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Why didn't he go then? 

That's where my educated guesses run out, folks; from this point they become 

progressively wilder. One possibility is that the crawlspace itself was clogged with crap 

and he had to clear it out But that wouldn't account for all the time. So what was it? 

I think that maybe Andy got scared. 

I've told you as well as I can how it is to be an institutional man. At first you can't stand 

those four walls, then you get so you can abide them, then you get so you accept them ... 

and then, as your body and your mind and your spirit adjust to life on an HO scale, you 

get to love them. You are told when to eat, when you can write letters, when you can 

smoke. If you're at work in the laundry or the plate-shop, you're assigned five minutes of 

each hour when you can go to the bathroom. For thirty-five years, my time was twenty- 

five minutes after the hour, and after thirty-five years, that's the only time I ever felt the 

need to take a piss or have a crap: twenty-five minutes past the hour. And if for some 

reason I couldn't go, the need would pass at thirty after, and come back at twenty-five 

past the next hour. 

I think Andy may have been wrestling with that tiger - that institutional syndrome - and 

also with the bulking fears that all of it might have been for nothing. 

How many nights must he have lain awake under his poster, thinking about that sewer 

line, knowing that the one chance was all he'd ever get? The blueprints might have told 

him how big the pipe's bore was, but a blueprint couldn't tell him what it would be like 

inside that pipe - if he would be able to breathe without choking, if the rats were big 

enough and mean enough to fight instead of retreating ... and a blueprint couldn't've told 

him what he'd find at the end of the pipe, when and if he got there. Here's a joke even 

funnier than the parole would have been: Andy breaks into the sewer line, crawls through 

five hundred yards of choking, shit-smelling darkness, and comes up against a heavy- 

gauge mesh screen at the end of it all. Ha, ha, very funny. 

That would have been on his mind. And if the long shot actually came in and he was able 

to get out, would he be able to get some civilian clothes and get away from the vicinity of 

the prison undetected? Last of all, suppose he got out of the pipe, got away from 

Shawshank before the alarm was raised, got to Buxton, overturned the right rock ... and 

found nothing beneath? Not necessarily something so dramatic as arriving at the right 

field and discovering that a high-rise apartment building had been erected on the spot, or 

that it had turned into a supermarket parking lot. It could have been that some little kid 

who liked rocks noticed that piece of volcanic glass, turned it over, saw the deposit-box 

key, and took both it and the rock back to his room as souvenirs. Maybe a November 

hunter kicked the rock, left the key exposed, and a squirrel or a crow with a liking for 

bright shiny things had taken it away. Maybe there had been spring floods one year, 

breaching the wall, washing the key away. Maybe anything. 

So I think - wild guess or not - that Andy just froze in place for a while. After all, you 

can't lose if you don't bet. What did he have to lose, you ask? His library, for one thing. 

The poison peace of institutional life, for another. Any future chance to grab his safe 

identity. 

But he finally did it, just as I have told you. He tried ... and, my! Didn't he succeed in