The Garden of Last Days (24 page)

She kept her eyes on him and shook her head. First slow, then fast, her hair swinging, her lower lip protruding.

“Don’t you want to see her? I know your mama. I know she’s in there.”

Behind him, around the corner of the club, came men’s voices, some drunk and loud, others quieter, more controlled, off to go do something. A few engines started up. A radio blared a metal tune he’d always hated and somebody was talking about shaved cunt, how he was sick to death of shaved cunt. The little girl was crying. AJ could only shake his head and with his good arm lift her up once more. She squeezed his neck tight and wasn’t letting go. He could feel her small heart jumping in her rib cage. What was he going to do? Go back in there and say he found her when he wasn’t even s’posed to be anywhere near here?

Then again it was late and it wouldn’t be too long before her piece-of-shit mother came back out. He could put the girl in her car and wait with her. And what? Be sitting with a child in a car that wasn’t even his when the hired beef finally came out to drive home? Do all this for a bitch queen who didn’t even goddamn deserve his help in this way? Meantime his arm needed some serious painkilling right now, painkilling that wouldn’t hurt his chances for getting up early.

Nope, he was just going to have to put her where he found her. He turned and carried her back, the noise from inside at its peak: hoarse-voiced losers calling out the fake names of the whores they’d gone broke over, the speakers blasting music so loud they were about to burst.

The air smelled like congealed grease and something dead.

“Let go, honey. You got to go back to your mama now. Let go.”

She was squeezing his neck tighter than ever. He tried to grip her
arm with his hurt hand but it was too much. He lowered her to the stoop, could hear her cries through the last-call Puma noise he’d like to toss a grenade into just to shut them all up.

“It’s scary. I don’t want to, it’s
scary
.”

God
damn
it. He straightened up, the little one sitting on his forearm. She was lighter than a bag of groceries and he walked hard and fast over the crushed shells for the dark shadows of the mangroves where his truck was and more Tylenol and cool beer to wash it all down. Did he still have some of Cole’s car toys in his glove compartment?

“Here, we’ll wait for your mama right here, ’kay?”

She sniffled, didn’t say anything, though she lifted her head now to see where they were going.

“Okay?”

“Mama’s coming
soon
?”

“I sure as hell hope so, Francie.”

“My name is
Franny.”

“Hold on to my neck again.” He fumbled for the handle, pulled the door open, and sat her down in the front seat. He could smell the Turkey he’d spilled earlier, the diesel grime and ditch grit that were the smells of his truck. She was so small she could stand in the seat and her head still didn’t touch the cab’s ceiling. She put both hands on the steering wheel to balance herself and he remembered that family parked outside a Walgreen’s down in Miami, a young mama letting her two-year-old sit up front while she strapped the baby in the back. Only an old man parking his car bumped her front fender and set off the air bag and killed the two-year-old.

“Get in the back a minute, ’kay?” He scooped her up, his arm a bit too low, and she started falling backward but reached out and grabbed his bad wrist, a crackle of fire through his arm bones into his shoulder. “Ah,
shit
.”

She started crying again, standing on his backseat barefoot in her pink pajamas next to Cole’s car seat full of empty beer cans. He wanted to tell her it wasn’t her fault, that he wasn’t mad at her, but man he had to get some relief. He opened the Tylenol bottle and upended it
into his mouth, swallowing five or six more, though half felt stuck in his throat. He reached by her, opened a Miller, and drank it down. Her crying faded to a whimper. He pressed the cool can to his wrist, thought about putting some ice on it, but that was wrong because it had to look bad under the bucket in the morning. The worse the better.

“Shh, shh, I’m not mad or nothin’. I just have a hurt hand. I’m not mad at you.”
Not mad at you
. Sometimes he’d scream that at Deena, I’m not mad at
you
, goddamnit! Though he was. She could’ve made things easier anytime she wanted and she never did.

Up against the steering column, his work bandanna hung from the gearshift. A little crisp with dried sweat. He put the beer on the runner board, grabbed the kerchief, and gently wiped the girl’s snot away. She cried harder, then slowed up, sniffling and wiping her eyes, her chest sputtering in and out with her sobbing.

“You’re just real tired, aren’t you?”

She was looking out his windshield to the back of the club and the bright kitchen door where he’d found her. No one was there.

“Hey lookit.” He opened the glove box, fingered around the Ford manual and his registration, the Burger King straws and drill bits and tire gauge till he felt the hard bumpy plastic of a purple frog that would jump once you wound it up. He stepped down and handed it to her. She took it like she might get in trouble if she didn’t.

“It’s a froggie, see?” He pointed to it, wanted to wind it up, but he needed two hands for that and anyway that little jump might scare her all over again.

“Here.” He leaned past her. He swatted the empty cans onto the floor. “Sit down, hon. There’s a little table you can play on.”

She looked up at him, her eyes dark and lost-looking, then sat down and seemed better right away. “This is like my seat. Is this my seat?”

“No, this is my boy’s seat.”

Above her head was the seat belt clasp hanging from the plastic tray AJ had left up and open since the last time Cole had sat in it. For weeks it had blocked his view out the rear window, still, he never put
it down, couldn’t even think of seeing that car seat buckled shut like Cole was locked out of it. Now he lowered the tray over the girl’s head till plastic touched plastic and she had a smooth surface in front of her to put her frog on.

“It’s like
my
seat.” She ran her fingers over it, dragged the frog over it. She was calm now. But what was he going to do with her? He was tired, his legs heavy, his arm something he was just going to have to get used to for a while. He drained the Miller, tossed it in the trees behind him, then grabbed another and shut the back access door. He climbed up into his seat and had to reach across himself to pull his own door closed.

He just needed to sit and think a minute. Sip some cool relief. He adjusted the rearview mirror so he could see her without turning around. She was looking at the frog in her hand real hard, trying not to cry. His window was open, the lot getting louder with men leaving the Puma, some of them talking trash the little girl shouldn’t have to hear. He wedged the can between his legs and started the truck, pressed the window buttons and flicked on the AC. She began to whimper again.

“Hey, we’re not going anywhere. I just had to start the engine to get the cool air going, that’s all.”

He saw her peeking through her fingers, her eyes wide and shiny, staring out the windshield at one of the hired beefs, a big dim-witted sonofabitch named Deke or some shit, a man who looked like all he did was lift weights, eat, sleep, and lift more weights. Only now he looked upset, walking fast away from the kitchen door and Dumpster, stopping to look left and right, his hand on his hips, his arms two thick shadows silhouetted against the fluorescent light behind him.

The girl was crying quietly now. What, he
do
something to her? AJ’s blood seemed to spread out through him, his heart revving up like a long-quiet engine. The man looked hard to his right at the loud parking lot, stepped once in that direction but then turned around and headed straight for the little girl’s Sable. He cupped two hands to his face as he looked inside. First the back, then the front. He jerked
his head up and looked around the car. The child was still covering her face with both hands, her crying muffled.

“Hey, it’s okay. I’ll take care of you.” And as he said it he knew he meant it, though he had no idea how. The beef stopped and scanned the employee lot, then looked behind him out at the dark stretch of wire grass, turned, and ran back toward the club.

In the fluorescent-lit kitchen were a few dancers and the man who’d broken AJ’s wrist. In that light AJ could see how flat and wide his face was, how much bigger he was than the other one as he stood there in a tight Puma Club T-shirt. With his foot, he propped open the door, glanced quickly outside, then let the door slam behind him.

The kitchen was empty. A fuzzy insect in AJ’s brain clicked that this was the time to get out of his truck, take the little girl, and run her back inside. But to who? To people who might think he was a different kind of man than he was? They’d hold him and call the law in, and even though he had nothing to be ashamed of—he’d only tried to give the girl some comfort—he couldn’t risk getting even the
thought
of that into the court. They’d never let him see Cole again.

But soon as they didn’t find her they’d be out here again, and the county might get here even before that. He could put the little thing in her mama’s car, drive off in his truck, and call the club on his cell phone to tell them where she was, but how could he leave her in a parking lot with all the men wandering and stumbling their way out of the Puma, fifteen or twenty of them in twos and threes, smoking and laughing and talking trash—a few of them off on their own, hands in empty pockets, heading for their rides to go off and do who knew what?

He looked at her in the rearview mirror. She was staring out the windshield behind her fingers, the frog upside down on Cole’s tray, and his good hand gripped the gearshift and slid her into drive, his boot toe tapping the gas, his truck rolling over the crushed shells past the club’s stinking Dumpster and bright back door. And now the air of his cab was ripped through with the high terrified cries of this child only he could save. Just under the canopy two or three business boys
glanced over at him in their loosened ties, jangling their keys, and he flicked on the radio and turned it all the way up, a DJ talking weather, more heat tomorrow, and he disciplined himself to keep his eyes looking straight ahead, to not look back up in his mirror at the crying girl, to just wait for the Econoline in front of him to pull out of the lot, this fallen shithole of a place this scared, wailing child was lucky to get out of, lucky A.J. Carey had come along and found her just when he did.

HE WAS OFF
somewhere now, smoking deeply, nodding to himself. In just minutes she’d be free of him. In these two hours she’d made six, seven, eight weeks’ pay, and to think she almost didn’t come, that for a few minutes she actually considered calling in sick.

She sipped the last of her Rémy, smiled over at him. He was drunk and back inside himself, and even though he scared her and pissed her off and made her feel like a liar, she couldn’t help but feel a little grateful to him—crazy as he was. Strange as he was. All that money he could’ve given to anyone but he’d chosen her. And he never even tried to move his fingers away from her scar and down. Or to unzip himself and ask for something Wendy or Retro or Marianne would’ve sold him.

Part of her wanted to keep him busy in some way, to keep him talking, to even let him touch her scar again, to distract him from the time
and that she was sitting here doing nothing while his wad was so much smaller than before.

Because she didn’t believe him: how can anybody not care about money at all? And his talk about dying and fate, about none of this being allowed. Once she got some Christian telling her the same thing, tears in his eyes, staring at her nakedness he’d paid to see.

On the other side of the wall the customers were all hollering at once, so loud the music was just vibrations of sound; another reason to thank this one, that she got to miss selling T-shirts for Louis. There was the way he looked at her earlier in the shift, the feel of her arm brushing his. She could only hope he forgot it though she doubted he did. She knew she’d have to see him later. But she had Franny for an excuse. Just as soon as she changed and paid out she’d have to get her home. Maybe that’d be enough to scare Louis off for good—Franny.

“We raced Grand Am, do you know this?”

He was looking at her. He’d slipped off his shoes. His socks were thin and cheap-looking. There was a small hole in one heel and his feet smelled like sweat and leather.

“The car?”

“Yes, Grand Am. American. Like you.”

“You raced it?”

“Yes, we were racers.”

“Who?”

“Khalid.”

“Who?”

“I and my brother.”

“What’s his name?”

He stared at her.

“That’s all right, you don’t have to tell me.”

“Khalid.”

“Halid?”

“No,
kha
lid. You cannot say this.”

Earlier she might’ve tried to prove him wrong, but not now; her time with him was short. It was good to finish when things were calm
like this. They could be a couple unwinding on the sofa after a long day and night.