The Garden of Last Days (20 page)

Up ahead were the hazy security lights of the industrial park buildings on the north and southbound sides. When he was Cole’s age there was nothing out there but stands of slash pine and clusters of cabbage palm and saw palmettos, him and Mama driving home after her shift as a chambermaid at the big resort on Longboat Key. She’d be in her white blouse and black skirt, fifty already, smoking one Tareyton after another, looking old and dried up to him even then. And he didn’t remember much now, but she’d said they let her take him in the rooms and clean with her, said he liked to toss the damp towels into the hamper, that he took pride in changing the toilet paper rolls on the pins set into the wall. And there were the later years working with his stepdaddy in Myakka City. Home repairs for old people mostly, replacing rotted sills under their houses, laying porcelain or ceramic tiles in their moldy bathrooms, building new porches and decks, patching their roofs, stringing a line and digging postholes and erecting steel or cedar fences, and all the while Eddie’d go out to the van every half hour or so for a nip of vodka or gin whose smell he’d mask with Wrigley’s and cigarettes. By the end of the day he’d be red-faced and more tired than he should but laughing and telling loud lies to the old people while AJ cleaned up and put away their tools and, at fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, drove the van home.

And then one Friday morning, Eddie was just a stiff lump under the covers of Mama’s bed and AJ got a night job after school down at Walgreen’s pharmacy and was even better at numbers and inventory than he was with his hands and they were going to send him to school for more training, put him in charge of an entire store one day, maybe
a chain, but there was Deena and her smell and the two of them clawing to get inside one another and now AJ’s left hand felt like sausages about to burst over a fire.

He’d always worked. His whole goddamned life he had worked and worked and goddamned worked
. He couldn’t remember ever having time off. Ever. And he just wanted a rest, a place to rest that wasn’t the foldout bed in Mama’s condo. Marianne’s skin and hair, her big, soft eyes. The way she’d look right at him when he talked about Cole, how she’d hold his hand with her small fingers, how, before tonight, she’d seem to look at him with admiration. Respect.

Had he scared her that much? Did he squeeze her hand that hard?

He slowed and checked his rearview mirror, turned into the median strip. He had to apologize. It was wrong of her to take his money when he was hurt like that, but still, he should apologize. Maybe she would too.

AJ felt like the one at the poker table who all night long gets nothing but shit cards he still has to play. But there was the new promise of Deena and Cole back home, some paid time off from Caporelli, and he felt the sparking hope not of the lucky but of the one who works at it, the one who watches and keeps track of the numbers and knows there’re at least two jacks and one king left in the dealer’s deck.

His truck rocked in and out of a rut, then leveled out onto flat asphalt, and he gave it the gas, the engine under his hood roaring like a loyal ally.

THE JAZZ CALMED
Jean quite a bit, and the station wasn’t hard to find, the brushes on the high hat, the low, soothing clarinet. Still, she’d broken out into a clammy sweat and had already driven twice by the yellow neon sign of the Puma Club. Its parking lot was full of men and cars, the actual business just a low, single-story structure with no windows. Driving north, it was to her left on the other side of the median. Heading back south now, it was at her right, much closer, and as she approached it she could see the long covered walkway to the pink doors of the entrance, a pink that opened and shut obscenely.

Some riffraff smoked cigarettes against a pickup truck and watched her drive by in her locked Cadillac. There was still time to turn into the parking lot but she accelerated instead, feeling queasy and cowardly. There was a steady weight on her chest now. She turned up the
soft jazz and breathed deeply through her nose.
It’s just nerves, that’s all. It’s not your heart, you fat old goat. Just your nerves
.

On either side of the boulevard were the black reaches of the countryside. All weed and trees that in a few years would be transformed into subdivisions. She knew that was April’s dream, to buy a place for her and her daughter. She’d never talked about it with Jean, but Franny did; rolling red and yellow Play-Doh in a ball she poked window holes and a door into, she said, “You’ll visit us when me and Mama buy our house, right?” Or early one morning when she was helping Jean water the plants and flowers, upending a small pitcher Jean had bought her, “Will you make us a garden like this in our new house?”

Of course I will, sweetie. Of course
.

Up in the distance the security lights of the industrial park glowed brightly over low concrete buildings, businesses that probably made microchips and Styrofoam padding, plastic brooms and office chairs, the kind of objects one eventually needed but rarely thought about. The compound was devoid of any beauty whatsoever and put Jean in mind of prisons and punishment and bad behavior. She felt afraid for Franny all over again and ready or not, panicked or not, she was going to drive back to that place and walk through that obscene pink door and take her.

LONNIE LOOKED OUT
over the crowded floor, past the smoky blue lights of the VIP half wall where Zeke was leaning with Paco, pretending not to watch any of the girls. Andy sat on his stool, just a black shape with a big, pale head. What could Spring have done for two hours in there with her little customer? Her daughter. She’d asked him to check in on her and he hadn’t had time to. But Tina had. She’d come down from Louis’s office and gone back there. Then she was in the VIP bar for a while talking to the new girl in the shadows. Then she went back up to Louis’s office. Maybe Lonnie should go take a look. How old could Spring’s daughter be anyway? And did that mean she was married? Did Spring live with someone?

Lonnie pushed himself away from the bar, but down at the apron of the stage one of the Portofino boys was raising his voice at another, his eyes dark and narrowed, and Lonnie waited to see if it was a pocket or just drunk bullshit he could ignore.

How tired he was becoming of all this. Used to be he only thought about moving on during his off days, when he was alone and a great yawning emptiness would blow in on him and with every breath it’d be deeper inside him, this wide-open question as to just what he was doing here? Not in the club or even the Gulf Coast, not in all the places he’d drifted to and from—three universities, one in Austin where his old man worked, the others in New Jersey and here in Florida, all the class discussions where he held his own, questioning everything from Weber’s “Theory of Bureaucracy” to the interlocking directorates of corporate boardrooms to the rise of postmodernism, whatever the hell that was, because he hardly knew. Whatever he knew, or thought he knew, came not from books but from class lectures he dutifully recorded in all the misspelled words only he could decipher. Such an irony, the son of the bookish man not being able to read books; but words were beautiful to Lonnie, as sounds, as airy vowels and iron consonants, as things to memorize and chew on later because he couldn’t read like the others, never could. A word another’s eyes passed over easily—
thorough
or
skate
—became math problems he had to solve before he could move on. Instead of seeing a graceful row of letters symbolic of specific sounds, he saw the broken arms and legs of insects, a pile of them that had to be put back together before their message could move and shine.

He loved music, though, and listened to it all the time. Tall and flunking at nearly everything but algebra and geometry, he walked the halls of his youth wearing Walkman headphones, his world suffused with Springsteen, Berlin, Mozart, ’Til Tuesday, Albinoni, the Clash. And Lonnie attracted women. Not those who shined so prettily at the top of the heap but the castoffs at the bottom like him, smart girls who smoked too much and didn’t mind a warm beer on a cool afternoon out in the sage grass, who liked music as much as he did and liked even better how he moved to it, gently pulling them in one at a time, one or two seasons at a time, rocking to it, pushing himself inside till they were just one thumping note reaching a crescendo and he’d let go.

Some loved him, and over the years, as high school gave way to colleges which gave way to work, he came close to loving them back. In their presence, sitting in a booth over eggs and coffee or driving down the highway together or just lying in bed right before sleep, most times he felt a great tenderness for whomever he was with, for each hair, each blink of her eye, each tiny blemish or line in her skin. He’d be drawn to her voice and the smell of her breath, the sound of her car pulling up in front of the house, her dirty underwear balled up on the floor, her dusty bureau cluttered with whatever filled it: with one it was useless receipts, a hairbrush and coated rubber bands, an overflowing ashtray; with another it was tip money, a cell phone and pack of cigarettes; with one other, no clutter at all, just a cotton doily spread across it ready to receive nothing. And still, he loved them, or thought he did till they needed gold proof, and in days or weeks he’d be gone.

He planted trees in shopping malls in New Jersey. Drove a vending machine truck in Austin. Flipped rugs for prospective buyers in a carpet boutique in Houston. He’d rent one- or two-room places in neighborhoods people seemed to avoid, and at night he’d listen to music or books on tape.

Early on he discovered he had a high tolerance for being alone, preferred it really. Though come Saturday night that always changed. He’d want good live music, bourbon and cold beer, and when he found all three, he needed a woman to dance with, maybe take home if she wanted; sometimes he’d want it too, but that was hardly ever his first intention when he went out at night. He saw men like that all the time, though. At the bar or lounging around the pool tables or sitting near the band, they wore too much jewelry around their neck and wrists, their work watches left at home for a shinier mall model. Their shirts were ironed and their hair was cut just right, a lot of them carefully gelled and spiked. You could smell their aftershave above the cigarette smoke and they had the furtive, calculated look in the eye of young hunters.

And maybe because he did not look like them, maybe because he’d
go out in a T-shirt, loose jeans and work boots, sometimes needing a shave, always needing a haircut, because he was so intent on the lead singer singing and the bass guitarist and drummer keeping time, he attracted women he wasn’t even looking for; alone or taken, pretty and otherwise, they’d dance and drink and dance some more. He’d buy drinks and light cigarettes and they’d lean toward each other and talk. One of the lone dogs might come near right about then, another of them once again not seeing much when they looked at tall, rangy Lonnie who’d gone and snared their prey without the license they’d dressed and preened for.

And let them come sniffing. If she wanted one of them instead, if she went out on the floor and didn’t come back, that was fine, too. He’d return to his music and Maker’s Mark and let the night go where it went.

But if she didn’t want the LD, Lonnie didn’t mind asking him to move on. Some of them did. Quite a few didn’t. He’d wait, say it again, and so often there’d be no more waiting and what he said got lost in all the movement after, the lone dog falling backward into a parting crowd in the joyful noise of a Saturday night band in a dark barroom, his arms spread all loose-jointed and useless, his mouth an oval hole of shock and surprise, the last thing Lonnie usually saw before he’d be asked to leave or leave on his own. Sometimes the woman would follow him out, more interested in him than before. Other times she’d move away as if
he
were the dog, one you thought you wanted to pet until it bared its fangs.

One, a short, muscular beauty up in New Jersey, followed him out and took him home. She lived in a condominium complex called Jersey Shores, and on her walls were framed photographs of her two grown children. In the fluorescent light of the kitchen where she poured them wine, he could see her face fully for the first time. She was ten years older than he’d thought, fifty-three or -four, her curly hair touched with gray. She washed his cut knuckles in the kitchen sink, his blood running over a plate and glass, and she dried his hand
with a clean dish towel, squeezed his fingers, and led him down a hallway to her room where she undressed him as if he were a boy.