Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption

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 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.’

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.