Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption

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 later 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 losing 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.