One Endless Hour

6

A knock at the cabin door woke me in the morning.

When I opened it, no one was there, but a bag of groceries was propped up against the wall. I carried it inside. After I unloaded it, the kitchen table was covered with coffee, tea, salt, sugar, butter, bread, milk, cereal, hamburger, and two TV dinners. That was one thing about Blind Tom's: the price was high, but service came with it. Anyone staying at one of Tom's cabins never had to leave it unless he chose. A shopping list Scotch-taped to the outside of the door each night would provide the supplies delivered in the morning.

I put the perishables in the refrigerator. I wasn't looking forward to eating my own mediocre cooking during the interval it took me to heal properly. I'm a fair subsistence cook and that's about all. Taking my meals in the cabin guaranteed privacy, though, and for that I was prepared to put up with my own culinary shortcomings.

Thinking about the necessary healing period sent me into the bathroom. I wanted to see my new face. The day before, I had had fleeting glimpses of myself in the cruiser's rearview mirror, but never so that I could see the overall effect. Then last night when I reached the cabin and tried to see myself in the dim light of the low-wattage bulb illuminating the water-spotted mirror, most of my new face was in shadow. All that showed up was my clean, bare skull with its spider web of perforations from sutures. Now in the bright morning light I could see myself clearly.

The scarred, crimson, rough-looking features that confronted me in the mirror were no surprise. Neither was the upper body with its patchwork effect where missing healthy skin had been transferred to other areas. There was one surprise, though. Dr. Afzul had given me the features of a man ten years younger. Not a handsome man, but then it had never been a handsome face. It was certainly a different face. I made a mental note that I still owed the little plastic surgeon ten thousand dollars. He had certainly earned it.

I left the bathroom and rummaged in a closet until I found a pair of faded swimming trunks and sneakers. I pulled them on, left the cabin, and descended the steeply winding, rutted path to the river's edge. Each spring after the high water receded, Tom had truckloads of sand dumped in front of each of the riverbank cabins. The result was instant beaches. All the cabins were strategically placed along the winding channel so that none commanded a view of any of the others.

I waded out into the cool water and splashed around for a moment. Then I swam the seventy or eighty feet to the opposite bank, rested a bit, and swam back. Each morning I intended to add another lap to my morning swim to restore muscle tone lost during the months in the hospital.

I stayed only ten minutes in the early-morning sun. Dr. Afzul had warned me that my tender new skin would have to be treated to sunshine only in brief, gradually increased doses. When I left the water and started to climb up the path to the cabin, a grunting sound to the left caused me to detour. Twenty yards along the riverbank I came upon an arrangement of telephone poles and steel cable interlaced with barbed wire. This was Cordelia's dwelling place. She lay there sunning herself on a mudbank.

If I had changed since Cordelia last saw me, the same was true of her. She had been a svelte five-foot maiden 'gator. Now she was a barrel-bodied ten-footer, and if Blind Tom were to be believed, complacently steeped in 'gator sin. At the sound of my approach she opened her eyes, fixed me with a cold stare, and closed them again.

I returned to the cabin and breakfasted on cereal, milk, and a cup of coffee. I waited half an hour and did a few of the RAF exercise series, then took out the.32 Sauer I had acquired from Blind Tom and cleaned it carefully with tools and gun oil I found in a drawer. In a couple of days I'd take it out into the woods to sight it in and learn its shooting characteristics.

I skipped lunch in favor of the river again. The spring-fed coolness of the swift current was wonderfully refreshing, and I prudently made myself return to the cabin to avoid the sun's rays before I was actually ready. I took a nap in the afternoon, and in the early evening I broiled a part of Blind Tom's hamburger. Afterward I took a chair outside the cabin and cocked it up against the wall. I sat in the swift-gathering twilight and listened to the increased volume of woods noises. The river breeze swept the majority of mosquitoes inland, leaving me comparatively unmolested.

By the time darkness fell and the river disappeared from sight if not from sound, the day-long combination of sunshine and exercise resulted in stifled yawns. I fought off sleep while I did some mental arithmetic. In the very near future, money was going to be a problem. In order to move on I needed a car, which Tom would have to purchase for me. It needn't be much car, but any kind of transportation worthy of the name wouldn't return much change from a thousand dollars.

I also needed a hairpiece. I didn't want Tom to know my need for one, so it would have to be one of the first orders of personal business when I left the cabin. I didn't see how I could stretch my stay at the cabin much longer than three months without leaving my bankroll dangerously low before I had made a connection. I hoped that three months would be long enough to restore a normal color so that I wouldn't be the conspicuous beneficiary of plastic surgery, but regardless, I'd have to be moving on.

I knew my next stop. I planned to drive to Mobile and look over the Golden Peacock, a nightclub. When it had been run by Manny Sebastian, the place also had functioned as a meeting spot and armament center for a hardcore underworld elite, those who operated on a major scale behind a gun. Manny Sebastian was buried under a mangrove root in a Florida swamp, but no one knew it except me. Sebastian had been one of the preliminary hurdles in my abortive effort to recover the Phoenix bank loot.

Regardless of the identity of the new proprietor, it was unlikely that the high-profit end of the Golden Peacock operation had changed. I even felt I knew who the new man would be. Sebastian's second-in-command at the nightclub was a slim, dark man named Rudy Hernandez. More than likely he had taken over. Hernandez had known me slightly, but he wouldn't know me at all with my new face. Sebastian had known me well, but not well enough to stay clear of me when his quick, greedy mind connected me with the Phoenix job.

Assuming that nothing else had changed, I could find out more quickly at the Golden Peacock than anywhere else what I needed to know: who was in circulation, who was not, and why.

I climbed out of my chair, entered the cabin, and went to bed.

For sixty seconds I heard the crisp night breeze whispering through the window screens, and then I didn't hear anything.

I sunned myself every day that it was possible, and I swam every day in the river whether it was sunny or not. Each time I came out of the water I applied some of the healing liquefied spray in Dr. Afzul's aerosol cans to my face. The first week I examined myself in the bathroom mirror each morning. I stopped when I could see no apparent progress. Every fourth day I permitted myself a quick look. Change was more noticeable that way, although it still came slowly.

The raw look of the transplants faded in the same proportion that the fish-white hospital pallor of normal skin gave way to a subtle tan. Even when I felt able to increase the sun dosage, the surgical scars were another story. They would be with me for a long time. During the time I could stay at the cabin the healing wouldn't be far enough advanced to conceal the fact that plastic surgery had taken place, but it would be far less evident.

Nobody came near the cabin except Blind Tom, who brought late-night sacks of groceries in a child's little red wagon. Sometimes I waited up for him. By the time he reached my cabin there was only one other sack left in the wagon. I didn't even know how many cabins were occupied. I didn't want to know. I saw no one during my daily swims and my forays into the woods to practice with the Sauer. Privacy was what a man's money bought for him at Blind Tom Walker's, and privacy was exactly what I wanted.

Six weeks after my arrival I stopped the old man one night on his rounds. "Keep an ear out for a thousand dollars worth of automobile," I told him. "Nothing fancy. Just transportation."

He nodded sagely. "Big?" he inquired. "Small? Sedan? Station wagon?"

"A small sedan," I decided.

"Volkswagen okay?"

I hesitated. I was used to thinking in terms of horsepower that could outrun pursuit but horsepower cost money. And at the moment it wasn't essential. "Sounds all right, Tom."

"I'll listen," he said, and shuffled away.

A week later he lingered while I was unpacking the sack of food. "Got you a Volks to look over," he informed me.

"In good shape?"

"One owner. Ol' whore who on'y used the back seat," he said without cracking a smile.

"How about a license and registration for Earl Drake?"

"It cost a bit."

"I expected it would. Where's the car?"

"Behind the office."

"Leave the keys in it. I'll come down in the morning and try it."

I made the trek along the rutted path at sunrise. I drove the VW down the road a couple of miles. It was clean, and it handled all right. When Tom stopped at the cabin that night, I counted out ten hundred-dollar bills. Tom held each up to his ear and crackled it slowly. "Come on, Tom," I said. "You know you can't tell the amount on a bill from the sound."

"I c'n tell if'n it's good or bad paper," he said dryly. "I'll check on the denom'nation later."

"Let me know when you have the license, title and registration."

He nodded and started to shuffle away.

"Oh, Tom!" I called after him. He turned and came back. I disliked putting the direct question, but I knew no way to maneuver around it. "What do you hear about the Golden Peacock these days?"

"It in business," he said, and waited.

"Sebastian still running it?"

"Last I heard he in Europe."

"Europe?"

"Vacation," Blind Tom explained.

It figured when I thought about it. Sebastian had disappeared, and whoever was running the club wouldn't know for sure from day to day when he might reappear. Some sort of story would have to be put out. "Thanks, Torn,"! said, and the old man went surefootedly down the path.

I was beginning to have second thoughts about the Golden Peacock. Through a combination of circumstances, some fortunate and some not, I had acquired a new face that no one could connect with the old one. If I went to Mobile, the task I'd be setting for myself would be to move in as a total stranger and convince someone that I was one of the regulars without giving away my past identity. But if it wasn't the Golden Peacock, then what was my next move?

What put me in a real squeeze was my short bankroll. I hadn't been so low on cash in years. By the time I felt it was reasonably safe to leave Blind Tom's, I wasn't going to have money enough left to lallygag around the Golden Peacock while I did a selling job on the new operator. Either I made a quick sale and acquired some helpful information, or I made a move for myself.

I'm not a worrier ordinarily, but nights in the tree-rustling darkness I found myself staring up at the dim outline of the cabin's rough plank ceiling, thinking myself into the dead ends of blind corners.

When my cash shrank to eighteen hundred dollars, I told Tom I'd be moving on. I took a final swim in the river, stopped to pay my respects to Cordelia, who intimated that she couldn't care less, walked down to the office with my extra slacks and sport shirt over my arms, and headed the VW west on the highway.

Clothing was another problem, I decided as I drove. I'd always been fussy about my clothes, without being fancy, but right now I was outfitted for a backwoods camp and nothing else. I didn't want to spend any money on clothes until I took care of something else first. I had one more expenditure coming up, and I turned south to drop down into Pensacola to take care of it.

Under "Wigs," the Yellow Pages listed five places of business. The first was in a run-down neighborhood, and I kept on going. The second looked better, and I pulled around the corner from it and parked. In the windows of the shop I approached there were wigs of all kinds, but only women's. There were no customers inside. A single clerk, a big blonde with a high-piled hairdo in the twisting curlicue Mae West style, stood near the door. A second look disclosed that it wasn't only the hairdo that made the blonde resemble Mae West.

Shrewd blue eyes examined me in detail while I fumbled for an opening line. "You need a hairpiece," the blonde informed me.

I was relieved to have her take the bull by the horns. "I didn't see any men's-you take care of men, too?"

"We'll take care of a rhesus monkey if he's got the price," she declared cheerfully.

"Yes, but-" I reached up and removed my broad-brimmed hat, then touched the top of my skull. "This is kind of total."

She raised her arms, put her hands over her ears, and lifted. What looked like about forty-five pounds of hair rose straight up in the air, disclosing a nude, polished skull. Oddly enough, the revelation didn't materially damage her sexy look. "Rheumatic fever got mine," she said, lowering the wig into position again.

"Mine was a chemical explosion."

She winked at me. "We guarantee that our hairpieces will restore your sex life to its former level."

Her voice was low and throaty. With the wink, it made me suspect the whole thing was a put-on. I started to reply that on the basis of restoring my sex life to its former level several million red-blooded American men would feel themselves shortchanged, and then I stopped. "Did anyone ever tell you that you look like Mae West?"

She nodded. "Thousands." She gave me a bright smile. "I did right by them all."

"It's your shop?" I asked for lack of something better to say.

"Yes, it is. You've already seen that I'm acquainted with the problem. Oh, sure, half the wigs I sell are to dizzy dames interested in seeing if a color change will add an inch to their boyfriends' muscle, but it's a challenge like yours that I try to do right by." She strolled over to me and studied my features. She had a rolling gait like a sailor's. "What people who need prosthetic hairpieces don't realize is that makeup is just as important as the hair," she went on.

"Makeup?"

"Exactly. I teach you how to use television makeup so that you can blend your face with your new hair so that only a makeup expert can tell it's not your own."

I had used up the supply of healing cream I had smuggled from the hospital during my first month at Blind Tom's. The healing had been well along by then, but I was still conscious of the visibility of the scars. "How long would it take you to teach me?"

"Half an hour. The practice necessary to do it correctly takes longer, of course." She moved away from me, behind the counter, and began rummaging in drawers. "Was your hair brown?"

"Before it turned gray."

She looked up at me. "You want gray again?" There was a definite twinkle in her saucy-looking eyes. "You don't need it."

"Thanks. I'll leave it up to you."

"That's the boy," she approved. "I'm glad you're not the type who comes in here sniveling because his face was burned. 'Why, man you've got it made,' I always tell them. 'Your face isn't going to change. You'll look exactly the same twenty years from now when every woman you know is envying the hell out of you.' " She removed a hairpiece from a drawer. "Come sit over here."

I moved behind the counter and sat down on a three-legged stool placed before a mirror with angled wings that showed the sides of the head as well as the front. The well-endowed proprietress sat on another stool slightly behind mine after enveloping me in a barber's apron.

" 'Course most men who come in here are afraid they're never going to make it with a woman again," she continued in her free-wheeling fashion. "And I can understand that. When I lost my hair, the first thing I thought was that I'd never get to do the split on my back again." In the mirror I could see her bright smile over my shoulder. "It didn't work that way. I even experimented. A few times I took the wig off just to see what would happen. Some guys just shriveled, but it turned on a few Johns like you wouldn't believe."

While talking, she had arranged a makeup tray beside me. Stubby tubes numbered from one to eleven rested in troughs along with three different kinds of powder in jars. "First the clippers on the back of the neck to blend the hairline," she said. I flinched at the cold touch of the steel, but she clip-clipped away, unheeding. "I recommend not wearing a hat," she went on. "Ninety percent of the trouble in wig wearing comes from hats and the complications they cause."

Finished with the clipping, her cool fingers trailed lightly across the back of my neck several times. I knew she was doing it on purpose, but I couldn't restrain the shiver that rippled through me. "Suppose it rains?" I addressed myself to her last remark.

"Unless you're with a gal you're trying to impress, take the hairpiece off and put it in your pocket. Otherwise, carry an umbrella. She'll think you're British and very gallant." I said nothing. "You see the numbers on the tubes? The range of color in them will take care of most facial gradations. The lower numbers are from light pastel pink to beige. The higher numbers are tan, brown, and dark brown. From the skin on your arms, you look as though you should be number six or number seven."

She picked up the number six tube, squirted a gob of the creamy material onto her palm, then worked it onto her fingertips. "Now watch this," she said, and began rubbing it into her cheeks with a rapid, circular motion of her fingers. Her white skin darkened. "This foundation not only supplies the basic color you need but it also covers the scars." She picked up a tissue and wiped off her face. "You try it."

I directed the tube at my palm and squeezed it awkwardly. "Too much," she said at once, leaning over my shoulder and halving the dose. I could smell her heady perfume. "There, try that."

I began spreading it lightly on my face, watching the mirror to make sure there were no gaps in the coverage. It was almost miraculous the way the seams and craters disappeared. In the midst of my efforts, she reached up casually and placed the hairpiece on my head. She attached two tabs in the lace-like foundation just above my ears but underneath the netting. I couldn't believe the difference it made. "How about that?" she crooned over my shoulder.

"I think well of it," I said fervently.

"I knew you would. It's not cheap, but it's the most natural-looking hairpiece I have in the shop." She reached around me for a jar on the tray, opened it, studied my face in the mirror for a moment, then closed the jar and opened another. "These different shades of powder permit natural blending with your own skin at the jawline and throat-line," she explained, showing me how to use it.

I examined the completed job in the mirror. The hair looked natural, but the face didn't. It still looked stiff, but it was a huge improvement over the shiny gloss that had called attention to itself before. "Each application is good for twenty-four hours unless you run into a cloudburst or something," she advised me. "Even then it won't run, but it might spot."

"How much for the works plus an extra makeup kit?" I asked.

She reached into a partly opened drawer and took out a wig identical to the one on my head except that its color was a deep coppery red. "Wouldn't you like a change-off?" she asked. "Six eighty would cover everything."

More than most men I could use a change-off. I stared at the burnished bronze of the second hairpiece.

"You haven't asked me the question usually asked by my men customers," the proprietress said.

"No? What's the question?"

"Whether everything will stay put while they're enjoying a roll in the hay."

"I can see how it would be embarrassing if it didn't. What do you tell them?"

She smiled sweetly. "I tell them that if they're worried about it we'll lock the front door and go into the back room and try it out."

"I'll bet you sell more wigs that way."

"Hairpieces," she corrected me with another smile. "Well? I'll bet you haven't had a piece since the explosion."

"You're right, but it's that fact that makes me gun-shy about the back room."

"Nonsense," she said briskly. "You've come to the right place for retraining." She rose from her stool, went to the front of the shop, inserted an "Out to lunch" sign in the window, and locked the door. She came back and took me by the hand. "Come on. You need a little hairpiece therapy."

"Just a minute." I freed my hand from hers and counted out six hundred and eighty dollars. "You've made a sale regardless."

She put it in the pocket of her uniform, then took my hand again. She led the way into a back room, which was comfortably fitted out as a bed-sitting room. I was curious, but I was also apprehensive. "This could be a disaster," I warned her as she disappeared behind a screen.

"Hang your clothes in the closet and relax," her voice floated out to me. "Just leave everything to me."

I was startled by a full-length view of myself in a pier-glass mirror attached to the closet door. Almost literally, I didn't recognize a single thing about myself. I was still staring when another figure moved into view beside me in the mirror. She wore a single sheer garment, which for lack of a better term might be labeled a short shirt. It half contained the jutting thrust of milky white breasts above while it flirted at mid-thigh with hinted-at shadowy depths beneath. I felt a long-dormant stirring.

"Relax," she repeated, and took charge of my undressing. She led me to the bed. She was self-assured, bold, eager, and skillful. I had never been physically seduced before. My response was as gratifying to me as I hoped it was to her. For a moment, with what seemed acres of sleek female flesh in my hands, my mind drifted to Hazel

Andrews and her cabin just outside Hudson. But only for a moment.

"It didn't hurt a bit, did it?" my companion inquired when I rolled, exhausted, to one side of the bed. She patted my shoulder. I got up finally and went to the mirror. The hairpiece was firmly in place. When I turned, she was smiling at me from the bed. "If you're not completely satisfied, come back anytime for an additional adjustment," she said. With her sexy voice, it was the epitome of a Mae West double entendre.

I dressed and prepared to leave. Back in uniform, she preceded me to the door and unlocked it. "No need to worry about a thing," she assured me breezily. "You proved that to both of us."

"Thanks," I said as I departed, and I meant it.

I was a dozen miles along the road toward Mobile when I realized that I didn't even know her name.