City of the Opium Serpent (all three parts)

City of the Opium Serpent
((1926-27) (the Great Flood of ’26))


Advance: The nation’s newspapers read: “People died from Minnesota and Illinois in the north to the Gulf of Mexico in the south. 27,000 square miles were flooded. From early September, 1926, through May, 1927; over a million people were victims of the tragedy. 650,000-700,000 people were displaced for many months, some for a full year. Over 300,000 of them were put up in tent encampments.” (And by the end of the flood, 1000-people would have died from the food.)


Part One
The Great Flood of ‘26


† Before he killed…, he licked butter off his fingers.

There was in progress a great flood, along the Mississippi (St. Paul, Minnesota), it had persisted from autumn 1926 (rain), and the winter of 1927 (snow), and its high point was now, in the month of April, 1927. It was the demon of all floods; it went from St. Paul, Minnesota, down to St. Louis, and onto New Orleans, and into the Gulf of Mexico (and soaked thirteen states in all). As one might expect, there were many causalities, and damage was on a paramount scale, along with social order being unmanageable, and the political scene, or issues unable to deal with this scope of disaster, and the consequences would be weighed and balanced way into the future. But at present the levees up and down the Mississippi, were mostly being covered over with water, and on the upper levee in St. Paul, there were five-hundred residences that lived on the levee underneath The High Bridge, as this mounting disaster was at hand. At one point, the Mississippi River was sixty-miles wide, wider than the widest part of the Amazon. Up and down the river, some 6000-boats and men were employed to assist in rescuing procedures; but in a little room, in the police station near Jackson and 10th Street sat the Captain of the Police, Captain Roger Schultz, whom this story is really about—he sat there, leaning back, a spittoon to his left side, he chewed tobacco, he was sixty-years old. As I was saying, or about to say, he chewed and drank, among other things, and right now he was tired, and leaned back to rest from the impeding flood waters, impeding I say, since the sandbags were holding some of the water back at present, yet it was an exacting flood.
Nonetheless, the waters were over the pier, the levee was under several feet of water some houses floating out into the center part of the river, others breaking up, and were boards floating down the river, and the river was rising to street level, up towards West Seventh Street, and filling the sewer system, and starting to drawn the downtown area—slowly. The stores were all closing: the Emporium, the Golden Rule, Woolworths, Grants, and the First National Bank. On East Seventh Street, the furniture stores were putting up their sofas on stilts, in fear the damp would ruin them, and in fear the dam of sandbags, would break and they’d have to hightail it out of there and not have a chance to secure their property.
Eighty percent of the folks on the levee were unaccounted for at this time: most of the folks who live on the levee were immigrants: Irish, Italian, some Germans and Polish, for the most part, the lower class of the city you might add.
The Captain had arranged one-hundred volunteers to sandbag the streets leading up to West Seventh Street and along West Seventh Street also; thus, stopping a high percentage of the water that would eventually, leak, or roll down hill to the inner city, but it wasn’t working too well.
Hundreds of bystanders were watching the rising river, the sandbaggers: mostly, old folks, children, dogs, women, and so forth.
Floods along the Mississippi were not uncommon, but this one was as if Noah himself was coming up out of the dead, like a ghost, up river out of deluge, 5000-years late, to preach the word of God. If anything, it made a lot of folks pray that never did before, it also made the church bells ring like they never did before (and all the churches were filled up with folks the clergy never saw before), and it was going to make the funeral parlors rich. God has His funny ways, that is for sure, for He got everyone’s attention, those who thought who needs God in the good times, thus, I think he took them away for a spell.



Part Two
Crisis and Emergency


Emergency procedures in the city were activated, as this crisis continued from day to day. The crowds gathered around the sandbagging and the cliffs overlooking the Mississippi, looking down upon the river from the upper cliffs that is, they all could see things were not getting better, that they would get worse first, before better, and hopefully, with prayer and wit and wisdom, they could ride out the flood, yet before it ended, there would be one-thousand dead.
Many of inner city folks, moved north, all the way towards Jim Hills Farm, a good seven miles outside of the inner city, some made tents, others stayed at the houses of relatives, and still others slept in barns and so forth. These were trying times, and one needed to be humble, if not creative, for some even slept onto of their roofs, with canvas over them, in fear their lightly built homes of wood and partly stone would crumble if and when the food might rich them.
In addition, the hospitals were becoming filled with patients; St. Joseph’s in the downtown area, and Anchor Hospital, the city’s main hospital, a little ways out of the downtown area. …

† And before he killed…he took a half gram of opium in hand, twice he repeated this, and licked butter off, his fingers.

Doctor Patricia Sowell, was in the police station, walking about the dead bodies being held in what was normally the garage area, connected onto the police station. The Captain knew the Doctor, and asked her what he was up to? The bodies were stacked on pallets, the good doctor could smell opium, smoke, accelerated, that is it permeated the area.
The Captained sensed the doctors interference was dangerous, and could be taxing, he was checking the bodies out pretty good, and objected, according to his face, how they were being stacked, there just had been sixty-people in the chilled large garage.
—The Doctor looked at the corpuses, it looked to him like a house of wax, the bodies wee full of bugs, looked like a mass of specks, specks of cinnamon, as one lays on top of the other, the bugs eating into the flesh, crowing into all the holes of the body . She was a young doctor, perhaps 35-years old. She noticed little bits of dried blood here and there on the faces of the dead, white sheets covered some of their body, soaked into the flesh like red kisses in the dark. On one of the pallets, the bodies were piled as high as haystacks. The arms and legs of the bodies were like cement, stiff as a yardstick, (paralysis). Some looked like frozen carp, chopped up with an ax.

“I smell opium, Captain, we could use some at the hospital, and we are completely out?”
It was better she felt to deal with the devil for the drugs to help the people that needed help, than to get involved in a long fight with what is right and wrong. The Captain, looking at her as if he was put into a corner, gave him enough to feed twenty people with the proper dosage for a few days, and then bid her farewell.




Part Three
The Opium


† Before he killed…he had coffee with his second dose of opium, and licked his fingers clean of butter.

The Doctor left, after she had made her completed rounds at Anchor Hospital, drove her Model T Ford to the police station. It was just before dusk. She had walked up a flights of stairs, she figured the Captain would be in his office still working, and perhaps she could hit him up for some more of his opium, the hospital was completely out again. She noticed, as she came towards his office door, through the adjacent window, he was eating his dinner. He had stewed fruit, it looked like, wheat bread, and it was highly buttered, he had a young Negro boy sitting in the corner with a locked box, under his chair, his feet dangled over the chair, didn’t touch the floor, but it seemed he was ready if need be to jump off the chair, unlock the large square box and do what he was suppose to do; that is where he kept his opium, she concluded. The boy could not have been over ten or eleven years old.
Everyone knew, but her I suppose, the old Captain, was using the opium for a third of his life, it was an open situation, but closed to talk about. Where he got it, is another question, and another story.
The boy measured the dosage for the Captain, and gave it to him, it was always the same (the boy had worked for him, going on several months now, he changed them ever so often), he never increased it or decreased it, nor did he mix (with alcohol) or for that matter, use other substances, such as morphine, a lesser evil, as a habit, or exchange. I suppose he did this to maintain some character, and his position.
“I see everyone has stopped with the sandbagging,” mentioned the Doctor, as she opened up his door, now standing in front of him, he is behind his desk, the boy has just given him another dosage, the Captain droopy eyed, more so than usual, looks at the doctor, shows a flat expression, of exasperation. She now looks towards the boy. He is smiling, for some odd reason, or perhaps he smiles a lot, the doctor concludes after a moment’s time of reflection, yet it is a weird smile.
“Weren’t you here a while ago,” asks the Captain, licking his fingers, barely licking his fingers.
He washes down a tablet with milk.
“How many of those have you had?” asked the Doctor.
“Two, as usually,” he looks towards the boy, “Right—boy?” he asks, a rhetorical question, because that is what he always has, and he turns back to Dr. Sowell. “Two doctor, just two, why do you ask, and matter-of-fact, what do you want, as if I don’t know?” (She smiles at that remark.)
You can see twilight seeping through the outside window, day is being covered up with night, and the Captain lights a kerosene lamp, barely lights it, and almost falls on top of it. He can now feel the opium flushed through his veins, like a race horse, through his neck, and his legs, and mind; his mind becomes foggy, dreamy.
“Are you here for something Doctor?” he asks again, “or do you simply want an update on the dead bodies we have in the garage?” (Ha ha, he laughs, because he knows she wants some opium.)
He now hastily sucks the butter off his fingers, looks at the boy, the black boy, he is smiling, he drinks a sip from his coffee cup, looks at the boy again, squints his eyes, says, “How many times did I ask for my second dose?”
The boy smiles, “Six, sir.”
“And did you give me a dosage, tablet each time I asked?” questioned the Captain.
“Yes sir, I did as you asked,” said the boy, with a smirk.
The boy starts to laugh, laugh so hard he has to hold his belly—actually pees in his pants in the process of laughing, he laughs so hard, it is like a donkey, as the Captain falls back into his chair—and I mean falls back. The Doctor dumfounded, looks at each of them, seriously looks, but is almost paralyzed, unknowing for the moment what to do, or say. The Captain had now figured it out, he was next to dead, he could hardly see, he pulls out of his drawer a 45-Webley Revolver, it has shells in it already, and he aims it at the boy, and licks the butter off his finger, says “And I passed you on your Boy Scout test…!” and pulls the hammer back, and the bullet is released from the chamber of the gun, smoke from its tip seep out of it, and the boy flies backward into his chair, dead, as the Captain also falls over his desk, dead; and the doctor, just shakes her head, as if to say, ‘what just took place here,’ and after a minute, getting her composure back, not wanting to be involved with the mess, simply takes the opium box, and leaves the scene, as she came, and no one was the wiser, and the hospital had enough opium for the next two weeks. And she never returned to that police station, never—ever, not even for the Boy Scouts.


Written in the afternoon at Starbucks, in Lima, Peru, 2-18-2007