The Garden of Last Days (19 page)

Did
he want to know? She leaned forward and looked past Retro’s smoothly muscled shoulder, the foreigner’s eyes darting to hers. He nodded his head at something Retro said, then waved his hand and stood just long enough to clear off half the cocktail table, pushing aside the ashtray and cash, the empty snifters still sticky with Rémy. He sat there, then crossed his legs, the smoking cigarette between his lips and his eyes squinting out at them. He was drunker than she’d thought he was. Retro lay her hand on April’s leg and squeezed.

“What do you want us to do, honey? Huh? What do you want to see?”

“Nothing. I want to see nothing.”

“Really?” Retro sounded skeptical, her hand still on April, a warm weight she could feel all the way to her belly. The foreigner was studying her now, his eyes on her face, her nipples. He looked at them for what seemed a long time. The hundred-dollar bills were spread out beside him, one of them on its side against the ice bucket. It was hard not to look at them. She hoped he wasn’t so drunk he’d forgotten their deal.

“Nothing, huh, baby?” Retro lifted her left thigh and rested her spiked heel on the table next to his leg. She let her right fall open, but he didn’t look down at her brown belly or her crotch. He blew out smoke, stubbed the butt on the table, burning the corner off one of the bills.

“What is your real name?”

“We can’t tell, honey, it’s against the rules.” Retro forced a laugh. Her hand lifted away from April and moved to him. She began to run her fingers in a circle over his knee.

“Do not touch me, please.”

“C’mon, baby.”

With his thumb and forefinger he gripped her wrist, picked her hand off him as if it were something poisonous, and dropped it over her spread legs.

“Tell him your name, Retro. He’ll pay you for it.”

“Only if she does not lie.”

“How’re you going to know, honey?”

“He’ll know.”

“No, I do not need this one’s name.”

“But you just asked me.” There was a smile in Retro’s voice, but the sassiness that’d been there a second ago was gone. Her hand lay on the cushion where he’d dropped it.

He shook out another Marlboro. “Remove this clothing, please.”

Retro stood and began swaying her hips in time to the club music out on the floor.

“No, do not dance.”

Retro stopped, her massive hoops catching the light in the smoke above April.

“Look, honey, I dance. If you don’t want the
dance
, then you gotta
pay
.”

He looked at April, his eyes dropping to her crotch. They lingered on the scar from Franny. He picked up a single bill and held it up to Retro. “Answer my question and you receive this.”

She reached out for it, her fingers on it, his fingers still on it.

“Ask away, little man.”

“What will happen for you after you die?”

“That’s a little creepy, honey, but, you know—worm food, baby. I’ll just be worm food.” She pulled on the bill. He didn’t let go.

“What does this mean?”

“It means we’re just food for the worms, honey. You know, those little snakes with no eyes? Worms.”

He held on to the hundred and he began to laugh. It was a tired, drunk, cruel laugh, and he shook his head and let go of the bill and Retro folded it lengthwise and snapped it under her garter.

He stopped and nodded, his eyes on her chest. “Clothing, please.”

“Sure thing.” Retro glanced down at April sitting there with her champagne, watching her, and April felt like an accomplice to some hostile action against her. Retro stepped over their legs and undressed quickly against the wall, leaving on her G-string, garters, and spikes, her hoops swinging back and forth. April had seen her breasts dozens of times, but here, in this tiny room under the smoky light on this cheap black love seat, drinking Moët, it was as if she’d never seen them before, small and beautiful, her nipples the color of tree bark. April looked away from them.

“Everything, please.” He picked up another hundred-dollar bill, pointed it like a pistol at Retro’s G-string.

“That’s my sweet spot, honey. You want the sweet spot, you got to give me more than that.”

“I have already paid for that, yes? I do not have to give anything more to see that.”

“Only if we dance, honey, but you don’t want the dance.”

He sat straight at the edge of the table. He looked directly at April’s face, and in his eyes was a hard, accusatory light. He picked up his lighter, flicked open a flame, and held it to the hundred-dollar bill.

“Mike,” April said. “Don’t do that.”

“You see, I do not care for money as you do. I do not.”

The bill flamed up immediately. Retro jerked it from his fingers
and blew it out, smacking and rubbing it against her hip, holding it up to the light, a quarter of it gone. He picked another hundred off the table and held it over the flame.

“Shit.” Retro dropped the burned bill, hooked her thumbs under the straps of her G-string, pushing it down her long legs, stepping out of it, kicking it behind her onto her mound of red clothes. Her crotch was only inches from April’s face and she could smell it, the scent of swamps, of fertile, wet, dark places where life comes from, and like most of the girls, Retro was shaved, just a narrow strip of hair riding up from her clit over her pubic bone. April didn’t turn her head and knew she was a little drunk: she let herself look at it as long as she wanted.

Mike the foreigner handed Retro the bill, then gave her a second one, too. “Thank you.” She folded and wedged them under her right garter and sat back down between them. One of the bills lightly poked April’s thigh.

She sipped her Moët. Retro’s hip was warm against her. He held the bottle by the neck and poured more champagne into both their glasses, his eyes flitting from April’s crotch to Retro’s and back.

“They cut a baby from you, yes?”

The question made her feel more naked than being naked, and she couldn’t answer. Tried to nightsmile at him. Nodded.

“And you,” he said to Retro. “You are mother?”

“Why do you want to know, little man?”

He put another cigarette between his lips. “Open your legs.”

“Ask nice, honey.”

He looked over at April, his eyes softer now, as if she were an old friend he expected to help him. He gathered up the remaining bills and wadded them into a tight crinkled ball and pushed them into Retro’s palm. She said nothing, just opened her legs and flashed him some pink, her thigh across both of April’s, her other hooked over the opposite arm of the love seat. The club’s music was country again, Sadie already back on. One man whooped and there was a lot of rolling
drums and fast-picking guitar, and Retro was trying to look like she was excited, tilting her head back, rubbing herself lightly with two fingers, Mike staring hard at what she’d parted for him.

He didn’t look quite as drunk now. His eyes were softer and he looked years younger. Like a kid, really. And Retro’s skin against hers had felt nice, but now her leg was heavy and made April feel hemmed in. She just kept looking at the table, empty of the one-hundred-dollar bills she’d hoped would be hers.

ATINY LIGHT UNDER
the stairs. She gets on her hands and her knees like Jean’s cat and there’s a place there. Far away a door opens and closes and a grown-up’s legs walk from the dark into the light. She can crawl under there. She just has to make herself small and she’s not scared. She’s not. She crawls into the wide low place and the floor is hard and dusty and the music isn’t loud anymore but above her the wood squeaks under somebody walking or running. Her hand touches something, a long piece of wood that doesn’t move. But it’s not big and she crawls over it. Dusty dusty. Makes her want to cough. The music stops and she can hear only voices, feet squeaking over her head. How will Mama find her here? Loud music comes again and more feet squeaking over her head. So close. She sits on the piece of wood and reaches her hand up into the darkness and her fingers touch more wood.

She crawls.

More long wood pieces, but she’s only a little afraid.
Do your best, sweetie. Just do your best
. And it’s not far away. She’s so close now so soon. She smells food like she ate for supper like she and Mama buy sometimes at the window the man gives them French fries through to their car. Boys smiling at Mama. And this hole is a square. A small square. The door opening and closing and opening. The light and smells on the other side. Another curtain too. The party over there she wasn’t going to. And she sits like an Indian by the square in the wall by the stairs. A lady pushes through the curtain and she’s carrying glasses on a big round plate and she pushes open the door to the light. A shiny metal oven, and a man takes the glasses and Franny doesn’t want to go in there now. But she can’t go back into the dark place. Her face is hot, her eyes burning wet, and she shouldn’t make noise. She just shouldn’t.

IN THE COOL
darkness of his truck cab AJ’s wrist was a swollen hurt he rested palm-up on his leg. The beer was cold, the can beaded with condensation, and every time he sipped off his Miller he pressed his knee to the wheel to stay on Washington Boulevard, Bob Seger singing about being all alone again up on the stage. But AJ still had that good new feeling about Deena, that maybe she
did
love him and would wait there for him after all, that he’d get Cole back in his arms again and probably Deena, too; he was glad he’d disobeyed that damn order and gone home but now he couldn’t stop thinking of Marianne, seeing her the way he first had under blue light, smiling shyly and shaking her tits at him. Nothing but a girl. It was her hand he kept seeing, her outstretched palm waiting to get paid even after that big sonofabitch bent and twisted his wrist till it’d surely cracked.

He drained his beer and tossed the empty over his shoulder where it landed on two others in Cole’s car seat. A mile up ahead, for the
fifth time in half an hour, were the yellow lights of the Puma sign rising up over the shell lot of cars and pickups and vans. AJ pushed on the gas, his F-150 responding like a gun. Under the canopy were three or four men yukking it up over some lying whore, and at the entrance was one of the hired T-bones smoking a cigarette, Sledge or Skeggs or something, nothing but whiskers and muscle and bad breath, the one who’d held open the door when the big chink tossed AJ out like trash.

AJ shot by the lighted club back into the darkness of Washington Boulevard. The big man had looked out at him like he was a problem he didn’t need, but goddamnit, AJ didn’t need for his wrist to be broken either, and unless he went into work tomorrow and made like he hurt it there, he wouldn’t get a decent paycheck for as long as it was going to take to get better. He tried to picture it, how he was going to hide this swelled up useless limb. The CAT was at the job site, a municipal drainage ditch out on Lido Key. He’d get there before Caporelli’s piece-of-shit son did; he’d toss the short-handled spade into the ditch, then lower the bucket and climb down in there and wedge his wrist under it. When Caporelli drove up AJ would yell to him that he was pinned, that he’d gone down to clean the teeth when the bucket dropped on him. He’d yell at Junior to get in the cab and free him.

That’d work. Especially with Caporelli Jr., just another lucky sonofabitch born into a cozy situation he never earned. He was five or six years younger than AJ and drove a V-10 he didn’t need, not a chain or single tool in it, and he kept it shiny and spent most of the day in his air-conditoned cab talking on his cell phone to his girlfriend or his sports bookie. AJ’d have him drive to the hospital in Sarasota, let the Caporellis pay for everything, including the time he’d have off, a few weeks anyway.

He wanted another cold beer, but the pain had flattened out enough, and again, there was the feeling his luck was changing; with that kind of paid time off he could go to that one damn class and let them say what they were going to say and then Deena would call off the wolves
and he could see Cole again. He could still hear his son’s voice as it’d sounded in his sleep, that high, pure, ever-hopeful voice of the child he’d be happy to die for.
Happy
to. And tonight, after five long weeks, there was the feel of his smooth cheek, the way his hair had smelled so clean, these thoughts spilling outside into the headlight path of his truck, the long wire grass on both sides of the road, the empty beer cans, a flattened cigarette carton, the matted fur husk of a long-dead animal.