Different Seasons(29)

Nobody was going to nominate Andy for the Inside-Out program, 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 shut-eye 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 program, but I wasn’t entirely sure. Maybe a good old Mississippi hard-ass 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 1976.

I’ll tell you what I know and what I think; that’s about all I can do, isn’t it?

On March 12th, 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-seven. Instead, there were twenty-six. 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 six-thirty 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 trusty, 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 I 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.”