The Garden of Last Days Read online

  ALL THESE TYLENOLS had finally shucked their skins and dissolved into his bloodstream, his wrist and arm just dull memories of pain now. Things had calmed and steadied: the night, the girl, his plans for the morning. He drove south in the darkness down Gulf of Mexico Drive, sipping hot coffee, his knee pressed tight to the wheel. Off to his left were the homes of the rich. To his right, their private beaches of sugar sand, then the endless salt water they claimed too. Miles out there were the twinkling lights of an oil freighter or commercial fishing vessel, he wasn’t sure which. There was a lot about the water he didn’t know, except that in hurricane season it could rise up and whip into homes and sweep away whatever it is you thought you could never do without. He’d have to get a boat that wasn’t too big, one he could haul and keep inland, him and Cole and Deena safe in their hurricaneproof house. He kept glancing at the little girl in his rearview, kids like dogs, how quiet they went when it was time to feed. At the gas station he’d bought her a cookie and it was gone before he even got to the Gulf and turned south for Lido Key. Now she sat there looking straight ahead, sucking hard on the straw sunk into her Slush Puppie.

  “You want a spoon?”

  She looked at the back of his head and nodded. He fitted his coffee cup in its holder, pressed his knee tighter to the wheel, and with his good hand lifted the console cover between his seat and the passenger’s. He punched on the overhead light. There were credit applications and a flash of loose coins, ketchup packets, a torn work glove, three or four roofing nails, and a bottle opener, the truck swerving toward the beach. He grabbed the wheel and let the cover slam shut. His heart was thumping and that hurt his hand somehow and he pulled over onto the narrow shoulder and put the truck in park.

  “I want a spoon.”

  “Hold on.”

  He checked his side mirror, saw the red glow of his brake lights, then the black air. If the county pulled up he’d say he and his daughter were on their way home from a family outing up north, Montgomery or Savannah, and they’d been driving all night.

  Daughter. It’d be sweet if she were his, wouldn’t it?

  He lifted the console lid and kept it up with his elbow while his fingers pushed aside the glove for the white plastic spoon that’d been there at least a year, probably from Deena’s hand, the ketchup packets too. Always hording shit like that. Sometimes he admired that about her, how she hated to waste anything. But other times, seeing her stash condiments and plastic utensils, it made him feel like she doubted his ability to provide, that there’d come a hard time when they actually needed this shit.

  Like now.

  He let the lid drop, wiped the spoon on his shoulder. He reached back with it and watched her in the mirror pull the straw out and wedge the spoon in. She lifted too much blended ice and put it in her mouth all at once, her eyes widening before she spit it out onto Cole’s tray top.

  “Too much, huh?”

  She looked from it, then back to the melting puddle in front of her, her eyes welling up.

  “It’s okay, that ain’t nothing. Don’t worry about that.” He grabbed his bandanna and dropped it onto the tray. But she began to whimper and he reached across himself for the door handle and slid out of the truck into the moist air and the Gulf-smell of dried seaweed and old oil, the road dark and empty to the south and north. He pulled open the access door, the cab lamp lighting up this crying little girl, her blond hair hanging over one eye and wet cheek, cookie crumbs in the corners of her mouth and on the front of her pink pajamas, her lips purple. “I want Mama. I want Mama.”

  “I know. I know you do. We’re going home right now. We sure are, honey. We sure are.” He put the Slush Puppie and spoon on the console, dropped the sticky bandanna on the empty beer cans on the floor and unbuckled and lifted the tray over her head, careful not to snag any of her hair, something he never had to think of with Cole. She cried now with no words and already there was less conviction in it, not because she didn’t miss her whore of a mother but because she was dog-assed tired and the Benadryl had surely begun to kick in. Right now she needed to be held, didn’t she?

  He slid his good hand under her armpit. His palm was against her ribs, and he could feel her heartbeat. He pulled her gently off the seat till she was standing and crying louder, looking over his shoulder and outside like she was searching for something. He scooped her under his arm and lifted her out.

  “Shh, shh, it’s okay. It’s okay.”

  He carried her to the shoulder covered with the same crushed shells as the Puma. She gripped his shirt. She went quiet. He’d done the right thing avoiding 301. He could hear the surf up in the distance rolling in and pulling back, rolling in and pulling back, and the sound or maybe it was him—maybe it was him—seemed to calm the girl because now she rested her forehead against his shoulder, her fingers clutching his shirt. Her hair was against his cheek, her thin legs around his ribs, and he turned from side to side and could hold her with one arm like this all night long if he had to. And couldn’t she feel that? Couldn’t she feel his power he’d use only to keep her safe? Couldn’t Deena still? If he never touched her like that again? That wouldn’t be so hard, would it? All she had to do was love him, that’s all. Just love him and quit her bitching and bad habits, maybe lose some weight. Or maybe they just needed another baby. Like this one. Born of a cold whore and she couldn’t get much sweeter, could she?

  And so sing her a song, AJ. Or at least hum something. But he’d never hummed anything in his life, ever, and knew no songs. How about her real daddy? Was there one? Maybe he had it all wrong and there was. Maybe he was a sorry, kicked-out sonofabitch like him.

  He spoke into her hair. “Fran? Franzie?”

  “I want to go home.” Her voice was muffled against his shoulder, her breath warm.

  “We will, hon.” AJ kept turning from side to side, his eyes on those tiny lights so far out on the Gulf. “How ’bout your daddy, though? Is he home, too? Or he live someplace else?”

  She said something he could feel against his shoulder, but it got lost in the hiss of the surf.

  “What’d you say, honey?”

  “Heaven.”

  “Heaven?”

  She nodded against him. AJ stood there a long while. He could feel her breathing grow more steady and he wanted to ask her how long her daddy’d been up there and how’d he die and did she ever know him? But she was almost asleep again, this child with no father, and he began to hum a tune he didn’t know he knew; it started in his throat, then sunk into his chest. And it was good the little one could feel or hear it there, this song of grace, how sweet the sound, of a man once lost but now—found.

  LONNIE DROVE SOUTH for Sarasota. His right headlight seemed dimmer than his left and both windows were open, the road wind whipping around in his cab—how in hell does one even try to find a child? And he wasn’t impressed with the questions either.

  Did you see the toddler tonight?

  No.

  Do you know her father?

  No.

  Does the mother have a husband or boyfriend?

  I don’t know.

  Any suspicious customers?

  Just every damn night. The lone dogs. The sulking drinkers. The brooders.

  Lonnie told the young cop about Dolphins Cap, about his disrespect and having to shut him down and throw him out. The cop sat on a stool in the vaginal pink light of the entryway and wrote down the man’s description, the cap and the beard and the clothes Lonnie could remember him wearing. He thanked Lonnie and handed him his card and told him he could go. Then he called in the next man, the foreigner Spring had spent so much time with in the Champagne. Lonnie held the curtain for him, this little runt with bad teeth and narrow shoulders smelling like cigarettes and body odor and aftershave, brushing past him without a thank-you.

  Louis was at the Amazon Bar drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette. Lonnie still wanted those three fingers of Maker’s over ice, but Louis looked over at him with such a pained expression he knew th
is wasn’t the time to pour himself anything on the house. He was about to keep walking toward the kitchen, the back door, and his Tacoma, but Louis waved him over.

  “They clear you to leave?”

  “Yep.” Lonnie leaned back against the bar and scanned the room. The men were louder now, talking in regular voices. They seemed more relaxed, like they knew this was a procedure they’d have to wait out like a line at the bank or the DMV. Just the cost of doing what you had to, or chose to; one of them, a big man in a loosened tie, was talking about the Devil Rays. Baseball. Just another thing Lonnie had never bothered with.

  “Tina really fucked me this time, Lonnie. I mean fucked me.”

  Lonnie nodded, thought of that word and how we used it for one of the best things that could happen to us and the worst.

  “I’m not shitting you. They could close me over this. You watch, they’ll fuckin’ lock the doors and take the key.”

  “They tell you that?”

  Louis shook his head, looked over his shoulder toward the entryway. He lowered his voice and Lonnie leaned in, could smell the coffee over the rum over the fear.

  “That one who took Spring home, he says no one under twenty-one means no one under fucking twenty-one. And what if something happens to that kid? What fucking then, Lonnie? I’m telling you, you can start looking for work.” He shook his head again and took a deep drag off his cigarette. He blew smoke out his nose. “Fucking cunts.”

  Who? Lonnie wondered. Every single woman who’d come here and rented herself out and made him rich? Or just Tina and Spring, who some cop was driving home now without her daughter? Lonnie kept hearing her screams as she ran barefoot from car to car in the shell lot of this joint he didn’t give two shits about closing. And there’d never been anyone in his life it’d hurt him that much to lose.

  Nobody.

  Not his mother and father back in Austin. Not any of the women he’d tried loving over the years. Maybe Troy, his golden retriever run over by a masonry truck out on Martin Luther King Boulevard when Lonnie was ten. Maybe him.

  Louis was bitching about how this place was never a fucking day care, and Lonnie kept nodding. Sleep wasn’t even a possibility tonight; he was thinking of Spring, how she’d asked him to check in on her girl and he hadn’t. He had to go see her, offer himself up in some way.

  “Am I too nice, Lonnie? Is that my fuckin’ problem? ’Cause Tina’s been coasting for I don’t know how long and I never punched her ticket like I should, you know why? ’Cause I felt sorry for her. She is used up and so over the hill you can’t even see her, but I kept her, I kept her ’cause I know she don’t have shit, and now look, Lonnie. Now look.”

  Lonnie rested his hand on Louis’s shoulder, felt flesh and bone under silk. “I hope everything works out, Lou. I’ll call in later.”

  “I just hope I’m here to answer. You hear what I’m telling you?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  Louis nodded, his eyes on his reflection in the bar mirror behind the liquor he sold at a thousand percent markup. Lonnie headed straight out back. The makeup room was empty but the lights were still on over the mirror. In its bright light on the countertop were a few hairbrushes and combs, a zipped cosmetics bag, five or six empty cocktail glasses and two full ashtrays, the butts brushed with lipstick that made him think of his mother.

  Tina stood in her small office folding a linen tablecloth, her massive breasts straining against her shirt. They put him in mind of clowns and balloons and a party gone terribly wrong.

  He was somewhere north of St. Armand’s Circle now, driving up and down streets of houses only a few blocks from the beach. Most of them were behind stucco walls roofed with terra-cotta tiles and he flicked on the overhead light of his Tacoma and read again the address Tina had written for him: April—44 Orchid Avenue. Up ahead was a Mobil station, its pumps shining under fluorescent light, and he pulled up beside a white compact and went inside.

  The place was too bright and smelled like disinfectant. An Indian or Pakistani sat at the register. Behind him, just beneath the cigarette shelf, was a boom box turned down low, the cry of a woman singing a love song in his language.

  “Evenin’, I’m looking for Orchid Avenue.”

  “Yes, Orchid Avenue.”

  “Can you tell me where it is?”

  “Yes, there.” The man pointed out the window past the pumps to the street.

  “This is it?”

  “No, one street more, sir. West.”

  A toilet flushed somewhere and Lonnie thanked the man, but he was thirsty and headed for the lighted cooler and grabbed a spring water. A door opened in the rear wall. A man Lonnie knew but didn’t know glanced at his face, then walked quickly past him, his tropical shirt tucked into his pants, the little foreigner who’d bought April all night long.

  Lonnie watched him leave and climb into his car and pull away. Again the cool cave opening up inside him. Did she just dance for him? For that long? Just that?

  Now he drove down a softly lit boulevard of royal palms, which didn’t feel right, this neighborhood of affluent retirees. Why not, though? Did he expect her to live like he did? On a loud main road across from a marine supply strip? And her name—April; he’d known it wasn’t Spring, but the truth was, it disappointed him; the only April he’d ever known had been in middle school, a slow girl with an under-bite. He’d had to sit with her in a room for kids who needed extra help with their reading. And just recently there was that poem he’d listened to from a book on tape. T. S. Eliot, right? April is the cruellest month. And so the word itself came to mean cruel and slow and not too good to look at, nothing like Spring, who’d always been warm to him and was the brightest girl in the place and better-looking than all of them because she looked more real somehow, real because of her pride, the knowledge you got she was there for her, not you.

  He turned right onto Orchid. Number 44. There it was, both numbers glinting under a lighted sconce set into the wall of a closed garage. He slowed to a stop in the middle of the street. The house was Spanish colonial, its sides a turquoise stucco that matched the high walls surrounding the courtyard. It had to be close to three in the morning but lights were on in the upper windows and beneath each one were flower boxes overflowing with blooming vines. Maybe he should just keep going. Maybe she needed to be alone right now or had someone looking after her already. But there was the way she ran screaming barefoot from car to car in the lot, her blouse unbuttoned, her long brown hair flapping wildly against her. Don’t let them leave, Lonnie! Don’t let them leave!

  He turned into the driveway. The high walls on each side made him feel embraced and slightly claustrophobic. He killed the lights and engine. He sat there feeling foolish. What could he do? Sit with her and hold her hand till she got some kind of call? Why was he really here? Wasn’t he just trying to keep up the momentum of her need for him? Apologize for letting her down though it was never really his job in the first place?

  A light came on to his left. There was a wooden arch and under it a short mahogany gate, half-open, its latch the same brass as the numbers on the wall. In the electric-lit shadows on the other side was a garden, dense with flowers and vines and through which a woman now came into view. She was older than Spring and much larger, her graying hair cut above the shoulders. She wore a robe she held partly closed with one hand, and as she pushed the gate open and stepped into the brighter light of the driveway, Lonnie thought this must be her mother. Spring lives with her mother.

  He opened the door and climbed out of the truck.

  She said: “Have they found her? Have they found her?” She was looking him up and down, taking in the club’s logo across the front of his T-shirt. She had a midwestern accent.

  “No, ma’am, they’re still looking.” He stepped forward and extended his hand. “I’m Lonnie Pike, ma’am. Are you April’s mother?”

  She shook her head quickly. Her palm was small and sweaty. “Do you work with her?”

  “Yes, ma’
am.” He glanced up at one of the lit windows. “How’s she doing?”

  “She took my car.” She was looking past him into the empty street, one hand pressed to her chest, her mouth open.

  “You okay?”

  She shook her head again, her double chin moving with it. “I need to go back inside. I should get back inside.” The woman took a deep breath, her round shoulders rising. “Please, she doesn’t have a cell phone, we can talk inside.”

  He followed her wide body. She was wearing cloth slippers open in the back, her heels pink. He pulled the gate closed behind him and she was already around the corner of the house, the entire courtyard a profusion of plants, flowers, and trees. He could smell some kind of night-blooming blossom—skunk and honey. She left the door open and he stepped past an outside staircase and walked in just as a fat calico leapt onto the kitchen counter and the woman took a wineglass from a cabinet above the sink.

  “I’m sorry, I get these attacks. Would you like wine?”

  “No thank you.”

  She pulled a rubber vacuum stopper from a half bottle of red and poured into her glass. “I was at the hospital. That’s why she had to take Franny. Because I couldn’t babysit.” She drank deeply from the wine, her eyes on the darkened living room behind. Above the sofa hung a mirror, its frame covered with crayon drawings; a lot of them were figures of people standing around houses under a shining sun. He was tired and his feet were sore and he needed coffee.

  “I tried to go get her. I left the hospital but I couldn’t do it. Oh God, I just couldn’t do it.” The woman began crying silently, three fingers covering her mouth. The cat walked across the counter and rubbed up against her arm. Lonnie wanted to leave; he wanted to get back in his truck and go find Spring.