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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 iater 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 lsing 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.
I heard the rest of what went on that night from half a dozen sources. There wasn't all that
much, anyway. I guess that Rory Tremont decided he didn't have much left to lose after
he'd lost his lunch and dinner, because he did go on. There was no danger of falling down
the pipe-shaft between the inner and outer segments of the cllblock wall; it was so narrow
that Tremont actually had to wedge himself down. He said later that he could only take
half-breaths and that he knew what it would be like to be buried alive.
What he found at the bottom of the shaft was a master sewer-pipe which served the
fourteen toilets in Cellblock 5, a porcelain pipe that had been laid thirty-three years