by Orca Various
“Rennie Charbonneau,” he said, hanging a big question mark in the air like for sure the name on my passport was an alias.
“That’s right. And you are?” Because I was not going to let this guy intimidate me. No way.
“Bill Jones.” Said with a pinched smile.
Bill Jones? And he’s acting like Rennie Charbonneau is a phony name?
Mr. Jones sat down across the table from me. “I see you were in Argentina.”
Wow, the guy could read a customs stamp.
I waited.
“What were you doing in Argentina, Rennie?”
“Seeing the sights, Bill.”
He bridled when I used his first name, but he didn’t say anything about it.
“And before that you were in Uruguay.”
Since he said this flat—a statement, not a question—to show me, I guess, just how sharp his reading skills were, I didn’t see a need to comment.
Silence.
“What were you doing in Uruguay, Rennie?”
“Seeing more sights, Bill.”
This time he locked eyes with me. “Bit of a smart-ass, huh?”
My answer: a smart-ass shrug. Why disappoint?
He reached into the folder and brought out my customs form. “Says here you’re taking a connecting flight to Detroit. What’s in Detroit for you, Rennie?”
“Just want to see—”
“—the sights. That answer is getting old, son.” He leaned back in his chair and did the thing cops like to do—he looked at me like he was studying me and then gave a little nod, like Okay, Sonny Boy, I’ve got your number.
The door opened. A head poked in. Bill stepped out of the room. He was back a moment later with my duffel and the tray with my shoes and other stuff. He set them on the table and sat down again.
“One more time, Rennie. What’s in Detroit for you?”
I didn’t want to play games anymore. I just wanted to get out of there. “I was on vacation with my dad, and now I’m on my way home.”
“Via Detroit.”
“My grandmother is meeting me there. We’re going to stay over and then drive up to see some friends of hers in Windsor. That’s in Canada.” It was also a lie—the meeting my grandmother part, I mean.
“I see. You ever been in any trouble with the police, Rennie?”
I guessed he knew the answer to that. I guessed that’s why he’d yanked me out of the line. I guessed that was what the waiting was all about.
“Yeah.”
“Tell me about it.”
I gave him the short course.
“Ever done drugs?”
“No.”
“Trafficked them?”
“I don’t have a record for that, if that’s what you mean.”
“It’s not.”
“No, I’ve never sold drugs.” Geez.
His eyes drilled into mine for a full minute, maybe longer.
“Okay. You’re free to go.” Just like that—now that I’d been run through whatever databases they check and had barely enough time to make my flight. Still, I was glad to get out of there.
FOUR
So that’s how—and why—I ended up in Detroit with a shotgun pointed at my back.
Well, that’s most of it.
When I landed, I went online again and did a search on the address Mirella had included on her one and only communication with her neighbors back home. That’s how I found out who lived there now. I wasn’t surprised to find that the phone number listed for the address didn’t belong to anyone named Franken. It belonged to a C. Forrester. But was Mr. (or Mrs. or Ms.) Forrester a new resident or an old one? If he (or she or they) had been there long enough, they might know the people who’d lived there before. Maybe C. Forrester knew where the old resident had gone. Hey, it had worked in Argentina. Maybe my luck would hold in Detroit.
That’s what I thought at the time—before I heroically (in my humble opinion) broke into the house and got mistaken for an invader.
“I’m not an intruder, I swear,” I say to the armed guy behind me without turning around. I’m not about to make any moves, never mind sudden ones, when there’s a loaded weapon pointed at my back. “I saw the old man—”
Something jabs me hard in the spine. It’s the barrel of that shotgun, I know it. I feel cold all over and then go numb. I pray I don’t wet myself.
“Put the gun down, Gerry,” the old man says. “The boy was helping me.”
“Helping you what?” the voice behind me growls.
“He fell,” I say, wasting no time getting in on the put-the-gun-down bandwagon. “I thought he might have had a heart attack or something.”
The gun pulls away from my spine, and the man holding it circles around me to get a good look. He’s shorter than me, but wide at the shoulders and chest and with very little gut, like maybe he works out. His hair is buzzed short and salted with gray. His jaw is stubbled. His mouth is pulled down into a frown that the lines etched into his face suggest is more or less permanent. Both of his hands are wrapped around the shotgun, ready to hoist it and take aim again if he feels he has to. His eyes glance away from me for no more than a split second while he says, “What happened, Dad? Do you have chest pain?”
The old man bats the thought away like a pesky fly. “I stumbled and fell, that’s all.”
“It looked like you were unconscious,” I say. I raise my hand to pull off the ridiculous hat I’m wearing. I bought it at the airport after I realized my tuque was missing. It’s cold in Detroit in late December, the damp kind of cold that seeps right into your bones. But when I start to reach up, Gerry tenses and the next thing I know, that shotgun is pointed at me again. I decide to leave the hat on my still-intact head.
The shotgun dips slightly in Gerry’s hands. His eyes go back to the old man. “Were you unconscious, Dad?”
The old man dodges the question. “I’m fine. There’s nothing to worry about.” His watery eyes zero in on me. “Why did you come here?”
“I told you. I saw—”
His hand slices through the air to cut me off. “You couldn’t possibly have seen me from the street, not if I was on the floor.” Clutching his wheeled walker, he glides in so close that I can smell his sour breath. “I don’t want to have to ask you again: why did you come here?”
I hear footsteps again and another voice, a female one this time. She sounds panicky. “Uncle Gerry? Grandpa? Are you here? What happened to the door? Is Eric all right?”
“In here,” Gerry calls.
“I asked you a question.” The old man presses closer so that all I can see is his lined face. It’s like a gigantic relief map. A map to nowhere pleasant.
I figure there are two ways to go here. I can improvise, or I can tell the truth. Two angry men and one loaded shotgun make me want to go with the first option—sorry, I must have got the wrong address; I’m new in town and I got lost—and get the hell out of there. But I’m here for a reason.
“I’m looking for someone,” I say. “A woman. I think she used to live here.”
“Nobody has lived here except Dad,” Gerry says. “If that’s the best you can come up with—”
“She was from South America. Her name was—”
“I already told you, no one has ever lived here except for my father.” Gerry sounds ready to heft the shotgun again.
“Uncle Gerry?”
It’s a girl a couple of years older than me at the most. She doesn’t look like she belongs here. She’s dressed too nicely, like someone out of a magazine, not at all like Uncle Gerry, who is in a plaid shirt, jeans, and work boots, or the old man, who is wearing pajamas, a raggedy robe and beat-up slippers.
“It’s okay, Katya,” Gerry says. “I’ve got this under control.” He turns to me. “So, according to you, you got the wrong house.” He raises the shotgun. “Well, you can say that again, sport. The only question is, do I turn you over to the cops for breaking and entering, or do I deal with you myself?”
&nb
sp; “Who is that?” Katya is not nearly as alarmed by the shotgun as I think she should be. “What’s going on, Uncle Gerry?”
“Intruder,” Gerry says.
“No! It’s not like that.” I have my hands over my head in a pose I like to call please-please-please don’t-kill-me. “I’m looking for someone. I only broke in—”
“See? He admits it!”
If you ask me, Gerry is looking for an excuse to blast me.
“Who’s he looking for?” Katya asks as if I’m not standing right in front of her. “Does this have something to do with Eric?”
“He says he’s looking for some woman who used to live here,” Gerry says, like he’s daring me to pull his other leg.
“What woman?” Katya looks to her grandfather for an explanation.
“Her name was Mirella,” I say quickly. Keep talking and maybe Uncle Gerry won’t shoot. “She sent a postcard with this address on it.”
I swear Gerry is going to rack the slide of that shotgun again. I pray his only intention is to march me out of his castle. But I’ll never know because the old man, Gerry’s dad, says, “Did you say Mirella?”
“You know her?” Gerry and I say at exactly the same time.
The old man looks at us, surprised, but I’m not sure why. He has the same chagrined expression on his face as Grand-père when he blurts out something and then realizes he shouldn’t have. It’s wha Grand-mère calls letting his tongue get ahead of his brain.
“If it’s the same Mirella,” he mumbles. “But that was a long time ago.”
“The postcard she sent from here was mailed in the sixties,” I say.
The old man nods. “I haven’t thought about her in a long time.”
“So you do know her,” Gerry says.
“She was here, but not for long.”
Gerry looks puzzled. “I don’t remember that.”
“It was before you were born. She came here from California, but she was originally from South America, as I recall.” He’s got a dreamy, remembering look in his eyes.
“She was from Argentina.” I’m excited. I’m on the right track. I have a lead. At least, I think I do.
“Who was she?” Gerry asks.
The old man stares at him. He wobbles a little, and Katya takes one of his arms.
“She…she was a friend of a friend of your mother’s,” he says. “She heard about the jobs here in the auto industry and came east to find work. But she didn’t know anyone and needed a place to stay until she could find something.” He smiles a little. “Mirella. She was a good person. Kind.”
“Do you know what happened to her?” I ask. “Do you know where she is now?”
He shakes his head. “I gave her a few leads. So did Lucille, my wife. She eventually found something—I don’t remember where. Maybe my wife saw her again, but I never did. Like I said, it was a long time ago.”
“Why are you looking for her?” Katya asks. The suspicion in her voice matches her narrowed eyes. Given the smashed doorframe, the broken lock and the shotgun, I don’t blame her. If I were her, I’d be wondering who I was and what I was doing in her house.
All three of them are staring at me, waiting for my answer to Katya’s question. I don’t know what to say. Gerry glances at the old man. The old man keeps his eyes on me.
“I should turn you in,” Gerry growls.
The old man takes a different tack.
“The boy helped me,” he says. Water is seeping from his eyes—not tears, just old-man eye water—but apart from that, they’re as sharp as lasers. “Make me a coffee, Gerry. Strong, not the watery slop you like. And you.” He means me. “You can help me to my room.”
Gerry hangs uncertainly in the passageway, the shotgun hovering between his shoulder and his waist. The old man wraps one hand around the barrel and lowers it. He wheels himself past.
“Grandpa—?” Katya begins.
“Not now, Katya.”
The old man steers his roller-walker past the stairs and down a narrow hall to a door. He pushes it open, slides inside and stands there waiting for me to enter. But I stay where I am, too stunned by what I see to move.
The old man catches me by the arm and pulls me in. His fingers are bony and strong. It feels like a living skeleton has clamped hold of me. Once I’m inside, all I can do is stare. The place is like a museum—a small one, but crammed from floor to ceiling with stuff. Some of the stuff is mounted on the walls—weapons mostly, daggers, bayonets, old rifles, handguns—and when I look closely at it, I see swastikas. Some of the stuff is in framed cases, also mounted on the walls. Inside are medals, badges, epaulets and brass buttons. They also have swastikas on them. There are posters and photographs—really old, all German, all from the Nazi era. There are a couple of mannequins in full uniform—one in black, one in brown. One’s a pretty sharp-looking officer, if you overlook the swastikas. On shelves there are more military hats and helmets. There are German beer mugs that look like what you’d see in the old days of World War II. There’s a pair of field binoculars with a beat-up leather case. There’s a pilot’s jacket and helmet, totally old-school. There are grenades, which I hope aren’t live. There are displays of insignia and dog tags. There are belt buckles, with and without the belts, leather holsters, with and without guns. There are coins, lapel pins and a swastika’d watch. There are flags and pennants, some of them hanging down from the ceiling, some of them on the walls, and some of them neatly folded and sealed in plastic bags. There are super-old magazines and newspapers, all in German. A lot of them have Adolf Hitler on the cover. There are bunches of official-looking documents, little booklets that look like passports but turn out to be work permits, travel permits, identification papers and ration documents. And books. Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds. Stacked on the floor and overflowing bookshelves. I turn slowly as I take it all in. When I look back at the old man, he’s smiling.
“Pretty impressive, huh?”
“Were you in the war?”
He laughs. “I may look old to you, but I was too young to serve. You’ve heard of D-Day, young man?”
I nod. “Sure. My dad’s in the military.” The Major is not only a career soldier, but he’s pretty sharp on military history. You don’t want to get him started on specific battles and tactics, trust me. Once he gets wound up, he won’t stop until he’s reenacted whatever battle it was and critiqued the strategy and tactics on both sides. It’s about the only topic on which he will deliver more than a sentence at a time—if you don’t count when he’s reaming me out for something.
“My father was there at D-Day. He was there during the march on Berlin too.” He glances around. “He collected some of this. A lot of soldiers did. Souvenirs of their times overseas. But I doubt many of them collected on this scale. I picked up the rest over the years.”
“It’s a lot of stuff,” I concede.
“When Gerry moved in with the kids, he wanted me to get rid of it all. Alice, my daughter, died twelve years ago, so Gerry and I took on the kids.” I wonder what happened to Alice’s husband, but he doesn’t say and I don’t ask. “Clutter, that’s what Gerry calls this. Trash. But I told him, this is my house, not yours. And these things belonged to my father—they meant something to him.” He shuffles over to the bed and drops down onto it. “You’re a young fellow. Imagine if you went to war. And not just any war, but one that really mattered. One that involved just about the whole world. And imagine you survived it—survived all those years. Because when men went to war then, young man—”
“Rennie,” I say. “My name is Rennie.”
“Pleased to meet you, Rennie. I’m Curtis. Curtis Forrester.” He thrusts out a hand and we shake. “When men—or should I say boys—went to war in those days, they went for the duration. And a lot of them didn’t come back. But my father did. He came back.”
Katya appears with two mugs of coffee. She hands one to Curtis and shoves one in my general direction.
“I didn’t know what you take,” she
says. She pulls something from her pocket—one of those plastic pill containers that are divided into days of the week. She opens the one for today and shakes half a dozen pills into the old man’s hand. “It’s time for you to rest, Grandpa.”
The old man takes the pills without argument. “I have to do what this lovely young lady tells me,” he says. He beams at her, and it’s obvious he adores his granddaughter. “Come back, Rennie,” he tells me. He sticks out his hand again, and I go closer to shake it. “Come back and visit. No one around here is interested in any of my stories.”
“That’s not true, Grandpa,” Katya says. There’s a lilt in her voice, the kind a parent uses with a small child. A jollying note. She’s indulging him, like a mother drinking imaginary tea from a doll-sized teacup at her little girl’s make-believe tea party.
“They think they’ve heard it all,” the old man says. “Even this granddaughter of mine, who moved away and hardly ever comes for a visit. Come back, Rennie. Keep an old man company.”
I nod, to be polite. I swallow some coffee, also to be polite. It’s too sweet and too milky. Then I let Katya hustle me out of the room and down the corridor to the front door where Gerry, cursing to himself, is trying to repair the damage I did. He glowers at me when I pass, and I edge clear of him and the hammer he’s wielding.
Katya follows me outside and down to the sidewalk, even though she’s not dressed for the cold.
“Thank you for helping my grandfather,” she says.
“No problem.”
“But it would be best if you don’t come back. He’s old and sick. He needs his rest.”
“You should probably get him checked out by a doctor. He was unconscious when I found him.”
“I will. You don’t have to worry about that.”
“He sure seems interested in World War Two.”
