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
