When the Saints (25 page)

“Put her on the phone.”

“Shut up and lisssen. I’m sorry you got messed up in this. You were right. It’s all on me.”

I hear the phone bang onto the table and some muted noises. Jewell picks up the receiver and whispers, “Don’t worry, Tabby. I slipped something in his drink. He’s not going anywhere.”

“Thank you.” I sigh with relief. “I’ll call if something happens.”

I hang up and hear a thump down the hall. I freeze, listening. The noise turns into a scurry and Gord the Ferret pokes his head into the room. I exhale and sit back down at the table. Ma’s just staring at the unlit cigarette in front of her.

“I miss my granddaughters,” she tells me. “Bird’s girls. I don’t talk about them because it upsets your brothers, but I dream about them all the time. Same as I used to dream about you.”

“You dreamt about me?”

“All the time. Now I dream about your father. Last night he came floating into my room and I asked him to find Swimmer and bring him back here. You’d think that bastard could do one little thing for me, but no. Not even in a goddamn dream
world. He just hovered over my bed like a bad fart.”

She gets up, marches over and pulls Daddy down off the shelf, slams his box on the table, flips open the lid and starts pouring his ashes down the sink.

“Ma, don’t!” I leap up. “You’ll clog the drain.”

I grab her arm, pry the box from her hands then watch in horror as she dips her pinky finger in the little grey pile and brings it to her tongue.

“Jesus, Ma! Would you sit down? You’re scaring the shit out of me.”

I scoop as much of Daddy as I can back into his box. As I’m hiding him in the refrigerator, I hear a faint knocking sound on the side wall of the trailer.

“That’s probably your father now,” Ma says. “He wants to slap me for that one.”

“Shush for a second.”

“Pissed you off, did I, Wendell?” Ma hollers.

“Shh!”

I hear the knock again and decide it’s the ferret, but then it trots through the kitchen right in front of us. I run to the door and fling it open, switch on the outside light. It takes a minute for my eyes to adjust enough to make out the silhouette of a familiar beer gut.

“Lyle?”

He steps to one side and a tiny shadow slowly detaches itself from his. I see the disproportionate head and lopsided stance.

“Swimmer?”

A plump little arm waves to me.

“I found him in the woods,” Lyle mutters.

Ma runs past me faster than I’ve ever seen her move. Her sweatsuit is just a blurry streak. In the same second, she has Swimmer wrapped in her arms, screaming at Lyle, “Get off this property, you shit stick!”

As soon as she has Swimmer safely inside, I run in and grab the two sweat socks full of cash from the ceiling hiding spot.

“Troy’s,” I say, tossing the white sock to Lyle from the doorway. “Yours.” I toss him the grey one. “Now fuck off.”

He misses both. I straddle the doorway to keep an eye on both him and Ma. Lyle dumps out the socks, rips off the elastic bands and counts both stacks. Then he gives me the finger and takes off running. In the darkness, I hear an engine start up, and a second later his Ford roars past.

Ma starts toward the phone with Swimmer still in her arms.

“No way!” I yell at her. “You call the police, this never ends.”

We take Swimmer into the living room and Ma strips him down. He has a skinned knee, but that’s it. She rocks him back and forth while he talks non-stop, trying to show us what he has in his hands. He’s got fistfuls of little Happy Meal toys, and a bunch more in a plastic bag tied to the belt loop of his pants.

“They must have fed him McDonald’s every meal.” Ma clicks her tongue.

We hear a crash. Janis has woken up and overheard. She comes charging down the hall yelling, “NO FAIR!”

Swimmer runs to meet her and they smack into each other at the corner, falling backward in opposite directions.

“Hi, Swimmer.” Janis hitches up her pyjama pants. “We’re moving to Saw-liss River.”

“Sawus ribah?”

I call Jewell, tell her what happened, and she pulls up in the Tercel within a half-hour. I see her struggling to get Jackie out of the passenger seat, so I go out to help. We practically have to hold him up. He’s loose as a goose. I ask Jewell what she gave him and she says just some NyQuil. When I have to remind him to put one foot in front of the other going up the stairs, she confesses, “And a couple Xanax.”

In the living room, we all surround Swimmer like he’s a meteorite crashed down from another planet. He doesn’t seem to notice he’s been gone. We try to ask him what it looked like where he was, and he just keeps saying “Swimma McDono” and something about a dinosaur blanket. Janis is sorting all his new toys into piles. She keeps counting them to be sure exactly how many times he got to eat McNuggets.

“Ma called Lyle a shit stick,” I say.

Jackie slurs, “Jewell called me a dick hat once.”

“More than once,” Jewell says, patting his knee. She reaches out and strokes Swimmer’s hair. Swimmer closes his eyes and rests his head on her baby belly.

“Should we put this little guy to bed?” she whispers.

“No!” Ma shakes her head. “I need to look at him for a few more hours, make sure he’s really here.”

I call and leave a message for Detective Surette, tell him Swimmer wandered home safe and sound. Surette phones us back and sighs loudly into the phone. “I need you to fill out some paperwork and I’ll have to see the boy myself.”

In the morning, we take Swimmer to the hospital. He checks
out fine, so we carry him up to Poppy’s room. Jackie arrived first and told her everything. As Ma and I walk in with the kids, she looks up and screams, “What’s wrong with his face?”

I tell her Janis kicked off the day by drawing a pair of eyeglasses on Swimmer with a permanent marker. Ma made me promise to leave out the part where I walked into the bedroom just as Janis was about to pour nail polish remover over his forehead to try to get them off.

Poppy pulls Swimmer onto the bed and squeezes him to her rib cage. She keeps him pinned there for five minutes, crying so hard it makes him wail too.

Jackie swats her with his hat, nods at me. “Tabby worked the whole deal out with Lyle.”

“We should do three cheers for Aunt Tabby!” Janis jumps up. “That’s what we do at church group. Like when Julie G. showed us that God’s love is all around us. I didn’t see nothing but the chalkboard, but I like doing the three cheers.”

“I think we’re taking you out of church group,” Jackie says. “It sounds weird.”

“Then you better learn to bake Smartie cake,” Ma tells him. “Because that’s the whole reason she goes.”

D
ETECTIVE
S
URETTE IS TORN BETWEEN DOING HIS JOB
and making it easy for us to leave town. I know which way he leans. He makes us wait while he talks to Swimmer alone in his office. Swimmer stares at him seriously from behind his new
spectacles, but Surette doesn’t get much more out of him than we did. Something about the lady and marshmallows, and a motorcycle man. Obviously no one’s buying that Swimmer toddled around in the woods for two weeks, but Surette knows the score. He knocks on the window to get my attention.

“That’s enough for now,” he sighs. “Detective McNeil’s on his way.” He gives Swimmer a Big Foot candy from his desk drawer, takes a handful for himself. Swimmer holds out his palm for an equal share and Surette reluctantly taps a few more out of the bag. He points to the door and Swimmer slides off the chair with his mouth full.

I’ve never met McNeil. Ma says he’s a tit, and she’s right. He’s way too blond for it to be natural, asks a bunch of standard questions and tells us we’re free to go. As Ma’s buckling Swimmer into her back seat, Surette comes out of the station and beckons me.

“Sometimes I wish I still smoked.” He pats his shirt pocket.

I hold out my pack to him and he looks at it for a few seconds before slowly sliding a cigarette out. He sticks it under his nose, inhaling deeply, then changes his mind and hands it back.

“Everything all right?” he asks.

“If you’re asking if we’re leaving, don’t worry. In a few hours, Jubilant can go back to being the quiet little fishing village it never was.”

I march back to the car and start the engine. Through the windshield, I see him still standing there with his hands in his pockets watching two pigeons peck at each other in the parking lot.

“Janis,” I say. “Moon that cop, would you?”

She unclips her seat belt and stands up on the back seat. I honk the horn and Surette looks up just in time to see her bare butt coast past his face.

W
E DO A QUICK WALK-THROUGH OF THE TRAILER BEFORE
we go.

“It looks naked,” Janis says to me, running her hands along the walls. “Like a hot dog that got no ketchup on it.”

“Do you want to say goodbye to your room?”

“Nope.” She kicks the front door shut on our way out, scrambles up into the passenger seat of the U-Haul and pumps her fist.

Ma is parked in front of us in her own car with Swimmer and Bird. We pull the vehicles out of the driveway, wait one behind the other on the shoulder of the road till Jackie and Jewell’s Tercel comes struggling around the corner hauling that rickety trailer. It looks like they’ve got a blue whale under the tarps. They putter up and Jackie motions for me to roll down my window.

“Where’s Poppy?” he asks.

“We’ll come back for her in a few days.”

“No fucking way. The hospital in Solace River said she can transfer any time.”

“Say
frigging
!” Janis yells at him.

Jackie leans across Jewell’s belly and says loudly, “There’s no
frigging
way we’re leaving your mother behind, so let’s go get her skinny ass.”

“Say
butt
!”

“
Butt
I say
ass
!”

Ma and I follow Jackie to the hospital and park in front. Janis runs in to tell Poppy we’re springing her and Ma follows to collect Poppy’s things.

Poppy herself’s outside within ten minutes. She jumps into the U-Haul holding her hospital robe closed.

“Think you could have got a bigger truck?” she jokes. It’s the first time I’ve seen her smile.

“SO LONG, SUCKERS!” Janis hollers at the rolled-up window.

“You trying to make me go deaf, Janis?!” Poppy snaps. “I got enough problems.”

“Sorry,” Janis says, blushing.

“What?” Poppy teases. “WHAT? I can’t hear nothing!”

Once we’re on the highway, Poppy tells me a reporter showed up at the hospital but the nurses wouldn’t let him in.

“The cops must have issued a press release about Swimmer being brought back,” I say. “Don’t mention it to Ma. She’s worried sick that if the press finds out all the details and how you’re in the hospital and everything, it might tip off social services.”

“I know.” Poppy gnaws her lip between her teeth. I can tell she’s been doing that a lot because the skin’s all rubbed raw. “She wants me to let her be Janis and Swimmer’s legal guardian.”

Janis taps her. “Grandma’s going to be my new mother?”

“No, baby,” Poppy says. “I’m your mother no matter what.”

Janis puts the hood up on her jacket and crosses her arms.

The Legend of Glooscap Motel is a long, green one-level building atop a gravel hill on the far side of the river. I stall at the
Ernie Ells Bridge and wait for the other two vehicles. We convoy over the river, honking our horns like crazy.

“Solace River, here we come!” I exclaim.

Poppy sighs. “Like it or not.”

W
E USED TO HAVE A COLLECTION OF
L
EGEND OF GLOOSCAP
towels and sheets in our old house, so Daddy probably stopped in here once or twice for a drink. We decide we better not check in under the name Saint.

“How about Snuffleupagus?” Janis says, jumping down from the truck.

Jackie gets the keys and I help sort out the sleeping arrangements. Ma and Janis will share one double bed, Bird and Swimmer will take the other. Jackie and Jewell get their own room a few doors down.

After everyone’s settled, Jackie takes Poppy to the hospital and I get in Ma’s car and drive over to West’s. I pause in the driveway, trying to block out the memory of Abriel’s white Rabbit parked in this same spot. When I look up, West is completely naked in the doorway flexing his butt cheeks. I go in and he massages my shoulders while I rehash everything that happened back in Jubilant. I don’t plan on getting back in the sex saddle until we sort through what happened with his wife, but I’m so tired I fall asleep before it’s an issue.

When I finally wake up, it’s past 1p.m. I drive back over to the Glooscap to check on things. The motel hasn’t been renovated
since the fifties. The rooms have green carpet and orange drapes, and the television sets still have rabbit ears. Janis thinks she’s at Club Med.

“I got to have a bubble bath without Swimmer in it,” she brags through a mouthful of Cracker Jack. “They have little soaps and shampoos and if you want more, you just pick up the phone and ask. And guess what? They chuck your glass in the garbage every time you use it and bring you a brand new one.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Auntie Jewell took me and Swimmer to play the video game and when we got back, these were all sitting right there all wrapped up, and the ones with the chewed-up animal crackers were gone.”

She hands me one as proof. Glooscap’s slogan is written fancily on the paper band:
We are the only motel in town!

I take a look around and spy Daddy and Grandma Jean sitting on top of the TV set. Ma said she wants to bury them both back behind the new house and buy little headstones. The boxes are almost identical, so I guess it’s a good thing about those Cheerios getting in with Grandma.

“They got Jell-O at the restaurant,” Janis says, jumping on the bed. “Buddy said it might be orange today. Want to go check?”

Ma’s in there with Swimmer and Bird. She seems to be in the best mood of her life, chatting like I’ve never seen to the staff in the restaurant, adding a gold-rimmed cigarette to the waitress’s tip. Swimmer’s apparently become a celebrity. There’s an article about him in the Solace River newspaper. I read it three times, but it doesn’t mention Poppy at all. It says the circumstances of his disappearance and return are still unknown to police.