ion 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

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