equation: a lot of luck, and WPA concrete.
You don’t need me to explain the luck, I guess. The WPA concrete I checked out for myself. I invested some time and a couple of stamps and wrote first to the University of Maine History Department and then to a fellow whose address they were able to give me. This fellow had been foreman of the WPA project that built the Shawshank Max Security Wing.
The wing, which contains Cellblocks 3, 4, and 5, was built in the years 1934-37. Now, most people don’t think of cement and concrete as “technological developments,” the way we think of cars and old furnaces and rocket-ships, but they really are. There was no modern cement until 1870 or so, and no modern concrete until after the turn of the century. Mixing concrete is as delicate a business as making bread. You can get it too watery or not watery enough. You can get the sand-mix too thick or too thin, and the same is true of the gravel-mix. And back in 1934, the science of mixing the stuff was a lot less sophisticated than it is today.
The walls of Cellblock 5 were solid enough, but they weren’t exactly dry and toasty. As a matter of fact, they were and are pretty damned dank. After a long wet spell they would sweat and sometimes even drip. Cracks had a way of appearing, some an inch deep. They were routinely mortared over.
Now here comes Andy Dufresne into Cellblock 5. He’s a man who graduated from the University of Maine’s school of business, but he’s also a man who took two or three geology courses along the way. Geology had, in fact, become his chief hobby. I imagine it appealed to his patient, meticulous nature. A ten-thousand-year ice age here. A million years of mountain-building there. Plates of bedrock grinding against each other deep under the earth’s skin over the millennia.
Pressure.
Andy told me once that all of geology is the study of pressure.
And time, of course.
He had time to study those walls. Plenty of time. When the cell door slams and the lights go out, there’s nothing else to look at.
First-timers usually have a hard time adjusting to the confinement of prison life. They get screw-fever. Sometimes they have to be hauled down to the infirmary and sedated a couple of times before they get on the beam. It’s not unusual to hear some new member of our happy little family banging on the bars of his cell and screaming to be let out... and before the cries have gone on for long, the chant starts up along the cellblock: “Fresh
fish,
hey little fishie, fresh
fish,
fresh
fish,
got fresh fish today!”
Andy didn’t flip out like that when he came to The Shank in 1948, but that’s not to say that he didn’t feel many of the same things. He may have come close to madness; some do, and some go sailing right over the edge. Old life blown away in the wink of an eye, indeterminate nightmare stretching out ahead, a long season in hell.
So what did he do, I ask you? He searched almost desperately for something to divert his restless mind. Oh, there are all sorts of ways to divert yourself, even in prison; it seems like the human mind is full of an infinite number of possibilities when it comes to diversion. I told you about the sculptor and his
Three Ages of Jesus.
There were coin collectors who were always losing their collections to thieves, stamp collectors, one fellow who had postcards from thirty-five different countries—and let me tell you, he would have turned out your lights if he’d caught you diddling with his postcards.
Andy got interested in rocks. And the walls of his cell.
I think that his initial intention might have been to do no more than to carve his initials into the wall where the poster of Rita Hayworth would soon be hanging. His initials, or maybe a few lines from some poem. Instead, what he found was that interestingly weak concrete. Maybe he started to carve his initials and a big chunk of the wall just fell out. I can see him, lying there on his bunk, looking at that broken chunk of concrete, turning it over in his hands. Never mind the wreck of your whole life, never mind that you got railroaded into this place by a whole trainload of bad luck. Let’s forget all that and look at this piece of concrete.
Some months further along he might have decided it would be fun to see how much of that wall he could take out. But you can’t just start digging into your wall and then, when the weekly inspection (or one of the surprise inspections that are always turning up interesting caches of booze, drugs, dirty pictures, and weapons) comes around, say to the guard:
“This? Just excavating a little hole in my cell wall. Not to worry, my good man.”
No, he couldn’t have that. So he came to me and asked if I could get him a Rita Hayworth poster. Not a little one but a big one.
And, of course, he had the rock-hammer. I remember thinking when I got him that gadget back in ’48 that it would take a man six hundred years to burrow through the wall with it. True enough. But Andy only had to go through
half
the wall—and even with the soft concrete, it took him two rock-hammers and twenty-seven years to do 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 asteep—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 remember 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 felt 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 one 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 of 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 with it 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.