The Garden of Last Days

by Andre Dubus III

He drank down some Turkey, liked the feel of its heat spreading out in his chest. He’d just started reading to baby Cole. Small cardboard books about a puppy and his friend Steve, the gator. AJ would lie on the bed with him, feel his son’s small head against his arm while he read each and every word slow, trying to make the story last and last, trying to slow time. Sometimes Cole would point to the picture, try to repeat a word he’d just heard his daddy say. His hand was so small and soft, his whole body like that, his feet hardly reaching AJ’s hip. He’d sneak a look at the side of Cole’s face staring at the book, at his short blond hair and rounded forehead, that bump of a nose, his pink lips and smooth chin. Then AJ would hug him close and kiss him on the head, smell the baby shampoo his wife used on him. It almost hurt to feel this much love. He’d never felt anything close to it before, and it scared him; lying there with baby Cole, he’d wanted to cover him with his whole body. Build a steel and concrete house around him. Erect a twelve-foot hurricane fence around that. Drive him places in a tank, and never let anybody bad close enough to see him or call his name or even know it.

  He was driving fast now, the white lines of the boulevard zipping under his truck. The Puma Club came and went off to his left and he barely glanced out the window at its yellow glow. What they all seemed to forget is he didn’t do anything wrong. Nothing. All he gave Marianne was his affections and hard-earned money. He only gave his wife what she deserved, and that paper scrap from the court could tell him all it wanted about how far away he had to be from his own son and his own damn home—fifty yards or a hundred, he couldn’t remember, and he didn’t give a good goddamn because twelve miles and some change up this road was his house he paid for. It’d been five weeks since he’d even laid eyes on Cole. It was time to see him. High goddamn time to see him.

  He pressed his knee to the wheel, reached for the pint between his legs. The glass was smooth and warm. He thought how that and his F-150 were his only companions tonight, the only ones he could count on.

  THE NEW BOTTLE of Moët was almost gone. He was small and should be drunk and maybe he was, but he didn’t seem it. She sat there next to him on the edge of the love seat in nothing but her G-string, garters, and heels. He barely glanced down at her body, instead kept his attention on her face, his eyes narrowed and tired-looking but lit up with an urgent curiosity. That’s what it looked like to her—urgent.

  “Why do you sell yourself?”

  “You think I’m selling myself, Mike?”

  “Yes, you sell yourself.”

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  He lit up another cigarette. “No, April. No.”

  She didn’t like how he’d just said her name. As if he knew her. It didn’t even belong in the air of this place. Why had she told him?

  “Did your father go to university?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You do not know?”

  “Nope. What about your father?”

  His forehead ridged up and he blew smoke out his nose and mouth at the same time. “Take off your bottom piece, please.”

  “I’m s’posed to dance.”

  “Why? Soon my hour with you will be over and I will give to this business three hundred dollars more. Do you think the owner cares what you do in this room?”

  “You want another hour?”

  “Please, I would like you to tell me why you do this. And do not say it is for money because that is a lie.” He pulled the bottle from the ice and poured the rest of the Moët into her glass. He stood, scooped his cash up off the table, handed her two hundred dollars but left the seven hundred on the cushion next to her. “I will buy you for one hour more. When I return you will not be wearing your bottom piece and you will surprise me, yes?”

  He smiled down at her, his bad teeth on display, his eyes hungry but distant, passing over her face and breasts and knees as if he wanted her but had also tired of her long ago. His back was narrow, his polo shirt wrinkled like he’d been driving for days. He walked steadily, didn’t look back at her, and pulled the door shut behind him.

  BEHIND BASSAM WHORES dance for seated kufar and he stands at the bar in blue light, the music loudest here, the smoke hanging thickly. A big man is beside him, one of the whores’ protectors. He has his back to him so rudely and his white T-shirt is stretched tightly across his muscled shoulders, but there, above the whiteness of his shirt, is his dark neck and of course this kafir could break Bassam’s body in two pieces but not if he is struck first. Not if the kafir is struck when he expects nothing but more and more of the comfort he is in now.

  Beneath Bassam’s feet, the floor seems to have movement. His arms and legs are like liquid, his face a smiling mask he gives to the barman as he hears his voice ask for the French champagne.

  “Moët?”

  “Yes, that.” How easy to thrust the blade into his throat. How easy to turn and reach up and plunge the razor just below the ear.

  Why is he here? Why does he stay? He can feel her waiting for him. Uncovered and beginning to talk. His last chance with one, he is certain. His last opportunity.

  He places a bill onto the bar and the barman takes it and pushes at him the bottle, and Bassam must hurry to the last woman who is the first woman. Hurry back to her and discipline himself to stay for one more hour only.

  The bottle is cool and heavy and he does not wait for the change. He walks back through the naked whores and they writhe like snakes in the firelight and he feels weak for giving the barman such money. How many dollars? Fifty? Sixty? But no, let him be fooled by it. Let them all be fooled.

  “Hey, little man. You drinking that yourself?”

  A black kafir, so much of her skin showing between thin red garments. She is tall, smiling down at his eyes, and in Khamis Mushayt, the daughter of the Sudanese who mixed the mortar for the mosque built by Ahmed al-Jizani, how tall she was and fully covered in the black abaya and she would bring to her father water, and Bassam was a boy but he watched her, her body covered and her head but not her face, her eyes like this one, her brown skin like this one.

  “You in the Champagne?”

  “Come, please,” he hears himself say to her. “I buy you too.”

  The pig at the curtain, she tells him words about rotation and she laughs and steps into the red light and opens the black door. The music so loud and crashing in his ears, so loud, the air too smoky, too crowded, the smell of sweating and fading perfumes, and this too must be a sign, the Holy One showing him what, Insha’Allah, he will avoid.

  THE NIGHT AIR blew warm against the side of AJ’s face, and he turned east onto Myakka City Road. His hand still hurt, and he was going to do something about that sonofabitch, but he’d been wound tight all day just getting up his nerve to tell Marianne where he’d take her, to ask her when she wanted to go, and even though she’d made a goddamned fool of him, at least it was behind him. At least his heart wasn’t going all day when it shouldn’t, giving him the shits for this woman who was all wrong about him.

  He sat back behind the wheel of his cruising Ford, his whole body light and loose in the warm Wild Turkey air, and he could see it all just a bit more clearly now, could get philosophical about it. She just didn’t know him, that’s all. He’d made the mistake of not talking about himself enough. He’d asked her questions about her because he wanted to know and because he wanted her to know he wanted to know. But she never did tell him much. And all he told her about himself was missing Cole and how dumb-luck beautiful she was, that it was his dumb luck to find someone so beautiful and she’d smiled a real smile and put her hand in his for the first time, felt the calluses there from working the knobs of his CAT. She probably thought right then that’s all he was. She didn’t know he’d always been good at math and numbers, that he’d been the night manager at the Bradenton Walgreen’s at twenty-one, that they wanted him to go to their training clinic up north somewhere, Deena working Register 3, sweet and quiet, her body nice to look at behind her Walgreen’s apron, woman curves all ove
r, and she called him Mr. Carey, which made him feel good, and one night she needed a ride home and he drove her and on the way they stopped and bought a six-pack of cold Millers and he got her to stop calling him Mister, told her a joke about the real manager, Simon Blau, and they both laughed and then they were parked under an oak somewhere, kissing and tearing at each other and then, like that, she was pregnant and they were married and her old man was offering to train AJ on heavy equipment for better pay, and now he hadn’t seen his boy in thirty-seven days and all the good months he and Deena had had were just asphalt under his wheels as he drove beneath I-75, thinking about how much she’d changed on him, how she didn’t like to have a good time anymore.

  Didn’t want to drink. Or play cards. Never wanted to fuck or even let him hold her or touch her a little. Just read her damn magazines about TV stars and the goddamn cars they drove and the houses they lived in and the pretty people they left for prettier ones ahead. She’d gotten fat and knew it, but instead of getting off her ass she’d work on her nails, growing them out too long, painting them a different color every week. And she was always restless about her hair, was never happy with the way God gave it to her, straight and brown. She’d get into their secondhand Corolla AJ’d paid for and drive into Bradenton to have her hair dyed or curled or bleached or ironed or whatever the hell it was they did. Then he’d come home, his shoulders and back stiff and sore, coughing up dust, a buzzing in his ears from the diesel engine and that steel bucket and all he’d made it do, and there she’d be cooking in the kitchen fat and unhappy with her new hair—blonde or red, sometimes a little purple or green, sometimes straight, other times curly—standing there frying him a steak and onions, or chicken and hush puppies, feeding Cole in his high chair, her face all round and greasy, and he didn’t know if he should cry for her, or laugh, or go over and hug her and tell her she was fine just the way she was, that she didn’t have to do that, but he never did any of those things because he’d be too goddamned angry, feel it rise up in his blood and muscles and skin, this tightening up when all he wanted to do was unwind, and he’d shake his head at her and tell her she looked ridiculous and how much goddamn money did that cost? Because he knew it was at least two hours of his workday, wasn’t it? Maybe three hours, his three hours, sitting in that cage, working the machinery in the fumes and dust and mosquito heat for them, for Deena and Cole, for the bank that held the note on their two-bedroom, for Caporelli Excavators he bled for so they could pocket their profit and toss him the crumbs. And—he had to admit—for him, for Alan James Carey, and his hard-earned self-respect that when he’d gotten into trouble with this girl he’d done the right thing by her and the baby, borrowed the down payment from his old mother in Bradenton and bought them their house off Myakka City Road, this abandoned cinder-block hut out in the wire grass and slash pine. But it had a well and electrical service, and nights and weekends he’d gutted it, built new partition walls, reinsulated it, hung Sheetrock, put in seven new windows, roofed it, and laid new floors. Deena hadn’t had the baby yet and they lived with her folks out on Lake Manatee. Shared the room she was raised in, the walls still covered with posters of those goddamned boy bands, and lying there after working from seven to eleven he couldn’t bear to look at them, hated being there at all, hated having to borrow money from her old man for most of the materials. But he could see how her father had grown to respect him. Saw how he could work and work and how fast he learned things. And her old lady was one of those too-cheerful-smiling-mice-of-a-woman you could never trust. He was glad Deena never laid it on thick like she did. Her mother always asking him questions about what he did all day, her smile nailed to her face, her eyes glazing over, looking right at him.

  But Deena was good, her belly growing by the week. It’d be between ten-thirty and midnight and the front porch light would be on when he pulled up behind her old man’s F-250 so goddamned tired he could hardly get himself to squeeze the door handle. Under the gutter at the north corner of the house was a bug zapper behind wire mesh, this four-foot dull blue glow, and he’d sit there a second or two and watch the moths and flies get it, see their tiny insect bodies spark and flash out of this world. Stupid fucking bugs. Couldn’t they sense the others getting fried right in front of them? It unsettled him to think about it, and he felt his own fate was somehow married to theirs, and that could bring him down. Being that flat bone-tired always did that anyway. Made him feel like he was losing at everything, that it was all just too big for him—the massive machinery they trusted him with, the house, Deena and this almost-baby—that he was going to trip and fall and get crushed under all its weight.

  But then the front screen would swing open and there’d be Deena standing in the light, holding out a cold Miller, smiling at him. She’d started wearing a yellow-flowered maternity gown to bed at night. It was thin and he could see her breasts and belly under it and he knew other men didn’t like looking at a pregnant woman but those nights, reaching for that iced bottle of beer she’d put in the freezer for him a half hour earlier, feeling those heavy breasts and that hard belly against him, tasting her warm mouth, he couldn’t imagine a woman looking more like a woman’s supposed to look and that’s when he knew it was all going to work out. Him and her and this child they’d made because they couldn’t keep their hands off each other, even though they hardly knew who lived there behind each other’s eyes.

  AJ sipped off his pint, the Turkey warm and medicinal down his throat. The pain in his wrist wasn’t completely gone, but he could live with it better than before. Out his open window he could smell the slash pines and the thick undergrowth of saw palmetto between the bare trunks that during the dry season would burn when the pines wouldn’t. It’d taken them years and years to get that way, seventy to eighty feet of bare trunk with all their pine needles clustered at the top where no wildfire could ever get them. They gave off a sap scent he smelled now and it was the smell of home and he felt more hopeful than he had in a long while that Deena might forgive him because he’d never laid half a finger on Cole and he only did it to her twice. Two times. That’s all. And didn’t she know why? Didn’t she know that she’d just goddamned disappeared on him? That their best time was when there was something ahead of them they could hardly wait to get to—him finishing the house, her having the baby, then the two of them being able to drink a beer together again, the two of them in their hurricaneproof house out in the wire grass he kept cut back, behind them a deep stand of longleaf pines. Out at the road he’d dug a hole and filled it with concrete and sunk a four-by-four post into it, built a mailbox in the shape of their own house, a corrugated gable on top at the same pitch, and he’d painted on the side: The Careys.

  He had to take a leak. His turnoff wasn’t more than a quarter mile away, but he didn’t want to knock on his door needing to take a piss. And shit, he should’ve brought something for them. A toy for Cole. Something pretty for her, though he didn’t know what that would be. A blouse? A big blouse?

  He steered off the asphalt onto the grassy shoulder. His truck jerked forward and he saw it was in park already, his hand on the stick. More than half the pint was gone. Time to slow down. Couldn’t remember the last time he drank anything hard. It’d be better if he weren’t like this right now, smelling like a roadhouse when he saw her. He had some Tums in his console from all the worrying she’d put him through, the shits and the heartburn. Sometimes during the day, working or driving to work or back, he’d tally up how much more his life cost now than it used to: the child support and mortgage; the gas in his truck from the longer drive to and from his mother’s place; his new and lonesome habit at the Puma Club. He still owed on his truck, but by God he’d paid off her old man for the house materials. Let him take it out of his check for seven months of steady payments, and now they were all square, and right after Deena pulled that order on him he quit her daddy and hired on with Caporelli’s for six dollars more an hour. Still, none of it was enough and he’d started using his credit card
for the Puma. Got cash advances just to drink eight-dollar beers and look at lying whores like Marianne.

  He had to go worse than ever. He set the pint on the passenger seat and reached for his door handle. But his left hand was useless so he swiveled, got the door open with his right, stepped out stumbling into the night. He leaned against his open door and got his zipper down and freed himself. Hadn’t ever known till right this second you use two hands to do that, not one.

  Two is better than one.

  Always would be for him. He’d never liked being alone. Standing there aiming for the blackness under his truck he could feel how tired he was, just how much he’d missed this road and that home he’d made up ahead. How much he hated his foldout bed in front of the TV at his mama’s, their quiet meals together in front of whatever the hell was on. His wrist hurt and he was tired and a little drunk on the relief he deserved, but he was tired more than anything. Tired of working so hard for nothing but bad feelings in return.

  Maybe tonight would be different. Maybe she missed him, too. Maybe she remembered when Cole was just a little baby and they’d all played together on a blanket in the grass. Lifted him up and kissed him and blew on his belly and made him laugh. How later, after he was down and asleep, they’d set out on lawn chairs up against the house with tall cold ones and watch the sun go down through the pines. And then there were stars.

  How’d she get tired of that? Why’d she start bitching at him about everything?

  He shook himself off and zipped up best he could. Some of the old bad feeling was coming up again, and he didn’t want it. Nobody but him knew he wasn’t proud of what he’d done, backhanding her and her expensive hair across the kitchen. All this weight on him and all she ever wanted to do was add more. Couldn’t she see how goddamned hard he worked? Even at home? Keeping the grass cut, scraping and painting the window and door trim, repointing the cinder block wherever it needed it, on and goddamned on. And it must’ve been having Cole that changed everything ’cause before he was born he’d catch her looking at him when she didn’t know he knew, see the shy pride in her eyes that she’d caught herself a good one, a man who did things. Grabbed a shovel and started digging. But that changed fast as her body did. They had their baby and moved into their small, solid house, and then what was there to look forward to but watching Cole grow, looking at each other over the kitchen table or across the couch in front of the TV or in those lawn chairs out back?