Читать книгу Dead Extra - Sean Carswell - Страница 9

WILMA, 1943

WHEN THE CAR started its descent down the Conejo grade, Wilma caught her first glimpse of Camarillo. It gave her a feeling of sunshine and optimism, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Flat stretches of lush farmland spread across the valley floor to the ocean. Patches of green dotted the golden hillsides as if they’d been painted there in watercolor. It all seemed so crisp and clear and clean, even the little town at the foothill with its white mission-style church next to a humble, rounded steeple. Islands on the horizon cut sharp brown lines into the expansive blue. Wilma had been trying to keep her mouth shut for this whole ride, but the view from this downhill road loosened her up. “It’s beautiful,” she said.

One of the white coats in the front seat turned to speak to her. “Sure. You’ll love it here.”

“Nothing like a vacation in the bughouse,” Wilma said.

The other white coat, the one who was driving, said, “You better believe it, sister. This place is fantastic.”

White Coat One backed him up. “Especially if you like horses. Do you like horses?”

“Who doesn’t like horses?” Wilma asked.

White Coat One pointed to the hills off to the left of the car. “Look at those mountain trails. You’ll get to go horseback riding on all of them.”

It seemed farfetched, but there were trails. Wilma could see those. There were even a few people on horses on the trails. “Really?” she asked.

“Like my partner said, you’re going to love it,” White Coat Two added.

White Coat One turned in his seat to face Wilma. “If you don’t like horseback riding, we have hiking excursions. Not on the same trails as the horseback riders use. We don’t want you stepping in anything untoward.”

“Lord, no,” White Coat Two said.

“And the hills are full of daisies. The girls at the asylum love to pick them after lunch, then lounge in the grass, making daisy chains.”

“You’re pulling my leg,” Wilma said.

“Do you like water sports?” White Coat Two asked.

“Like what?”

“Canoeing,” White Coat One said. “There’s a river that runs alongside the hospital. We take patients canoeing in it.”

“Really?”

White Coat Two kept his eyes on the road but nodded vigorously. “Not just in the river. We have Polynesian boats. You know, the canoes with the floats on either side? If you’re good enough in the river, you can paddle around through the ocean.”

This seemed like too much for Wilma. Before she could protest, White Coat One said, “It’s like being in the South Seas.”

“The Marquesas,” White Coat Two said. “Tahiti.”

“Hawaii,” the two white coats said together.

“Yes, ma’am,” White Coat One said. “This may be the best two months of your life.”

Wait. What? Two months? Was Wilma hearing that right? She asked, “Two months?”

“That’s what the paper says,” White Coat One said.

“And did we tell you about the springtime productions of Shakespeare in the park the hospital sponsors?” White Coat Two asked.

“Take me back to the two months,” Wilma said. “What paper says two months?”

White Coat One dug through a briefcase that sat on the seat between him and the driver. He found a file with only a few sheets of paper in it. He extracted a carbon copy from the file and passed it back to Wilma. She read the form.

It was a notice of commitment, a California 5150. According to the paper, Wilma had waived her right for an arraignment. She refused to speak on her behalf in front of the judge. The judge sentenced her to two months rehabilitation at the Camarillo State Hospital. The arraignment and trial were recorded as happening while Wilma and the white coats had been driving up Ventura Highway. “Look at this time,” Wilma said, pointing at a line on the form. “The judge signed this order at noon today. It won’t be noon for another half hour, at least.”

White Coat One took the carbon copy from Wilma. He read the judge’s orders. “Well, I’ll be.” He turned to the driver. “We better drag our feet dropping this one off.”

“You feel like grabbing lunch?”

White Coat One shrugged. “Why not?”

White Coat Two steered the sedan off Ventura Blvd. and into a little roadside café near the St. Mary Magdalen Church in downtown Camarillo. He reached under his seat. White Coat One provided the running commentary. “We’re going to duck in for a sandwich. I hope you understand that you can’t join us.”

Food was the least of Wilma’s concern. The booze from her four-day binge had been draining out of her liver since she’d gotten into the car with these white coats. The thought of taking a bite out of a sandwich, chewing, and swallowing it made her even more nauseous than the snowballing hangover she’d been trying to ignore. “It’s all right. I’ll stay in the car.”

“Of course you will. And we’ll make you comfortable. Just you sit tight.”

White Coat Two took the jacket he’d pulled out from under the seat and came around to Wilma’s door. He opened it. He rolled down the window. White Coat One opened the other door and rolled down that window. “You’ll get a nice breeze,” he said.

“And just to make you comfortable and warm, we’ll loan you this lovely camisole,” White Coat Two said. He guided her out of the sedan. Wilma stood in the alcove between the car door and the backseat. White Coat Two instructed her to raise both arms. He slid the sleeves down her arms.

“Wait a minute,” Wilma said. “You’re putting this on me backwards.”

Just as she said this, she realized there was no opening at the end of the sleeves. Her hands were trapped. White Coat Two stepped closer, yanking Wilma’s hands behind her back before she could think to resist. White Coat One had already slid across the backseat behind her. He buckled the straightjacket in place. The two men forced her down into her seat. They shut the sedan doors.

“We won’t be long,” White Coat One said.

“No more than an hour and a half, two hours,” White Coat Two added.

“Can we get you anything?” White Coat One asked.

“A coffee, at least,” Wilma suggested.

To his credit, White Coat One did return about fifteen minutes later with a mug of coffee for Wilma. He explained that he didn’t have time to hold it for her while she drank, and he couldn’t take off the camisole. So he put the mug between her knees. “Just you balance it there,” he said. He went back inside the café.

Wilma spread her legs. The mug tumbled to the floor. Coffee soaked the bottom of her housedress, her nylons, and her mules. The coffee itself stunk like it had been filtered through gym socks. Wilma couldn’t take it. She leaned as far forward as she could and vomited everything that was left from her final party with Tom Fillmore: the martinis from the Players, the Formosa Café liver and onions, the red wine to top off the night. It puddled on the floor with the dirty roadside coffee.

Wilma leaned her head against the back of the seat and breathed through her mouth. She waited for some kind of air to move somewhere, for that promised breeze to blow.

The white coats dropped the comedy act on the final seven- or eight-mile drive to the hospital. They left her in the straightjacket and didn’t speak other than to curse the stink of coffee and vomit, which had gotten worse over the two hours they spent in the café. Wilma tried to ignore them and angle her head to catch the wind rushing through the back windows. She watched the rows of lettuce and onion and celery crops angle toward her, then straighten, then angle away from her. This nuthouse was in the middle of nowhere. She’d have to be Pheidippides to get away from this joint by foot. And, as well as she could remember, the story hadn’t turned out well for him. The way things looked from her backseat perch, Wilma was going down for two months. It was time to reconcile herself to that fact.

When they got to the main building of the hospital, the white coats dropped her off with a burly woman dressed like a cop. The woman wobbled like she’d been thrown off balance by the armory of keys on her belt. A couple of the keys looked big enough to fit the kind of doors you’d find at the top of a beanstalk. She didn’t speak. She just pushed Wilma toward a door with a little less iron than your typical bank vault. One of the giant keys opened the door. Wilma had the sense walking through the doorway that she may never walk back out.

A nurse on the inside checked Wilma in. The only words she said were statements of facts, like, “alcoholic” and “two months.” She gave Wilma’s name as Wilma Chesley. This seemed further proof that the old man had pulled strings to set up this commitment. Not that Wilma needed further proof. Not that it took a lot of pull to get a woman committed these days.

The nurse led Wilma down a long hall. Each door had a sign painted on it. “Dental Clinic.” “X-Ray.” “Diet Kitchen.” “Electroshock.” “Secretary.” When they reached the door labeled “Hydro,” the nurse extracted a key from her giant key ring, unlocked the door, and led Wilma inside.

A row of baths stood along the left side of the room. A woman lay in one of the baths. Heavy rubber blankets covered her body. Only her head rose out of the water. The tips of her hair were soaked. A fuzzy patch of dry hair rose from the top of her head. She rolled her eyes slowly in Wilma’s direction. The eyes focused on Wilma for a split second, then slackened into an unfocused stare. Whatever the woman saw at that moment, she saw it without the use of her eyes.

Wilma had seen some sad women in her time, but this woman was the saddest. Her sallow skin and rubber blankets and empty eyes were enough to make Wilma forget that she was wearing a straightjacket. Someone always seems to have it worse.

The nurse had apparently forgotten about the straightjacket, also. She told Wilma to strip.

“I’ll need a little help with that,” Wilma said.

“Are you too drunk to undress yourself?” the nurse asked.

“Honey,” Wilma said, “if I could’ve unbuckled myself from this straightjacket, I would’ve gotten out of that car and found a safe place to hide hours ago.”

“Oh.” The nurse considered Wilma for what looked to be the first time. “Right.” She unbuckled the back of the jacket. Wilma shook herself free. Another woman—a secretary, judging from the formless dress and cracked-leather mules and clipboard in her hand—came into the room. She sat on a bench along the wall opposite the tubs. Wilma stripped to her slip. “Down to the bare skin,” the nurse told her.

Wilma took the rest of it off, remembering, oh Christ, her foray the night before with Tom Fillmore. Surely, they’d be able to tell what she’d been up to. Surely, that was one more humiliation waiting to happen.

The nurse led her to the scale and checked Wilma’s weight. “One twenty-eight,” she called to the secretary. Wilma double-checked the weights. Not bad. Say what you will about these benders, they always brought Wilma’s weight down a few pounds. The nurse checked Wilma’s height next. Wilma stood tall, stretching her spine as much as she could. The nurse called out, “Five-four.”

“And a half,” Wilma added. “Don’t forget the half.”

“Five-four,” the nurse called.

“Are you sure you can see all the way up to the top of the ruler, Shorty?” Wilma asked.

The nurse shot her a look. She called out to the secretary, “Five-three and a half.”

“Oh, now you’re just lying.”

The secretary asked Wilma a litany of questions: birthplace, place of residence, father’s name, mother’s name, mother’s maiden name, occupation, religion. Wilma figured that the State should have all this information anyway, and if they were going to rob her of two months of her life and an inch off her real height, she was going to make up all her answers. So she did. Birthplace: Kalamazoo. Place of residence: The Doheny Mansion, Beverly Hills. Father’s name: Culbert Olson. Mother’s name: Joan Olson. Mother’s maiden name: Crawford. Occupation: hand model. Religion: pagan.

At the end of this charade, the nurse pushed Wilma into a tight shower stall. The nurse took a step back and turned on the water. It felt like it was about two hundred degrees, and it pummeled Wilma from three directions. The nurse tossed a bar of soap and a rough washcloth into the mix. Wilma twisted and contorted, trying to pick up the soap and cloth without getting her hair wet. “What the hell are you doing?” the nurse asked.

“You didn’t give me a shower cap,” Wilma said.

“Get your hair all the way under,” the nurse said. “Soap it all down.”

After dipping her head, the hot water felt all right. She scrubbed her skin until it was rosy pink, clearing all the crust and old makeup off her face, scouring away any traces of her previous night’s transgressions, even opening her mouth to the jets and letting the water wash her teeth and rinse out her mouth. She kept turning and running the cloth over her until the nurse had enough and turned the water off.

The secretary tossed Wilma a towel that wasn’t much bigger than the washcloth. It was soaked through before she was done with her hair, much less drying her skin. The nurse pointed to a metal table near the scale. “Hop up,” she said.

“I’m still dripping,” Wilma said.

“Hop up,” the nurse said.

Wilma climbed onto the table. Her dripping skin made it slick. The metal sucked the last traces of warmth from her. The secretary handed the nurse a magnifying glass. The nurse inspected Wilma. She combed through Wilma’s pubic patch, parting the wild red hair, checking the roots, pushing Wilma’s legs open wider, viewing more of Wilma than Wilma could ever see of herself. The inspection was remarkably and painfully thorough. Had any lice or worms or bacteria found refuge between Wilma’s toes or under her arms or within any other crevice, the nurse would have found it. The whole thing seemed to last for weeks. Wilma wondered if maybe this would be her whole two-month stay at the asylum.

Finally, the nurse told Wilma she could stand. Wilma asked, “Are you sure? You may have missed a freckle somewhere on my ass.”

“Enough, Lady Chesley,” the nurse said. She pointed to a shapeless cotton dress that must have been hospital property when the joint opened in the thirties. “Put that on.” Wilma climbed into the dress. It was big enough to fit the fat lady in a sideshow act.

“Am I supposed to wear this or build a tent with it?”

The nurse hadn’t gone for any of Wilma’s jokes and wasn’t going for this one. She just said, “Wear it.”

“Can’t I wear my dress?”

“It has coffee and vomit on it,” the nurse said. “You’ll get it back after it’s been laundered.”

“Can I at least have something that Dumbo didn’t wear in the movie?”

The nurse didn’t respond. She walked out of the hydro room. Wilma followed, her bare feet slapping against the cool concrete of the hospital floor.

The nurse rushed down one hallway and into another. Again and again. Wilma trotted to keep up with the nurse’s long, purposeful strides. She tried to make note of how many turns she’d taken and which way she’d gone. There was no hope. She was irretrievably lost in the madhouse maze. Some rooms she passed had names of doctors or signs saying things like “Surgery” or “Music Room.” Many were dorm rooms. She passed cavernous spaces with thirty or forty beds. Next to them were rooms the size of closets with bunk beds inside. What little daylight snuck into these rooms seemed a cruel mockery. After what felt like a few miles, the nurse stopped at a small room with four beds. “Welcome home,” she said.

No patients were in the room. Each bed housed the exact same style of bland brown satchel. Peeking out of the top of each was a pitiful collection of hairbrushes and photographs and combs and lipstick and paperbacks and knitting needles and yarn. Worn purses and splintered sewing boxes. One bed was empty. Wilma would have to write to Gertie and ask her sister to bring a new collection of sad little lifelines to fill her state-issued satchel. At least one of Wilma’s new roommates had a pencil and a notebook there.

The nurse turned to leave. Wilma quick asked, “What am I supposed to do now?”

“Wait. We’ll call you for supper in a few hours.”

The thought of being alone in this tiny room was too much. “Can I at least have a smoke?”

The nurse took a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of her scrubs and handed it to Wilma. Wilma shook one cigarette loose, stuck it between her lips, and handed the pack back. “Come on,” the nurse said. “There’s no smoking in the rooms. I’ll take you to the Section and light that for you.”

The hospital had been so beautiful from the outside. It struck Wilma initially as more of a Santa Barbara resort than a bughouse, with its red tile roofs and iron balustrades and wide, sunny balconies. Wilma pictured the smoking room to be some kind of veranda or garden, like the ones she’d known at Union Station. She couldn’t indulge in this fantasy for too long, though. The Section was three doors down from her own. And it was the restroom. The nurse led her inside, lit the cigarette, and left without a goodbye. There were no seats in the restroom, save the toilets and the floor. Wilma chose the floor. The cool tile pressed against the prodigious folds of her cotton dress. She leaned against the wall, legs splayed out in front of her, and sucked in the tobacco.

Two months.