The Garden of Last Days (15 page)

But Deena was good, her belly growing by the week. It’d be between ten-thirty and midnight and the front porch light would be on when he pulled up behind her old man’s F-250 so goddamned tired he could hardly get himself to squeeze the door handle. Under the gutter at the north corner of the house was a bug zapper behind wire mesh, this four-foot dull blue glow, and he’d sit there a second or two and watch the moths and flies get it, see their tiny insect bodies spark and flash out of this world. Stupid fucking bugs. Couldn’t they sense the others getting fried right in front of them? It unsettled him to think about it, and he felt his own fate was somehow married to theirs, and that could bring him down. Being that flat bone-tired always did that anyway. Made him feel like he was losing at everything, that it was all just too big for him—the massive machinery they trusted him with, the house, Deena and this almost-baby—that he was going to trip and fall and get crushed under all its weight.

But then the front screen would swing open and there’d be Deena standing in the light, holding out a cold Miller, smiling at him. She’d started wearing a yellow-flowered maternity gown to bed at night. It was thin and he could see her breasts and belly under it and he knew other men didn’t like looking at a pregnant woman but those nights, reaching for that iced bottle of beer she’d put in the freezer for him a half hour earlier, feeling those heavy breasts and that hard belly against him, tasting her warm mouth, he couldn’t imagine a woman looking more like a woman’s supposed to look and that’s when he knew it was all going to work out. Him and her and this child they’d made because they couldn’t keep their hands off each other, even though they hardly knew who lived there behind each other’s eyes.

AJ sipped off his pint, the Turkey warm and medicinal down his throat. The pain in his wrist wasn’t completely gone, but he could live with it better than before. Out his open window he could smell the slash pines and the thick undergrowth of saw palmetto between the bare trunks that during the dry season would burn when the pines
wouldn’t. It’d taken them years and years to get that way, seventy to eighty feet of bare trunk with all their pine needles clustered at the top where no wildfire could ever get them. They gave off a sap scent he smelled now and it was the smell of home and he felt more hopeful than he had in a long while that Deena might forgive him because he’d never laid half a finger on Cole and he only did it to her twice. Two times. That’s all. And didn’t she know why? Didn’t she know that she’d just goddamned
disappeared
on him? That their best time was when there was something ahead of them they could hardly wait to get to—him finishing the house, her having the baby, then the two of them being able to drink a beer together again, the two of them in their hurricaneproof house out in the wire grass he kept cut back, behind them a deep stand of longleaf pines. Out at the road he’d dug a hole and filled it with concrete and sunk a four-by-four post into it, built a mailbox in the shape of their own house, a corrugated gable on top at the same pitch, and he’d painted on the side:
The Careys
.

He had to take a leak. His turnoff wasn’t more than a quarter mile away, but he didn’t want to knock on his door needing to take a piss. And shit, he should’ve brought something for them. A toy for Cole. Something pretty for her, though he didn’t know what that would be. A blouse? A big blouse?

He steered off the asphalt onto the grassy shoulder. His truck jerked forward and he saw it was in park already, his hand on the stick. More than half the pint was gone. Time to slow down. Couldn’t remember the last time he drank anything hard. It’d be better if he weren’t like this right now, smelling like a roadhouse when he saw her. He had some Tums in his console from all the worrying she’d put him through, the shits and the heartburn. Sometimes during the day, working or driving to work or back, he’d tally up how much more his life cost now than it used to: the child support and mortgage; the gas in his truck from the longer drive to and from his mother’s place; his new and lonesome habit at the Puma Club. He still owed on his truck, but by God he’d paid off her old man for the house materials. Let him take it out of his check for seven months of steady payments, and now
they were all square, and right after Deena pulled that order on him he quit her daddy and hired on with Caporelli’s for six dollars more an hour. Still, none of it was enough and he’d started using his credit card for the Puma. Got cash advances just to drink eight-dollar beers and look at lying whores like Marianne.

He had to go worse than ever. He set the pint on the passenger seat and reached for his door handle. But his left hand was useless so he swiveled, got the door open with his right, stepped out stumbling into the night. He leaned against his open door and got his zipper down and freed himself. Hadn’t ever known till right this second you use two hands to do that, not one.

Two is better than one.

Always would be for him. He’d never liked being alone. Standing there aiming for the blackness under his truck he could feel how tired he was, just how much he’d missed this road and that home he’d made up ahead. How much he hated his foldout bed in front of the TV at his mama’s, their quiet meals together in front of whatever the hell was on. His wrist hurt and he was tired and a little drunk on the relief he deserved, but he was tired more than anything. Tired of working so hard for nothing but bad feelings in return.

Maybe tonight would be different. Maybe she missed him, too. Maybe she remembered when Cole was just a little baby and they’d all played together on a blanket in the grass. Lifted him up and kissed him and blew on his belly and made him laugh. How later, after he was down and asleep, they’d set out on lawn chairs up against the house with tall cold ones and watch the sun go down through the pines. And then there were stars.

How’d she get tired of that? Why’d she start bitching at him about everything?

He shook himself off and zipped up best he could. Some of the old bad feeling was coming up again, and he didn’t want it. Nobody but him knew he wasn’t proud of what he’d done, backhanding her and her expensive hair across the kitchen. All this weight on him and all she ever wanted to do was add more. Couldn’t she see how goddamned
hard he worked? Even at home? Keeping the grass cut, scraping and painting the window and door trim, repointing the cinder block wherever it needed it, on and goddamned on. And it must’ve been having Cole that changed everything ’cause before he was born he’d catch her looking at him when she didn’t know he knew, see the shy pride in her eyes that she’d caught herself a good one, a man who
did
things. Grabbed a shovel and started
digging
. But that changed fast as her body did. They had their baby and moved into their small, solid house, and then what was there to look forward to but watching Cole grow, looking at each other over the kitchen table or across the couch in front of the TV or in those lawn chairs out back?

Maybe she should’ve gotten out of the house more. It wasn’t his fault she got bored with Cole all day. That she didn’t have any girlfriends and hated visiting her mother out on the lake, that she didn’t have any damn hobbies she could work on when Cole was napping, that all she could do was watch those soaps full of actors better-looking than he’d ever be, wearing suits he’d never be able to buy or even wanted, carrying on in bedrooms bigger than their whole house, so, when he came home, he’d catch her looking at him differently; he’d be on the couch bouncing Cole on his knees and he’d glimpse her watching them. Sometimes she looked happy, but that was because she liked hearing Cole laugh the way he could make him do. And he didn’t know what she saw when she stared at him, just what she looked like—that he was a disappointment to her. Nothing but a plain man who worked hard and wasn’t good-looking or rich and never would be and he didn’t even begin to know the secrets of her heart. Seeing that look, his hands splayed across Cole’s back, he felt it and believed she was right.

He began to scoot back behind the wheel. A vise was squeezing his wrist again and there was his left hand on the door handle where he put it every time he climbed into his truck, the things you do without thinking how good it is you can do them till you’re hurt. That’s what he was banking on with Deena. That she was no goddamned prize herself and after all these weeks she must miss him the way he missed
her. Curling up at night to nothing but a pillow. He must look a lot better to her now, even though he’d done what he did.

He grasped the wheel with his right and pulled himself up and in, then reached for the door and barely got it and almost fell out. Marianne’s face. Those wide blue eyes. He could still feel the sweet way she held his hand and listened to him. All that warm skin she showed him, sure, but more than that was how she looked at him when he told her about his boy and the house he’d built him—not like he was a plain man and a nothing, but like he was strong and handsome and something else.

He righted himself, yanked the door shut. He wedged the pint carefully between his legs, put her in drive, and pulled away from the grassy shoulder. A pair of headlights had been coming his way for a while and now they were close and a horn honked long and loud as it passed, a beat-up El Camino that was already gone, and what the hell was his problem? There was this feeling in AJ’s throbbing wrist and arm that he was an easy mark somehow. But he’d never taken any shit from anyone and he wasn’t about to start now; there was Marianne holding her hand out to him for her money, the smell of that big Chinese who’d walked him outside—cologne and hair oil and Coke on his breath—the final shove he’d given AJ out from under the canopy and into the crushed shells. That wasn’t called for. None of it.

His truck lights lit up the road high and far ahead. He drove slow, sipped from his pint, saw under his dash the single blue dot of his brights, and that’s why that sonofabitch had given him the horn and couldn’t cut him a little slack like
he
never forgot about his damn brights before.

A little slack. That’s all. Couldn’t everybody just ease up and give each other a little slack? Didn’t he work hard enough to expect some of that?

And there ahead, lit up by his brights he wasn’t about to flick off now, was that old sable palmetto at the turnoff to his road home, its palm fronds fanning out high on its scarred and scaling trunk. His lights swept past it, a beacon marking the fort just for him, and again,
he felt sure he was doing the right thing coming home. Tired and beat up on. Lonely for what Marianne had promised but only Deena could give.

The road was two tire tracks of packed clay his truck fit right into, carried him forward to where now he could hardly wait to get. He thought of being inside Deena again. That had never stopped feeling good. Even with all the weight she’d put on. It was still a soft, warm place to sink the better part of himself, his desire for her and what they could make together. Him and this woman, the mother of his son. He reached for the pint between his legs but thought better of it and left it there. Steered with his knee and fished his Tums out of the console and shook two or three into his mouth. A breeze swung in from the east, pushing through the high wire grass on both sides of the road. Years since there’d been a fire out here in the dry season and now they were in the wet months again but it was only a matter of time before lightning struck and all the wire grass would go up and he hoped she’d kept it all cut away from the house, which would never burn anyway—still, little Cole.

His and Deena’s son. Cole.

SHE’S CRYING. SHE’S
hot and sweaty under this blanket and she cries for Mama. Where is she? She sees the light on the little table and naked mamas in pictures on the wall. Loud sounds and bad yelling in the loud music. Sometimes Mama turns on the radio and they drive to the store. This music. Like that.

Mama?

She doesn’t like this blanket and the floor. Her feet and no shoes. Where are her flip-flops? No knob on the door and her fingers go into the crack and everything is hard to see because she’s crying and where’s Mama? She uses her hands and the crack gets bigger and a naked lady is pulling up her dress and zipping up her dress and the lady looks at her and there’s black all around her eyes. Something shiny on her face and Franny runs back into the crack and onto the soft pillow. The lady with the hard bobbies. Where did she go?

Mama
.

Her throat hurts. Everything hard to see. She doesn’t want that naked lady to come inside. She wants Jean. Where’s Jean? She’s afraid of the crack to the room with the naked lady and she covers her eyes so she can’t see her, but they’re all wet and it’s dark and she opens them. She wants Jean. The rug is dirty. The floor makes her feet cold. She wipes her eyes to see. She wants the other lady not there now. She wants her to be gone because Mama went through the crack into the big room.

Now the lady is gone away and she goes into the big room. A pretty mirror, but the lights are hurting her eyes. She smells smoke like Granma made with her mouth when they lived in Granma’s house far away. The pretty mirror, so many lights and her hair is in the mirror. Her nose is stopped up and Jean makes her use tissues and she sees the box with one sticking out, a yellow one. Everything pretty here but messy. All the colors. The shiny necklaces and pretty bracelets. She can’t reach the yellow box and her hand is in the mirror and it looks funny. She wishes she had the tissue for her nose like Jean gives to her all the time. A pretty scarf under makeup like Mama puts on. She pulls it to her nose and wipes her face and the music is loud but it feels good under these lights. Bright lights. Round bright lights.