Sandy Gingras - Lola Polenta 01 - Swamped (2 page)

I pull into the gravel driveway. “Vagabond.” The trailer sits in front of me like a big can thrown into the road of my life. A crazy kind of dare.

I get out my suitcase. Dreamer trots around and sniffs all the new smells.

An old guy on a tractor mower comes wheeling around the trailer. He stops the mower suddenly when he sees me. He looks like a gnome, gnarly faced and squat—built like a wrestler. He’s wearing one of those chipper canary yellow bike shirts with all the decals all over it, and shiny blue Lycra bike shorts like he’s the Lance Armstrong of lawn mowing.

He stares at me and Dreamer and the suitcase and scowls.

I usually can pull off attractive, but, lately, my major food group has been M&M’s. When I get stressed I eat chocolate and salt. Today, I look pasty and carbohydrate-laden. My hair is a wilting shag. I’m wearing a pair of rumpled black capris and an even more rumpled black tee.

I hitch up my pants and adjust my shirt.

The guy on the mower stabs his finger at my suitcase. “You can’t live here,” he says. He’s yelling so I can hear him above the mower. “The policy is sixty-five and over.” His voice is high-pitched and kind of squirrelly. Dreamer cocks her head. She hates squirrels.

I take a step back. Who is this guy?

“And no dogs are allowed,” he says pointing at Dreamer. Sal made an exception for Dreamer. Well, he hopes I move out in a couple days. Plus, people are always making exceptions for Dreamer. She’s that kind of dog.

“It’s the policy. I can’t have no dog crap in my mower blades,” he yells at me. Every “p” he says, he spits.

In conflict situations, I usually freeze. This is a perfect example of that.

“I’m going to report you,” he snaps. Another spit.

And here I was feeling so sunny a moment ago.

He grinds his mower into gear and drives right at us, so close he brushes us back. Maybe he was just trying to scare us, but I swear he was trying to run us over. As he roars away, pebbles kick up behind him like BBs against my trailer.

I take a deep breath, “Sheesh,” I say. Welcome to the neighborhood.

I turn to close the door to my Pathfinder, and there’s another man standing right next to me. I jump.

“Don’t pay any attention to Ernie,” the man tells me nodding toward the receding mower.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s the handyman, but he thinks he owns the place. He yells at me all the time because I’m staying with my mom. Visitors are only supposed to stay a week in the park, but I’ve been here two months.” He indicates the trailer across the road from me with a big sudsy sponge he’s holding in his hand. He looks about my age—an overly-ironed look to his clothes, a big-front-teeth smile.

He’s been washing his car. It’s a sparkly already-clean red sports car. The red and white trailer behind him looks shiny like he Turtle Waxed that too. “My wife and I split,” he explains.

“Ah,” I say.

“My name is George,” he says, switching the sponge to his other hand.

“Lola.” I shake his wet hand. “And this is Dreamer,” I say.

He bends down and gives her head a pat. “Cutie,” he says. “Ernie’s gotten worse lately, I think. Angrier,” he tells me, “if that’s possible.”

What have I gotten myself into?

“You really moving in?” he says.

“It’s temporary,” I say, “It’s a stop-gap measure.” I wonder what I mean.

He looks like he’s wondering too.

“Well, I gotta go,” I tell him. I can tell he’s just being friendly, but my resolution is to avoid men while I’m down here. No dating, no looking, no being friends, no nothing. That’s another reason why living in a retirement community sounds like such a good idea to me. Everyone’s old. Everyone’s safe.

George waves his sponge and backs off.

I drag my suitcase up the steps.

When I unlock the door to my trailer, the emptiness of it all is startling. Somehow, when Sal was in here showing it to me, it didn’t seems so devoid of well… everything. I turn on the AC. Cold air roars out of the vents. I try out my cardboard chair. I try out the bathroom. I open the refrigerator. Nothing in there except a box of baking soda. “It’s neat,” I tell Dreamer, “you have to give it that.”

I go over to my cot, and I lay down on it. I have to balance carefully because one leg is shorter than the others, and there’s a seesaw effect. I lay there listening to the lawn mower drone on in the distance. I try not to think about my husband telling me, “You’re always going to be alone,” as I was leaving him.

“I’m living in the now,” I say aloud to the ceiling.

We had an in-service day at school at the beginning of May. A woman therapist with pink streaks in her hair and a shirt with little mirrors on it told us all about affirmations and the power of positive thinking. She told us to repeat the phrase, “I’m living in the now,” to ourselves when things got crazy with the ninth graders. She said it would help center us. I’ve been trying it to no avail.

“I’m living in the now,” I say again.

All I can think about is me throwing my whole life into the air like a bunch of confetti, standing in a cloud of pieces.

Dreamer grunts and lies down next to me. “Breathe,” I tell myself. I haven’t been sleeping all that sporty. I feel the quiet of the little trailer, the sound of the refrigerator rumbling into a higher gear, the swish of a bicycle going by. As the evening sun slants across my face, I doze off.

When I wake up, it’s dark, and I feel like I’m falling, but it’s just the tipping motion of the cot. Dreamer is nudging my elbow. She needs to go out.

It smells murky outside like flowers and swamp. “I gotta get a flashlight,” I tell Dreamer. Night in New Jersey is more of a glowing grayness from all the lights and houses, but this is dark dark.

I don’t want to walk toward the swamp, so we go down the dirt lane. There are a few solar lights like blue mushrooms in someone’s yard. A spotlight shines up against a palm tree. A line of trailers rumble with air conditioning. TV lights flicker. I get a whiff of what might be chicken parmesan. My stomach growls. I should start eating real meals, I tell myself, with vegetables.

There’s a little clearing next to a shed. “Pee here, “ I tell Dreamer, but she trots over to the shed. I can make out that the door is half open, and it’s pitch black inside. Dreamer growls low in her throat.

“What is it?” I say.

There’s a darker something or other in the doorway propping open the door. Before I know it, Dreamer goes into the shed. “Where are you going?” I say. She moves fast like she’s on the scent of something. She doesn’t listen to me. I do my attempt at a whistle.

“Dreamer?” I edge my way over to the shed’s door. I can’t see anything, and it smells weird.

I take one step inside the door and I trip on something, which is typical. As I’m falling I get this flashback to first grade when I had to take occupational therapy before school every day because I kept falling out of my chair in class. I had to sit on a little low square of a scooter and wheel around the halls before anyone else came to school. I had balance issues, they said. I was klutzy. And it didn’t get any better with age.

Now, I land on what’s just inside the door. And one of my hands lands on the cement floor which is wet. The rest of me lands on something which turns out to be cold and bloody and slippery. And, I think, dead.

Chapter 4

I hope I don’t throw up.

As I’m starting to run back toward my trailer and my phone, I realize there’s a guy standing next to me right outside the shed.

“Help,” I say. My breath is ragged and shallow and my heart is pounding.

“I already dialed 911,” he tells me. His voice is calm.

“Is it a dead person?’

“I’m afraid so. Come with me,” the guy says. He points toward a trailer next door, and leads me over to a deck chair holding my elbow. The air is suddenly full of sirens.

He goes inside the trailer, and comes out with some warm damp paper towels and a blanket that he puts around my shoulders. He sits down next to me. “Take some deep breaths,” he tells me.

I rub my hands on the towels. It’s no good. There’s too much blood. The towels are already red. I want to throw myself into a scalding hot shower and stand there for days.

“Are you a doctor?” I ask him. He’s wearing green medical scrubs.

“Retired G.P.”

The ambulance comes up the road and the guy stands up and points them to the shed. There are two cop cars right behind it. The old guy says a few words to the cops, then comes back.

“That was quick, “I say.

“There’s a hospital right down the road,” the guy tells me. “Rt. 41 is retirement alley. We’re surrounded by medical facilities.”

“I’ll buy you a new blanket,” I tell the guy. I’m sure it’s ruined. I pull it closer.

“Don’t worry about it.” He’s got thick black glasses that give his eyes a kind of swimmy look. He’s a skinny old guy, no hair but lots of strong bones in his craggy face, and there’s a kindliness that you just can’t fake in the lines of his face.

“I just moved in,” I tell him. “Lola Polenta.” I decided to start using my old name again, and I’m not used to it. I was Lola Wood for five years. Now it sounds like I’m using my tongue too much when I say my name. All those L’s are really something. LaLaLa. It gives the conversation an oddly festive feel. In spite of the blood.

He must think so too because he smiles. “Joe Setzer.”

“I’d shake your hand,” I say.

“No need,” he says.

“Do you know what happened?” I say.

“Looks like Ernie finally went and got himself killed,” he says.

“Ernie?”

“The handyman.”

“Oh, him,” I say.

“He was asking for it.”

“You think somebody killed him?” I’ve never been around a dead person before. I can’t really see anything happening at the shed, just a bunch of cops clustered around, an ambulance waiting with its doors open. I can see into the ambulance, and it looks really empty.

Dreamer lies down on Joe’s slippers. “There you go; keep my feet warm,” he tells her.

“You mean murder?” I raise my eyebrows. I learned this from Lesson 1 in my P.I. course, the section titled: “Winning friends through body language.” When you raise your eyebrows they make arches that invite people in. You become a kind of garden path and people want to stroll among your roses.

“I doubt he bashed himself in the head,” Joe says.

“Maybe he fell?”

Joe looks down and shakes his head. “How did you find him?” I ask.

“I saw the door open. Ernie’s never there at night. I just went over with my flashlight to check. Ernie ran that place like an operating room. There was never anything out of place, and it just seemed odd. I didn’t see his body at first. Then, when I did, I called 911, then you came. It all happened very quickly,” he says.

“You think there’s some sort of homicidal lunatic serial killer loose?” I ask. I glance behind me at the black looming swamp. I always think over-blown. My fears can take my imagination from zero to sixty in two seconds flat.

“My guess is that somebody just got fed up with Ernie.”

“Do you think it was a mafia hit?” I ask Joe. Sometimes I think I watch too much HBO.

“He stares at me.

“Do you think it was a drug addict on methamphetamines?”

“What do I look like?” he asks me.

“I was hoping you would know something.”

He looks down. “Ernie Stank was crazy,” Joe tells me.

People in pj’s and robes are pouring from their trailers, gathering in the dirt road. “What happened?” a woman asks Joe. “What happened?” somebody else asks her. A man points at me.

The night seems to be vibrating. A camera flashes. Yellow police tape flutters between the palm trees. Crime Scene people, dressed up in puffy white jumpsuits, are moving around as carefully as spacemen.

Joe nods toward where a big cop is talking to a woman. We both stand up to see better. We walk toward the police tape. I feel like a zombie. Dreamer follows. People are staring at me and whispering. I try to ignore them.

“That’s Ernie’s sister, Marie,” Joe says to me, “They share a trailer—the one with all the whirligigs.”

I’ve only been here a couple hours, but the place is a landmark. To get to my trailer, you turn in at the clubhouse, left at the whirligigs. There have to be fifteen in their front yard. Most of them are some sort of elaborate contraption where the wind turns the fan which makes the man row the boat which then makes the whale rise out of the water. Like that.

Marie is talking loudly. Joe and I lean forward to hear, but she’s talking about what Ernie ate for lunch. Macaroni and cheese, evidently. Except Marie calls it macaronis and cheese. She’s got a shower cap on over some curlers and an orange robe. The robe is quilted and shiny. “She looks like a road work cone,” I tell Joe.

Joe looks at me askance.

I get glib when I’m nervous. I should just shut up.

Marie is speaking in circles; “I didn’t know where he was at,” she’s saying, “I had the meatloaf cooking then I turned it down. I had the mash potato because Ernie he likes his mash potato. But he doesn’t like them sticky. So I set the oven at 250 just to warm, you know, and I turned on Wheel of Fortune…”

I’ve been an English teacher for ten years: Harding High School, Freshmen and Sophomores. I taught your basic essay form, your topic sentence, your body of supporting evidence. This is a lost art. People these days are all over the place. It gets to me how you can have entire conversations without a topic sentence making itself known. And most people are stumped when you ask them what the heck they’re talking about.

This happens to Marie. The cop stops her, and asks her again when she last saw Ernie. Marie says, “Ernie is always on time. He likes his schedule. You could set your watch by him. If you asked him what time it was, he says 12:31 not 12:30. Do you know what I mean?”

The cop has out his little book with his pen poised over it. He’s not writing anything. Not a word. I feel for him.

He takes Marie by the elbow and leads her to the stretcher by the side of the road where they already have Ernie’s body. When she looks up, her silence is so pronounced that she looks like a different person.