Jack didn’t address Hammond. He sat facing forward, waiting for the waitress. He pulled out a pouch of tobacco and started rolling his own. The waitress swung by. “Just coffee,” he said.
Hammond heard the voice and looked to his right. Jack kept his face forward, his hands on his cigarette. He could feel Hammond’s stare, almost hear the internal dialogue. Hammond brought that dialog to the external in no time. “Am I seeing a ghost?” he asked.
Jack slowly turned his head left. When he caught Hammond’s glance, he said, “Boo!”
Hammond jumped in his seat.
Jack smiled. It was a cruel joke, but he couldn’t resist it when the opportunity arose.
“Jack? Holy cow!” Hammond walloped him in the center of his back. “You’re alive!”
“So it would seem,” Jack said.
“I was at your funeral, kid. Christ, what happened?”
“At the funeral?” Jack asked. “I don’t know. I wasn’t there.” He pointed a finger at Hammond. “I hope you cried, though. I hope you turned to Gladys and cursed what a waste it was to lose a great man like me.”
Hammond smiled. He kept his hand on Jack’s shoulder and squeezed hard enough to crush the suit padding. “You son of a bitch. It’s good to see you.”
“You too.”
The waitress poured Jack’s coffee. He ordered a slice of peach pie.
“So what the hell happened over there? How’d you get yourself killed and come back to life?”
Jack lit his cigarette, watched the smoke gather around an overhead lightbulb. He gave Hammond the short version. “The plane I was in got shot down. I took a parachute ride followed by a little tour of Germany on my own. Sometime later, I ran into some Nazis who gave me a place to live for a couple of years. Now I’m back.”
Hammond scratched his balding head. “A little tour? Were you by yourself?”
Jack nodded. “I was the only member of the crew who made it.”
“So you were behind enemy lines? By yourself? For how long?”
“I didn’t count the days. A couple months, anyway.”
“Jesus, Jack. You must’ve seen some shit.”
Jack waved the comment away. He took another drag and felt the burn down deep in his lungs. “What about you? How’s life treating you?”
Hammond smiled. “Good. I got my pension. Little garden in the back. Coffee here in the afternoons to give Gladys a break. It’s the life of Riley.”
The pie came and Jack ate it. While he did, Hammond thumbed Jack’s library book. “I read this,” he said.
“Did you?”
“Sure. You know I always liked Wilma.”
“She was the best.”
“I made her funeral, too. I cried at that one. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house that day.”
Jack lifted his napkin to his mouth and gave his nose a surreptitious wipe while he was there. “Not many people there to cry, as I hear.”
“Oh, there were some. Me. Gladys. Wilma’s twin. A host of hash slingers from the joint she’d been working in at the time.”
“Did my pop make it?”
Hammond looked down at the linoleum counter. He shook his head.
Jack nodded, pushed away his pie plate.
The restaurant fluttered around them.
“What do you think of that story?” Jack asked.
“Which one?”
“Falling face-first in a tub.”
Hammond shook his head. “Hell of a way to go.”
“Fishy, too, huh?”
“How do you mean?”
Jack spun his stool to face Hammond the best he could. “Picture it for me, Dave. You’re five-foot-four in a four-foot-long tub. There’s a wall behind you and a wall next to you. You stand up in the middle. Something makes you slip. And what happens? Somehow, your knees don’t go down. They go up. Somehow your arms don’t go out. Somehow you contort yourself so that you land on your nose, and with enough force to kill you. What does that fall look like to you?”
“Strange things happen, Jack.” Hammond stood from his stool. He dug a handful of change from his pocket and dropped it on the counter next to his half-full coffee cup. “It doesn’t have to add up to anything.”
“It’s suspicious, is all. And you’re telling me you didn’t ask any questions.”
“I asked questions.”
“What did you find out?”
Hammond took a step away from the counter. “I found out not to ask questions, Jack.”
Jack rushed to fish out enough coin to cover the bill. He didn’t want Hammond to slip away this easily. “Hold up, Dave. I’ll walk with you.”
Hammond placed a meaty hand on Jack’s shoulder and pushed him back onto his stool. “Stay and drink your coffee, kid,” Hammond said.
“Are you telling me.… You’re telling me something. What is it? Were you scared off the case?” Jack asked.
“I wasn’t scared. I was just smart enough to know when to back off.” Hammond plopped his fedora onto his head. “Take my advice, kid. Back off.”
“Dave, this is my wife we’re talking about.”
“She’s six feet under. You’re above ground. Let her stay there and you stay where you are.”
“I have to know I’m outmanned before I do that,” Jack said, still sitting.
“You’re outmanned, kid. I’m telling you this because I love you. Play it smart. You didn’t survive months behind enemy lines and years in a POW camp just to get yourself killed over a dodgy story.” Hammond waved goodbye to the waitress. He turned back to Jack. “Ask the twin what happens when you stick your nose in the wrong places.”
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?”
Lottie smiled and tapped the tip of her straight nose. Wilma couldn’t help noticing the perfect manicure on her silver fingernail. Lottie’s eyes drifted to catch those of a passing man. He wore cook’s whites and had his hair parted straight down the middle like George Raft. Nothing about him told Wilma whether he was a patient or an employee. Lottie winked at him. The man breezed by the table and passed Lottie an apple. Lottie said, “Hey, what about one for my pal, here?”
The man smiled at Wilma. He handed her an apple the way a father passes candy to a little girl on Christmas. Wilma thanked him. He gave her a quick smile, raised his eyebrows, and carried on his way.
“You’re a doll,” Lottie told him.
The man waved goodbye with barely a glance back.
“Stick with me, kid,” Lottie said. “You’ll be off that stew and eating real food in no time.”
Wilma liked the sound of that. She kept eating her stew, anyway. She asked Lottie, “How’d you know my sister?”
“From pictures.” Lottie said that she’d learned to fly airplanes when she was a kid. Her father had been a hobbyist, flying the earliest, most rickety planes he could get his hands on. He’d take her to the east side of Pasadena, where other men of leisure tinkered with their machines and their lives. He’d come out of the sky with his plane in flames and in pieces a time or two. This convinced Lottie that the Bells couldn’t die in the air. She flew with her father and, when she got old enough, flew on her own.
Her father had endowed her with a trust fund, but for a laugh, she started flying for the studios. She took cameramen up around Los Angeles on days clear of smog. They’d capture stock footage, shots that could be spliced into dozens of films. For a while, she worked exclusively with one studio hell-bent on making a Western a week. She’d fly cameramen out east by Bishop and catch sweeping shots of the southern Sierras and Death Valley. That’s how she’d met Gertie.
Gertie was hired piecemeal by the studio as the script girl for one of their directors. When Lottie would land on the airstrip in Lone Pine, she’d hunt down Gertie and go for a drink. “Only Gertie knew when to quit. I hate that about her.”
“You and me both, sister,” Wilma said.
“You don’t share Gertie’s restraint?”
Wilma shook her head. Lottie winked at another man. He dropped off a couple of prune sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. Lottie slid them both into her handbag. They also exchanged small slips of paper. Lottie smiled and covered the paper with her hand.
“I thought twins were supposed to be identical. How’d you get to be a souse and not Gertie?”
“I’m the evil twin, I guess.”
Lottie kept the note under her hand. Wilma wondered about it. She’d noticed this note passing at breakfast. The men and women seemed to flirt through these little missives. Wilma wanted in on that, or really in on anything to ward off the boredom.
Lottie asked, “Are you a scribbler like your sister?”
“I used to write a bit.”
“Pictures, too?”
Wilma shook her head. “I used to write for the pulps, under the name William Greene. My husband was a cop. I’d steal his stories and make some things up and sell them for sewing money.”
“Sell them for drinking money is my guess.”
“Can’t put one over on you, Lottie.”
Lottie opened the note. It read, “shee-roo-koo-dee-doo.” Lottie took a fresh piece of paper from a pocket notebook and wrote, “bop-bop-skoo-bee-doo-bop.” She passed it to the next man who walked beside their table. Wilma watched the man cross the dining hall.
&nbs
p; “What’s your husband now, if he isn’t a cop anymore?” Lottie asked.
Wilma shrugged. She wasn’t ready to answer. She watched the man carry Lottie’s note to the north end of the hall and pass it to a dark, broad-shouldered man. Even in the harsh light of the hall, he was painfully handsome. He unfolded the note, mouthed the words, and smiled. Wilma caught Lottie returning the smile.
Wilma said more than asked, “That Negro fellow over there is your beau.”
The smile fled Lottie’s face. Her eyes grew wide.
Wilma answered before Lottie could. “It’s okay with me,” she said. “Can’t any of us start looking down their noses here. I’m just happy to make a friend.”
Lottie rested her silver manicured hand atop Wilma’s.
JACK, 1946
JACK SPENT an hour the next morning trying to read Wilma’s book. It was called The Brain Emporium. It opened with a story about her and Gertie stealing a milkman’s horse. She told the story pretty much as Jack had heard it and as he remembered it. He was mentioned by name as the cop who kept her out of the pokey that night. Gertie was changed to “a friend” and given a new name. From there, Wilma wrote about the news of Jack’s death, her mourning, and her trip to Camarillo. Heavy stuff.
The rest of the book, presumably, was about Wilma’s two months at the nuthouse. Jack would read it later. Maybe. The combination of Wilma’s opening chapters and Jack’s interviews the day before, the neighbors slagging Wilma, the apathy, the abandonment of the woman he loved: it was about all the pain he could take for the time being.
He watched Highland Park stretch and awaken into the day. He contemplated a jacaranda across the street. It had no leaves he could see but exploded in purple flowers. His second cup of coffee turned into his third, then his fourth.
Gertie’s little coupe was parked along the curb in front of his house. He watched her walk up, high heels clomping on the stone path leading up to his porch, her stride purposeful and direct.
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