The Garden of Last Days (25 page)

“He was a fast boy. I was fast as well but Khalid, he was fastest. He was never afraid. He goes two hundred, two hundred twenty kilometers per hour. He was strong.” He gazes at the black wall. “He would have become shahid. The best shahid.”

“What’s that?”

He glanced at her face, then away. “He hated the kufar, he hated all of you, but he wears a hat for baseball, he drinks Pepsi and Coca-Cola, he smoked only cowboy cigarettes.”

“Why’s he hate
us
?”

He looked at her for what seemed a long time. She was tempted to smile but didn’t. “Yes, many of you are blind.”

“Many of who?”

“You kufar.”

“What’s that?”

“I have said enough.”

“No you haven’t, I’m curious.”

“What does this mean?”

“Curious?”

“Yes.”

“It means you want to know something.”

“Yes, there are many things you should know.” He shook his head, looked like he wanted to say something but stayed quiet, his eyes on his cell phone on the table. The club noise was muffled and Andy would be here soon and she didn’t want to take the money when nothing was being said.

“Do you guys still race?”

“No.”

“Is your brother back home?”

“He is in Jannah.”

“Where’s that?”

“You will never know.”

“Why not?”

“People like you go to hell, April.”

People like her. She tried to smile but she was angry again and anyway their time was up. All that money, this was the price. Like lingering at your door with a Jehovah’s Witness. Out in the club the noise had died down. Even the music was lower, the place slowly emptying one or two customers at a time. Andy was late, had to be.

“Time’s up, Mike.” She reached over the arm of the love seat, nudged the money off her clothes—still folded so neatly by him. She found her G-string and stood, straightening and pulling it up around her hips.

“You will not see me even once more, April.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Mike.”

“Bassam.”

She picked up her T-back, looked at him. Now he was young again, a kid at your doorstep holding a flower. “That’s nice.”

“It means for smiling. Something like this.”

“You don’t smile much, though.” It was a joke, but he looked down and away as if she’d just offended him. She cinched her skirt and pulled on her blouse, her eyes on the door, the money on the carpet in the shadow of the love seat.

“I should not like you, April.”

“Why shouldn’t you?”

He lit another cigarette, inhaled deeply. “Because then I would be like you. And I am not like you. Someday, Insha’Allah, you will know me.”

“I know you now, don’t I?”

“No, but you will. Everyone will.”

“I thought I wasn’t going to see you anymore.”

“Yes.”

“Then how will I know you better, Bassam?” She laughed, but he was not smiling.

“You will see, Insha’Allah.” He stubbed out his cigarette, though it was only a quarter smoked. “When will you stop doing this?”

“What?”

“This.” He held out his arms and looked around the room as if it were much larger and more important than it was.

“Is that any of your business really?” She smiled at him, and it was
her
smiling, April, and she knew immediately it was a mistake, his face hardening as he took the snifter, stared at the Rémy inside like it was the ocean or a fire. “Yes, yes, laugh, and then wait until Youm al-Qiyama.”

The knock echoed into the room. Andy’s voice came muffled through the door like the guardian he was. “Time’s up, Spring. And Tina wants to see you.”

She kept her eyes on the foreigner’s, squatted and grabbed her cash, such an unbelievably thick stack. He stood there like a spurned lover, the tail of his polo shirt hanging from his pants. She’d gotten sickos before and now it was easy being Spring again. Whatever he felt about her wasn’t personal, she could see that. He was talking like it was but he hated all of them, didn’t he?

Andy knocked louder. “Spring? You need me?”

Bassam lit up the last of his Marlboros, his eyes on hers. If she said yes to Andy, they’d throw him out and not let him back in for a long time, if at all. The door handle turned and there was Andy’s shaved square head, his pink face and high cheekbones, his raised eyebrows that glistened slightly with sweat. He looked disappointed, like he was hoping to catch them fucking or to see the little foreigner strangling her so he could do something about it.

“You hear me, Spring? Tina wants to see you.”

“Yeah.” She gripped the money tightly in her hand, looked one last time into this Bassam’s face. Now he looked drunk and tired and mean, just another high roller at the end of the night who’d spent too much and drunk too much and now had to watch her walk away and not look back.

“Everything’s fine, Andy. Couldn’t be better, really. Could not be better.”

IT WAS ALMOST
soothing being back in the dim glow of the VIP toom. Nearly every chair was occupied by a man clutching a white Puma Club T-shirt, watching his girl dance for it. April moved quickly through them all, her fingers gripping the cash. The new girl danced badly against the half wall and she looked right at the money, her overly made-up eyes lighting up, and April knew she’d be hustling hard for any available Champagne customer and April wasn’t about to tell her this never happens, nobody ever walks out with this.

She could hardly believe it herself and couldn’t get back to the dressing room fast enough, not so much because Tina wanted her to—Franny probably awake again, missing her and wanting to go home—but because she had to get that money into her purple bag in her padlocked locker before anybody else noticed it. But was her skimpy metal locker safe enough? She began to think where else she could stash it till lights-up.

She squeezed the money tighter and made her way past the blue light of the VIP bar and into the white shadows of the main floor. A third of the customers were gone, though the ones left, the last-call lonelies, the drunk and horny assholes, were yelling it up, standing to watch Renée be a naked ice queen or sitting back with their arms crossed, their feet on an empty chair, their chins low. One or two eyed her buttoned blouse, her breasts, her face. One reached for her, his fingertips grazing her arm, and Lonnie Pike was already moving toward him from the Amazon Bar, his eyes on hers just a second before he picked up his speed. She felt like she’d been gone a long while. Her mouth was dry, and she had to pee again. Her head felt heavy then light. Louis was up at the bar and had a drink in his hand–always a Captain Morgan’s and Coke with two lime wedges, the lights from the show reflecting off his glasses. He could be looking at anyone, though it was probably her. She
was
going to have to deal with him, wasn’t she? Find a way to shut him down without getting fired. She was anxious to see Franny. She almost wanted to show her all this money, show her how good fortune had finally come their way, that somehow by putting one foot in front of the other and doing what she had to, her number was really coming up. Not the big one, but still, a little luck like this felt like bait for bigger luck.

She moved around the stage. The music blasted so loud from the speakers she could feel it in her temples. The cigar smoke was thick here and somebody had thrown up, that sour-gut smell, and April hoped Tina wouldn’t put her back into rotation right away, that she’d give her a chance to check on Franny and store her money and go to the bathroom, then the makeup mirror to freshen up.

She tried to step carefully over the new rubber mats with the holes in them, but still, her heels slipped into each one, then another, and she wanted to unstrap them and go barefoot, but Louis was up at the Amazon and he’d see her and she wouldn’t hear the end of it.

Fucking Louis. She yanked her heels one at a time from the holes till she was through the first black curtain, then the second. Through glass windows in the doors was the pale fluorescent light of the kitchen
that made her squint. It was strange to see Tina and Zeke standing near the screen door, Zeke’s arms crossed, looking down at Tina and shaking his head at whatever she was saying. In this light she looked old, her bleached hair dry and frizzy, her boobs ridiculously large. April pushed open the doors and let them swing shut behind her, Tina jerking her head toward her. Her lips were set in a straight line, like when she was pissed off, but her eyes were soft-looking. Afraid.

“What’s the matter, Tina?”

And from Tina’s red lips came the words April already knew and the floor seemed to drop away and she was falling, falling into a dark and empty sky.

HIS TRUCK’S AC
had always been too strong. He turned it down so she wouldn’t get cold in those thin pajamas. Poor little thing had cried only fifteen or twenty minutes before she whimpered herself asleep in Cole’s car seat, her head at a bad angle against her shoulder, her hair lying across one eye and her parted lips. He finished his beer, dropped the empty onto the passenger seat, and disciplined himself not to have another.

Once again he was driving north into the darkness up Washington Boulevard. Just the hum of his V-8, the muffled whine of rubber on asphalt, the low rattle and purr of his AC, the child’s breathing behind him he couldn’t hear. He glanced back at her in the rearview, felt in the way he tilted his face up to do it just how many times he’d checked on Cole like that. It was good doing it again, to be watching over a little one like this. His wrist and arm were one massive ache, no more throbbing of sharp peaks with less painful valleys, just one
long mountaintop of hurt. Still, he didn’t care. He couldn’t remember the last time he got to do something so pure for somebody else, to do something this good.
Shaved cunt
. He kept hearing one of them say it, and the memory of that and her crying there alone in the Puma’s kitchen, the drunken noise behind her, then the driving away with her buckled behind him, felt like a calling of some kind. He’d
rescued
this child.

It was eleven past one on his truck’s digital, three minutes slow. Almost a quarter after. The club closed in forty-five minutes but after seeing the T-bones—so high-strung—looking for the girl, they’d surely been looking for a while and would’ve called the law by now. There were those key-jangling corporate boys under the canopy, how they’d looked over at him when the girl started screaming. His back windows were tinted so they didn’t see anything, but who knows what they could’ve said to who by now?

Way off to the west in the wire grass were the twinkling lights of a trailer park. Mostly old people. This whole damn state full of them. Like God picked up the country and shook it and all those who weren’t nailed down with jobs and commitments slipped right out of their houses, their card games and visits with grandkids, their nine holes of golf and double dates with other old people who’d lived long enough to make it to dinner one more Saturday night—every year more and more of them just slipped out of their lives and fell to Florida.

And now Mama was one of them, though she’d lived her life here doing what only the Cuban women and the Asians and the blacks did now—cleaning up after other people who came down here just to flash money he never saw any of, her either. All those years cleaning motels on Longboat Key, St. Armand’s, the Lido. Pushing her cart loaded with scrub brushes and cleanser, sealed bars of soap and tiny bottles of shampoo, fresh folded towels, sheets and pillowcases, wrapped rolls of toilet paper. His mama in her white sneakers, black nylons and skirt and white apron. The chain of keys she carried in the front pocket. Her hairnet and red lipstick and how she was always
smoking and would unlock one of the motel’s doors and leave her cigarette burning outside in a coffee can of sugar sand from the beach. She’d balance her cigarette across the tin lip and let it burn.

And how many no-count sonsabitches had played possum when she knocked on the door and let herself in only to see a man with his johnson hanging out or sticking straight up? Acting surprised to see her or not surprised at all—and really, what’s a son ever to know for sure? When he had to come along, when he played on the floor under a window with his plastic Transformers, he’d never seen her do anything but work quick and efficient, sometimes humming a tune from before his own birth, just aiming to get done and back out to the hallway with the ash can and her smoking cigarette—but who knew later, when he was off to school or working with Eddie, if she didn’t let a high roller pay her? There’d been those late-fights with Eddie, AJ lying in bed in the dark, the window open, the smell of their orange tree blossoming in the air, the smell of escape.