The Garden of Last Days Page 19

  He shouldn’t even try to sleep. Not with everything he had to do. There was an all-night Walgreen’s on Manatee Avenue not far from Mama’s. He’d stop there, lock his truck up, and keep an eye on it through the plate glass of the store. The same way Deena confessed she watched Cole, though he never liked hearing about that. Never did.

  He glanced back up in the rearview at the sleeping child. Her head was so tilted to the side her hair covered most of her face. It was just as blond as Cole’s. She could be his sister. Really. She could.

  TWO DOORS NO windows.

  Two doors no windows.

  Those first stark seconds or minutes when she couldn’t have breathed and couldn’t remember now what she’d said or who she’d said it to, that’s all April could think of—that there were no windows in Tina’s office or the dressing room or bathroom, that Zeke had guarded the door and Franny couldn’t’ve gone the other way or she’d be onstage so where was she?

  Tina was saying something and Louis had appeared and Zeke and now Retro, but April was trying to be Franny, trying to be as small as she was, and whatever everyone was saying was just a zip of chatter in her way as she yanked Tina’s couch from the wall and saw darkness, a coat hanger, a condom wrapper, a plastic lighter. She pushed past Tina, her hand pressing into her silicone flesh, and every locker with no padlock she jerked open calling her daughter’s name, though she couldn’t hear that either, just felt it in her throat and face and air in front of her, the metal doors clanging one against the other, all of them empty; her ankles kept buckling in her stilettos and she bent over and uncinched them, kicking them away. She looked under the makeup counter, saw dozens of sneakers and sandals and pumps, there were tote bags and duffel bags and bare linoleum in between and now things began to blur and she wiped at her eyes and yanked open the bathroom door again—pink toilet and sink, round mirror in a pink frame, Tina’s rotation tacked to the pink wall, and her daughter’s name was in the air, her throat straining behind it; she turned and rushed past Louis on his cell phone, Tina and Retro gone, Zeke standing there like a useless piece of garbage, and she headed for the blue-lit corridor to the stage. She stopped and rifled through the dusty curtain, she looked to the right into the black corner, squatted and waved her hand, felt air, the painted plywood wall. She felt now how empty her hands were, the money—where was it? Where did she put it? But it was like worrying about your coffee spilling as your car rolls over and over down the highway, and she peered into the blue darkness to her left, she saw two holes on either side of the stairs to the backstage. Then she was there, sticking her head in—

  “Franny! Franny!”

  She knew she’d shouted that but could only hear the thump, rattle, and cry of the club music above, the shouts and whistles and whoops of the men. On the other side of the low darkness was some light from the kitchen door, just enough, but it was too dark to see anything more and she was up and back in the brightness of the dressing room. The other door was open now, Zeke back at his post, Tina and Louis in her office—cops; Tina said cops, call them, and hearing this only made things blur again, Zeke looking down at her, his eyes flat and dull.

  “Tina’s got your money. You dropped it.”

  “Just give me your fucking flashlight!”

  Back into the blue dark, squatting at the hole beside the stairs, shining her light into her own terror because there was nothing to see but the wood frame of the stage, a few fluffs of dust, a flattened Coke can. Her eyes burned and she was crying. It was as if she were standing in a rock-strewn stream and the water was rising fast, the current getting stronger, pushing hard against her but she couldn’t let it. She couldn’t.

  She ran back through the dressing room. Another girl there now, Sadie primping in front of the mirror for her act. April wanted to push her face into the glass for even acting like this was still a normal night in this normal dressing room of this normal club for normal fucking men.

  “Zeke. Did you ever leave the door alone? Did you?”

  “Yeah, for two seconds.” Like she was a cop. Like she could screw him for this.

  “When?”

  “For Louis. Right after T-shirts.”

  She moved past him, the current pulling her through the kitchen that was well-lit and had no corners or places to hide. She pushed open the screen door and stepped under the light onto the crushed shells. A few stuck into the soles of her feet. A flurry of insects flew above her. There was the last-call noise of men out in the parking lot, rotten smells from the Dumpster, the cooling air. She shined her light onto the parked cars and found her Sable, the current sweeping her toward it. Her feet hurt, but she didn’t care and even before she got there she knew her car was empty, that Franny was nowhere near.

  AJ PULLED HIS truck up into the fire lane and shut off the engine. She was still out, her small mouth open. Under the lights of the Walgreen’s lot a half dozen cars were parked and in one of them a boy and girl sat in the front seat talking and smoking. At the store where he used to work the law cruised by twice an hour and he hoped the one around here had just come and gone; he could get cited for parking in the fire lane, but he wasn’t about to leave the girl farther back where he couldn’t see her too well from inside. He reached around with his good hand and flicked the ceiling switch so the overhead light wouldn’t shine in her face when he opened his door. He took his keys, reached across himself to pull the latch, then slid out and down, pushing the door slowly closed until it clicked shut, locking it.

  His legs were stiff and heavy, his arm a steady screaming pain he’d just about grown used to. But it felt good to be out in the air. The two kids were laughing about something and he thought how they were probably stoned and if they weren’t careful would be off somewhere fucking and then—like that—your free years are gone and you’re stepping into the fluorescent slap of a Walgreen’s with a broken bone you have to ignore till morning looking for drugs to keep the little ones safe and asleep.

  An old one behind the register. Somebody’s grandmother. She was reading one of those Danielle Steel books Deena had a stack of. She eyed him over her glasses. AJ smiled, but he didn’t care for her expression. Like he was up to nothing good. Like he’d never managed one of these stores himself and could’ve hired and fired her anytime he wanted to.

  The allergy aisle was way in the back near the pharmacy. He turned and looked past a sunglasses display out the window, his truck sitting there, the girl safe within. He walked quickly and knew just where to find it. Nobody would see her behind his tinted windows anyway, and as he passed shelves full of wrapped candies, magazines and romance books, household cleaning supplies and notebooks, pens and Scotch tape, he knew if she were Cole he wouldn’t’ve left him like that. His blood wouldn’t let him.

  The liquid Benadryl was right where he knew it’d be. There was grape and there was bubblegum. He picked the grape. Something low caught his attention. It was his wrist. Two, three times its normal width—all pink and puffy-looking. His hand swollen, too. Maybe he should try to get the swelling down. Maybe Caporelli wouldn’t buy it if he looked like this right after the bucket was s’posed to’ve dropped on it. He headed down the aisle toward the pharmacy counter. Behind it stood a skinny pharmacist in thick glasses studying something AJ couldn’t see. AJ held his wrist up to his shoulder and moved by him to the analgesics. Found some Extra Strength Motrin, an ice pack he’d have to get ice for. He squeezed the pack under his arm, the Benadryl and Motrin in his hand, and walked fast now past woman’s hair coloring, combs and brushes and rolled umbrellas, past VHS tapes and rows and rows of batteries, more candy, then there was the lady at the register and he lay down his purchase. That’s what they called them when he used to work in a store just like this—purchases. She closed her book slowly, saving her place with one of those bookmarks with scripture written across Jesus’s outturned palms.

  AJ’s mouth was dry. He looked out the window, saw his truck and nothing else.

  “What happened to you?” S
he scanned in the Benadryl. She had a voice like Mama’s, scraped raw from smoking, and she didn’t sound unfriendly.

  “Accident.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “Backhoe bucket dropped on it.”

  “You go to the doctor’s?”

  “Not yet.”

  “It looks broken to me.”

  “Yeah, I’ll go in the morning.”

  “Honey, it is the morning.” She laughed but not in a way to make him look stupid. He’d been wrong about her, hadn’t he? Made him wonder what else he’d been wrong about.

  “Seventeen forty-three, please.”

  He reached into his pocket, pulled out his last twenty. Thought of the thousands and thousands he’d get off Caporelli’s insurance, the cheap half-assed sonofabitch. He watched her bag his things. She put in the Benadryl last and he pictured himself trying to squirt some into the little one’s mouth without waking her up or making her choke.

  “Here you go, sir. I do hope your hand gets better soon.”

  He thanked her, held the bag close. At the door, he turned. “I used to manage one of these. I’m with the district now. What’s your name?”

  “Gladys Evans.”

  “You just got your store a good report, Gladys. I’ll tell your manager.”

  “Well, thank you.” She smiled though she looked confused, glancing at his injured arm, supposedly by a damn backhoe.

  “We’re building a new store up in Tampa.”

  “Oh. Well you take care of yourself, sir. Thank you again.”

  He nodded and smiled back, pushing the door open with his shoulder. Outside in the humid air more voices rang out from the lot behind his truck. More kids. Too old for high school, too lazy or unlucky for more schooling, so they sit in their rides half the night doing nothing. And the lie he’d just told didn’t feel like a lie. If he hadn’t gone into heavy equipment he would be a district manager and he would’ve given that woman a good report for her efficiency and politeness.

  He squeezed the bag between his knees, unlocked the truck, and peeked in. She was still deep asleep, Cole like that too: once he was down you could drive all over with the radio on, haul him out to go here and there, put him back into his seat and buckle him up and still he’d stay asleep. The hard part was getting him to go to sleep. But maybe this one was like that too, and he wouldn’t have to give her anything after all.

  LONNIE HAD NEVER even heard of something like this happening before, a club owner closing up a few minutes early to clear the place out, bring up the lights, and look for a child. Spring’s child. And why hadn’t he checked in on her like she asked? He’d seen Tina coming and going all night. He should’ve gone and looked. Man, he should have left his station for two seconds and fucking looked.

  Now Spring hurried barefoot through the lighted club, her usual poise and confidence gone. Her blouse was partly buttoned and her hair swung wildly in front of her face every time she bent down to look under a table, then straightened up and rushed past the last men, ignoring them.

  Under the bright lights of closing time the club always looked dirty but tonight it was worse than usual: the Portofino boys had left layer upon layer of drifting smoke which hung in the air like remnants of some disaster. The tables were covered with half-empty cocktail glasses and beer bottles and overflowing ashtrays, the chairs scattered all over. The red carpet—worn to a bloody gray in most places—was gritty and soiled with boot and shoe filth, spilled drinks, stray coins and streaks of ash.

  Paco and Little Andy were herding some of the men along, nodding their heads and shooing them to the entrance like little kids they’d be more than happy to spank. Most of the girls from the VIP were still naked or half-naked and they stood in the bright smoky light dressing and talking with one another, looking a bit startled. They reminded Lonnie of fire drills back in middle school, that same look on the faces of girls having to leave the gym in just their tank tops and shorts. Tina was clapping to get their attention, and Spring moved right through them. She was crying, her glistening cheeks smeared with eyeliner, and she looked to him as if she were breaking in two. He felt left out of something big and natural he should know more about than he did. She rushed through the curtains of the Champagne, all the empty rooms in there she could’ve hidden in while April was in one of them, though how could her child ever get through the VIP or the club without being seen first? He would have seen her. Should have seen her.

  Lonnie moved between the empty chairs and tables of the main floor.

  A little girl, Tina said in the VIP. A three-year-old in pink pajamas.

  HE WAS IN Bradenton now, heading west along Manatee Avenue. He passed one-story stucco houses with poured-concrete driveways, cars locked behind chain link. Some had low floodlights that lit up their pitiful houses and lawns hardly big enough for a barbecue, but this was a good town Mama had landed in; soon he was driving through the historic district on the Manatee River and there were old buildings—a stone courthouse wedged between wood-framed bungalows that went back to the time of the Seminoles and Spaniards. There was a clapboard boat hut used for rum-running back in Prohibition, and along the sidewalks and in the grassy median were live oaks older than the state, their long and gnarled limbs hung with Spanish moss. Between the old structures new ones were getting framed and closed in, big COMING SOON signs nailed to stakes out front. Every twenty or thirty yards, there’d be the mile-wide Manatee River beyond, dark now, a few lights from Palmetto City trembling on its surface.

  At Mama’s he’d leave the girl sleeping in the truck, then go inside to change into his work clothes and make coffee and get some ice for his pack. He hoped smelling the coffee wouldn’t wake Mama. It’d be good to go sit on her balcony and sip a cup, put ice on his wrist, and think. A church is what he was seeing now. Someplace holy to leave this girl. Someplace close to the ditch out on Lido Key.

  His eyes burned and he slowed for the turn into the old folks’ village where Mama was lucky to buy what she did. They never had much but Mama had always been good with her money, squirreling it away whenever she could, hoarding a little pile over the years that got a lot bigger once Eddie died. He’d had more insurance than AJ would’ve thought, Mama as the sole beneficiary, and he had two grown kids up north somewhere who didn’t come to the funeral. The daughter, Nancy something, sent flowers.

  He drove slowly down the paved road. On both sides of it was a four-foot lane of mulch lit up by ground sconces two or three inches above the grass. Late nights after the Puma, driving back to his mama’s place when he only wanted to be going home instead, the lights always made him feel welcome, beacons to guide him. And right now it was good to have them there and he slowed to under ten miles an hour, pressed the window button with the elbow of his hurt arm. Warm air filled the cab. He could smell the river through the mangroves. The lane curved south and his headlights swept past the ruins of the castle owned by the man Bradenton was named after, the good Dr. Braden and his dream to live on this place, the poor sonofabitch, this whole spread—nine hundred acres—his sugar mill, his castle he’d built himself from poured tabby—sand, lime, crushed shells, and water—only to be overrun by the Seminoles and then, years later, burned half to the ground in a fire. Tourists came to see it, these great crumbling walls overgrown with flowers and shaded by cabbage palms, spattered with gull and pelican shit. But these long weeks living with Mama, AJ never did go take a close look, even when driving by; it was too much of a monument to tripping over your own feet and landing in a load of shit. It reminded him of his own stone house out in the slash pine off Myakka City Road where his son and angry wife lived, his only consolation being that he’d done his job by them and hoped to be back there in that solid little castle again one day.

  But tonight, when his truck lights lit up the ruins, it was Caporelli Sr. AJ thought of, his castle falling, AJ the wily Seminole about to take a piece of it from his rich, lazy ass.

  Now he was into the clearing, a wide lawn sloping d
own to where the Manatee River met the Braden. Up ahead was the dimly lit and sleeping complex of condos and mobile homes. It was just after 2:00 a.m. and he flicked off his headlights and drove in the yellow glow of the lamps along the ground. Nearly every condo had an exterior light shining over their front doors, old people, he noticed, more worried about break-ins than anybody. In front of every other building was a carport, its latticed roof laced with thick and flowering bougainvillea. Each one could hold two cars and he pulled into the third one down on the right alongside Mama’s Buick.

  In the quiet of the complex his engine sounded loud and wrong and he shut it off quickly, turned to see the top of the sleeping girl’s head, her hair parted straight down the middle. Did her mother part it for her and brush it just right? Did she feel like a good mama then?

  His eyes ached. He needed cold water on his face, a cup of hot coffee in his hand. The child’s shoulders couldn’t be more than ten inches from one to the other, and they rose and fell with her breathing. It’d be real bad if she woke right now and started bawling but he couldn’t leave her head like this, her chin touching her chest. He got his door open and slid outside, then opened the access door and with three fingers of his good hand lifted her head up and leaned it into the padded corner of the car seat. Damp strands of hair covered her face, but he didn’t dare move them away. The night had cooled a bit. Her feet were bare. Balled on the floor behind the passenger seat was a Caporelli’s Excavators T-shirt Cap Sr. had proudly handed out from his F-350 like he was giving him a cash bonus. AJ grabbed it now, shook it off and smelled it—cotton and dried sweat and old diesel. He leaned in and draped it over the car seat tray, tucking it in lightly around her shoulders, draping it down over her feet. And again there was that sweet feeling rising up in him that he was doing something good for a stranger, though since Cole had made him a dad he didn’t see other people’s kids as strangers anymore anyway; true, before Cole, he’d never really noticed them; they were like the barking of a dog you hear but don’t listen to so don’t think about. But now, every little kid he saw—the loud ones in the Publix trailing their mamas’ shopping carts, the quiet ones strapped into minivans he passed on the highway, the ones in front and back yards in neighborhoods he drove through, the ones he worried would chase each other into the busy street—especially them—they were all his; he loved and worried about them all, every single one.