Dead Extra. Sean Carswell

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