The Garden of Last Days (5 page)

Except now. She was at the apron of the stage, her hair covering one of her nipples as she reached down to pull off her right high heel. She lost her balance and came down hard on her barefoot, both breasts
bouncing out of time to the music. Two or three men laughed though it wasn’t a sound Lonnie heard, just saw and felt. Spring smiled at them, but it wasn’t a real smile, not her professional one anyway. Lonnie had never seen it before.

Another pocket opened out on the floor. A tall regular stood to go back to the VIP with one of the short-shorts girls whose name started with an M, though Lonnie couldn’t remember the rest. Names didn’t matter. Just their bodies. Keep track of the bodies and make sure nobody touched them.

The club was more than half full now, all four bartenders working fast and without a break. There was the thump of the bass guitar and drums, the woman singer’s backstreet voice; there was the clink and scrape of ice, the talk and laughter of men and a few women, and Spring was starting her night out badly, kicking her jeans off behind her now, dancing in a pair of panties, just panties, not a G-string or crotchless, and another pocket began to show itself off to the right, a big man in a Miami Dolphins cap sitting back and tossing a wadded bill at her. It hit Spring in a rib and she ignored it, turned and started pushing down her panties, letting them all glimpse her ass before she pulled them back up again. Other pockets kept opening at the entrance, new customers coming in in twos or threes, parting the curtains and letting in the pink light of the front hallway where Big Scaggs and Larry T sat on stools.

Dolphins Cap tossed another one. Spring moved to the other side of the stage. She’d rolled the sides of her panties up high onto her hips and was dancing at the edge now, holding her hair up with her hands. Lonnie stood away from the bar, watched the man crumple another one in his fist. Behind the man’s ear was an unlit cigarette. In front of him was a scotch or bourbon on the rocks and he wore the mustache and goatee so many men did now, and you could bet if they had one, they were not near as tough as they wanted to look. Out on the floor another pocket opened up, then another and another, but they were just customers hooked on the line of the VIP, and Dolphins Cap tossed one that missed Spring and landed in the tables on the
other side of the stage, just a few bills folded into her panties, her second number almost over, time to give them everything.

And Dolphins Cap didn’t deserve it.

Lonnie took the steps lightly, moving between the tables like a mist. He was aware he had a heartbeat, that his adrenal glands had just secreted some juice, but he wouldn’t need much of it; he was relaxed and clear of everything. Dolphins yelled out something ugly and Lonnie didn’t hear the actual words, just felt them rip the pocket open wider, and he stepped sideways between occupied chairs on his toes in his Nikes, and if he brushed up against someone’s shoulder or head, he didn’t feel that because all there was now was Dolphins Cap sitting back in the pocket he created, raising his arm to toss another wadded insult. Paco or Little Andy would grab that arm and twist it till he dropped whatever he held. But Lonnie preferred the soft touch, the quiet approach; they were always more surprised then.

He stepped past the last table. Dolphins didn’t even look over, just snapped his wrist toward Spring, and Lonnie’s arm left his side and there were the soft corners of a crumpled dollar in his hand, the lip of the stage at his back. Dolphins Cap looked up at him with eyes small and dark and so deeply instinctual it appeared he’d bite his own flesh. Was he looking for it? Or surprised? And if he was surprised, was it a good surprise or a bad one? But what Lonnie saw in those small eyes above that clichéd goatee was a man used to having his amusement thwarted, a man trying to decide, at this very moment, just how much more he was going to take. And so Lonnie would make it easy for him; he lifted his hand, wagged his finger at him, and shook his head. Behind him, in the air around him, the song was in its last measures, which meant Spring was naked and collecting folded bills from men who knew how to behave, but Dolphins Cap hadn’t moved, nor had he stopped looking into Lonnie’s eyes, and this, Lonnie knew, is where he came out ahead, because he was tall and lean with none of the beef Louis’s other boys had. All he had was what his hands had been able to do for a long time now.

The music ended and there was clapping and a few hoots. Then
the man broke his stare just long enough to watch Spring’s lovely ass disappear behind the curtain. He looked back at Lonnie, but it was clear it was over, and Lonnie placed the crumpled bill on the table and stepped sideways back into the darkness of the crowd. He looked behind him once but this pocket was now closed, Dolphins Cap sipping his drink and looking hard at the curtains, as if the dancers somewhere behind it, and not Lonnie Pike, had stopped his fun.

Three-quarters of the tables were filled now, mainly with men, though there were a few women too, wives or girlfriends who maybe got turned on by the dancers or were lesbians or just women who liked to sit in the dark and drink themselves into a warm bed of the brain where seeing a woman dance for them put them somewhere they rarely went—on top, no longer the server but the served.

But it was the men Lonnie watched. The quiet ones, the loud ones, those who traveled in packs, and those who came in alone. The loners were more dangerous; they were here because they couldn’t stay away. And right now in the club there were five of them: Dolphins Cap probably. And a thin man two tables over. On the other side of the stage were three more, including Gordon, a longtime regular with a neatly trimmed white mustache who wore silk ties and starched shirts. The girls said he sold his company and in the last six months alone had spent over fifty thousand dollars in the Champagne Room on Wendy. That was the trouble right there. A lone dog fell in love.

At first he’d come in only once or twice a week. He’d get a table on the main floor and hold on to his money and watch all the acts. Every now and then one of the girls would approach him for a private, but for a while—most of a night or an entire week—he’d smile and shake his head and stay put. But then one would come up to him he couldn’t say no to and he’d let her lead him back to the VIP for a one-on-one, and once he started to go there, he’d keep going, at twenty bucks a dance, again and again. Sometimes he fell for that one. Sometimes it was another. Then, each night, he’d wait for her. Like the man three tables over from Gordon waited now. He sat there and drank and said no to all the other girls because he was waiting for his girl and when
she finally came back out on the floor he wanted her to come to him only, and when she didn’t, his pocket could open with all kinds of trouble. But even when he got his girl, when she moved right to his table and he paid her to take him back to the easy chairs of the VIP, he didn’t want her to dance for him anymore—he wanted to talk; at twenty dollars a song, he just wanted to sit and talk. Like the man in the VIP now, the fourth lone dog in the club, sitting with Marianne, who hadn’t taken off a thing.

For weeks he’d chosen her, her hair dyed so black it looked purple on stage. Her blue eyes and pouty lips and fake breasts, her nipples stretched wide as a silver dollar. She couldn’t be more than twenty-two or -three and spoke with an accent that was east Texas, her voice high in her throat and nose. She laughed hard and often at nothing and, despite everything, had the naïve, too-friendly gaze of a child.

But this one liked her. He had bright blond hair and heavy shoulders and he leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, his hand opening and closing, gesturing this way and that. Marianne leaned forward too, nodding her head with an overly enthusiastic but feigned interest, and onstage, Retro’s gown was off as her second number began, a Luther Vandross that made the whole place feel like somebody’s carpeted fuck van. In the smoky recessed light, five or six dancers had their customers happily seated in easy chairs and they stripped for them to Retro’s number. Marianne’s boy still had his elbows on his knees, one hand illegally holding hers as he made point after point with the other. His eyes were on his eight-dollar Budweiser, and as he talked, he shook his head as if he’d been deeply wronged. Marianne’s face was stuck in a half smile. She kept glancing behind her toward Paco standing in the blue light of the VIP bar talking to a regular, missing it all, seeing none of it.

Lonnie hit the steps. It was Paco’s station for the night, but still, a pocket was a pocket and it had to be zipped shut.

Retro’s number was on its last seconds, Luther done now, just a hundred synthesized strings in the air as the crowd applauded and the pack yelled it up. Retro’s long legs were spread wide, and leaning
back on one hand, she lightly touched herself with the other. Lonnie hit the steps and moved through the crowd for the VIP. The air was heavy with cigar and cigarette smoke, perfume and cologne, hot French fries from the kitchen. Lonnie had to step by a waitress balancing a tray and just as he got to the half wall and was about to leap over it, Paco moved to what he should’ve seen earlier. Half-Cuban, half-Chinese, with his thick forearms and big hands, Paco stepped between them and gripped his fingers around Lone Dog’s wrist and twisted and it was as if an electric current had just shot into his easy chair, his torso straightening right up, his legs kicking out under the table.

Marianne pulled her arm away and stood.

Retro’s number ended with a tinkling of falling electronic chimes and in the air were just dozens of voices and bar sounds, the kitchen door opening and swinging shut, the high whimper of Marianne’s customer gripping Paco’s hand with his own. A few seconds passed before a Hank Jr. song charged out of the speakers, all drums and piano and lead guitar, and even though her LD’s eyes were squeezed shut, his wet cheek pressing against Paco’s knuckles, Marianne just stood there, her silicone breasts round and hard-looking. She was supposed to get the money up front but it was clear to Lonnie she hadn’t; she was staring down at her hurting customer. Paco eased up and she leaned over and said something. Then she straightened, rested one hand on her hip, and held out the other to get paid.

APRIL HELD FRANNY
in the darkness of Tina’s office. She twisted slowly from side to side, humming a nameless tune. She kissed the top of Franny’s head, could smell the beach in her hair, the salt and sun, the watermelon shampoo from yesterday when they’d taken a bath together before supper. She tried to ignore the rowdy country song out on the floor Sadie danced to in boots and a cowboy hat, and she stroked Franny’s hair, felt beneath her forearm the vertebrae of her three-year-old’s spine.

It was so wrong to have her here at all. There was no way she could leave now, though, not after pissing off, then distracting Louis. If she left, he’d find a way to take it personally and make it harder for her to make money. No help from Glenn ever. Their five months on the third floor above the old Woolworth’s that’d been sold and turned into a remnant carpet shop. You could smell the rugs all the way up
the creaking stairs, the dusty weaves and that new chemical smell, though they’d had a big three-room apartment with a view over the naval yard to the Piscataqua River and the bridge, the big ships that Glenn always stared out at. He’d hand her Franny, still in his shirt and tie from the shop at the mall where he sold computer games all day to isolated teenagers or lonely men. Glenn would lean against the windowsill and smoke his daily joint, blowing his smoke out the window, his back wide and his hips narrow because he took care of himself, the first thing she’d noticed when they’d met at the pub a year earlier, his thick arms and broad shoulders, his skin soft as a woman’s, but it was his green eyes that got her, so bright with flecks of blue in them, like they were lit from the inside, and when he finally looked at her and smiled, it was as if he was smiling right into her.

Probably the same thing that got the new one too. And he was probably with someone else after that one now, working a different shitty mall job in a different town. Going to the gym, smoking his joints, looking out a window at whatever he saw there, maybe thinking about the ships he never had the balls to get on. And not one dollar from him after the first couple of months. Just gone.

She should hate him but she didn’t. Instead, she found herself thinking of his eyes those first months, how he seemed to take all of her in, how he seemed to love all of her.

April kept humming, turning from side to side. She put her back to the muted TV and hoped Franny might start watching the new movie Tina had put in before she left. In her small dark office, the club on the other side was loud and pulsing and April knew the place was filling up and every minute she wasn’t out there she was losing money. Sadie was already into her second number, the third dancer in the rotation to do her act since April’s. She stopped humming, said into Franny’s ear: “Want some ice cream?”

“I want to go home.”

“We will. We will.” April reached back for Franny’s fingers, gently pried them away from her hair. “Chocolate or vanilla?”