Hob Broun - Odditorium

Sara’s mother sent her a book on crewel embroidery that Christmas, but that was the last she’d heard. Chuck, the body builder, sent a few letters promising a visit but never showed.

“I’m dead to them I think,” Sara said, plucking devotedly at her split ends. “I have a brother and he cares about me. But I’m not allowed to see him or even speak to him on the phone.”

“Is that legal?”

“They say he’s a negative influence…. I don’t know, maybe I’ll spend the rest of my life here. Sometimes I think about eloping, but I’m not strong enough. Not yet anyway.”

“Eloping” was the term inmates used to describe a permanent and unauthorized self-removal from the facility.

“I’ve been thinking about that ever since I got here,” Christo said. “We ought to put our heads together.”

Sara fervently agreed but by the following afternoon had retreated into the egregious nullity that was her food and shelter.

Christo moved ahead on his own. He began shining up to a new aide on the ward, a blond smart-mouth he’d instantly pegged as a colleague, a fellow delinquent. The kid had skipped bail in San Diego and the proceeds of a fast drug-store robbery were eaten up on the trip east. Broke, forced to spend his first night in town at a 24-hour laundromat, he’d answered a want ad in the paper.

“Be gone soon as I get a shot at the narcotics closet,” he confided.

In exchange for intelligence on who carried master key sets and their lunch hour routines, he told Christo of a little out-of-the-way office where a set of hospital blueprints was on file. Late that night Christo broke into the office with the aid of a nail file stolen from the nurses’ lounge.

He studied the blueprints for almost an hour and discovered a serviceable escape path through a series of heating ducts to the ground-level parking garage. Facing budget cuts, the chief administrator had instituted an austerity program; the heating system was shut down from one till five in the morning. The parking garage was at the rear of the hospital facing a narrow residential street. There was one security guard at the gate and if he wasn’t asleep, Christo would have to take him out. He’d need a blunt instrument. And clothes. And good breaks.

Early on a Friday morning, when the last portion of the heating system’s off cycle coincided with the hour when several of the nurses were wont to gather in a vacant supply room for gossip and cigarettes, Christo slipped down to Sara’s ward on pilfered crepe-soled shoes. He carried with him in a pillowcase two janitor uniforms and a steel support bar it had taken less than two minutes to unscrew from his bed.

Sara was fast asleep. Christo peeled back the covers and gently pinched her behind.

“Time to go, Sara.”

Her only response was to brush once, twice at her cheek as though a fly had landed there. He whispered urgently, prodding her ribs. But Sara slept on, burrowing deeper into the pillows. He cursed her aloud, convinced she would foul him up, but unwilling to leave without her. One of Sara’s roommates sat up in bed, moving her hands in front of her as if she could part the darkness like living room drapes.

“I would like a glass of water, please,” she said.

Christo took Sara in his arms and carried her out the door.

“Taking her away for repainting?” said the roommate. “It’s fine with me.”

Sara came awake as they moved down the hall, kicked feebly and said, “Put me down. I’m sick.”

“There’s nothing to worry about,” Christo said, propping her against the wall. “It’s all been figured out for you.” He handed her a pair of cracked vinyl slippers he’d found next to her bed. “Here. Put these on…. Come on, come on, we have to move fast.”

Sara’s knees were shaking. With the metal bar, Christo pried off the grate, pointed into the dark mouth of the heating duct.

“I’ll go first and you hold on to my ankles. We’ll take a left and then our second right. It’s a sharp angle so watch out.”

“No.” Sara shook her head hopelessly. “You go on, I can’t. I can’t deal with closed spaces like that. I can only say goodbye.”

As she swayed forward to kiss him, Christo rapped her upside the head, caught her by the shoulders, shook her. “Listen to me, you cunt. You don’t have a choice, understand? I’m taking you. You’re going out of here if I have to strap you to my back like a knapsack.”

Frightened, doll-like, she obeyed and, only moments after stuffing herself into the cramped and stifling shaft, passed out. Christo heard a diminuendo moan behind him and felt her grip relax. He had to slither down to a junction point, where a smaller pipe fed into the main line, in order to turn himself around and drag her the rest of the way. It was very noisy work — sweaty, too, since the tin walls were still warm — and he was amazed that no one intercepted them at the other end. He kicked out the grate and pulled Sara free; her eyes fluttered open and she looked like a movie star at the finish of a deathbed monologue.

“Can we get a bus from here?”

“Not yet, not yet.”

Their pyjamas were soaked through but they were too far behind schedule to change clothes now. They’d have to go for it as they were, even though the white garments would practically glow in the dark. At the end of the narrow, carpeted corridor, through a high window in a heavy brown door, Christo could see light glinting off windshields. He put his arm around Sara’s waist and coaxed and carried her forward.

“Use your legs, dammit.”

He thought: This is a lot like babysitting.

She snapped to in the cold air of the parking garage, leaned over the hood of a station wagon hyperventilating.

“Wait a minute…. Wait a minute.”

“Don’t fade in the stretch, Sara. We might reach a point where I can’t afford you anymore.” He took the steel bar out of the pillowcase.

Sara nodded, took his hand. They ran up a cement ramp to the driveway, stopped, looked in unison to right and left like figures in a pedestrian safety film, then briskly but quietly walked across. Christo pulled her down in a bed of ivy; she was trembling. Up ahead, the gate man stared out at the street from his lighted cubicle and puffed on a pipe.

“Wait here and be ready to fly.”

With long, low strides, Christo covered the intervening ground in seconds. As the gate man turned toward the sound of his final step with a half smile on his brown, creased face, Christo cocked the bar and brought it down square on the back of his head. The gate man’s cap with the shiny badge in front flipped off and hit the ground before he did. A flash as Christo spun away, blood welling over gray crewcut stubble.

“Now, Sara. Now!” And he took off like a deer.

She breathed deep, gathered herself and went after him, her slippers coming off as she sprinted through half-melted snow, the pillowcase swinging wildly at her side.

Shivering, embracing, they climbed into the janitor clothes behind a hedge six blocks away.

“Okay, next phase,” Christo said as Sara jumped up and down and crooned at the stars. “Where does your brother live?”

“In Boston — oh, you beautiful man. I can’t believe I’m out … I’m really out. I could never have done it by myself.”

“Well, don’t tell the neighborhood about it.”

“I don’t even care if I get frostbite,” Sara said, wiggling her bare toes.

“Phase two now, darlin’. Concentrate. You know this town, find us a Western Union.”

They walked for endless blocks as a cheerless dawn broke overhead. Sara was manic and couldn’t stop talking, even when Christo walked ahead, fingers plugging his ears. He sat, teeth chattering, on a park bench while she wired Pierce collect, asking him to send as much money as he could as soon as he could. The clerk gaped at her in the baggy green work shirt, the impossible balloon pants she had to hold up by the belt loops.