Sandy Gingras - Lola Polenta 01 - Swamped

by Sandy Gingras

  “After that, people hired Ernie to look after their homes. He’d go by every day or so, open up, make sure everything was okay. Sometimes turn the water on for them when they were coming back down. That kind of thing.”

  “He had a lot of access to people’s lives,” I say. “Didn’t he?”

  It’s like there’s a war going on inside of my stomach right now. Excitement is churning around with fear. The idea of being an investigator is tumbling around with my rational mind and my father’s voice and the detective’s warnings. It’s a wrestling match between my new self and my old. One of them, I know, is going to get pinned.

  We’re walking along a chain link fence that encompasses Alligator Estates. Beyond it are mown fields and a grid of empty streets. There are stop signs at every corner, street signs on every street, but there’s only one lonely stucco house in the middle of it all. It’s pink and there’s a tricycle and a plastic slide in the backyard and an old van in the driveway. “What’s all this?” I ask.

  “It’s a lawsuit. The Tidewater Dam project in the 70’s created hundreds and hundreds of acres of swampland where it was supposed to create a lake. The Army Corps of Engineers thought the water would stay in a contained area, but the area never seemed to fill. It just made a big swamp and then went underground and sprawled out and made its own rules. In this development, some of the lots and a few of the houses are actually underwater. There’s a street here that dead-ends in a pond. This development was one of the worst casualties of that project, but even now there are sink holes mysteriously appearing in people’s backyards in Alligator Estates, and flooding coming out of storm drains on Rt. 41, and swamps taking over orange groves down in Mystic Shores. This is a development that was all sold out, and was just starting to build. Now it’s stalled out in the courts. If you come by here at 7 p.m., all the street lights still click on up and down the empty streets. It’s eerie.”

  “I think that swamp next to my house is growing,” I tell him. “This morning walking Dreamer the ground seemed squelchier than yesterday.”

  Joe is silent.

  “I mean it. I swear my trailer is more tippy today than when I first went in it.”

  “Hmm,” he says.

  “I know I’m sinking into that swamp,” I say. “I’m going to have to buy one of those levels to keep track of things.”

  “It’s a good tool to have,” he says.

  “What if it just swallows me up?” I say.

  He doesn’t say a word.

  I take a deep breath. Okay, maybe I’m over-reacting.

  Chapter 8

  When I get to my father’s office, nobody is there except Squirt. “Morning Squirt,” I say brightly. That’s a hard name to say. Especially because she’s so large. She’s tall and heavy too, and she wears shoulder pads under her suit, so her body seems like a square. Her hair is a platinum helmet of tightly permed curls. She looks up at me like a guard dog, like a big, vicious badly-named guard dog.

  “Almost afternoon,” she replies.

  It’s 11:30. I have to give her points for accuracy. “Murder at my new home,” I tell her. The word “home” is almost as odd to say as “murder.”

  “I heard,” she says.

  The business is in a strip mall on Rt. 10. My father gave me a little tour yesterday. My uncle and my father both have their own offices on either side of the waiting room.

  Squirt points to a tray on the side of her desk. “Your uncle left some work for you to do.” I reach over and grab two folders. I look around for a place to sit down. There’s nowhere. Squirt sits at her desk surrounded by green file cabinets. Plus, there are stacks of papers and machines all around her. She is a fortress. There’s no sharing a desk with Squirt, that’s for sure. There are four beige nubby chairs lined up against one wall of the waiting area. I could go sit there, but this seems like a depressing idea. I tuck the folders crisply under my arm.

  I stand awkwardly in the silence. It’s like when you played musical chairs as a kid and everyone sat down and you were left just standing there.

  “Where’s the closest Staples?” I ask her.

  She grudgingly admits that it’s right down the road. “Could you pick us up some tootsie rolls when you go?” she asks pointing to the almost empty glass jar of candy on her desk. Is it my imagination that she emphasizes the word “go?”

  “Sure,” I say.

  I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror behind Squirt. My hair has been growing out for months into some shaggy irregular sticky-out thing. My blonde streaks are blonde half-streaks. I’ve lost weight. I’m a little thing to begin with, with my mother’s small frame and my father’s family’s Italian curves, thick hair and dark eyes. I hold one straggly clump of my hair straight up in the air and assess my appearance. “I look like white trash,” I tell the mirror.

  I think I see Squirt nod.

  My uncle, Paulie, comes in just then. He gives me a hug. “How’s my honey?” He got all the warmth in the family. He looks a lot like my father, but there’s something crooked about his shoulders and the way he walks kind of penguin-ish, wearing down the insides of his shoes, that makes you warm up to him right away.

  “I need an overhaul,” I tell him.

  “Don’t we all,” he says. “Listen.” He beckons me down a hallway behind Squirt. I thought it was just a back exit, but there’s a little room off of it. It’s being used now as a supply closet and storage area. “I’m going to make some room in here for you. I’ve got a table in my garage that would work fine for a desk and you can sit right here.” He points to a corner that is now piled with boxes of files. “We need to clean this out anyway,” he says. “What do you think?”

  “I was thinking I could work from home,” I say.

  “We need more of the female dimension around here. Right, Squirt?” he yells toward her.

  She is typing earnestly in the other room.

  “Is that what my father thinks?” I ask.

  “He worries about you. That’s all.” He elbows me. “C’mon now, you show him what you got.”

  “I’m only on Lesson Two of the Online Detective Training Institute,” I tell him.

  “You gotta start somewhere,” he says. He always did believe in me.

  I say, “You have to let me do all this. How ’bout I come by later and pick up the table, and I’ll set it all up. I’ll make a list for Staples…”

  “Take it easy there, buckaroo. You don’t have to conquer the world yourself. I’ll get the storage people to come pick up the files, and I’ll get Tweenie’s sons to bring over the desk. You can take over from there.”

  I nod.

  “Come over for dinner tonight,” he says. “Tweenie would love to have you.” Tweenie is his second wife. “Get out of Murder Acres or wherever you’ve parked yourself.”

  Chapter 9

  The main streets of downtown Ft. Palms are palm-lined. The buildings are a bit shoddy and mixed up. Old stucco buildings squat alongside of the strip malls and fast food drive-throughs. Still, there’s a certain elegance to the place. Maybe it’s the palm trees that are waving gently in the breeze like hula girls.

  I go to Staples.

  The midday sun is glaring when I come out. The air in the parking lot smells like humidity and exhaust fumes and hibiscus flowers and lizards—that weird Florida mix. I slide into my car and crank up the air conditioning and wait until the air is breathable. I watch a couple cars go by Scibbetta’s Butcher Shop across the street.

  Cars are so sealed in and meditative. I know my marriage is over. I know I never really loved Ed. Still, there are powerful things built out of routine and habit and civility and who pays the bills and who does the dishes. It’s mortar. It’s cement. I start to feel heavy just thinking about it.

  I knew what I was getting into when I married him though. I CHOSE it. Not loving someone I was marrying seemed like a good idea at the time. It seemed kind of freeing actually.

  When I met Ed, my fiancé, Johnny, had just
left me at the altar. So I was gun-shy. To say the least. I was terrified, wounded, lost.

  I considered my relationship with Ed like an investment in a CD: Locked-in, safe, low interest rate. Marrying him, I thought I could turn my heart into one of those quiet organs, like a liver, for example, or a kidney. You can go through life and never hear a peep out of them. They don’t RUN your life. You are in charge. Somehow I thought the heart thing would work the same way.

  But it didn’t.

  When I get back to the office, I give the half melted Tootsie Rolls to Squirt. She almost smiles at me.

  My father is in, so I stop in his open doorway.

  He’s a short-ish, heavy-set, shiny-headed bald guy who just turned sixty. He looks the same to me as he always did. He’s the kind of shape the doctors warn you not to be—all his weight in his middle. After his heart attack, he didn’t take up exercising, didn’t change his diet. He just decided to take his chances. He pops an occasional digitalis pill, but that’s the extent of his health-consciousness.

  His office looks chaotic. He’s got an old wooden desk and piles here and there and everywhere. My mother always said that he could never let go of anything.

  On a corkboard behind his desk, he has a bunch of curling photos tacked up. They’re all cases that are unsolved back from when he was a cop. My father started this corkboard when I was a little girl. It haunted him, the missing kids, the murdered people, the victims. He never gave up on a case.

  There are new faces on it now tacked over the old ones.

  I’m surprised to see it. “I remember that,” I say pointing. There are people on his corkboard from twenty years ago, faces I even recall from my childhood. I used to look at these pictures all the time. He kept them in his office at home.

  “My failures,” he says glancing back. “They’re always watching me.”

  He always was tough on himself.

  He was also so tough on me too that I didn’t have much empathy as a kid. But now that I look at the corkboard, it seems so sad. Where other people have family photos on their wall, my father has strangers.

  “I need to get a Florida P.I. license,” I tell him.

  He looks at me over his half glasses perched on his nose. He’s got a round cherubic face, the kind of face that fools people into thinking he’s a softie. When I think of my father, I always think of that kind of upholstery where the mushy stuff is sewn in so tightly that the furniture ends up feeling like a rock.

  “He tells me, “You have to pass a written test. It’s standard stuff: Wiretap questions, rules of evidence gathering, what caliber gun you can carry with a permit… things like that. Do you have a gun?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever shot one?”

  “No,” I answered. I never even held one, but I don’t tell him that.

  My father stares at me.

  “I am quite good with pepper spray,” I say. Once I sprayed my car lock with it when it froze up in a blizzard. It worked too. But I’m not about to share my war stories. “I’d just like to do investigations that involve talking and walking around and looking at stuff,” I tell him.

  My father sighs. “Paulie’s given you a couple simple cases to work on. Perhaps you can put your walking around and talking skills to the test on them.” He pushes back from his desk. “Then you’ll see how boring being a P.I. really is. It isn’t some glamorous job, you know.” He told me this a hundred times already.

  “After you get a taste of things, you’ll go back to your REAL job,” he says nodding.

  I don’t say anything. Which is a miracle for me.

  He says, “Write your hours down on our time sheets. Submit them on Friday to Squirt. Get copies of our fee sheet and our contract from Squirt too.”

  If anyone hires you for some reason, they hire the whole firm.” He raises his eyebrows. “Not that you and your pepper spray will not be impressive enough,” he adds.

  “Some guy wants to hire me to help clear his name in Ernie’s murder,” I say.

  My father’s gets this frosty look on his face. “Leave it alone. You’re in it deep enough. And you don’t know anything about murder.”

  Hmpf, I think. I say, “I may need a lawyer.”

  “Why are you always so…?” He stops.

  He opens his top drawer and hands me a card. I walk over to his desk. I have to skirt a chair piled with files. And there’s a stack of paperbacks on the floor. My father always was a reader—biographies, history.

  “She’s expensive, but she’s good,” he tells me. “I have to leave town for a couple days.” He says it like it’s no big deal, but I can see worry in the set of his mouth. Between his lips is a hard long line.

  “You’re leaving?”

  “I have a job in Jacksonville,” he says. “Squirt will be around…”

  Squirt? “I doubt Squirt wants to help me,” I say.

  My father puts his reading glasses on and looks at a pile of paper on his desk. That seems to be the extent of the sharing.

  I go back out to the waiting room. “I heard him,” Squirt says not looking up from the computer screen. “Wait one sec.” She finishes and draws a sheet from a file drawer. “Here, make a copy of this. It’s the guidelines for licensure.”

  I glance briefly at it. It looks like I’ll have to pay a bunch of fees and study from some booklet and pass the nasty test. “Where do I go for all this?”

  She writes down some directions. My father strides past us and out the door with an overnight bag, “Lola… Squirt…” He half waves.

  “He’s just going to throw me in and watch me sink,” I say to his back.

  Squirt says, “If you let him.”

  “He’s always been hard.”

  “He’s a good man.”

  We look at each other. We seem to be talking about different people.

  She leans toward me. “My real name is Diamond,” she says.

  “Is it?” I ask politely.

  “My mother named me that. She said I was a ‘diamond in the rough.’ My father called me Squirt from the day I was born. It was a real tug of war over what kind of person I would become.”

  There’s something a little odd about this, but I don’t say anything. I turn back to the copy machine.

  “Want me to do your cards?” Squirt asks.

  “Excuse me?” I say pretending to be deafened by the copier.

  “Your cards.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  She opens her desk drawer and right next to her box of paper clips is a square deck of Tarot cards in a red box. She fans them out before me. She has some big rings on her fingers. One is like a World Series ring—a stadium of gold with a big gem like a giant meteor embedded in the stadium, like a disaster film—the ruby that crushed Yankee Stadium.

  “I’m taking a night course at the adult school,” Squirt says.

  “Really.”

  “I need to practice,” she says. “Pick a card, any card.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to, you know, shuffle and think about something that’s bothering you and cut with your left hand and all that?” I did this once at a Psychic Fair and now I think I’m a pro.

  “Pick a card.” Squirt glares at me.

  “All right already.”

  I sit on the corner of her desk and pluck. It’s the 8 of cups. It’s a woman spinning upside down through darkness.

  Squirt says, “That doesn’t look good.”

  “Is that what they taught you to say in the adult school?”

  She straightens her shoulders.

  “It looks like Dorothy in the tornado in the Wizard of Oz,” I say. I’ve got Wizard of Oz on the brain.

  She looks at the card again. “There’s no place like home.”

  She takes back the card from my limp hand, slides it back into the deck, crisply chunks the deck against the desk and puts it all away. Game over. She looks at me. Even she wants me to go back to New Jersey.

  “You’re supposed to do a whol
e thingy,” I tell her, “a spread thingy.”

  “We only had two classes so far,” she says.

  “Uh huh,” I say. I really don’t know what to make of her. I really don’t.

  Chapter 10

  I start stacking all the files in the back room in the hallway outside the storeroom so they can be carted away. I organize all the supplies in the closet. Then I clean the empty room. I don’t think about what I’m doing or why I’m doing it, I just do it. I’m living in the now. Manual labor is so good like that. Maybe I should become a professional closet organizer!

  I get my new file cabinet and my new printer from my car, and take them out of their crisp new boxes. I sit on my file cabinet and open a file that my uncle gave me. It’s a woman who suspects her husband is cheating on her. There’s a sticky note on it from my uncle. It says, “Ask Squirt what to do.”

  I’m not asking Squirt for anything. There’s no place like home, my ass. She didn’t live in my home.

  I get claustrophobic just thinking about it.

  When I first got married to Ed, I thought his hobby of collecting marbles was kind of cute and childlike-quirky. Ed looked a lot like George Clooney so I was eager to make allowances. At first, we had glasses filled with marbles and wooden bowls displaying them on the coffee table. But it turned into an obsession. Soon, we had fish tanks filled with them all over the house. Ed got so that he spent hours on Ebay every night poring over pictures and bidding enormous sums on tiny marbles. Then he started collecting rubber band balls, then fishing sinkers, then Scooby Doo paraphernalia. It was when he showed me his album displaying his collection of the ID stickers that they put on fruit a couple months ago that I started thinking about leaving. By then, there was almost no room in the house for me anyway. I’d been buried years ago by the collections.

  I call up the woman from the file that Paulie gave me. She wants to meet with me in my office as soon as possible. I make an appointment with her for tomorrow morning bright and early. My stomach quakes. I don’t even have a real office yet. “It’ll just be a conversation,” I tell myself. Fake strong, I tell myself. I straighten up my shoulders. I’m good at being determined, although some might call it stubbornness. It’s the one quality I can count on in myself.