Secrets of St. Joe, page 17
“When’s your train?”
“I have an open ticket,” the doctor answered. “I’ll figure it out when I get to the station. If you can stop by the Floridan so I can get my bag and then drop me at Union Station, I’d be much obliged.”
“No problem, Doctor,” Wiley said, fishing a cigar from his shirt pocket. “I’m just sorry we didn’t find out more.”
“We found out plenty,” the doctor said. “Maybe too much.”
Chapter 26
With all the traffic, it was a little past noon when Bert Wiley dropped the doctor off at Union Station. As it turned out, there were a number of Atlantic Coast Line trains that would take him back to Chattahoochee, but there were only two Apalachicola Northern passenger trains a day running from Chattahoochee to Port St. Joe, one at 11:00 A.M. and the other at 3:00 P.M. So it was too late for him to get to Chattahoochee to catch either one of those. He was, however, just in time for an express train to Thomasville and then another to Chattahoochee that would get him there by 7:00 that evening.
The doctor rushed down the platform and appeared to be the last one to board the Gulf Coast Special bound for New York City. This train was fast. Once they gained speed, the doctor felt like they were almost flying, ripping past all those little stations they had stopped at on the way down. The doctor had a comfortable window seat all to himself and maybe enough time to finish The Grapes of Wrath.
But something was bothering him besides his visit with Lucky Lucilla’s aunt. He stared out the window, but the train was now moving so fast that he didn’t have time to focus on the passing landscape. Then it hit him: Chattahoochee, home of the Florida State Hospital, from which Lucilla had escaped for the second time only a few days earlier. And his train to Port St. Joe tomorrow didn’t leave until 11:00. Why hadn’t he thought of this before? He could pay a visit to the hospital in the morning before his train left and see what he could find out about Lucky Lucilla from his doctors there.
He finished The Grapes of Wrath a few minutes before the train pulled into the station in Chattahoochee. He was so repulsed by what Lucky Lucilla’s aunt had told him and how the Joads and the other victims of the Depression were treated that he had forgotten all about eating. But now he was hungry again and needed a place to spend the night.
Trouble was, Chattahoochee was such a small town there wasn’t one single hotel there. The station master told him that his only choice was the Azalea Boarding House, a couple of blocks from the depot. Following his directions, the doctor walked over to Azalea Street and found who he assumed were the house’s residents sitting on the front porch in rocking chairs, looking out at the street as if awaiting his arrival.
A tall, stout woman in a long, gingham dress and white apron, somewhat resembling a poor man’s Queen Victoria, opened the front door for him and invited him in. The house smelled like soap and supper.
“Welcome to the Azalea Boarding House,” she said. “How long will you be staying?”
“Just one night,” the doctor answered.
“Okay. Are you hungry?”
“I’m starved.”
“Good, you’re just in time for supper. We hold it every night until the train comes, just in case a traveler like you shows up, so come on in. I’ll show you to your room and where the bathroom is. Then you can wash up and join us in the dining room. Just follow your nose. I’ll be serving it up while you’re washing up.”
His room for the night had a narrow, single bed, a dresser with a bowl and pitcher on it, and a small desk in front of a window that looked out onto the house’s dark backyard. The shared bathroom was at the end of the hall. Everything was modest but neat and clean. The doctor washed up and went down to the dining room.
The Queen Victoria landlady was placing bowls of steaming food on the table as he entered. She motioned for him to sit in one of the empty chairs. Then she sat at the head of the table and looked at the man to her right.
“Reverend Boyd,” she said, “would you say grace, please?”
“Why, of course,” the reverend said and launched into a flowery thanks for everything from the food to the day, his housemates, and his dead wife.
Then the landlady started passing the bowls around. There was crispy fried chicken, mashed potatoes and rich brown gravy, green beans with tomatoes, sliced cucumbers and onions in vinegar, and big hunks of steaming cornbread. One of the men at the table poured himself a glass of sweet tea and passed the pitcher on. As all of this passing was going on, the landlady made introductions.
“This here to my right,” she began, “is Reverend Floyd Boyd. He was pastor of the United Methodist Church here for near forty years. When his wife passed and his children moved to Atlanta and he retired, he moved in here with us, some four years ago now. And next to him is Leonard Shifler. Leonard works for the Apalachicola Northern railroad as a laborer in the yards. When his mama died back in thirty-six, he came to live with us. And then there’s you, sir.”
“Yes, well,” the doctor said. “I’m Van Berber. I’m a doctor who lives in Port St. Joe. I’m returning there from Tampa, where I was visiting a friend. I plan to catch the eleven o’clock train in the morning.”
“Then across from you is Mike Nelson, the one with the messy hair. Mike works as an orderly at the Florida State Hospital. He moved in here two years ago, when he and his wife divorced. And next to Mike is Carl Ostrum. He’s worked at the Gulf station downtown for twenty years and lived here for the last ten, since his parents passed in a car accident. Then to Carl’s right is Alexander Gaeta, who was injured in the Great War. He helps me out around here, cleaning, gardening, and fixing things that need fixing. And then there’s me. I’m Millicent Carson. My husband’s dead and all my children have moved away. I’ve run this place by myself, except for Alexander’s help, for the last twenty-three years now.”
“I’m pleased to meet y’all,” the doctor said, wiping fried chicken grease from his chin. They all nodded and continued eating. There was some other idle conversation as they all ate, most of which the doctor couldn’t follow since he couldn’t hear that well and the talk seemed to revolve around private matters pertaining to the interlacing lives of Mrs. Carson’s longtime guests: who was to bathe when, whose alarm clock was the loudest, who played his radio too late and too loudly, who held a grudge against whom for some long-forgotten slight.
“If you’d just read your Bible for once,” the pastor was saying to the Gulf service station attendant, “you’d know your hollering is all wrong. And be ye kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you,’ the Bible says. So if Mike forgets to clean out the sink after he’s shaved, would it kill you not to scream at him at six o’clock in the morning, for Christ’s sake?”
“Don’t you be quotin’ scripture at me, you jackleg preacher, or I’ll come over there and beat you over the head with your damn holy book!”
“Why, you ignorant grease monkey.… ”
“All right, that’s enough,” the landlady interrupted. “All of you skedaddle now and let me clear the table. I’ll bring you watermelon out on the porch.”
They all did as instructed, and on the porch the doctor pulled a rocking chair next to Mike Nelson, the orderly at the Florida State Hospital with the disorderly brown hair. They were sitting far enough away from the others that no one could hear their conversation. “So how long have you been at the hospital?” the doctor asked.
“Almost seven years now,” he answered. “Care for a smoke?”
“No, thanks. How do you like it?”
“It’s okay. I’m just an orderly, so it’s mostly just cleaning up and doing the stuff the nurses and doctors don’t wanna do.”
“Like?”
“Oh, helping patients who can’t take care of themselves, restraining patients who are violent, just trying to keep everything clean and orderly … Get it? Orderly?”
“I get it,” the doctor laughed. “Ever come across a patient named Lucky Lucilla?”
“Well …”
“It’s okay. Whatever you say, I’ll hold it in confidence.”
“Hmm …,” the orderly said as he blew cigarette smoke from his nostrils and the tree frogs began their evening chorus. The doctor decided not to push it and waited to hear whatever the man wanted to tell him. The landlady brought them both a slice of watermelon and then went back inside.
“There’s nothing better than ice-cold, ripe watermelon,” the doctor said.
“It’s true.”
After they had finished their watermelon, the orderly took their rinds back into the house. The doctor was about to get up and go to his room when the man returned. He again sat in his rocking chair next to the doctor, lit another cigarette, and in a low voice began to speak.
“There are certain things that happen out there.… ”
“At the hospital?”
“Yeah … that I would not like to be quoted on.”
“I understand,” the doctor said. “Whatever you tell me is between you and me. I’m just trying to keep this Lucilla man from hurting anyone else in Port St. Joe. That’s the only reason I’m asking about him.”
“Well, good luck with that, ’cause Lucilla is one deranged son of a bitch. He never hurt me, but he hurt plenty of others. Some seriously. Even killed a man the first time he escaped. Stabbed a nurse this last time.”
“So what did the doctors do about it?”
“Well, that’s what I need you to keep quiet about. Leastwise don’t involve me, ‘cause, as much as I hate it sometimes, I need the job.”
“We never spoke.”
“Well … the doctors … they did about everything, short of killing him, to try to keep him calm.”
“Like what?”
“You sure you wanna hear this?”
“No, but go ahead.”
“Well,” the orderly whispered. “At first they just had us strip him, put him in a straitjacket, and throw him in the hole.”
“The hole?”
“Yeah, a little room with nothin’ in it. Just concrete walls and nothin’ else. They’d tell us to keep him in there for days, weeks at a time. Just take him out and feed him and take him to the bathroom three times a day.”
“And?”
“Well, that didn’t work too good. He’d bang his head against the wall until it was a bloody mess, and then when we brought him something to eat, he’d throw it on the floor and go crazy. So then they tried medicating him.”
“With what?” the doctor asked.
“At first, insulin, enough to produce major convulsions. And then Metrazol, which produced even stronger convulsions. For some patients, these drugs worked, frankly, I think, because they would do almost anything, including being nice, to avoid convulsions, which, to be honest, scare the shit out of me, and I’m not even having them.”
“They still do this then?”
“Yes, especially with the violent patients.”
“And Lucilla was one of these?”
“Oh, yeah, except on him these so-called shock treatments didn’t work. Made him worse, in fact.”
“So?”
“They came up with something else, something experimental, something even worse.”
“What?”
“They’re calling it electroconvulsive shock therapy.”
“What the hell is that?” the doctor asked.
“They strap the patient down and then they hook his head up to a bunch of electrodes and then they shoot him full of electricity. They shock the shit out of him basically. It’s an awful thing to watch.”
“And this is supposed to help the patient?”
“Yeah, that’s what they claim. And, to tell you the truth, sometimes it does. The patient is less violent, easier to control. But for Lucilla it had the opposite effect. He couldn’t take it. It took a bunch of us to restrain him. Once we started to strap him down on that platform, he went crazy. It was the day after he had his last treatment that he checked into the dispensary, stabbed the nurse, and escaped.”
“I see,” the doctor said.
The doctor went back to his little room, took his dose of morphine, and tried to sleep. But it was slow in coming. When he closed his eyes, all his mind seemed to present to him was a chilling image of a boy tied to a platform, helpless, crazed with fear, awaiting his fate.
So it was no surprise, when he finally did go to sleep, that he dreamed of a bloody monster chasing him in the cool night air through the back alleys of Port St. Joe, to the sea, to his death, with nothing but stark fear in his heart. He woke drenched in sweat and wanting badly to be back home, even if it meant that he would probably have to confront the monster face to face in real life.
He had breakfast in the dining room with the other boarders, except for Mike Nelson, who was now nowhere to be seen. Then he walked in the summer sunlight to the Florida State Hospital, which was a large compound of old white houses and new large buildings scattered about a quiet green campus.
A gardener directed him to the main administration building in one of the stately old houses. He told the woman at the reception desk that he was a doctor in Port St. Joe and that he wanted to talk to Anthony Lucilla’s doctor.
The woman, slim and pretty in her starched white nurse’s uniform, asked him to wait while she found the doctor. There were deep brown leather chairs in the waiting area, but the doctor was too agitated to sit. So he paced back and forth in front of the tall windows that looked out on the bucolic grounds.
Soon the woman returned and led him down a long hall to an office at the very back of the house. She introduced him to Dr. H. Mason Smith, who rose slowly from his chair to shake the doctor’s hand.
“How may I help you?” the nervous, middle-aged man asked as he lit his pipe. “Please sit.”
“I have reason to believe that a recent patient of yours, a man named Anthony ‘Lucky’ Lucilla, may have returned to Port St. Joe, where I practice medicine,” Dr. Berber said as he eased into the brown leather chair. “And I was hoping that you might be able give me some insight into his personality that might help me locate him.”
“Well, I wish I could help you, Doctor, but I don’t know where he could be.”
“Could you tell me what his diagnosis was?”
“Well …”
“I assure you that whatever you tell me will remain strictly confidential.”
“Ordinarily no, but since this is such an extraordinary case, I’ll give you all the information I can, not only as a matter of professional courtesy but also as a matter of public safety. This man Lucilla was diagnosed with dementia praecox with serious homicidal tendencies.”
“And your treatment?
”Hmm … well, we tried several things to calm him. First opiates and barbiturates of various types and dosages. Then insulin and Metrazol.”
“To induce convulsions?”
“Why, yes.”
“To what end?”
“To calm the patient and hopefully restore him to a more normal existence. We’re not sure how it works, but it does seem to.”
“With Lucilla?”
“Yes, at first the shock treatments were effective, but as we continued to use them, the patient regressed.”
“What about electroshock treatments?” Dr. Berber asked.
“How do you know about those?”
“I try to keep up.”
“Well, then, you know they’re experimental at this time.”
“My question is,” Dr. Berber asked, “have you been experimenting?”
“I’m afraid that I’m not at liberty to tell you that.”
“I think that answers my question,” Dr. Berber said as he hoisted himself out of the chair. “Thanks for your help, and thanks for allowing Lucilla to escape again.”
Chapter 27
The doctor walked back to the boarding house, thinking about Lucky Lucilla’s troubled life. He was going to retrieve his bag, walk to the station, and return to Port St. Joe to meet his fate at the madman’s hands. Not a very inviting prospect. If he had any sense at all, he would stay right there in Chattahoochee at the Azalea Boarding House and live out his remaining days with Queen Victoria and her sorry subjects. But he didn’t.
Instead he boarded the train to Port St. Joe and watched the world, such as it was, pass by. He dozed and brooded. By the time the train pulled into the Port St. Joe station, he was tired and despondent. And it didn’t help when there was no one to meet him at the station. No one to welcome him home. No one who cared. So, without checking for explosives, he started his car and drove over to the Black Cat Café for dinner. Friday was fish day at the café so he ordered the fried catfish, hushpuppies, and coleslaw and then wolfed it all down so he could get back to his office and Nadyne.
She met him at the door.
“Thank God, you’re back,” she said.
“Why? What’s going on?”
“You name it. Everything went fine yesterday, but today all hell’s broken loose.”
“What?”
“Well, I don’t know where to start. About an hour ago Jewel’s daddy and her new husband came by looking for you because Jewel and Marcus have gone missing.”
“What?”
The doctor suddenly felt sick. The greasy catfish and hushpuppies seemed to settle into the bottom of his stomach with a ferocious vengeance. He wanted to run to the toilet and vomit, but Nadyne was explaining.
“They said Jewel and Marcus went out to do some shopping first thing this morning but haven’t come back. They thought maybe they had come to see you.”
“What time was this?”
“Like I said, about an hour ago … that would make it about one o’clock.”
“So they’ve been gone for about three or four hours?”
“I guess,” Nadyne answered.
“Well,” the doctor said, with a slight tinge of relief, “that’s not that bad. They could have just taken a drive, or Jewel could have got to talking with someone and lost track of time.”
“I hope so, but you better drop by and see if they’ve found them yet when you’re finished delivering Katie Mulligan’s baby. She just called and said her water broke and the contractions are coming fast and furious. Since this is her third, I told her to come here right away instead of trying to make it to the hospital in Panama City.”
