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Andy wasn‘t that way, but I was. The idea of seeing the Pacific sounded good, but I was
afraid that actually being there would scare me to death - the bigness of it
Anyhow, the day of that conversation about Mexico, and about Mr Peter Stevens ... that
was the day I began to believe that Andy had some idea of doing a disappearing act. I
hoped to God he would be careful if he did, and still, I wouldn‘t have bet money on his
chances of succeeding. Warden Norton, you see, was watching Andy with a special close
eye. Andy wasn‘t just another deadhead with a number to Norton; they had a working
relationship, you might say. Also, he had brains and he had heart Norton was determined
to use the one and crush the other.
As there are honest politicians on the outside - ones who stay bought - there are honest
prison guards, and if you are a good judge of character and if you have some loot to
spread around, I suppose it‘s possible that you could buy enough look-the-other-way to
make a break. I‘m not the man to tell you such a thing has never been done, but Andy
Dufresne wasn‘t the man who could do it Because, as I‘ve said, Norton was watching.
Andy knew it, and the screws knew it, too.
Nobody was going to nominate Andy for the Inside-Out programme, not as long as
Warden Norton was evaluating the nominations. And Andy was not the kind of man to
try a casual Sid Nedeau type of escape.
If I had been him, the thought of that key would have tormented me endlessly. I would
have been lucky to get two hours‘ worth of honest shuteye a night Buxton was less than
thirty miles from Shawshank. So near and yet so far.
I still thought his best chance was to engage a lawyer and try for the retrial Anything to
get out from under Norton‘s thumb. Maybe Tommy Williams could be shut up by nothing
more than a cushy furlough programme, but I wasn‘t entirely sure. Maybe a good old
Mississippi hardass lawyer could crack him ... and maybe that lawyer wouldn‘t even have
to work that hard. Williams had honestly liked Andy. Every now and then I‘d bring these
points up to Andy, who would only smile, his eyes far away, and say he was thinking
about it.
Apparently he‘d been thinking about a lot of other things, as well.
In 1975, Andy Dufresne escaped from Shawshank. He hasn‘t been recaptured, and I don‘t
think he ever will be. In fact, I don‘t think Andy Dufresne even exists anymore. But I
think there‘s a man down in Zihuatanejo, Mexico named Peter Stevens. Probably running
a very new small hotel in this year of our Lord 1977.
I‘ll tell you what I know and what I think; that‘s about all I can do, isn‘t it?
On 12 March 1975, the cell doors in Cellblock 5 opened at 6.30 a.m., as they do every
morning around here except Sunday. And as they do every day except Sunday, the
inmates of those cells stepped forward into the corridor and formed two lines as the cell
doors slammed shut behind them. They walked up to the main cellblock gate, where they
were counted off by two guards before being sent on down to the cafeteria for a breakfast
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.
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
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
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
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 sewerpipe 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. 1 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 six or eight months. ‘I was glad to go, me. All the time cold. He
don‘t let nobody touch his things. That‘s okay. Nice man, never make fun. But big
draught.‘ Poor crazy Normaden. He knew more than ail 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 ... even if it was only 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 oil 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, and
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. Tectonic plates 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 had a hard time adjusting to the confinement of prison life. They get
screw-fever, they have to be hauled down to the infirmary and sedated couple of times
before they get on the beam. It‘s not unusual to hear some new member of our happy little
family bang on the bars of his cell and screaming to be let out ... 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 1948, but that‘s not to say that
he didn‘t feel many of same things. He may have come close to madness; some 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 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 went right through the wall -even with the soft concrete, it took
him two rock-hammers and twenty-seven years to hack a hole big enough to get his 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 sleevepocket
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
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.
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 twentyfive
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 heavygauge
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
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
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
prison society as a scaled-down model of your outside world, but I had no idea of how
fast things moved on the outside; the raw speed people move at. They even talk faster.
And louder.
It was the toughest adjustment I‘ve ever had to make, and I haven‘t finished making it yet
... not by a long way. Women, for instance. After hardly knowing that they were half of
the human race for forty years, I was suddenly working in a store filled with them. Old
women, pregnant women wearing T-shirts with arrows pointing downward and the
printed motto reading BABY HERE, skinny women with their nipples poking out of their
shirts - a woman wearing something like that when I went in would have gotten arrested
and then had a sanity hearing - women of every shape and size. I found myself going
around with a semi-hard almost all the time and cursing myself for being a dirty old man.
Going to the bathroom, that was another thing. When I had to go (and the urge always
came on me at twenty-five past the hour), I had to fight the almost overwhelming need to
check it with my boss. Knowing that was something I could just go and do in this toobright
outside world was one thing; adjusting my inner self to that knowledge after all
those years of checking it with the nearest screwhead or facing two days in solitary for
the oversight... that was something else.
My boss didn‘t like me. He was a young guy, twenty-six or -seven, and I could see that I
sort of disgusted him, the way a cringing, servile old dog that crawls up to you on its
belly to be petted will disgust a man. Christ, I disgusted myself. But ... I couldn‘t make
myself stop. I wanted to tell him, That‘s what a whole life in prison does for you, young
man. It turns everyone in a position of authority into a master, and you into every
master‘s dog. Maybe you know you‘ve become a dog, even in prison, but since everyone
else in grey is a dog, too, it doesn‘t seem to matter so much. Outside, it does. But I
couldn‘t tell a young guy like him. He would never understand. Neither would my P.O., a
big, bluff ex-Navy man with a huge red beard and a large stock of Polish jokes. He saw
me for about five minutes every week. ‘Are you staying out of the bars, Red?‘ he‘d ask
when he‘d run out of Polish jokes. I‘d say yeah, and that would be the end of it until next
week.
Music on the radio. When I went in, the big bands were just getting up a good head of
steam. Now every song sounds like it‘s about fucking. So many cars. At first I felt like I
was taking my life into my hands every time I crossed the street.
There was more - everything was strange and frightening -but maybe you get the idea, or
can at least grasp a corner of it I began to think about doing something to get back in.
When you‘re on parole, almost anything will serve. I‘m ashamed to say it, but I began to
think about stealing some money or shoplifting stuff from the FoodWay, anything, to get
back in where it was quiet and you knew everything that was going to come up in the
course of the day.
If I had never known Andy, I probably would have done that But I kept thinking of him,
spending all those years chipping patiently away at the cement with his rock-hammer so
he could be free. I thought of that and it made me ashamed and I‘d drop the idea again.
Oh, you can say he had more reason to be free than I did - he had a new identity and a lot
of money. But that‘s not really true, you know. Because he didn‘t know for sure that the
new identity was still there, and without the new identity, the money would always be out
of reach. No, what he needed was just to be free, and if I kicked away what I had, it
would be like spitting in the face of everything he had worked so hard to win back.
So what I started to do on my time off was to hitchhike a ride down to the little town of
Buxton. This was in the early April of 1977, the snow just starting to melt off the fields,
the air just beginning to be warm, the baseball teams coming north to start a new season
playing the only game I‘m sure God approves of. When I went on these trips, I carried a
Silva compass in my pocket.
There‘s a big hayfield in Buxton, Andy had said, and at the north end of that hayfield
there‘s a rock wall, right out of a Robert Frost poem. And somewhere along the base of
that wall is a rock that has no earthly business in a Maine hayfield.
A fool‘s errand, you say. How many hayfields are there in a small rural town like
Buxton? Fifty? A hundred? Speaking from personal experience, I‘d put it at even higher
than that, if you add in the fields now cultivated which might have been haygrass when
Andy went in. And if I did find the right one, I might never know it Because I might
overlook that black piece of volcanic glass, or, much more likely, Andy put it into his
pocket and took it with him.
So I‘d agree with you. A fool‘s errand, no doubt about it. Worse, a dangerous one for a
man on parole, because some of those fields were clearly marked with NO
TRESPASSING signs. And, as I‘ve said, they‘re more than happy to slam your ass back
inside if you get out of line. A fool‘s errand ... but so is chipping at a blank concrete wall
for twenty-eight years. And when you‘re no longer the man who can get it for you and
just an old bag-boy, it‘s nice to have a hobby to take your mind off your new life. My
hobby was looking for Andy‘s rock.
So I‘d hitchhike to Buxton and walk the roads. I‘d listen to the birds, to the spring runoff
in the culverts, examine the bottles the retreating snows had revealed - all useless nonreturnables,
I am sorry to say; the world seems to have gotten awfully spendthrift since I
went into the slam - and looking for hayfields.
Most of them could be eliminated right off. No rock walls. Others had rock walls, but my
compass told me they were facing the wrong direction. I walked these wrong ones
anyway. It was a comfortable thing to be doing, and on those outings I really felt free, at
peace. An old dog walked with me one Saturday. And one day I saw a winter-skinny
deer.
Then came 23 April, a day I‘ll not forget even if I live another fifty-eight years. It was a
balmy Saturday afternoon, and I was walking up what a little boy fishing from a bridge
told me was called The Old Smith Road. I had taken a lunch in a brown FoodWay bag,
and had eaten it sitting on a rock by the road. When I was done I carefully buried my
leavings, as my dad had taught me before he died, when I was a sprat no older than the
fisherman who had named the road for me.
Around two o‘clock I came to a big field on my left. There was a stone wall at the far end
of it, running roughly northwest I walked back to it, squelching over the wet ground, and
began to walk the wall. A squirrel scolded me from an oak tree.
Three-quarters of the way to the end, I saw the rock. No mistake. Black glass and as
smooth as silk. A rock with no earthly business in a Maine hayfield. For a long time I just
looked at it, feeling that I might cry, for whatever reason. The squirrel had followed me,
and it was still chattering away. My heart was beating madly.
When I felt I had myself under control, I went to the rock, squatted beside it - the joints in
my knees went off like a double-barrelled shotgun - and let my hand touch it It was real. I
didn‘t pick it up because I thought there would be anything under it; I could just as easily
have walked away without finding what was beneath. I certainly had no plans to take it
away with me, because I didn‘t fed it was mine to take - I had a feeling that taking that
rock from the field would have been the worst kind of theft. No, I only picked it up to
feel it better, to get the heft of the thing, and, I suppose, to prove its reality by feeling its
satiny texture against my skin.
I had to look at what was underneath for a long time. My eyes saw it, but it took a while
for my mind to catch up. It was an envelope, carefully wrapped in a plastic bag to keep
away the damp. My name was written across the front in Andy‘s clear script.
I took the envelope and left the rock where Andy had left it, and Andy‘s friend before
him.
Dear Red,
If you‘re reading this, then you‘re out. One way or another, you‘re out. And If you‘ve
followed along this far, you might be willing to come a little further. 1 think you
remember the name of the town, don‘t you? I could use a good man to help me get my
project on wheels.
Meantime, have a drink on me - and do think it over. I will be keeping an eye out for you.
Remember that hope is a good thing, Red, maybe the best of things, and no good thing
ever dies. I will be hoping that this letter finds you, and finds you well.
Your friend, Peter Stevens
I didn‘t read that letter in the field. A kind of terror had come over me, a need to get away
from there before I was seen. To make what may be an appropriate pun, I was in terror of
being apprehended.
I went back to my room and read it there, with the smell of old men‘s dinners drifting up
the stairwell to me - Beefaroni, Ricearoni, Noodleroni. You can bet that whatever the old
folks of America, the ones on fixed incomes, are eating tonight, it almost certainly ends
in roni.
I opened the envelope and read the letter and then I put my head in my arms and cried.
With the letter there were twenty new fifty-dollar bills.
And here I am in the Brewster Hotel, technically a fugitive from justice again - parole
violation is my crime. No one‘s going to throw up any roadblocks to catch a criminal
wanted on that charge, I guess - wondering what I should do now.
I have this manuscript I have a small piece of luggage about the size of a doctor‘s bag that
holds everything I own. I have nineteen fifties, four tens, a five, three ones, and assorted
change. I broke one of the fifties to buy this tablet of paper and a deck of smokes.
Wondering what I should do.
But there‘s really no question. It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living
or get busy dying.
First I‘m going to put this manuscript back in my bag. Then I‘m going to buckle it up,
grab my coat, go downstairs, and check out of this fleabag. Then I‘m going to walk
uptown to a bar and put that five dollar bill down in front of the bartender and ask him to
bring me two straight shots of Jack Daniels - one for me and one for Andy Dufresne.
Other than a beer or two, they‘ll be the first drinks I‘ve taken as a free man since 1938.
Then I am going to tip the bartender a dollar and thank him kindly. I will leave the bar
and walk up Spring Street to the Greyhound terminal there and buy a bus ticket to El
Paso by way of New York City. When I get to El Paso, I‘m going to buy a ticket to
McNary. And when I get to McNary, I guess I‘ll have a chance to find out if an old crook
like me can find a way to float across the border and into Mexico.
Sure I remember the name. Zihuatanejo. A name like that is just too pretty to forget
I find I am excited, so excited I can hardly hold the pencil in my trembling hand. I think it
is the excitement that only a free man can feel, a free man starting a long journey whose
conclusion is uncertain.
I hope Andy is down there.
I hope I can make it across the border.
I hope to see my friend and shake his hand.
I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams.
I hope.

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