The Garden of Last Days (40 page)

April ignored Jean’s lighted windows and walked over to the Adirondack chairs under the darkened mango tree. The soles of her cut feet burned. She waited for Lonnie before she sat down.

“It’s all right I’m here?”

“Yeah.” She rested the hot cup on her knee, remembered burning herself with the Mobil station coffee yesterday afternoon driving Franny, the hurried walk into Tina’s office. “I could kill Tina, Lonnie. I swear to God I want to kill her.”

“She feels pretty bad.”

“She should. She fucking
should
.”

“But I should’ve checked in on her like you asked. I just didn’t—”

“No, Lonnie, it was
Tina
. I paid her for that.” She meant it; she wasn’t mad at him. She raised the cup to her lips but her throat closed and her eyes began to fill and she was ashamed. “I should’ve called in sick, Lonnie. But fucking
Louis
.”

“They’re lifting prints in your car. They think they’ll find something.”

She watched him sip his coffee, his Adam’s apple rising and falling in his throat. “You mean find some
one
.”

He nodded. The garden beyond him was shadowed in the blue-gray light, and Jean’s door opened, her slippers slapping against the soles of her feet. She stood in front of them both. Her robe was cinched
tightly and Franny’s backpack dangled from her hand. April’s stilettos stuck out of the half-zipped flap.

“Any news? Is there news?”

“No, ma’am.” Lonnie sat forward. “Would you like to sit?”

“Thank you, no.” Jean was looking down at April. “Where did you go?”

“Everywhere. Nowhere.” April couldn’t look at her. She shook her head.

Jean held out Franny’s pack. “That’s an awful lot of money.”

April took it and lowered it to the ground at her feet. She could feel her heart beating behind her eyes and she wanted to tell Jean she never made that much, that she got a drunk foreigner in the Champagne, that every single bill in there meant nothing to her now, nothing.

“She works hard,” Lonnie said.

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“Are you judging me, Jean?”

Jean folded her arms.

“Who are you to fucking judge
me
?” April pushed herself out of the chair, her cup falling and spilling onto the bricks. “You’ve never worked a fucking day in your life. You don’t even know what work
is
. This wouldn’t’ve happened if you weren’t such a hypochondriac and had to go to the
hospital
. I had to take her ’cause of
you
, Jean!
You!
”

“April.”

The phone was in a spreading puddle of hot coffee and April snatched it up and grabbed the backpack and moved around Jean standing there, the stairs ahead of her April wouldn’t climb, Jean’s apartment she couldn’t stand with more of Franny in it than upstairs where she really lived, in her real home, and she yanked the backpack strap over her shoulder and walked toward the growing light of the driveway, Jean calling her name.

AJ DROVE SLOWLY
along the southern tip of Longboat, his eyelids swollen with fatigue. Past the pale beach was the Gulf he could just begin to see in the dark and it’d be daybreak soon and he didn’t want to drink a beer while driving the child but what else could he do? The coffee was long gone and hadn’t done anything but give him heartburn and a dry mouth. He needed some kind of fuel for just two more hours. That’s all, just two.

He pressed his knees up against the wheel and reached into the passenger’s seat for one of the Millers. The can was cool and he wedged it down between his legs, popped the tab, kept his eyes on the road, and took a long drink. Up ahead were the dim lights of the drawbridge over to Lido Key. His heart picked up a bit. He glanced in the rearview, could see in the darkness her hair over his T-shirt covering her.

YOU ARE NOW LEAVING LONGBOAT KEY

The sign was streaked with pelican shit, and he passed the empty expanse of the aquarium’s parking lot, then the thick mangroves where they’d built boardwalks snaking through the trees. He’d wanted to take Cole there when he got bigger, go look for bobcat and manatee and osprey. And he would. He would.

He drank and accelerated up over the drawbridge onto Lido Key. He finished his Miller and dropped the empty onto the passenger seat. Soon enough he pulled into dark and quiet St. Armand’s Circle, a few streetlamps shining dimly among the palm trees and hibiscus in the center, and he guided his truck around the circle John Ringling designed before he died. He built the causeway over to Sarasota too, used his circus elephants to haul the bridge timbers. AJ had always like reading about Ringling, a man with vision and balls, a head for numbers and no fear of hard work, a man AJ frankly believed he had much in common with; he just needed some help getting started. He just needed to get pointed in the right direction.

AJ drove the full circle. At his constant right were locked tourist shops and bookstores, ice cream parlors and cafés. No light came through their windows and some were covered with steel shutters padlocked to the sidewalk. Most of the buildings were painted white as oyster shells, even Mario’s-on-the-Gulf he’d planned to bring Marianne to, his headlights sweeping over it now—the red canopy and diamond-shaped windows, the outdoor tables and their collapsed umbrellas as tall and still as sleeping vultures; there was the feeling he was a dog-assed fool who’d never be allowed in such a fine place with such a fine-looking woman on his arm and he reached for another Miller, but the lights of a car shone out at him from twelve o’clock, and he eased up on the gas and cut the wheel to the right and shot his truck away from the circle.

He gunned along a palm-lined street of fine homes behind stucco walls. Coming up on his left was an opening between two of them and he turned into it, a route for the trashmen and deliverers of food and ice, a place in the shadows for men and women who kept things running smoothly. It was dark and narrow and he was about to stop when
a corner revealed itself to the right and he turned again and parked in a shortened driveway leading to a garage, its security lights coming on bright in his face, but keep cool, keep cool. They’re on motion detectors, that’s all. Just like the ones he almost bought for him and Deena. So sit still and they’ll go dark soon enough. Switch off your engine and sit tight.

All was quiet. He opened the Miller and turned to look at her. Her chin was touching her chest, the part in her hair straight from front to back. Again he pictured Spring doing that with a comb before she brushed it—
somebody
had to’ve done it—and there was the feeling he’d done something wrong, that maybe there was more to all this than he knew. And if the cruiser—’cause what else could it be? poor neighborhoods don’t get looked after all night like rich ones do—if it pulled up on him now, sitting in this service entrance waiting for the light to go off, they’d bust his ass for sure and there’d be no chance to cash in against Caporelli. No chance for anything but trouble.

He hated to see her sleeping like that, though; she’d wake up with a sore neck. He leaned past the seat and with two fingers pushed her head up till he could see her face, but then the cab went dark, the air outside too. He let go of her and hoped her chin didn’t loll back to where it’d been.

SHE IS OLD
. She is the old of his dear mother. Her skin is dark as his own, her face round, and her hair is gray and black and her eyes are black as well. Before her is a small television and her hearing must be bad for it is so loud Bassam can hear all of it on the other side of the shop, the sound of shooting, of shouting, of autos racing, and more shooting. And it is here under this white light before the cooler of bottles of water and Gatorade and Pepsi and Coke that he knows he is still not yet himself, that he is still damaged from the drinking.

The blackness out there, kilometers and kilometers of it. Over one hour driving and only one auto coming at him from the east, its lights blinding. Then more blackness, the Neon’s headlamps cutting into it dully, weakly. The whores’ protector at the fuel station. Bassam had felt followed and bought no fuel or drink or cigarettes. He disciplined himself not to drive too fast and once in the countryside he turned on
the radio, but it was meaningless talk in this language he hated, the language of the far enemy his father insisted all his children learn. And so Bassam had learned and it had made him more valuable than Ahmed al-Jizani could have ever known, and his son opens the glass door and removes three plastic bottles of Coke and at the counter for paying she smiles at him, and perhaps she says to him words, he does not know, her television so very loud.

Behind her are magazines of whores. Above them stacks of cigarette packages. He asks the woman for Marlboros. She shakes her head, turns down her television. “What, honey?”

“Please, Marlboros.”

She turns for them. On the back of her clothing is written: Miccosukee Indian Resort.
Indian
. He does not know this word, or the one before it. He pulls from his pocket too much money, the surprise in her old eyes. Too much surprise.

Outside once more, the air is warm yet beginning to cool, and the cigarette package and three bottles difficult to hold at once. He shakes his head at his own foolishness, at his own continued recklessness. The white Neon is parked beside the fuel pumps, and he rests upon the roof two of the plastic bottles and opens his door, but one of the bottles rolls down over the windscreen to the ground at his feet. He lowers himself to it, and grasps it and as he rises he tells himself to be careful with this one, Bassam. Be careful with the one that may explode.

LONNIE LEANED AGAINST
his driver’s door and looked at April. In the peach-blue light, she sat low in the passenger seat, her daughter’s backpack on the floor between her bare calves, the cordless phone in her hand. She still wore her makeup from last night but her cheeks were drawn and he wanted to kiss her.

She was looking out the windshield at the empty street. “Say something, Lonnie. I can’t have any quiet right now. I can’t.” She began tapping her bare foot on the floor.

He reached past her and pulled open the glove compartment, five rows of cassettes wedged on top of his registration and manual. “Books on tape. I listen to them ’cause I can’t read.” He shut the hatch, his wrist skimming her bare knee.

“Really?” She was looking at him now. He felt about fourteen years old and wished he’d kept his mouth shut.

“I’m not illiterate. I can read signs and shit. It’s just sentences. They
get all fucked up in my head. Unless I hear them. Then the words don’t crash into each other.”

“What do you listen to?”

“Novels. Some poetry.”

April kept looking at him. Her lips were parted. She opened the glove compartment. “Can we listen to one? Can we just sit here and listen to one?”

She pulled out a tape. T. S. Eliot.

“Poetry. You want that?”

“Anything.”

Lonnie didn’t like the voice of the reader; he sounded like one of those little shits he’d seen in clubs over the years who’d gone to prep schools on the East Coast and somehow ended up with a British accent.