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 h

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