One Endless Hour

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.

"That isss hard to-" he began, then turned from his magazine to look at me. I was staring straight ahead as usual. The doctor glanced about the ward. Spider Kern was at its far end, out of earshot. Dr. Afzul lowered his voice before he spoke again. "I have not heard you ssspeak before."

"I want to talk to you, but not here."

He was looking at his magazine again. "I have my share of curiosssity. I will have you brought to my office tomorrow."

"Fine."

Neither of us said anything more.

After Dr. Afzul left the ward that afternoon, I experienced another break in my usual monotonous routine. Colonel Sam Glencoe of the state police came to see me. He'd come three times before, and each time I'd let him see a slight improvement in my supposed catatonic condition. Another man was with him this time, not in uniform. He looked like F.B.I.

They drew up chairs and sat down, one on either side of me. The first time Glencoe showed up, Spider Kern had tried to horn in on the interview. Glencoe sent him packing with a single hard look.

I knew it was still bugging Glencoe that he couldn't get a line on Chet Arnold. It probably bugged him almost as much that after talking to Hudsonites like Jed Raymond and Hazel Andrews, he didn't hear much that was wrong with Chet Arnold. Chet had arrived in Hudson as a stranger with a tool kit and a trade. A year in a lumber camp had made me a tree surgeon when I wanted to be. That and a crack shot.

I came to Hudson to try to find out what had happened to my partner, Bunny, who had gone there with the loot from a bank job in Phoenix. While looking for him, I did a little tree work and blended with the local citizenry. As I gradually uncovered the slimy trail of Blaze Franklin and his girl friend, Lucille Grimes, I developed an affair with Hazel that was the finest man-woman relationship I'd ever had. Then the roof had fallen in.

The unexplained explosion had baffled the sheriff's department, too, but they'd given up a lot more easily. Colonel Sam Glencoe wasn't naive enough to believe that a man of Chet Arnold's locally demonstrated dimensions had sprung full-blown from the earth, though. With no fingerprints possible, and me out to lunch mentally, as Glencoe thought, the colonel was frustrated.

"How are you feeling today?" he began.

I waited for a count of three instead of five. "Good."

His hard blue eyes inspected me. "What day is it?"

I waited again. "Tuesday."

"What month?"

"March."

"What date?"

I shook my head negatively.

Glencoe smiled, although it wasn't much of a smile. His frosty-looking features merely rearranged themselves in a different pattern. "If you'd known the answer to that, I'd have accused you of seeing me coming and boning up. There's plenty of days I don't know the date myself."

It was a surprise to me that he would even attempt a smile. He certainly hadn't on his previous trips. He'd sat and fired hard-voiced questions to which I'd supplied no answers while staring straight ahead. This time Glencoe was apparently ready to try sugar instead of vinegar. It suited me fine. Up to a point, I was ready to show progress.

"You've never told us anything about yourself, Arnold," Glencoe continued. "Now that you're communicating better, I want to ask again about your background. Where you're from originally, what you do for a living, how you happened to be in Hudson, what triggered the events there… quite a few questions. Where would you like to begin?"

I waited, then slowly lifted a burned hand to my scarred, ridged face. "I'd… feel… more… like… talking… if… I… didn't… know… what… I… looked… like."

"I'm sure the hospital staff is making plans to correct it," the state police chief said smoothly. I didn't reply, and he tried again. "There must be some loose ends in your background that it would be advantageous to you to pick up. Why don't you let us help?"

I wasn't going to reply, but even before I could have, the FBI man-if he was an FBI man-reached out suddenly and took hold of my hand still resting against my face. He bent down to look at the fresh cigarette burns on the back of the hand, and Glencoe leaned closer to look, too. Glencoe started to look down the ward in Spider Kern's direction, then caught himself and stared up at the ceiling instead.

When the man with Glencoe let go of my hand, I dropped it into my lap. Glencoe cleared his throat and started over again. "Where's your hometown, Arnold?"

I sat there.

"Where were you living before you came to Hudson?"

I sat there.

It went on for ten minutes. Questions with no answers. They tired of it finally and got up to leave. "We'll be back," Glencoe promised. The usual threat was back in his voice.

Before they left the ward, they stopped just inside the locked ward door and appeared to be arguing about something.

I didn't doubt that Glencoe would be back.

But just wait long enough, Colonel, I thought.

Wait long enough and I might not be here.

For the first time in months I'd begun to see a little daylight at the end of the tunnel.

Dr. Sher Afzul-as proclaimed by a nameplate on his desk-sat almost knee-to-knee with me in his office. The partitioned-off, windowless space couldn't have been more than twelve by fourteen. There was the desk, two chairs, a wall cabinet, and a four-drawer file. That was it.

He was smoking the thin tube of an aromatic-smelling cigarette as he leaned back in his chair to study me. Several more of the elongated tubes lay on the desk in front of him. The tobacco in them looked black. "How is it that you so suddenly are no longer a vegetable in conversssation with me?" he inquired.

"I've never been a vegetable, Doc. Not since I came out of the very first bandages."

"You are a consssumately clever actor, then?"

"How clever does a man have to be to play idiot?"

His dark brown features creased in a quick smile.

"And why am I favored now with the bright side of your sssparkling persssonality?"

"You know why. You can give me a new face."

He nodded. "Yes, I can."

"I'll pay for it."

A slender eyebrow arched. "You will pay me for doing that for which the hospital already pays me?"

"I'll pay you additionally, Doc. They'll pay you for a quick-hurry-up job that would still leave me as the leading candidate for a role in a horror movie. I want a first-class job." I kept on talking when he would have interrupted me. "I overheard members of the staff saying it would have cost thousands in any private hospital in the country for the job you did on Willie Turnbull. If anyone in the private hospitals were skilled enough to do it. How come you're buried in a place like this?"

He smiled again. "Because I find that a prophet is without honor in countries other than his own, too. I was not without reputation in Pakistan. In Karachi. There I was of the upper-middle class. Here"-he spread his slender hands-"I qualify for-for-what is the name of your poor mountain region?"

"Appalachia."

"Appalachia," he agreed. "I knew that it would be difficult to establish myself here before I came, but not this difficult. It's not easy for a foreign doctor to be accepted in your country. Before the state examination can be taken, there must be both an accepted length of residence and demonssstrated hospital training. The red tape is ressstrictive."

I glanced around the shabby office. "They're not exactly overwhelming you with facilities here, Doc."

He held up both hands, then tapped himself on the forehead. "Here are my facilities. I need no other. When I first came to this country, I was in Grace Hospital in New Orleans, one of the largest and with the finest in facilities. I found, though, that someone was always watching over my shoulder. Checking on me and suggesting or ordering changes in my techniques. I decided this would be better. Here no one cares what I do."

"I care, Doc. You heard me say I'll pay well for a good job?"

"You will pay?" he looked skeptical. "I have examined the circumssstances of your presence here. You are indigent."

"Only while I'm still inside the walls."

"So? The file shows that you have no assets or even a record of regular employment." The brown eyes were probing me. "The record, in fact, is more remarkable for what it doesn't show than for what it does. Did you know that you represent a problem to Colonel Glencoe, the chief of the state police?"

"Not a problem. A puzzle."

"If you like. Colonel Glencoe does not favor puzzles. Or loose ends. With the purpose in mind of gathering up same, he has already recommended to Dr. Mobley that plastic surgery be performed upon you to make you more communicative."

That must have been what Glencoe and the FBI man were talking about at the door of the ward before they left yesterday afternoon, I thought. "I don't want the kind of job they're talking about," I said. "I want the best job you can give me. For cash."

His head was cocked to one side like a bright-eyed bird's. "This cash," he said. "How much did you have in mind?"

"Twenty thousand. Half in advance."

His face closed up like a furled umbrella. "Your delusions of grandeur had previously essscaped me."

"Half in advance, cash," I repeated.

"But all this is just talk. There iss nothing-"

"When you're ready to take me seriously," I interrupted him, "I'll tell you where to go to put your hand on the first ten thousand. In untraceable cash. You keep that and bring me back whatever's hidden with it."

He still looked doubtful. "This hiding place-it is near here?"

"No."

"Then I would have to invest my time and money in this venture?"

"You gambled when you left Karachi, Doc. And twenty thousand would go a long way toward setting you up nicely in private practice." I tried to think how to get through to him. "When you first saw me on the ward, what were the odds against us ever having a conversation like this?"

"Astronomical," he admitted.

"You're still thinking of me like that. It's a mistake."

"You have a point." He said it slowly.

"Think it over." I rose to my feet. "The cash will be there anytime you give me the word you'd like to try for it."

"I sssuppose this is illegal money?"

I didn't answer his question. I opened his office door. "Don't expect me to turn verbal handsprings the next time you see me on the ward."

His smile was unwilling and a bit sour. "That I will not expect." The smile turned to a frown. "But this pro-posssal-"

"Think it over, Doc."

I shuffled out into the corridor in my role of slow-moving dimwit. Dr. Afzul followed me and used his key to let me back through the heavy glass door into the ward.

I didn't feel that the conversation had been a waste of time.

I'd given Dr. Sher Afzul quite a bit to think about.

Three weeks later I heard one of the nurses saying that Dr. Afzul was going to New York to attend a convention of plastic surgeons. When I felt that no one was looking at us the next time he came on the ward, I pointed a finger at myself and then at him. He nodded.

I was summoned to his office the same afternoon.

"This is supposed to be a preliminary examination of your condition prior to assessment on my part," he said, "but you have something to say to me?"

"A man can have a good time in New York, Doc, if he's properly financed."

"So we're back on that sssubject?"

"We are. In New York you'll be close to the money."

It reached him. "How close?"

"About two hundred and twenty-five miles."

He tapped thoughtfully on his desk top with a pencil.

"Tell me exactly what it is you would have me do."

"Hire a car in New York and drive to the spot I'll tell you. It will take you about five hours. Dig up a sealed jar eighteen inches below the surface of the ground, remove ten thousand dollars and bring me whatever else is in it. And remember that the ten thousand is only the down payment." He was silent. "Does it make sense that I'd send you after nothing when I'll still be here when you get back?"

"No," he acknowledged. He hitched his chair forward in sudden determination. "All right. Where isss this place?"

"In Guardian Angel Cemetery in Hillsboro, New Hampshire." He wrote it down. "It's an abandoned cemetery. Drive in the front gate and follow the circular gravel driveway to the right. Turn left at the first intersection. The third headstone on the right will have the name Mallory on it. Twelve feet behind the stone you'll find the jar."

"Suppose the gate is locked?" Dr. Afzul asked when he finished writing.

"There's no gate as such. Just an arched entranceway. The township has a newer cemetery but still maintains the old one after a fashion. How long will you be in New York?"

"Ten days." He said it absently. He was thinking of something else. "Dr. Mobley has approved your facial re-conssstruction."

"Then we're in business."

"I have proposed to Dr. Mobley that in the interest of furthering my technique I do a full-scale rebuilding job. He is consssidering it." He hesitated for a moment. "Even if he agrees, it will be tedious and painful," he warned. "It will take a long time."

I refrained from stating the obvious. "Have a nice visit in the big city, Doc." I rose and went to the door of his office. I turned and looked back at him. "Send a carton of cigarettes onto the ward for me with one of the nurses," I said casually. "Pall Malls."

I moved out into the corridor.

The cigarettes were a test.

I didn't know if I'd sold Dr. Afzul. If he dug into his own pocket for the cigarettes, he was at least partially sold. If he didn't, it was time I began looking for another boy.

I'm not the worst judge of human nature, though, and on the way back to the ward I couldn't help feeling that for the first time in a long time I was once again in at least partial control of events.