Sandy Gingras - Lola Polenta 01 - Swamped

by Sandy Gingras

  “Bob hated me. He always pecked at me. Then he’d look away and pretend he didn’t do it. He would even try to attack me through Ed’s shirt. His little beak would come right through the fabric and sometimes he’d get stuck that way. Bob should have been in the Hitchcock movie; he would have fit right in.”

  The detective is leaning forward listening to me. I don’t know where I’m going with this, but I just keep on. That’s the trouble with me. Then I end up somewhere, and I look around, and I realize I’m lost.

  “Bob used to free-fly around Ed’s house; he’d only go into this cage at night. One day, after a couple months of dating, I left a glass of water in the sink at Ed’s house and went off to work. Bob evidently tried to drink out of it, fell in, got stuck, head down, legs up, and drowned.

  “Ed never forgave me.

  “He had Bob stuffed. Bob was up on the mantle wired onto a plastic nest. His beady little eyes used to follow me around.

  “Every time we had a fight, Ed would look toward the fireplace, then he’d turn back sadly to me, as if I drowned his best buddy, the only one who understood him in the world, on purpose, and he was crushed that all he was left with in life was me—a mere human.”

  Sometimes, you’re in a room with one person, but you feel like there’s a crowd of people in the room. This is one of those moments. The picture of the detective’s family feels alive. The bird knocking at the window. Ed. They all seem like they want to come in, sit with us.

  I look at the detective. My phone chirps with a text message. I forgot to turn it off when I came in. “I’m sorry,” I tell him and reach in my bag to get it to shut it off. There’s a name on the screen. Johnny. I don’t know why I never took his name off my phone.

  Something must happen to my face, because the detective says, “Is everything all right?”

  “Just a ghost from my past,” I tell him. I throw the phone back into my bag. My heart is going a million miles an hour in spite of myself. It’s one of those kind of things where you don’t know what it is you’re feeling—anxiety, hate, fear, love?

  I look at the detective. He’s a looming presence behind the desk. I’m aware of his lime scent. His eyes look like they’re apologizing for something. He slams one hand down on his desk. “I warned you,” he says. “That’s all I can do. Stay out of trouble.”

  I get up.

  “One more piece of evidence, and I’m going to have to arrest you.”

  I walk out. I can feel his eyes all over me.

  When I get in my car, I look at my phone. “I’ll always love you,” the message says.

  I press the ERASE button. Erase is a great concept. If only it worked.

  Chapter 23

  I go to check on Marie. Joe is already there standing on her deck getting ready to knock. “Do you want to go to Coconuts with me tonight?” Joe asks me.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a bar that Ernie used to go to. Maybe he had some friends there who would know something…”

  “The detective called me into the station today,” I tell him. “He told me to stay out of trouble. I don’t think we should be involved anymore.”

  “I like to be involved.”

  “But…”

  “I need to be involved,” he says firmly. He looks around, “I’m dying here.” It’s another Florida evening, the puffy clouds sit neatly in the indigo sky; the hibiscus flowers are yawning in the thick air; the trailers are gleaming in their rectangular yards.

  We stand in the awkward sunshine, the palm trees full of singing birds. Loneliness is such a stupid and powerful thing. Here is the world, so chock-a-block full, and here we both are feeling empty.

  Marie comes out of her trailer. “I wanted to tell you all, the funeral is still going to be tomorrow at 2:00.”

  “Can I do something to help?” Joe asks.

  “You could help set up the chairs and tables. Help bring the punch bowl over, and I have some pretty tablecloths. Subway said that they’d provide the tablecloths too, everything from soup to nuts! But I have some checkered ones that I think would go nicer. I used them at the Easter Ball last year, and everyone loved them. They’re happy colors.”

  Joe and I nod at her. Joe says, “I’ll cut some flowers from my yard.”

  “That will be beautiful,” Marie says.

  “You should rest,” Joe tells her.

  “I won’t be able to rest, until this is done,” she says.

  Done, I think, is another illusion. You have to close the door—have a funeral; file for divorce; solve a case… whatever. But I don’t believe in closure anymore. Most things linger on and on.

  “Marie, where did Ernie do his wood work?” I say.

  “Come on,” Marie says. She walks gingerly with her arms out for balance and leads us behind her aluminum storage shed to a little area attached to it, with an awning roof and a workbench and stool. It’s semi-enclosed, and there are some shelves with half-finished carvings lined up on them, and cuts of wood neatly sorted into cubbies. Little jars of paint sit on one shelf, and, next to it, a Wells Fargo Bank coffee mug holds a spray of paintbrushes. An old beige transistor radio perches on the workbench, its antennae bent into a fanciful curlicue. “He kept all his tools in the shed, out of the weather, but he worked back here. He loved it here.”

  “Can I look around?” I ask her.

  “I’m going to go sit down on the lanai for a bit. This sun is still strong,” she says.

  Joe helps her in, then comes back to join me.

  I click on the radio. It’s tuned to a talk radio station. Rush Limbaugh is yelling at someone. “Soothing,” Joe says.

  “It sets a nice tone for creativity. You gotta admire how he did this,” I say, looking systematically through each cubby. I love cubbies.

  There isn’t any ordinary mish-mash, any stuff just loitering without a place. It’s all regimented. There’s a stern feel to the place. Yet the few carvings that he was working on, although stiff-figured, are expressive. I hold up a little carved dog. It’s nothing but a rectangle with peg legs and a box head. But somehow the eyes look alive, like there’s a real animal hiding inside of the wooden one.

  “What are we looking for?” Joe asks.

  “Maybe what the murderer was looking for,” I answer.

  “What’s with the hearts?” Joe says. There’s a whole cubby full of all sized hearts cut out and some painted. They’re all a little crooked. The left side is larger than the right. Dreamer snuffles her nose into the cubby. “The box of crooked hearts,” Joe tells her.

  “The box of angry hearts,” I say. Rush Limbaugh is on a tirade about Al Gore and the idea of man-made global warming, upsetting the poor woman who called him up to ask him why he thought it was 85 degrees in Michigan last October. “The weather changes,” he yells. “It’s not because of anything you or I do!” I click him off.

  We look inside the shed too, but there’s nothing there. We knock on Marie’s lanai screen door when we’re done.

  “What’s with these?” Joe asks, putting a carved heart on the table.

  “Oh, Ernie put a heart on everything he made. He thought it was funny,” Marie says. “It was like his signature. He always painted a heart on something or put one of those on,” she points to the cutout heart.

  “Funny?” I ask.

  “He thought it was funny how much people loved that. ‘Look,’ he’d say, ‘another bleeding heart liberal.’”

  “It was political?” Joe asks.

  “Not really,” Marie says. “Ernie didn’t take sides. He thought the country was weak. He thought people were weak. He kind of looked down on everyone who gave in to their emotions.”

  “Who gave in to their hearts?” I say.

  She nods. “A lot of his little doors had hearts on them. The door to people’s hearts,” he liked to call them.

  Maybe the door to people’s wallets too, I think.

  Chapter 24

  When I get home, I see George putting away the m
ower in the shed where Ernie was killed. I wait, and he locks the door behind him and catches up with me, keys jingling around his waist as he runs.

  “How was your first day on the job?” I ask.

  “I mowed everything,” he says happily. “Tomorrow I learn how to clean the pool. Thanks,” he adds, “Just getting out of the house…”

  I nod.

  We stand there awkwardly. I’m picturing William and George and Mean Muumuu all squished into that sparkling clean little trailer. It makes my shoulders hunch up. “We used to be normal,” he tells me as if in explanation. “When my father died, my mother kind of went off the deep end. She got real depressed. She got on medication, but it didn’t help much. She cried all the time, and if I didn’t go over there, she wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t get out of bed.”

  I don’t know why he’s telling me all this. It happens to me a lot. I must look like a big empty basin that people want to pour out their troubles in.

  “Then she started drinking, going out to bars.… It was weird, I mean, my mother was never like that. Anyway, it turned into a full time job—watching my mother. My marriage went right down the tubes. I moved in with her just to keep an eye on her. Then, just when I thought it couldn’t get worse, my mother joined this church: The Church of the Holy Innocents. At first I thought it was great, because she stopped drinking, started going to church and cleaning up her act. Then she started going every day, two times a day. One day, she comes home with this guy, William. She says she got married to him that day. She says it was a church ceremony with only church members; that’s the way they do things. I say, what kind of a church asks you to keep your own family out? I didn’t even know that she was DATING, if you can call it that.

  “William is one of the church fathers. His job is to start up a new branch of the church down here. So they sold the house and moved down here. I helped them move, then I stayed. I’m afraid to leave her, to tell you the truth. It’s a weird religion. It’s very rigid. William is in charge of the house and home, and my mother is like his slave. She’s really quiet most of the time, but sometimes I actually hear her say, ‘Yes, sir.’ She gained fifty pounds since she married him. He doesn’t want me to be here, and, believe me, I don’t want to be here, but I feel like maybe my mother will die if I leave. Not that I’m doing any good being here, but I feel like I can’t abandon her.

  “Every day she asks me, ‘When are you moving out and going back to Debbie?’ That’s my wife. I think he makes her ask. I wouldn’t be surprised if one day he just changes the locks and I can’t get in. When I get her alone, which is almost never, and ask her how she is or if she’s happy, she says, ‘Please don’t make trouble.’”

  I shake my head.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t burden you with this, but I don’t know what to do. Maybe I could hire you to do something?”

  “What kind of something?”

  “Check William out, check out the church… I don’t know… something.”.

  “You might want to hire a real P.I.” I tell him.

  “I like you,” he says.

  “That’s sweet of you, but I have no experience.”

  “I’ll help you,” he says.

  “Oh, for goodness sakes,” I say. “Everyone wants to be a P.I. now.”

  “I watch TV,” George tells me.

  That’s about the extent of the qualifications that I have too, so I can’t say anything. Although now I don’t even have a TV anymore. “Have you been to this church?” I ask him.

  “A couple times. They don’t really encourage visitors. They want you to join up. In other locations, they have a whole compound. I mean, you LIVE there. You give up all your worldly possessions and they take care of you. That’s what they’re trying to start here.”

  “Sounds like a cult. What do they believe in?

  “It’s hard to say. I know more about what they don’t believe in. Almost everything is a sin. No movies, TV, music, books. There are lots of rules. And it seems really patriarchal; you have to obey God and obey your husband. Women aren’t allowed to work, and they hardly ever leave the house without their husbands. And they’re all fat. I think the men just fatten the women up so that they are inert and feel horrible about themselves and so feel even more trapped than they are.”

  “How can that be?” I say.

  “What do you mean?” he asks.

  I don’t really know what I mean. Sometimes the world is just too strange. You get a little glimpse inside the trailer next to yours and you just want to run screaming from the park.

  “I can’t let this happen to my mother,” George says.

  We’re in front of George’s trailer now. William is putting out the garbage. He nods to us.

  “Oh, all right,” I tell George.

  When I get inside, I call my cousin Kathy. She’s a lawyer. “File me up for divorce,” I tell her.

  “What?” she says.

  “Ed called me to tell me he’s become enlightened. I’ve been squelching his energy,” I say.

  “Really,” she says. “Squelching?”

  “Considering I’ve been living in a world of a million marbles, I think I’m the one who’s been more squelched. I was almost BURIED alive,” I tell her.

  “Why don’t you take some time to think about it?”

  “I took enough.”

  “Look, you need to be sure about this. The last three people who hired me made me go through all the paperwork and then they changed their minds. They figured out how emotionally draining it is and how much money they would lose. And they were right,” she tells me. “I really don’t know why divorce is so popular,” she concludes.

  “We had separate investment accounts and retirement accounts, and the house is his. All I want is the dog. That’s all there is to it,” I tell her. And, suddenly, it does seem that clear.

  “I’ll give you the family rate,” she sighs.

  I slide my wedding band off my finger and put it on the card table. It slides off my finger easily. I must have lost weight. There’s a pale space on my skin where it was. I’ll have to go to the beach and even that band line out, I think. Then I realize that I don’t even know where the beach is.

  It’s 5:30. I don’t have to go to Coconuts til 7:30. I get in my car and start driving. I don’t know where I’m going, but what else is new?

  I pull into a big shopping mall. What’s a girl to do after she realizes that her whole marriage was a lie. Go shopping! I buy some pastel-colored clothes. Then I walk into a hair salon. I sit down in front of the huge mirror, look at myself in the big plastic smock and decide to go extreme.“Very short and spiky,” I tell the stylist. “And put some streaks in.” I know I’m on a roll, veering wildly into the superficial, but I don’t care. I need action.

  As I’m leaving the salon, who’s coming in but Detective Johansen with a young girl. I stop short.

  He reluctantly says, “Hi.” Then he says, “This is my daughter, Juju.”

  “Juliet,” she corrects him.

  “Juliet,” he says.

  She’s a chunky girl who looks about eight years old with unruly curly black hair and cat’s eye tortoise shell glasses. She looks a little like I did when I was her age—her shoulders all set, her mouth pouty.

  “Who are you?” she asks me suspiciously glancing at her father. Territorial.

  “I’m a murder suspect your father knows in the course of his inquiries,” I say.

  He glares at me.

  “Really?” she says, her eyes lighting up.

  “I allegedly killed a man with a golf club.”

  “Wow,” she says. “Was it a lot of icky blood?”

  “I’m innocent,” I whisper to her.

  “That’s what they all say,” she sneers.

  “Suspicion must run in your family,” I tell her. “Your father doesn’t believe me either.” I look at him. He’s looking at the ground.

  Juliet narrows her eyes at me, “Did you just get that hairc
ut?”

  “Yup,” I admit.

  “You look like a porcupine.”

  “I thought it gave me height,” I say.

  “I’m just getting a trim,” she says, avoiding her father’s gaze. “I’m growing my hair out so I can have dreads,” she tells me.

  “Ah,” I say.

  “That’s short for dreadlocks,” she informs me.

  Her father shakes his head.

  “Well, good luck with your trim,” I tell her. I nod goodbye at the detective. He looks at me like he wants to say something. From the look in his eyes, it might be “Help.”

  Chapter 25

  A neon palm tree fills the window of Coconuts and flickers in a cheery way. The music is tinny and comforting coming from the jukebox. Coconuts is half-full with a dinner crowd of older men eating and drinking at the bar. The door is open to the balmy night air.

  Joe has on a blue button down shirt and chinos. His little bit of hair is combed neatly and gelled down so that the comb marks show. I have my new pink shirt on. I haven’t worn any color in weeks, so I feel like a popsicle.

  When we sit down at the bar, Joe glances over at me and winks. I wink back.

  We order two beers and two cheeseburgers medium rare. The bartender is a woman in her 60’s, big and gravel voiced and gruff but with a wide smile.

  “What are we looking for?” Joe asks.

  “Let me remind you that this was your idea.”

  He takes a sip of his beer. I take a sip of mine.

  Joe says, “Marie told me that Ernie was in a dart’s league here. I’m gonna go play and see if anyone knows anything about him.” He gets up to see if he can get the next dart game.

  I hand the bartender a Curious George card. She looks at it. “What’s your name?” I ask her.

  “People call me Cha-cha.”

  I say I’m investigating Ernie’s death. Did she know him?

  “Stanky?” she says, “Sure, I knew him.”

  “What did you think of him?”