One Endless Hour Read online

  My brain sent me straight through, over the dog, over Jed, to try the odds with the cruisers. Instead, my hands spun the wheel, hard left. Somebody else will have to explain it to you. I missed them both, caromed broadside off the left-hand cruiser in a whining, ear-splitting wail of tortured metal, then hurtled a hundred and fifty yards down into the open field.

  The front wheels dropped into a ditch and the Ford stood up on its nose. There was a loud Whump! The door flew open. I flew out, hit hard, and rolled. I didn't lose consciousness, and I still had the gun.

  I started to crawl toward the Ford, and knew in the first second that my right leg was broken. Up on the highway the spotlight pivoted and crept down through the field. It caught me, passed on, hesitated, and came back. There was a sharp crack, and a bullet plowed up the ground beside me. The rifle sounded like a.30-.06.

  I dragged myself over the uneven ground to the Ford and crouched beneath its elevated back wheels. I could see the road and the spotlight, and I got it with my third shot. They turned the other cruiser around-the one I hadn't smashed into-and its spotlight started down through the field. I popped it before its light reached the Ford. Not that it made much difference. More red lights, spotlights, and sirens were whirling up to the roadblock every second now.

  I reloaded the Smith and Wesson again. Nothing for it now but the hard sell. Nothing but to see that a few of them shook hands with the devil at the same time I did. To get to me in a hurry they had to come through the field. By now they knew better than to be in a hurry. The.30-.06 went off again, and a large charge of angry metal whanged through the body of the Ford, just above my head. The rifle would keep me pinned down while they circled around behind me.

  The spotlights were crisscrossing the field in an eerie pattern. A hump in the ground ahead of the Ford kept its underside in shadow. I couldn't see anyone coming through the field. I heard the rifle's sharp sound again, and above me there was another loud ping! Suddenly I was drenched to the waist in gasoline. The.30-.06 slug had ripped out the belly of the gas tank. I swiped at my stinging eyes and shook my dripping head. I looked up toward the road again just as gas from my hair splashed onto the hot exhaust.

  Whoom!

  I saw a bright flare, and then I didn't see anything. The explosion knocked me backward, out from under the car. I dragged myself away. I didn't feel the broken leg. I could hear the crackle of flames. Part was the Ford. Part was me. I was afire all over.

  I rolled on the ground, trying to smother the flames. It didn't help. I still had the gun. I hoped they could see me and were coming at me. I knelt on the good leg and faced the noise up on the road. I braced the Smith and Wesson in both hands and squeezed off the whole load, blindly, waist-high in a semicircle. Then I threw the empty gun as far as I could in the direction of the road.

  There was a dull roaring sound in my ears.

  I tried to put out the fire in my hair.

  I rolled on the ground again.

  I could smell my own burning flesh.

  The last thing I heard was myself, screaming.

  ***

  The leg healed in six weeks.

  I was in darkness a lot longer than that.

  I gave them a hard time in the prison wing of the state hospital. I went the whole route: whirlpool baths, wet packs, elbow cuffs, wrist restraints, straitjackets, isolation. Then I stopped fighting them. They don't pay much attention to me now.

  I didn't talk to anyone, and my hands were burned so badly they couldn't take any prints. It bugged both the state and federal lawmen that they couldn't run a tracer on Chet Arnold. During their visits I listened to a lot of questions, but I didn't supply any answers.

  Even before I could see I knew how I looked. Hair gone. Eyebrows gone. Nose bulbous. Face scarred. Only my chin and throat had escaped fairly lightly. I could sense the reaction to my appearance when a new patient was admitted, or a new attendant came on duty. There was an almost tangible shrinking.

  I refused permission for Hazel to visit me. She came to the hospital four or five times, and then she stopped coming and went back to her hometown in Nevada. There was no point in letting her drag herself down with me.

  Because I don't talk, the attendants and the doctors think I'm crazy.

  They think I'm a robot.

  I'll show them.

  There's a hermetically sealed jar buried in Hillsboro, New Hampshire, and another in Grosmont, Colorado. There's money in both. There's a stripped-down gun in both. I don't need the money, but I do need a gun. One of these days I'll find the right attendant, and I'll start talking to him. It will take time to convince him, but time I've got.

  If I can get back to the sack buried beside Bunny's cabin, plastic surgery will take care of most of what I look like now. With a gun, I'll get back to the cabin.

  That's all I need-a gun.

  I'm not staying here.

  I'm getting out, and the day I do they'll never forget it.

  1

  Spider Kern and Rafe James entered the prison wing of the state hospital together. Kern was a little man with big shoulders and hard-knuckled hands. He worked a spittle-soaked toothpick continually between his uneven teeth. His face was red and his thinning hair sandy. His key ring swung loosely at his hip where he dropped it after unlocking the heavy ward door with its wire mesh embedded in the glass. When my sight returned, one of the first things I noticed was that Kern's key ring was fastened to his studded belt by a metal clamp as well as a leather loop.

  Rafe James went to the desk in the niche in the corridor that served as a ward office. James was thin, dark, and had a long face with a lantern jaw. He had mean-looking eyes and a beard so heavy he always looked unshaven. A foul-smelling pipe that never seemed to go out was as much a part of him as Spider Kern's toothpick was of the senior attendant.

  James removed the inmates' folders from the old-fashioned wooden file behind the desk. Kern strutted down the ward in his short-man's swagger. He stopped in front of old Woody Adams, still a flaming queen despite his years. "Cigarette me," Kern ordered. The white-haired Woody simpered as he took a pack from his pajama pocket. Kern helped himself to half a dozen.

  I had overheard muttering among the inmates about Kern's mooching practices. Old Woody would never become the leader in attempting to do anything about it, though. Not that I ever entered into inmate conversations. I never spoke to anyone except in monosyllables.

  Cigarette going, Kern glanced around the ward. I was sitting in an armless rocker near a window overlooking the hospital grounds and part of the parking lot. The early-morning sun was still evaporating the night mist, which had sprinkled rose bushes and bougainvillea with a million drops of water that glittered like tiny pearls of light. I often sat by the window at night, too, after the lights went out on the visitors' side of the parking lot and only a single arc lamp was visible above the employees' cars.

  Nearby chairs contained half a dozen dozing men, but the majority of the inmates were at the other end of the big ward near the games table. We all wore the loose, white cotton pajamas, drab gray flannel bathrobes, and pressed-paper slippers, that were the twenty-four-hour-a-day patient uniform.

  "Everybody up!" Kern snapped at the sound of a key in the lock of the ward door. I didn't move, but there was a general shuffling of feet as the other men rose. I saw Rafe James's pipe disappear into a pocket of his white attendant's jacket. Dr. Willard Mobley, the hospital's chief psychiatrist, entered the ward followed by his usual entourage of doctors and nurses. With his bushy, snow-white hair and high coloring, Dr. Mobley had the look of a hard-boiled Santa Claus. He had a deep bass voice that lent authority to everything he said.

  Rafe James fell in behind the group with his armful of file folders for the ritual twice-a-week walk-through of the ward. Mobley began a rapid circuit of the large room, talking steadily. He paused briefly in front of a few of the men, asking questions but not listening to the answers. The hatchet-faced head nurse, an elderly blonde known on the ward as
Gravel Gertie, took notes.

  Mobley took a file folder from James occasionally and scribbled a line into the case history of the favored individual. The psychiatrist rarely spent more than two minutes with anyone. The group of doctors and nurses following him murmured chorused acquiescence to Mobley's drum-fire pronouncements like a flock of twittering parakeets. The nurses were old, the doctors young. Every one a has-been or a never-was in his profession.

  Spider Kern posted himself a careful five yards in advance of the procession. A silence enveloped each group of men he approached. Except to respond to a direct question, no one spoke again until Dr. Mobley and his troupe passed. This was Spider Kern's Law, ruthlessly enforced. The protruding knuckles on Kern's hands slashed like knives. Rumor on the ward had it that Kern soaked his hands in brine to toughen them.

  "Here's a case for you one of these days, Dr. Afzul," Mobley said briskly, halting in front of my chair. I stared straight ahead. "Been here-oh, five months. Burns resultant from the explosion of a car's gas tank while he was attempting to escape from the sheriff's department. A murder charge against him is being held in abeyance while we try to penetrate his catatonia."

  I had already noticed a new face in the group, a spindly little man with dark mahogany features, slick black hair, big brown eyes, and a pencil-line moustache. He looked dapper even in his semishapeless hospital whites. "An interesting case," he agreed after looking me over. His Oxford-accented sibilants hissed like snakes.

  He picked up one of my burned hands from my lap and turned it over to examine the back of it. He stared down at three obviously recent bright red marks in the previously burned flesh. The little knot of doctors and nurses stared at them, too. No one said anything. Dr. Afzul released my hand, and I let it drop limply into my lap.

  The dark-faced little doctor put two fingers under my chin and tilted my head back to study my face. I had long since stopped looking into the mirror mornings at the lumpy scar tissue and disfiguring discoloration that extended down almost to my mouth. "A strong conssstitution," the doctor commented. "Shock alone from extensssive burns like these would have killed many." He removed his hand from under my chin and started to step back. I held my head in the position in which he had placed it. Dr. Afzul reached out again and tipped my head down into its former position.

  "You can see that passivity is the motif in his case," Dr. Mobley said.

  The group moved down the ward. I could see them out of the corner of my eye while I stared straight ahead through the window at the rose garden. The next stop was in front of Willie Turnbull, an undersized eighteen-year-old with a purplish birthmark covering the right side of his face.

  Dr. Mobley gestured and Dr. Afzul moved forward again. His delicate-looking slim brown fingers probed lightly at the disfiguring growth. "It has always been of this dimensssion?" he asked.

  "Sure has, Doc," Willie replied in his high, piping voice.

  "And he says he steals automobiles because of it," Mobley interjected.

  Willie grinned self-consciously. "How else is a guy looks like me gonna get a gal into the back seat?"

  Mobley chuckled. One of the nurses snickered. The slender doctor dropped his hand from his palpating examination. "You would like it removed?"

  "You can't fix it, Doc," Willie said. "Ma took me to all the relief doctors. They wouldn't touch it."

  Dr. Afzul crooked a slim eyebrow. "Believe me when I say I can 'fix' it, as you put it. That is my business. Come along to my office."

  Willie looked at Dr. Mobley, who nodded. The skinny kid fell in behind the procession as it moved along. When the circuit of the ward was completed, Spider Kern unlocked the see-through ward door. "Oh, Kern," Dr. Mobley said, "I want you to meet our newest staff member, Dr. Sher Afzul. Kern is our man in charge of law and order on the ward, Doctor. Dr. Afzul is from Pakistan, Spider."

  "Pleasssed to meet you," Dr. Afzul said, extending his hand.

  Spider Kern ignored the hand. He mumbled something unintelligible while he appeared to study the key ring in his hand. After an awkward pause, Dr. Afzul pulled back his hand. The group filed out of the ward with Willie Turn-bull in their wake. Spider Kern tested the door behind them to make sure the automatic lock had caught. "Think-in' I'm gonna shake hands with the likes of him," he grumbled to Rafe James, whose pipe once again was in his mouth. "Can't they hire no white men anymore?"

  When I was first promoted from isolation to the ward, I couldn't understand why Spider Kern devoted so much attention to me. Personal attention. Physical attention. Sudden muscle punches on my arms and thighs. Longarmed feints at my face to try to make me duck. Cigarette burns on my hands and arms. I'd stopped taking showers during Kern's shift when he began following me into the shower stall with his fixed grin and goddamned cigarette. It wasn't only me, of course. Kern spread his sadistic business around, but I couldn't help thinking I received more than my share.

  Even Rafe James noticed it. "You really work out on the loony, don't you, Spider?" he asked one day when Kern was trying to make me flinch in my chair by applying the end of his lighted cigarette to my forearm. I'd steeled myself to wait for a count of five before removing the arm. "You'd think he was your mother-in-law."

  "He shot up my buddy," Kern replied.

  "Your buddy?"

  "Deppity Sheriff Blaze Franklin. You must've read about it. Blaze V me was on the force together awhile. This bastard like to blew his balls off with a thirty-eight. I'm gonna fix his clock. I think he's fakin' it, anyway."

  "He's a hell of a good faker if he can take what you been dishin' out without showin' nothin'," James observed.

  "I've seen his eyes a couple times," Kern said. "He's fakin' it, even if I can't convince of Mobley."

  I gave thought to Spider Kern after that. Not very productive thought. There was nothing loose in the ward that could be used as a weapon. All the furniture was tubular aluminum. Even a leg wrenched from a chair would be too fight for my purpose. I'd get only one chance if I went after Kern. I couldn't afford a mistake.

  So day after day I sat in my rocker and stared out over the hospital grounds. Not even rocking. Just waiting. I never doubted that I'd find a way. I'd been in tougher places. I waited, and meantime I toughed it out each time Spider Kern came down the ward to my chair.

  Nothing lasts forever, I kept reminding myself.

  Least of all Spider Kern.

  ***

  Willie Turnbull was back on the ward in three weeks. His head was wrapped like a mummy's, and his right arm was elevated above his head with the flesh of his inner arm pressed against his cheek. For three-quarters of each hour he had to he down on his bed to keep the blood circulating in his arm. The other fifteen minutes he would prowl the ward restlessly until the upstretched arm started getting numb again. His meals were liquids taken through a tube. The only way he could sleep was under sedation.

  Dr. Afzul came to see him every day. Twice a week he worked on Willie's arm and face without ever fully removing the facial bandages. "It isss coming," he said each time to Willie. "Don't get dissscouraged." Willie had become very discouraged. "You will find that it will all be worth it."

  Once a week the slender little doctor would knock Willie out with a needle, loosen the bandages, and treat him for half an hour with a thin-looking liquid in an aerosol spray can. Then Dr. Afzul would wait for another half hour before he rebandaged Willie. During the interval Dr. Afzul would roam the ward, talking to the other inmates. "How do you feel today, sssir?" he would ask me, stopping in front of my chair. I would wait for a count of five, then nod my head slowly.

  At first Spider Kern accompanied Dr. Afzul as he toured the ward, but as time went on even Kern became adjusted to the little doctor's continued presence in what Kern considered to be his own private domain. Occasionally the doctor would sit down with a magazine while he was waiting. He never looked at anything except the advertisements for cars, footwear, and men's clothing and jewelry.

  He came into the ward one day
with two young doctors. The three of them set up a portable tent around Willie Turnbull's bed, and they all disappeared inside it. Most of the men on the ward drifted in that direction for what they sensed was to be the unveiling. "What does it look like, Doc?" we heard Willie ask impatiently several times.

  "Soon you will see for yourssself," Dr. Afzul assured him each time.

  It must have been two hours before the doctors emerged from the tent. All three were smiling. Willie Turnbull followed them. His head was no longer mummified and his arm was at his side again although still bandaged. The lumpy, purplish growth on the right side of Willie's face was gone. In its place was a shiny, reddish, taut-looking sheath of flesh that didn't look too much like skin.

  "The color will fade," Dr Afzul said calmly, correctly interpreting the doubtful expressions on the faces of his audience.

  "And it will blend," one of the young doctors confirmed.

  "It will never match exactly the other ssside of your face, Willie," Dr. Afzul said. "But we will show you how to use cosssmetics so that few can tell the difference."

  The third doctor shook hands ceremoniously with Dr. Afzul. "As fine a job as I've ever seen, Doctor."

  Willie didn't sound nearly as certain when he voiced his own thanks.

  From the time Willie walked out of the ward until the unveiling, the process had taken about twelve weeks. In another month the lobster-red coloring had faded to a dull pink and the shininess had begun to disappear. Every third day Dr. Afzul would come onto the ward and cover the new side of Willie's face with his liquid spray, wait for an hour, then do it again.

  I had watched the program with more than an academic interest. What I had just seen accomplished was what I most needed myself. I waited until Dr. Afzul sat down near me with a magazine one day while his liquid concoction "set" on Willie's face. "How long would it take you to fix me a new face, Doc?" I said in a normal tone but without looking at Dr. Afzul.