The Garden of Last Days (64 page)

“But you’re all right now.”

“Yes.”

“Good.” He wrote more, as if something had just been verified for him. “What did he say that didn’t make any sense?”

“I don’t know, he talked about truth and lies. He said none of what we did was allowed.”

“He was instructing you.”

“No, he wasn’t instructing me.”

“But how did he say it?”

Now they were all looking at her, the oldest one’s eyes on her eyes, like she knew something she wasn’t telling and should, but more, it was as if she had no right to know what she knew, that she’d gotten this knowledge wrongly.

“He said it like he hated us. You know, you could tell he hated us.”

“Who? You dancers? Or Americans?”

“No, all of
us
.” She waved her arm in the air to encompass the
men in her house, but her last word hung between them and she felt outside of it, not that she wasn’t hated too, but that she had somehow been banished from the rest.

There were more questions about him, about anything else he may have said or done, but soon it felt to her as if they were talking in a wide floating circle. As they were leaving, the oldest one placed his card faceup on her kitchen counter like an unpaid bill. They thanked her for her time and stepped out into a soft rain. She waited for them to drive away, then she went down to Jean’s, the steps warm and wet. The television was on, Franny sitting cross-legged on the rug in front of it, a plate of cheese and crackers on her lap.

Jean was pulling a bowl from the dishwasher. April wiped her feet on the mat. The television’s bright colors spilled over her daughter and Jean’s cat lying beside her, and Jean straightened and pushed a strand of hair from her face. She was flushed in the cheeks and when she looked over at April she no longer looked distrustful but sad and slightly impatient, as if whatever she was here to tell her, then please, let’s get it over with.

They sat on the edge of Jean’s bed. The cat had followed them, and he stretched out behind them on the bedspread, his tail lightly flicking April’s back. There were vacuum tracks in Jean’s carpet. It felt thick and soft under her feet.

“I danced for one of them.”

“Who?”

The rain tapped the window. From down the hall came Franny’s laughter. April turned to Jean, could see in her eyes that she knew but wasn’t saying so. “The hijackers.”

Jean nodded. She looked away. “I read that some of them had been seen there, April. I was hoping—”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

“No, Jean, what?”

“I hoped you’d had nothing to do with that.”

“I didn’t. I just danced for one of them.” There was the small smoky Champagne Room, his eyes on her face and breasts, his money scattered across the sticky cocktail table.

“What did they ask you?”

“What he was like.”

“What
was
he like?”

“Like a boy. Just some drunk and lonely boy.”

“Are you in any kind of trouble?”

“No, why would I be in trouble?”

“My show’s over.” Franny stood in the doorway. There were cracker crumbs on her shirt, and she’d been smiling, but now she wasn’t, her eyes moving from April to Jean, then back to April. She looked close to making some kind of important decision.

The next day the sun was back, and before they drove to the beach April told Jean she had a quick phone call to make. Would she mind waiting for her with Franny down in the garden? In the kitchen she opened the yellow pages and found the club in Tampa. She pressed the numbers and waited, her eyes on the number in the ad box, a silhouette of a naked woman lying across it as if it were a bed.

The rings were long with little space between them. She could feel her pulse in her palm. She looked out the kitchen window down into the garden. Near the cedar boxes of hibiscus and allamanda, Jean and Franny were hopscotching over the terra-cotta brick work. First Jean, heavy on her feet, then Franny, the sun on her hair.

“The Golden Stage, a Gentlemen’s Club.” It was a woman’s voice. April pictured her standing in a pink entryway. Behind her was the hum of a machine, maybe a vacuum cleaner, a man shouting something, and she imagned a big windowless room that would soon darken and fill with more men.

“Hello?” The woman’s voice sounded so young and hungry to please. Outside, Jean sat in one of the Adirondacks breathing hard
and Franny was hopping on one leg, trying to hit each brick with her foot.

“Hello?”

It was as if April had just woken a long venomous snake and now it was slithering past her and Franny and Jean. She opened her mouth to speak but there came a click in her ear, then the dial tone.

She hung up.

She closed the phone book and placed it back into its drawer and slowly pushed it shut. Maybe she would try again later. Maybe tomorrow.

She picked up her beach bag and walked outside. The day was early and bright. From the landing she could smell the mango leaves, could see Jean’s garden spread out before her. And she hurried down the stairs to join them, her friend and her daughter, waiting for her down there under the sun.

FOR TWO YEARS
Deena had done her best, one weekend a month packing up Cole and driving the eight hours north and west to the farthest end of the panhandle here to Santa Rosa. She had to stay in a motel in Milton, or Pensacola. Pay for a room she couldn’t afford. And that did something to him. Her going to all that trouble. Those first visits she held the phone to her ear and stared at him through inch-thick glass, her hair finally her own, her eyes sometimes welling up. She’d sit Cole on her lap and let him talk though Cole never understood that the voice he heard was his daddy on the other side of the glass, and he’d look away from him and talk to the man on the phone instead.

After seven years he’s in Open Population, him and seventy-nine other men on bunks in the barracks just off the rec yard. He’s got a locker and pictures on the wall of his son, and his job assignments are no longer in food service scraping slop after slop from plastic trays, or
in the laundry room washing out the sweat and piss and dried semen of lowlifes.

For a while he worked in the law library cataloguing books. Then the trustee there saw his head for numbers and for two years he’s been a math tutor in the ED helping men learn what nobody ever taught them before, or they were too damned smart to listen to. Some of them call him Teach. Sometimes they come up to him in the rec yard or when he’s just lying on his bunk and ask him to help them with their GED or to send a budget back home to their wife or girlfriend or to give them the probability of getting an ace in a deck when three have already been played. Some of them just come up and ask him things because others call him Teach, and they think he knows more than the others.

One asked him about God, if he believed in him, and AJ shrugged and said, “Man, I just hope he believes in
us
.”

Once or twice a year now Deena will drive Cole to see him. Her husband stays back at the motel, and for a while AJ preferred it that way, didn’t want to lay eyes on him. But it’s different now. He no longer pictures her fucking him in their bed in their house she sold anyway. He no longer pictures him reading Cole a book at night, helping him with his homework, throwing a ball to him under the sun, this man Deena met at the Walgreen’s where she got her old job back. She wrote to him how it felt good to be working again, that she’d lost weight and one afternoon a computer salesman came in for ballpoint pens and they got to talking.

After the divorce papers she stopped writing letters about herself, just sent along pictures of Cole, the latest of his team photo from Little League. AJ’s son was the skinny one in the back row, his uniform shirt tucked tightly into his pants, his ears sticking out beneath his cap.

But he looked happy. That was the thing. His son looked happy, and cared for.

On Wednesdays, after the two-thirty head count, AJ sits in a corner of the mess with two dozen short-timers and they talk about how they’re going to live when they get out, how they’re going to avoid coming back. Ray Brown, the leader, a man who for years stuck a gun in people’s faces and took everything from them, said he wrote letters to all his victims, even if they were dead. He wrote letters and asked forgiveness.

The letters help with parole too, but for so long AJ couldn’t even imagine writing anything. He shouldn’t’ve done what he did, he knew that. But who brought her there in the first place? And then when he’d seen and read who else was there that night, that she may have danced for one of
them
—well, it was too much.

It’s three o’clock on a Friday in September, job assignments done for the day. AJ’s sitting against the wall in the rec yard. Tomorrow he’ll get a new student, a young con in a wheelchair. He sees him at the edge of the basketball court now, a dark-skinned kid with dead legs lighting a cigarette, a bunch of short-timers playing a loud game of full-court in front of him. At the exercise station some of the younger ones do push-ups and chin-ups, the free weights hauled out of here last winter after somebody smashed an iron plate into another’s face. All this rage all the time. AJ just doesn’t feel it anymore. He doesn’t feel much at all really. But he looks forward to the small things, sleep after lights-out, a good piss, hot coffee, then teaching, sitting down with another man beside him and laying out the rules of numbers for him, how to create a problem and how to work it out.

And this isn’t so bad, this concrete against his back, the sun high and in his face. In this heat he can smell the sap on the other side of the chain link and concertina wire, can see the thick stands of slash pine and loblolly and red cedar. He knows the Blackwater River is somewhere beyond that and that it flows twenty miles south of here to the Gulf, fresh water into salt, all that water flowing out to more
water, our bodies made of it. He sees him and Cole on a boat fishing together, laughing together. And once again, there’s the little girl, how he held her and sang to her and lay her down asleep. For a moment he doesn’t remember her name, but then it’s there in his head, like a prayer.

The unit will be quieter now. He’ll sign out a pen and get his notebook from his locker. He’ll lie down on his bunk. He does not yet know what he’ll say or if she’ll ever receive it or even read it, but she’s the one he must write to. And he’ll write to his son after that. Tell him more than he has in the past.

The kid in the chair tosses his cigarette. He wheels himself away from the game and stops near the chain link and stares through it to the trees.

IT WAS THE
waiting that did it, that crept up on her and pressed against her chest and reached in with a cold hand and squeezed her heart. But then something truly horrible happens and you’re still here. More fortunate than so many others. Blessed by fate.

But, still here.

After April and Franny moved, there was one other tenant, a young man from Haiti who spoke poor English and played his music too loud and had over many friends. They stayed late, speaking in French and drinking, laughing and sometimes yelling, and after two months of this, Jean worked up her nerve and asked Jean-Paul to leave.