Sandy Gingras - Lola Polenta 01 - Swamped

by Sandy Gingras

  “I haven’t really settled in yet,” I tell my mother. “In fact, I don’t even know if I’m staying.”

  Both my mother and the detective look at me.

  “How did you know where I was?” I ask my mother.

  “You gave me the address to forward your mail, remember?” She says it as if that was invitation enough.

  She pulls out the silverware drawer. “One fork?” she says, bewildered.

  “Here,” I say. I bring my cup to the sink, wash it out, fill it with bottled water and slide it into the microwave. “Sit down. I’ll make you some tea.”

  The detective comes up behind me and asks, “Do you have a plastic bag for the putter?” His voice is rumbly and warm, and I can feel him behind me exuding Earth Science.

  I give him a paper towel and a kitchen garbage bag.

  “What’s that?” my mother asks.

  “Nothing. I’ll tell you later,” I say.

  “I’m so sorry to interrupt,” my mother says again.

  “Nice to meet you, ma’am,” the detective says. He nods at me, “Be careful.”

  “Earth science?” I ask him.

  He half-smiles.

  When he leaves, the trailer seems bigger, not much bigger, but a little bigger. It’s clear that there’s no furniture in it though. My mother looks around vaguely. She’s a domestic person. This is inconceivable for her. I might as well be living in a cave. I get her mug of water out of the microwave and plunk a tea bag in it. I carry it over to her on the cot, “He’s cute,” she tells me.

  “He’s a cop,” I tell her again.

  “Oh well,” she says.

  “This is my bed,” I tell her. “My ONLY bed,” I tell her.

  “Oh,” she says.

  “Maybe you could stay in a hotel or with Tweenie and Paulie for a few days.”

  “Do you have a bathroom?” she asks.

  I nod toward the hallway. I hear her heels tippy tapping along as she explores the emptiness of the rear of the trailer.

  I look at Dreamer. Dreamer looks at me. “What?” I say.

  There’s another knock at the door. “Are you kidding?” I say to nobody.

  It’s Joe. “I saw your car,” he says. Then he sees my mother walking up the hallway.

  “Joe Setzer,” I say, “this is my mother, Angela Polenta.” Although my parents have been separated forever, they never got divorced. My mother is Catholic. She doesn’t believe in it for one thing. But, I always thought there was more to it than that.

  “I didn’t know your mother was coming to visit, Lola,” Joe says.

  “I didn’t know my mother was coming to visit either,” I say.

  “It’s a whim,” my mother says.

  “It was a whim,” I tell Joe.

  “That’s nice,” Joe says. “I’m going to set up the clubhouse,” he tells me

  “I’ll help you,” I say.

  “No, help your mother get settled in,” he says.

  “Settled in where?” I ask.

  “I’m going to call your father right now,” my mother says.

  “My father?” I ask.

  My mother goes into the back room with her cell phone.

  “She’s quite a beautiful woman,” Joe says, nodding toward the back room.

  I look at him. My mother is a gracious and composed woman, always dressed beautifully and somehow “put together.” Small, round, compact and calm, she’s “like a little ship in a storm,” my father used to say.

  “Well, I’m off,” he says and goes out into the rain.

  I get some Chips Ahoys and put them on a paper plate with a napkin. I put this next to the mug of tea. It’s not even a real mug. It’s the plastic travel kind they give you at the Quickie Stop if you buy 24 ounces and you want cheap refills. “I’m a loser,” I tell Dreamer.

  My mother comes back. “It’s fine Lola, dear. Your father has just gotten back into town, and he’s coming to pick me up. I explained the misunderstanding.”

  “Misunderstanding? How does he know which trailer I live in?” I ask. My mom just looks at me. She sits down and takes a cookie and bites it gingerly. “Delicious,” she says. “Thank you.”

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I had no idea you were coming.”

  “You couldn’t know,” she says. “Tomorrow,” she pats the cot with the palm of her hand, “we’re going shopping. You can’t live like this.”

  “I can’t?” I ask.

  “No,” she says.

  “Is daddy going to bring you to Paulie’s?” I ask.

  “No,” she says.

  “A hotel?”

  “I’m staying with him,” she says.

  “Huh?” I say.

  “He invited me to stay in his condo,” she says. She looks downright happy. The trailer is wiggling in the wind like a big aluminum puppy. She pulls the plastic curtain aside and looks out at the slashing wind, the endless swamp. “It’s beautiful here,” she says.

  Chapter 28

  “I love my mother,” I tell Joe as we unfold the chairs and arrange them in rows, “but why is she here?”

  “She’s worried.”

  “I’m a grown woman.”

  Joe says, “My daughter, she’s going through some things. It’s hard for me to stay away. I see what she’s going through. She’s got three kids and she’s working full time and her husband is a schmuck. He works part time teaching Communication at the community college, but he expects her to take care of him too. And he barely helps with the kids. Most of the time when he’s home, he’s working on his novel, and he wants her to keep the kids quiet. He’s been working on his novel for three years now. You know what page he’s on? Eighty-three. My daughter is making herself sick. If my wife were alive, I would probably send her out there. I’ve been out two times in the last year, and I want to stay, or take those kids home with me to give her a break, or punch the schmuck husband or get him a real job, or something. But she doesn’t want me to. She keeps telling me, ‘Go lead your own life.’

  “‘I don’t have a life,’ is what I tell her.”

  He’s rearranging his flowers in their vases, plucking and pinching.

  “They look beautiful,” I tell him.

  “They got blown out by the wind,” he says.

  “I like them that way,” I say. “You can’t solve anyone else’s problems.”

  “But you want to help. You need to help. You need to feel useful,” he insists.

  “I know what you mean…. Enough, enough,” I say. I don’t think there’s going to be any flowers left the way he’s picking at them.

  “Let your mother buy you a couch or something,” he says.

  “A couch?” I ask? “That’s kind of a permanent piece of furniture.”

  “Most furniture is,” he says. “Here, help me flip this table.”

  “Do you think a lot of people will come?”

  “Out of curiosity. And for the free food.”

  “Subway. You can eat and lose weight at the same time.”

  “Why did you come down here then, if you’re not planning on buying any furniture? Are you leaving that soon?” he says as he balloons the bright aqua tablecloth over the table.

  “I don’t know. I’m running away from my life,” I say. This has become my standard excuse for myself, and sounds funny coming out of my mouth this time.

  “Oh,” he says, “don’t you have to run to someplace else?”

  “I just got bored with myself,” I say thinking aloud.

  “Ikea has nice couches,” he says. “I don’t ordinarily like their furniture because you have to use an Allen wrench to assemble them. It’s an instrument of torture. Why don’t they believe in screwdrivers in those Scandinavian countries? You should ask that detective about that. He’s Scandinavian.”

  “It was like I was half-way through a novel and I just put it down. I didn’t like the way it was turning out,” I tell him.

  He smoothes out the tablecloth. “Is it straight over there?�
�� he asks.

  “Yup.”

  “And now you want to pick up the book again?” he asks.

  I think of Ed. “Um,” I say. I think of Johnny.

  “Or you just don’t want to pick up this book?” He looks around the room. It’s the All Purpose Room at the clubhouse. It’s got coral colored walls with bulletin boards up near the hallway. There’s a kitchen off to one side, a workout area on the other and some sliders that open out to the pool area. The rain puckers the gray pool. The white chairs are arranged in empty conversational clusters around tables with coral and white umbrellas that shudder in the wind.

  “Did you know that my uncle is going to quit his job because I’m around?”

  “No,” he says.

  “He wants me to take over as a Polenta Brother.”

  “Hmm,” he says.

  “I don’t even have my P.I. license yet. I read the booklet , but I can’t take it in.”

  “It’s hard?” he asks.

  “No, it’s not hard,” I insist. “I just… I’m not sure I want to follow through with this.”

  “You want to put that book down too?”

  I look at him. “Stop with the book already,” I say.

  “Okay.”

  “I was almost eaten by a Rottweiler the other day.”

  “That breed has large heads,” he says.

  “No kidding,” I say. “His owner punched my car.”

  “Is it dented?”

  “That’s not the point. I’m living in a retirement community,” I explain to him. A little white hair is tufting out around his ears. He needs a trim.

  “You haven’t even been to Bingo night yet,” he says.

  “Maybe this week,” I say.

  “Nobody can beat Joelle Fleur. She’s got the game wired.”

  “Sometimes,” I tell him, “a conversation with you is like running on a treadmill. You can run and run and never get anywhere.”

  “I’m listening,” he insists.

  I lean over and tell him in a sonorous tone, “Someone left a putter on my doorstep last night.”

  “Oh,” he says. “Me too.”

  Chapter 29

  “Amen,” the minister says.

  “Amen,” we all say.

  I love these non-denominational services. Nobody tries to convince you of anything. There’s no actual mention of Ernie’s character. It’s just a few mumbly prayers and a couple semi-crosses to the chest, and you’re done. The Subway people flooded in right on time before the service and set everything up. Then Marie arrived with the punch ingredients and the urn of ashes. “The urn of Ernie,” Joe whispered to me and he placed it carefully on the front table between the flowers.

  After the “Amens,” the minister says that the family would like to invite everyone to stay for refreshments. And, he adds, the police will be taking everyone’s fingerprints as they leave. There’s kind of a hitch in the crowd, like we all hiccup collectively. But then we adjourn to the Subway table for chunks of hoagies. Marie is teary eyed, and stands behind the huge hoagie saying, “Eat, eat” and also, “Ernie would have wanted that.” Cathy Bumbridge gets Marie a plastic cup of punch. There are a good thirty people hovering around the hoagie. “Good thing I got the twenty footer,” I hear Marie say.

  Good thing we filled the jumbo punch bowl, I think. There’s two entire bottles of rum in that punch. People are scooping up cups of it, eating chips and murmuring in tight groups. Nobody’s leaving. I peek out at the front desk. Two uniformed cops are standing there with a notebook and a fingerprint kit. Sal is getting them chairs. One is a nice looking young Hispanic woman, and the other is a pudgy bald white older guy, kind of a quiet cop presence, but still, it looks official.

  Detective Johansen comes up behind me. “There are fingerprints all over that club of yours. We had to do this.”

  “Joe got a putter too,” I tell him.

  “When? Where?” he says.

  “Last night, same as me, except he didn’t get his light bulb unscrewed. I didn’t get a chance to talk with him about it.”

  He goes off to find Joe.

  Marie has put a small poster board full of pictures up on an easel in the foyer. I look at little black and white Ernie and Marie in matching cowboy and cowgirl outfits. I look at Ernie in a too big baseball uniform posing with a bat on his shoulder. There’s one of Ernie standing bare-chested with hip hugger pants and a 70’s haircut next to a Mustang in a driveway. There’s a recent one of Ernie on the tractor. In all of the photographs, his smile looks as stretched as a rubber band.

  Marie comes up to me. “There’s no real early pictures of Ernie cuz he was born with club feet. They had to break all the bones in his feet and reset them. He wore metal braces for the first two years of his life, and nobody wanted to take a picture of that.”

  “Oh no,” I say. That sounds inhuman. It also makes my teeth hurt for some reason.

  “One leg was never right. I don’t think the doctors were very good. They had to break the bones again when he was four. That leg grew less than the other one. He had to wear a lift in his shoe his whole life.

  “When he was a baby, he was always smiling. Then our parents died in a car crash when he was ten.” She looks at the photographs as if trying to piece some story together.

  “We went to live with our Aunt Dram and Uncle Felix. They had a puppy. Ernie broke its tail. He said he was just playing with it, but I saw him snap it between his hands. Like a stick, kind of. Then he cried as if his heart would break. I don’t know what made me think of that. I haven’t thought of that in years. Micky the dog’s name was,” Marie says. Then she goes to check on the giant hoagie.

  Feather weaves up next to me and looks down at the pictures. There’s no Fred in sight. She’s had a lot to drink already and she has a punch in her hand. “He wasn’t as nice as he looked,” she tells me, “and he didn’t even look that nice.” She kind of giggles. “He was a bashard, really,” she insists.

  She leans in toward me. “I have trouble with my female energy,” she whispers.

  “Is that so?”

  “It’s squashed.” She rubs one hand into the top of her cup of punch. “Mushed all down until there’s harly any left at all,” she tells me her voice lilting up. “My tarot master says that I have to allow it to grow like a flower again.” She stretches her arms upward in an awkward but graceful way.

  “Here,” I say. I take her drink and put it down on the side table. “That’s better. Like a flower?”

  “Flowers grow in the dirt you know,” she says. She looks around, “It takes a lot of dirt to make a flower. I bet you never thought of it that way. Did you? But my tarot master is teaching me.” She’s really very close to me. I keep thinking she’s going to fall into my arms.

  Then she focuses in on me like she’s seeing me for the first time. She looks around the room frantically. “Where’s Fred?” she asks me. She clutches my arm suddenly looking around. “Oh, please,” she begs, and she sits down on the end table and starts to cry.

  Oh boy, I think, she almost sat right on top of her drink.

  Fred comes up right then and takes her arm. “I just went to the men’s room for one minute, Feather,” he says accusing her.

  “I’m no good without choo,” she says looking up at him.

  He pulls her up and she drapes both arms around his neck. “Let’s go, honey,” he tells her. He’s wearing a blue and white striped polo shirt with white pants and so is she. They look like a boating crew.

  “Can I help?” I ask.

  “We have the cart right outside,” he says over his shoulder, barely acknowledging me. He tries to parade right past the cops, but cops are very good at stopping people.

  I hear his voice growing more piercing as he says, “We have to go. My wife is sick. She’s ill. I have to get her home.” He’s speaking very clearly, emphasizing one word in each sentence as if the police don’t understand English. But they do, and they also understand the difference between dru
nk and ill, so they make Fred and Feather go through the fingerprinting routine. Fred makes a big production of holding Feather up and helping guide her hand to the ink, then steering her out.

  By now, a little crowd has gathered. Everyone’s pretending to look at Ernie’s pictures, but they really are looking at the cops.

  Dick walks by with Gladys, hurrying her forward. Dick’s got his big hat on again. “But I love Subway,” Gladys says.

  Dick nods at me as they pass, “We have a previous engagement,” he says. They try to walk past the cops as if the cops are invisible.

  “Excuse me,” the older cop says and blocks the door.

  “Oh, we didn’t think you meant us,” Dick says.

  “Just routine, sir,” the cop says. “We’re in the process of eliminating suspects at this point.”

  “Oh, well then, eliminate me,” Dick says, and makes it sound obscene. His wife lines up behind him tittering.

  Richie and Susie are looking at the pictures of Ernie. “That’s Ernie with Ted and Fritzie, the guys who owned your trailer.”

  I bend over to look. They are two thin men. One is bald and the other has Donald Trump hair. “That’s Fritzie,” Richie points to Donald Trump.

  Susie says, “I don’t know why he insisted on wearing that hairpiece.”

  “He should have looked in the mirror more,” Richie says.

  “They didn’t stand a chance. Ernie sucked them dry,” Susie tells me.

  “What are you saying?”

  “He got to them.”

  “He killed them?”

  “I think he just collapsed their will until they decided to die.”

  “I thought they died naturally.”

  “That’s what everyone says.”

  “But you don’t think so.”

  “Nature doesn’t usually work so simultaneously. Fritzie had been a nurse for years. He had plenty of access to drugs that could put you down easy.”

  “So they killed themselves together.”

  “We’ll never know now, will we?” she says.

  Chapter 30

  Miss Tilney tells me, “He was happy ruining people. He was nobody, then POOF, he thought he was somebody. That’s what steroids do to you. He got muscles where he should have had brains.” She’s looking at the pictures of Ernie. She’s in a ruffly purple dress today. Her eyebrows are purple too, but she lacks her usual spunk.