The Garden of Last Days (14 page)

He drank down some Turkey, liked the feel of its heat spreading out in his chest. He’d just started reading to baby Cole. Small cardboard books about a puppy and his friend Steve, the gator. AJ would lie on the bed with him, feel his son’s small head against his arm while he read each and every word slow, trying to make the story last and last, trying to slow time. Sometimes Cole would point to the picture, try to repeat a word he’d just heard his daddy say. His hand was so small and soft, his whole body like that, his feet hardly reaching AJ’s hip. He’d sneak a look at the side of Cole’s face staring at the book, at his short blond hair and rounded forehead, that bump of a nose, his pink lips and smooth chin. Then AJ would hug him close and kiss him on the head, smell the baby shampoo his wife used on him. It almost hurt to feel this much love. He’d never felt anything close to it before, and it scared him; lying there with baby Cole, he’d wanted to cover him with his whole body. Build a steel and concrete house around him. Erect a twelve-foot hurricane fence around that. Drive him places in a tank, and never let anybody bad close enough to see him or call his name or even
know
it.

He was driving fast now, the white lines of the boulevard zipping under his truck. The Puma Club came and went off to his left and he barely glanced out the window at its yellow glow. What they all seemed to forget is he didn’t do anything wrong. Nothing. All he gave Marianne was his affections and hard-earned money. He only gave his wife what she deserved, and that paper scrap from the court could tell him all it wanted about how far away he had to be from his own son and his own damn home—fifty yards or a hundred, he couldn’t
remember, and he didn’t give a good goddamn because twelve miles and some change up this road was his house
he
paid for. It’d been five weeks since he’d even laid eyes on Cole. It was time to see him. High goddamn time to see him.

He pressed his knee to the wheel, reached for the pint between his legs. The glass was smooth and warm. He thought how that and his F-150 were his only companions tonight, the only ones he could count on.

THE NEW BOTTLE
of Moët was almost gone. He was small and should be drunk and maybe he was, but he didn’t seem it. She sat there next to him on the edge of the love seat in nothing but her G-string, garters, and heels. He barely glanced down at her body, instead kept his attention on her face, his eyes narrowed and tired-looking but lit up with an urgent curiosity. That’s what it looked like to her—urgent.

“Why do you sell yourself?”

“You think I’m selling myself, Mike?”

“Yes, you sell yourself.”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

He lit up another cigarette. “No, April. No.”

She didn’t like how he’d just said her name. As if he knew her. It didn’t even belong in the air of this place. Why had she told him?

“Did your father go to university?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You do not know?”

“Nope. What about your father?”

His forehead ridged up and he blew smoke out his nose and mouth at the same time. “Take off your bottom piece, please.”

“I’m s’posed to dance.”

“Why? Soon my hour with you will be over and I will give to this business three hundred dollars more. Do you think the owner cares what you do in this room?”

“You want another hour?”

“Please, I would like you to tell me why you do this. And do not say it is for money because that is a lie.” He pulled the bottle from the ice and poured the rest of the Moët into her glass. He stood, scooped his cash up off the table, handed her two hundred dollars but left the seven hundred on the cushion next to her. “I will buy you for one hour more. When I return you will not be wearing your bottom piece and you will surprise me, yes?”

He smiled down at her, his bad teeth on display, his eyes hungry but distant, passing over her face and breasts and knees as if he wanted her but had also tired of her long ago. His back was narrow, his polo shirt wrinkled like he’d been driving for days. He walked steadily, didn’t look back at her, and pulled the door shut behind him.

BEHIND BASSAM WHORES
dance for seated kufar and he stands at the bar in blue light, the music loudest here, the smoke hanging thickly. A big man is beside him, one of the whores’ protectors. He has his back to him so rudely and his white T-shirt is stretched tightly across his muscled shoulders, but there, above the whiteness of his shirt, is his dark neck and of course this kafir could break Bassam’s body in two pieces but not if he is struck first. Not if the kafir is struck when he expects nothing but more and more of the comfort he is in now.

Beneath Bassam’s feet, the floor seems to have movement. His arms and legs are like liquid, his face a smiling mask he gives to the barman as he hears his voice ask for the French champagne.

“Moët?”

“Yes, that.” How easy to thrust the blade into his throat. How easy to turn and reach up and plunge the razor just below the ear.

Why is he here? Why does he stay? He can feel her waiting for him. Uncovered and beginning to talk. His last chance with one, he is certain. His last opportunity.

He places a bill onto the bar and the barman takes it and pushes at him the bottle, and Bassam must hurry to the last woman who is the first woman. Hurry back to her and discipline himself to stay for one more hour only.

The bottle is cool and heavy and he does not wait for the change. He walks back through the naked whores and they writhe like snakes in the firelight and he feels weak for giving the barman such money. How many dollars? Fifty? Sixty? But no, let him be fooled by it. Let them all be fooled.

“Hey, little man. You drinking that yourself?”

A black kafir, so much of her skin showing between thin red garments. She is tall, smiling down at his eyes, and in Khamis Mushayt, the daughter of the Sudanese who mixed the mortar for the mosque built by Ahmed al-Jizani, how tall she was and fully covered in the black abaya and she would bring to her father water, and Bassam was a boy but he watched her, her body covered and her head but not her face, her eyes like this one, her brown skin like this one.

“You in the Champagne?”

“Come, please,” he hears himself say to her. “I buy you too.”

The pig at the curtain, she tells him words about rotation and she laughs and steps into the red light and opens the black door. The music so loud and crashing in his ears, so loud, the air too smoky, too crowded, the smell of sweating and fading perfumes, and this too must be a sign, the Holy One showing him what, Insha’Allah, he will avoid.

THE NIGHT AIR
blew warm against the side of AJ’s face, and he turned east onto Myakka City Road. His hand still hurt, and he was going to do something about that sonofabitch, but he’d been wound tight all day just getting up his nerve to tell Marianne where he’d take her, to ask her when she wanted to go, and even though she’d made a goddamned fool of him, at least it was behind him. At least his heart wasn’t going all day when it shouldn’t, giving him the shits for this woman who was all wrong about him.

He sat back behind the wheel of his cruising Ford, his whole body light and loose in the warm Wild Turkey air, and he could see it all just a bit more clearly now, could get philosophical about it. She just didn’t know him, that’s all. He’d made the mistake of not talking about himself enough. He’d asked her questions about her because he wanted to know and because he wanted her to know he wanted to know. But she never did tell him much. And all he told her about himself was
missing Cole and how dumb-luck beautiful she was, that it was
his
dumb luck to find someone so beautiful and she’d smiled a real smile and put her hand in his for the first time, felt the calluses there from working the knobs of his CAT. She probably thought right then that’s all he was. She didn’t know he’d always been good at math and numbers, that he’d been the night manager at the Bradenton Walgreen’s at
twenty-one
, that they wanted him to go to their training clinic up north somewhere, Deena working Register 3, sweet and quiet, her body nice to look at behind her Walgreen’s apron, woman curves all over, and she called him Mr. Carey, which made him feel good, and one night she needed a ride home and he drove her and on the way they stopped and bought a six-pack of cold Millers and he got her to stop calling him Mister, told her a joke about the real manager, Simon Blau, and they both laughed and then they were parked under an oak somewhere, kissing and tearing at each other and then, like that, she was pregnant and they were married and her old man was offering to train AJ on heavy equipment for better pay, and now he hadn’t seen his boy in thirty-seven days and all the good months he and Deena had had were just asphalt under his wheels as he drove beneath I-75, thinking about how much she’d changed on him, how she didn’t like to have a good time anymore.

Didn’t want to drink. Or play cards. Never wanted to fuck or even let him hold her or touch her a little. Just read her damn magazines about TV stars and the goddamn cars they drove and the houses they lived in and the pretty people they left for prettier ones ahead. She’d gotten fat and knew it, but instead of getting off her ass she’d work on her nails, growing them out too long, painting them a different color every week. And she was always restless about her hair, was never happy with the way God gave it to her, straight and brown. She’d get into their secondhand Corolla AJ’d paid for and drive into Bradenton to have her hair dyed or curled or bleached or ironed or whatever the hell it was they did. Then he’d come home, his shoulders and back stiff and sore, coughing up dust, a buzzing in his ears from the diesel engine and that steel bucket and all he’d made it do, and there she’d
be cooking in the kitchen fat and unhappy with her new hair—blonde or red, sometimes a little purple or green, sometimes straight, other times curly—standing there frying him a steak and onions, or chicken and hush puppies, feeding Cole in his high chair, her face all round and greasy, and he didn’t know if he should cry for her, or laugh, or go over and hug her and tell her she was fine just the way she was, that she didn’t have to do that, but he never did any of those things because he’d be too goddamned angry, feel it rise up in his blood and muscles and skin, this tightening up when all he wanted to do was unwind, and he’d shake his head at her and tell her she looked ridiculous and how much goddamn money did
that
cost? Because he knew it was at least two
hours
of his workday, wasn’t it? Maybe three hours,
his
three hours, sitting in that cage, working the machinery in the fumes and dust and mosquito heat for them, for Deena and Cole, for the bank that held the note on their two-bedroom, for Caporelli Excavators he bled for so they could pocket their profit and toss him the crumbs. And—he had to admit—for him, for Alan James Carey, and his hard-earned self-respect that when he’d gotten into trouble with this girl he’d done the right thing by her and the baby, borrowed the down payment from his old mother in Bradenton and bought them their house off Myakka City Road, this abandoned cinder-block hut out in the wire grass and slash pine. But it had a well and electrical service, and nights and weekends he’d gutted it, built new partition walls, reinsulated it, hung Sheetrock, put in seven new windows, roofed it, and laid new floors. Deena hadn’t had the baby yet and they lived with her folks out on Lake Manatee. Shared the room she was raised in, the walls still covered with posters of those goddamned boy bands, and lying there after working from seven to eleven he couldn’t bear to look at them, hated being there at all, hated having to borrow money from her old man for most of the materials. But he could see how her father had grown to respect him. Saw how he could work and work and how fast he learned things. And her old lady was one of those too-cheerful-smiling-mice-of-a-woman you could never trust. He was glad Deena never laid it on thick like she did. Her
mother always asking him questions about what he did all day, her smile nailed to her face, her eyes glazing over, looking right at him.