The Garden of Last Days (11 page)

She zipped the bag and locked up. “Tell Tina I don’t appreciate her leaving this fucking room, Donna.”

“You tell her.” Donna didn’t look up from her book, and she was right but April wanted to push her face into it. She hurried into the bathroom, peed and washed her hands. She glanced into the mirror as she passed, saw this tanned woman with long brown hair, her ass pale with a bikini line, her hoop earrings dangling.

RETRO ALWAYS GAVE
a good act. Tonight she was even better than usual and had to take up the whole pause between numbers to get her cash off the stage floor. The young men at the table kept up their hollering for her and she smiled and winked over at them on her knees. Now Hank Jr. was back in the air and Retro just barely scooped up her gown and underthings before Sadie came dancing onstage in her white Stetson, vest, and boots. A pocket opened up to Lonnie’s left, the front curtain parting pink, two men leaving, three more coming in. The main floor was still crowded and loud and smoky, but only three girls danced in the VIP, and Hank Jr. going on about his family tradition took Lonnie to Austin where he was raised, their small framed house overlooking a culvert where bluebonnets grew along the cracked concrete, his happily drunk mother and ineffectual father who’d made a life out of watching over books at the university library. Cataloguing them. Keeping the mold
off. Checking them out to thousands of people over the years. He was tall like Lonnie, but quiet, and would let anyone say anything to him in anger and do nothing, from his wife to a man in traffic out on MLK Boulevard. On his off-hours he listened to records—Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, Waylon Jennings and Jerry Jeff Walker, Hank Sr. and Jr., and for Lonnie it was hard to hear the son without thinking of the father, his, though now Spring walked quickly from the kitchen and around the stage still half-dressed from the Champagne, her long hair swinging low just above her naked bottom. She walked tall as usual, but there was nothing usual about her being in the Champagne or having to leave half-dressed and Lonnie felt the steps under his feet as an afterthought. He moved between the tables and cut her off between the Portofino boys, the lights on Sadie flashing white in a rodeo strobe. He put his hand on Spring’s shoulder. Smooth skin and warm muscle. She stopped and looked up into his face, hers beautiful but distracted. He leaned close to her ear, her hoop earring brushing his chin. “Everything okay?”

She said something.

“What?” He turned his ear to her and now he felt her nose against his temple, her warm breath.

“My daughter’s sleeping in Tina’s office, Lonnie. Can you keep an eye on her? Tina’s upstairs.”

He nodded, straightened, watched her go.
Daughter
. She was hurrying through the tables, not bothering to work them a bit on her way to the Champagne Room, and she held something in her hand. A cold cave opened up in his gut—Wendy, yes, and maybe Retro or Sadie or Marianne, if she ever got asked—but not the one woman in this club who really seemed to be above everything she did here. Tell me that’s not a rubber in her hand. Tell me Spring did not go back to her locker for a fucking
skin
.

He stood there between full tables, knew he was blocking the view of customers behind him but he didn’t move. Watched her rush into the blue light of the VIP bar, smile at Paco, and hand the bartender the cash she held in her hand—not a rubber, but
money
, Lonnie. Money.

He felt the cave close up and his lungs filled with smoky Puma Club air. One of the Portofino boys yelled louder than anyone had all night and Lonnie turned to say something to him but onstage Sadie was spinning her breasts in perfect clockwise circles, one hand in the air spinning an imaginary lasso, so let him yell. Let them all yell. Yell themselves right over the line where he’d be waiting.

He climbed back up to the Amazon Bar, but he could only think of the one waiting for Spring. The little high roller who had her all to himself in his little black plywood room.

HE SHOULD NOT
have come. They are in the final phase, and he should not have come.

But he cannot leave. Not yet.

On the worn carpet lies her top she removed for him. Her bottom robe lies across the table where she dropped it beside her empty glass, the pail of ice, his ashtray and glass, empty as well. He picks up this clothing and he folds it and places it beside him. He should not drink further. He should stop. Why then did he send her for more? Because he wants
her
to drink. He wants her to drink so she will speak truthfully to him, so she will forget for a moment her work. For just this hour or maybe two. It is not anything the Egyptian is required to know. Or Imad or Tariq, his brothers, waiting for him on the other coast.

But this kufar music, even through the walls it charges like a wild animal. Why did Khalid like it so much? His eyes upon the highway,
he would turn the volume until the ashes in the tray shook, his head bouncing to it, laughing as he gave the engine all its fuel, Bassam afraid and grasping the door handle but laughing as well.

This David Lee Roth, if there was time Bassam would find him and kill him. For he worries. At his death Khalid was living like the kufar. He had not yet turned back to holiness and the Book. He had not visited the imam many evenings between the last two prayers, he had not sat upon the carpet looking into the sheikh’s eyes that shone with wisdom and the light of iman as he revealed the nothingness inside them, the nothingness that made them race on the Road of Death and sneak away to Mount Souda to smoke tobacco and play music, some of the boys using their cell phones to call girls and talk and talk and talk.

The imam pointed in the direction of the air base of the Americans, the air base Ahmed al-Jizani helped to build, the air base their own king permitted in the Land of the Two Holy Places. “It is what they want. The further you fall from our faith, the stronger they become. The ways of the West, it is how Shaytan spreads confusion among the believers.”

And Khalid’s body was washed and wrapped in white and laid down on his right side facing Makkah.

Bassam began smoking more. He and Imad drove friends to Mount Souda and made fires. They sat around the flames, Tariq playing the oud, and they smoked cigarettes and talked of nothing but gossip—the mall in Abha where girls entered with a male guardian only to separate and meet their friends, their heads covered, their laughter, their eyes you could see seeing you. The chat rooms where you could have for hours a written conversation. The music allowed in other countries that made your heart beat more quickly and made you want to dance, something that was permitted outside the kingdom in nightclubs where men and women could go freely. And beer. Tariq wanted to taste beer. To taste the drunkenness he heard you could find in it. Your head becoming someone else’s.

Bassam lay beside the fire. He listened to his friends and all their
longing for more nothingness he was only beginning to feel was nothing. He lay there upon the hard ground and he watched the sparks rise to the stars in the blue-blackness above. A baboon began its howling cry. There he was under the moonlight in a thorn tree, his head tilted upward.
That is me. I am just a baboon in a thorn tree. I am nothing. All of us. We are nothing
.

Until the imam. Until the fasting whose thirst and hunger bring you closer to the Creator, the All-Knowing Sustainer and Provider, the teachings of their boyhood, that all beliefs other than our own are void and it is the plan of the Ahl al-shirk to separate us from our faith, to occupy us with their armies, to send us away from the One True God and Jannah. How could Bassam have forgotten his own king permitting the kufar onto the birthplace of the Prophet, peace be upon him? How could he have forgotten as a boy of fourteen years, the roaring sound of the American jets taking off to bomb their Muslim brothers in Iraq and Kuwait? It was the sound of Shaytan laughing at them. The air shook and you could not hear the mu-adhin’s call to prayer. You could not hear the prayers of the imam inside the mosque built by Ahmed al-Jizani, only the jet engines of the kufar attacking our faith.

But remember too the American officers walking through the souq. Their uniforms pressed, their shoes dusty from the street. They talked too loudly and laughed too often. They pointed at goatskins of olive oil and made jokes. One picked up precious incense you burn for guests in your home, musk and myrrh and amber, and held it to his nose as if to judge its worthiness. You watched him, Bassam. You watched him, hungry and thirsty as you were from the fast of Ramadan and you saw inked into his arm the false idol cross that is haram, and you looked up and down the crowded street but there were no mu’taween to report to, and you cannot lie, there was something about these men you wanted to become. Tall and strong and afraid of nothing. Warriors. Above the rules. Living by rules from another world.

Khalid. That evening during Ramadan. There was a cold wind
from the mountains and he came home without his coat. He’d missed the nightly Iftar to break the fast, and many uncles and cousins were in the outer building with Ahmed al-Jizani, who called Khalid inside to eat.

Where is your coat?

I don’t have it
.

Where is it?

I gave it to the man in the souq
.

Why?

He was cold. He did not have a coat
.

But now you have no coat
.

Yes, that is true
. Khalid sat down and their father was smiling and in his eyes was the wet light of pride.

In only three days, Insha’Allah, they will shine brighter than ever before for the highest place in Jannah is reserved for the shahid, but also for the man who helps widows and the poor. The Prophet has said this, peace be upon him, and so Bassam will see Khalid again, yes? He must have faith that he will see him very soon. Allah willing, Insha’Allah.

“MRS. HANSON?” THE
young nurse hurried into the room. She pressed a button on the monitor, and the beeping stopped. Jean moved past her to the short chest of drawers in the corner and pulled out her sundress.

“I’m going home.”

A second nurse appeared in the doorway, tall and older, her hair pulled back in a tight French braid. “What seems to be the trouble?” Again, speaking too loudly, enunciating her words too damn clearly.

“No trouble,” Jean said. She untied her johnny and let it drop to the floor. “I have to get home and I’m leaving.” She found her bra in the drawer and put it on, hooking it together in front, then pulling it around and cupping her breasts into each one. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d done that in front of anyone else—years. With Harry, years ago.

“Mrs. Hanson,” the young nurse said. “You should really stay and rest.”

“Thank you, but I have to go.”

The other nurse was in the room now, leaning against the wall, her arms folded. “If something happens to you, we’re not responsible. You do understand that, don’t you?”

“Of course.” She stuck her arms into the sleeves of her dress and didn’t bother reaching up in back to struggle with the button. Franny did that for her sometimes, her tiny fingers against Jean’s bare neck.