Читать книгу Dead Extra - Sean Carswell - Страница 11

WILMA, 1943

WILMA’S FIRST assignment was in the sick bay. A nurse led her there after breakfast. “It ain’t rocket science, doll,” she’d said. “You gather up the bedpans and buckets and dump them in the Section. Change the bedding. Wipe down the walls. Mop the floor and polish it when it dries. Do it all in that order. Clean the whole ward. Got it?”

Wilma nodded. The nurse led her to a supply closet where Wilma found the mops and buckets and scrub brushes and polishing brushes and bedding. She dug around for rubber gloves. When she found none, she asked the nurse. The nurse told her that they didn’t have rubber gloves for patients. “So I’m cleaning piss buckets and bedpans with my bare hands?” Wilma asked.

“Don’t be such a prima donna. You can wash your hands when you’re done.”

Wilma got to work. She emptied all the buckets and bedpans first, scrubbed her hands raw after she was done, then set to the real cleaning. She’d never been much of a housekeeper. She hated to clean her own home and preferred her place to be more of a nest with clothes and books and projects scattered around. Even so, she knew how to clean. She’d been doing it at restaurants since she’d first started waitressing in her teens. It was the worst, the final hurdle of the night, the time when she wasn’t making any real money but was still doing her job. She’d learned to work fast.

She attacked the sick bay with the same fervor. She changed linens in assembly line style: all the bottom sheets in the ward first, then all the top sheets, then all the blankets, then all the pillow cases. Each motion became mechanical. It seemed to take half the time that changing each bed individually would have. She scrubbed the walls and mopped the floor with the same kind of deliberateness. Before long, she was glistening with sweat. Polishing the floors was toughest. The polishing brush must’ve weighed fifty pounds. After all the other effort, it took a bit of her reserves to push it around the floor. She got through everything, though.

By ten o’clock, the ward was a showplace. It was the cleanest she’d ever gotten anything in her life. She packed away her supplies and sauntered down to the nurse’s station. The same chubby brunette who’d set her to work that morning asked her what she was doing. “All finished,” Wilma said. “You could eat off the floors in that joint.”

The nurse looked at her watch. She said, “It’s not clean enough, yet. Go back and clean it until 11:30.”

“Oh, for Christ’s fucking sake,” Wilma said.

The nurse popped to her feet. “What did you just say?”

Wilma took a deep breath. “I apologize,” Wilma said. “I’ll go back and clean.”

And so she went back through the ward again, rescrubbed the walls, remopped the floors, danced again with that man-size polishing brush. She worked as slowly as she could, sometimes so slowly that she’d stop altogether. She finished her second round of cleaning the ward at about quarter after eleven. She overturned a bucket in the supply closet and sat there for fifteen minutes.

Even with two rounds of scrubbing and mopping and polishing, with the soap and disinfectant and floor wax, the room still had a sickly insane smell that Wilma couldn’t place. It was something noxious, some kind of mixture of alcohol and lighter fluid and industry and decay. And it was in the air, somehow. It made no sense.

The nurse released Wilma for lunch at 11:30.

The dining hall was a long, narrow room with high ceilings held up by wide arches. Daylight flooded in through the side windows to the east. Hanging lamps filled in the rest of the shadows. Four rows of rectangular tables covered the floor, six high-backed wooden chairs per table. Patients were separated by gender, the men occupying the northern quarter of the hall, the women taking up the other three quarters. Wilma carried a muddy brown stew, a hard roll, and a mug of coffee on a metal tray. She searched the table for someone who didn’t look too blank, too crazy. Surely, there’d be a host of other drunks just like her. They’d be crazy in a way she could handle.

A woman stood from her table and waved at Wilma. “Yoo-hoo,” she called. “Gertie. Over here.”

Wilma checked for signs of nuttiness. The woman had perfect posture, shoulders thrown back, chin jutted, head held at an angle poised to balance a stack of finishing school texts. She wore a plain dress of soft cotton, the kind Wilma hadn’t seen new like this since before the war started. Even her wave was more of a parade wave than the flopping madhouse arms that looked like they were forever trying to wave a plane down onto a landing strip. She had all the signs of a rich drunk, someone who’d sipped down one too many gin rickeys at one too many debutante balls. Wilma decided to take a chance on her.

The woman welcomed Wilma to an empty seat at the table. “Gertie Greene, is that you?” she asked. “I don’t have my glasses, but when I saw those flickering flames of red hair charging from the top of your head, I said to myself, ‘I’ll be damned if Gertie Greene didn’t get sent up for a little dry spell.’”

Wilma set her tray down on the table. She wasn’t too surprised at the mistaken identity. She and Gertie had been switching roles since they were little girls. “Looks like you’ll be damned,” Wilma told the woman. “Gertie hasn’t been sent anywhere. She’s still down in Hollywood, typing up scripts that some man takes the money and credit for.”

“What?” The woman squinted at Wilma. “Are you pulling my leg?”

“No. I’m not Gertie.”

“But you know her? And you look just like her?”

Wilma nodded. “She’s my twin.”

The woman examined Wilma, looking her up and down with the care the nurse had used in the hydro room the day before. “Well, I will be damned. Gertie did mention a twin to me before. Wanda, is it?”

“Wilma.”

The woman stretched out a hand to shake. “Nice to meet you, Billie. I’m Carlotta Bell. Folks call me Lottie.”

Wilma shook hands. They had a half hour for lunch, regardless how quickly or slowly they ate, so Wilma turned to her stew. She sniffed it.

Lottie said, “Best not to smell. The stew or anything. Just turn that old nose off until you’re released from here.”

“What is that smell? It’s everywhere around this joint.”

“Paraldehyde,” Lottie said. “I suppose that, if you don’t know it, they haven’t given you any yet.”

Wilma spooned in a mouthful of stew and shook her head.

“Lucky so far. If they try to give it to you, do everything you can to keep it out of your stomach. It’s a doozy. It burns going down. Before you know it, you don’t know your name anymore or where you are. You get that vacant stare. Your breath reeks. It’s the worst.”

Wilma sipped her coffee and thought about this. “Is that what I’m smelling? Everyone’s paraldehyde breath?”