'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 cellblock 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 before. It had been broken into. Beside the jagged hole in the pipe, Tremont found Andy's rock-hammer.
Andy had gotten free, but it hadn't been easy.
The pipe was even narrower than the shaft Tremont had just descended; it had a two-foot bore. Rory Tremont didn't go in, and so far as I know, no one else did, either.
It must have been damn near unspeakable. A rat jumped out of the pipe as Tremont was examining the hole and the rock-hammer, and he swore later that it was nearly as big as a cocker spaniel pup. He went back up the crawlspace to Andy's cell like a monkey on a stick.
Andy had gone into that pipe. Maybe he knew that it emptied into a stream five hundred yards beyond the prison on the marshy western side. I think he did. The prison blueprints were around, and Andy would have found a way to look at them. He was a methodical cuss. He would have known or found out that the sewerpipe running out of Cellblock 5 was the last one in Shawshank not hooked into the new waste-treatment plant, and he would have known it was do it by mid-1975 or do it never, because in August they were going to switch us over to the new waste-treatment plant, too.
Five hundred yards. The length of five football fields. Just shy of a mile. He crawled that distance, maybe with one of those small Penlites in his hand, maybe with nothing but a couple of books of matches. He crawled through foulness that I either can't imagine or don't want to imagine. Maybe the rats scattered in front of him, or maybe they went for him the way such animals sometimes will when they've had a chance to grow bold in the dark. He must have had just enough clearance at the shoulders to keep moving, and he probably had to shove himself through the places where the lengths of pipe were joined. If it had been me, the claustrophobia would have driven me mad a dozen times over. But he did it.
At the far end of the pipe they found a set of muddy footprints leading out of the sluggish, polluted creek the pipe fed into. Two miles from there a search party found his prison uniform - that was a day later.
The story broke big in the papers, as you might guess, but no one within a fifteen-mile radius of the prison stepped forward to report a stolen car, stolen clothes, or a naked man in the moonlight. There was not so much as a barking dog in a farmyard. He came out of the sewerpipe and he disappeared like smoke.
But I am betting he disappeared in the direction of Buxton.
Three months after that memorable day, Warden Norton resigned. He was a broken man, it gives me great pleasure to report. The spring was gone from his step. On his last day he shuffled out with his head down like an old con shuffling down to the infirmary for his codeine pills. It was Gonyar who took over, and to Norton that must have seemed like the unkindest cut of all. For all I know, Sam Norton is down there in Eliot now, attending services at the Baptist church every Sunday, and wondering how the hell Andy Dufresne ever could have gotten the better of him.
I could have told him; the answer to the question is simplicity itself. Some have got it, Sam. And some don't, and never will.
That's what I know; now I'm going to tell you what I think. I may have it wrong on some of the specifics, but I'd be willing to bet my watch and chain that I've got the general outline down pretty well. Because, with Andy being the sort of man that he was, there's only one or two ways that it could have been. And every now and then, when I think it out, I think of Normaden, that half-crazy Indian. 'Nice fella,' Normaden had said after celling with Andy for six or eight months. 'I was glad to go, me. All the time cold. He don't let nobody touch his things. That's okay. Nice man, never make fun. But big draught.' Poor crazy Normaden. He knew more than all the rest of us, and he knew it sooner. And it was eight long months before Andy could get him out of there and have the cell to himself again. If it hadn't been for the eight months Normaden had spent with him after Warden Norton first came in, I do believe that Andy would have been free before Nixon resigned.
I believe now that it began in 1949, way back then - not with the rock-hammer, but with the Rita Hayworth poster. I told you how nervous he seemed when he asked for that, nervous and filled with suppressed excitement. At the time I thought it was just embarrassment, that Andy was the sort of guy who'd never want someone else to know that he had feet of clay and wanted a woman ... even if it was only a fantasy -woman. But I think now that I was wrong. I think now that Andy's excitement came from something else altogether.
What was responsible for the hole that Warden Norton eventually found behind the poster of a girl that hadn't even been born when that photo of Rita Hayworth was taken?
Andy Dufresne's perseverance and hard work, yeah - I don't take any of that away from him. But there were two other elements in the equation: a lot of luck, and WPA concrete.

　　“把这个人弄出去！”诺顿尖叫着，由于我笑得太厉害了，根本不知道他指的是我，还是崔门。我只是捧腹顿脚，拼命大笑，简直一发不可收拾，即使诺顿威胁要枪毙我，我也没有办法停下来。“把他弄出去！”
　　好吧！各位亲朋好友，结果他指的是我。他们把我一路拖到禁闭室去，我在那儿单独监禁了十五天，尽管长日漫漫，但我并不感到无聊，我经常会想起那个不太聪明的可怜鬼崔门大喊“是大便”的声音，然后又想到安迪正开着新车、西装笔挺地直奔南方，就忍不住又开怀大笑起来。在那十五天里，我笑口常开，或许是因为我的心已经飞到安迪那里。安迪·杜佛尼曾经在粪坑中挣扎着前进，但是他出污泥而不染，清清白白地从另外一端爬出来，奔向蔚蓝的太平洋。
　　那天后来发生的事，我是从六七个人那儿听来的。我猜当崔门那天把中饭和晚饭都吐出来之后，他觉得反正不会再有什么损失，于是决定继续爬下去。他不用担心会从内外墙中间的通道掉落下来，因为那里实在太窄了，崔门得费好大力气才能推挤前进。他后来说他几乎得屏住呼吸才下得去，而且他到这时候才晓得被活埋是什么滋味。
　　他在通道末端发现一个主排水管，那是通往第五区牢房十四个马桶的污水管，是三十三年前装置的瓷管，已经被打破了，崔门在管子的锯齿状缺口旁发现了安迪的石锤。
　　安迪终于自由了，但这自由得来不易。
　　这管子比崔门爬行的通道还要窄。崔门没有进去，就我所知，其他人也没有进去，我想情况一定糟糕得几乎难以形容。当崔门在检查管子上的缺口和那把石锤时，一只老鼠就从管子里跳了出来，崔门后来发誓那只老鼠跟一头小猎犬一样大。他像猴子爬柱子一样，慢慢爬回安迪的牢房。
　　安迪是从那根管子逃出去的。也许他知道污水管是通往离监狱五百码外的一条小溪，因为很多地方都找得到监狱的蓝图，安迪一定想办法看过蓝图。他是个讲求方法的怪胎，他一定已经发现，整个监狱只有第五区的污水管还没有接到新的废水处理厂，而且他也知道，此时不逃，以后就没机会，因为到了一九七五年八月，连我们这区的污水管都要接到新的废水处理厂了。
　　五百码，足足有五个美式足球场那么长，绵延将近半英里。他爬过这么远的距离，也许手上拿着一支小手电筒，也许什么都没有，只有几盒火柴，我简直不愿想象，也无法想象，他爬过的地方有多么肮脏，还有吱吱乱叫的肥老鼠在前面跑来跑去，甚至老鼠因为在黑暗中胆子特别大，还会攻击他。通道中几乎无法容身，可能只有非常狭小的空隙足以让他挤过去，在管子接口的地方，或许还得拼命推挤身体才过得去。换作是我，那种幽闭恐惧的气氛准会让我疯掉，但他却成功逃脱了。
　　他们在污水管尽头找到一些泥脚印子，泥脚印一路指向监狱排放污水的溪流，搜索小组在距离那里两英里外的地方找到了安迪的囚衣，而那已经是第二天的事了。
　　这件事在报上喧腾一时，但在方圆十五英里内，没有任何人向警局报案说车子被偷或丢了衣服，或看到有人裸体在月光下奔跑，更没听见农庄上的狗吠声。安迪从污水管爬出来后，就像一缕轻烟似的失去踪影。
　　但我敢说他一定是消失在往巴克斯登的方向。
　　那个值得纪念的日子过了三个月后，诺顿典狱长辞职了。我很乐意报告一下，他像只斗败的公鸡，走起路来一点劲也没有。他垂头丧气地离开了肖申克，就像个有气无力地到医务室讨药吃的老囚犯。接替他的是高亚，对诺顿而言，这或许是最冷酷的打击吧。他回到老家，每个星期日上浸信会教堂做礼拜，他一定常常纳闷，安迪到底是怎么打败他的。
　　我可以告诉他，答案在于“单纯”。有些人就是有这种本领，典狱长，有些人就是没有，而且永远也学不来。
　　以上是我所知道的经过；现在我要告诉你我的想法。或许我在细节部分说得不尽正确，不过我敢打赌，就事情的大概应该八九不离十。因为安迪这样的人会采用的办法不出这一两种。每当我思索这件事时，我总会想起那个疯疯癫癫的印第安人诺曼登所说的话。诺曼登在与安迪同住八个月后说：“他是好人。我很高兴离开那儿。那牢房空气太坏了，而且很冷。他不让任何人随便碰他的东西，那也没关系。他人很好，从不乱开玩笑，但是空气太坏了。”可怜的诺曼登，他比任何人知道的都多，知道的时间也更早。安迪足足花了八个月的时间，才设法让诺曼登转到其他牢房，恢复单独监禁。如果不是诺曼登和他同住了八个月，我相信早在尼克松辞职前，安迪就逃之夭夭了。
　　我相信，安迪是在一九四九年开始他的计划，不是托我买石锤时，而是托我买丽塔·海华丝的海报时。我告诉过你当时他似乎很着急，一副坐立难安的样子，兴奋得不得了。那时我还以为他难为情，不愿让别人知道他想女人，特别是梦幻性感女神，但现在我才发现我想错了，他的兴奋是别有原因的。
　　监狱当局在海报女郎背后发现的那个洞（现在海报上的那个女孩在第一任海报女郎丽塔·海华丝拍摄那张照片时，甚至还没出生呢），究竟是怎么来的？当然，最主要的原因是安迪·杜佛尼的毅力和苦工，但是还有另外两个不可忽略的因素：幸运之神眷顾和WPA混凝土WPA是指美国在一九三〇年代罗斯福新政时期成立的工作改进总署（WorksProgressAdministration），当时联邦政府采取以工代赈的方法，在公共工程领域提供了八百万个工作机会给失业人口。。