The Garden of Last Days

by Andre Dubus III

  She crawls.

  More long wood pieces, but she’s only a little afraid. Do your best, sweetie. Just do your best. And it’s not far away. She’s so close now so soon. She smells food like she ate for supper like she and Mama buy sometimes at the window the man gives them French fries through to their car. Boys smiling at Mama. And this hole is a square. A small square. The door opening and closing and opening. The light and smells on the other side. Another curtain too. The party over there she wasn’t going to. And she sits like an Indian by the square in the wall by the stairs. A lady pushes through the curtain and she’s carrying glasses on a big round plate and she pushes open the door to the light. A shiny metal oven, and a man takes the glasses and Franny doesn’t want to go in there now. But she can’t go back into the dark place. Her face is hot, her eyes burning wet, and she shouldn’t make noise. She just shouldn’t.

  IN THE COOL darkness of his truck cab AJ’s wrist was a swollen hurt he rested palm-up on his leg. The beer was cold, the can beaded with condensation, and every time he sipped off his Miller he pressed his knee to the wheel to stay on Washington Boulevard, Bob Seger singing about being all alone again up on the stage. But AJ still had that good new feeling about Deena, that maybe she did love him and would wait there for him after all, that he’d get Cole back in his arms again and probably Deena, too; he was glad he’d disobeyed that damn order and gone home but now he couldn’t stop thinking of Marianne, seeing her the way he first had under blue light, smiling shyly and shaking her tits at him. Nothing but a girl. It was her hand he kept seeing, her outstretched palm waiting to get paid even after that big sonofabitch bent and twisted his wrist till it’d surely cracked.

  He drained his beer and tossed the empty over his shoulder where it landed on two others in Cole’s car seat. A mile up ahead, for the fifth time in half an hour, were the yellow lights of the Puma sign rising up over the shell lot of cars and pickups and vans. AJ pushed on the gas, his F-150 responding like a gun. Under the canopy were three or four men yukking it up over some lying whore, and at the entrance was one of the hired T-bones smoking a cigarette, Sledge or Skeggs or something, nothing but whiskers and muscle and bad breath, the one who’d held open the door when the big chink tossed AJ out like trash.

  AJ shot by the lighted club back into the darkness of Washington Boulevard. The big man had looked out at him like he was a problem he didn’t need, but goddamnit, AJ didn’t need for his wrist to be broken either, and unless he went into work tomorrow and made like he hurt it there, he wouldn’t get a decent paycheck for as long as it was going to take to get better. He tried to picture it, how he was going to hide this swelled up useless limb. The CAT was at the job site, a municipal drainage ditch out on Lido Key. He’d get there before Caporelli’s piece-of-shit son did; he’d toss the short-handled spade into the ditch, then lower the bucket and climb down in there and wedge his wrist under it. When Caporelli drove up AJ would yell to him that he was pinned, that he’d gone down to clean the teeth when the bucket dropped on him. He’d yell at Junior to get in the cab and free him.

  That’d work. Especially with Caporelli Jr., just another lucky sonofabitch born into a cozy situation he never earned. He was five or six years younger than AJ and drove a V-10 he didn’t need, not a chain or single tool in it, and he kept it shiny and spent most of the day in his air-conditoned cab talking on his cell phone to his girlfriend or his sports bookie. AJ’d have him drive to the hospital in Sarasota, let the Caporellis pay for everything, including the time he’d have off, a few weeks anyway.

  He wanted another cold beer, but the pain had flattened out enough, and again, there was the feeling his luck was changing; with that kind of paid time off he could go to that one damn class and let them say what they were going to say and then Deena would call off the wolves and he could see Cole again. He could still hear his son’s voice as it’d sounded in his sleep, that high, pure, ever-hopeful voice of the child he’d be happy to die for. Happy to. And tonight, after five long weeks, there was the feel of his smooth cheek, the way his hair had smelled so clean, these thoughts spilling outside into the headlight path of his truck, the long wire grass on both sides of the road, the empty beer cans, a flattened cigarette carton, the matted fur husk of a long-dead animal.

  Up ahead were the hazy security lights of the industrial park buildings on the north and southbound sides. When he was Cole’s age there was nothing out there but stands of slash pine and clusters of cabbage palm and saw palmettos, him and Mama driving home after her shift as a chambermaid at the big resort on Longboat Key. She’d be in her white blouse and black skirt, fifty already, smoking one Tareyton after another, looking old and dried up to him even then. And he didn’t remember much now, but she’d said they let her take him in the rooms and clean with her, said he liked to toss the damp towels into the hamper, that he took pride in changing the toilet paper rolls on the pins set into the wall. And there were the later years working with his stepdaddy in Myakka City. Home repairs for old people mostly, replacing rotted sills under their houses, laying porcelain or ceramic tiles in their moldy bathrooms, building new porches and decks, patching their roofs, stringing a line and digging postholes and erecting steel or cedar fences, and all the while Eddie’d go out to the van every half hour or so for a nip of vodka or gin whose smell he’d mask with Wrigley’s and cigarettes. By the end of the day he’d be red-faced and more tired than he should but laughing and telling loud lies to the old people while AJ cleaned up and put away their tools and, at fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, drove the van home.

  And then one Friday morning, Eddie was just a stiff lump under the covers of Mama’s bed and AJ got a night job after school down at Walgreen’s pharmacy and was even better at numbers and inventory than he was with his hands and they were going to send him to school for more training, put him in charge of an entire store one day, maybe a chain, but there was Deena and her smell and the two of them clawing to get inside one another and now AJ’s left hand felt like sausages about to burst over a fire.

  He’d always worked. His whole goddamned life he had worked and worked and goddamned worked. He couldn’t remember ever having time off. Ever. And he just wanted a rest, a place to rest that wasn’t the foldout bed in Mama’s condo. Marianne’s skin and hair, her big, soft eyes. The way she’d look right at him when he talked about Cole, how she’d hold his hand with her small fingers, how, before tonight, she’d seem to look at him with admiration. Respect.

  Had he scared her that much? Did he squeeze her hand that hard?

  He slowed and checked his rearview mirror, turned into the median strip. He had to apologize. It was wrong of her to take his money when he was hurt like that, but still, he should apologize. Maybe she would too.

  AJ felt like the one at the poker table who all night long gets nothing but shit cards he still has to play. But there was the new promise of Deena and Cole back home, some paid time off from Caporelli, and he felt the sparking hope not of the lucky but of the one who works at it, the one who watches and keeps track of the numbers and knows there’re at least two jacks and one king left in the dealer’s deck.

  His truck rocked in and out of a rut, then leveled out onto flat asphalt, and he gave it the gas, the engine under his hood roaring like a loyal ally.

  THE JAZZ CALMED Jean quite a bit, and the station wasn’t hard to find, the brushes on the high hat, the low, soothing clarinet. Still, she’d broken out into a clammy sweat and had already driven twice by the yellow neon sign of the Puma Club. Its parking lot was full of men and cars, the actual business just a low, single-story structure with no windows. Driving north, it was to her left on the other side of the median. Heading back south now, it was at her right, much closer, and as she approached it she could see the long covered walkway to the pink doors of the entrance, a pink that opened and shut obscenely.

  Some riffraff smoked cigarettes against a pickup truck and watched her drive by in her locked Cadillac. There was still time to turn into
the parking lot but she accelerated instead, feeling queasy and cowardly. There was a steady weight on her chest now. She turned up the soft jazz and breathed deeply through her nose. It’s just nerves, that’s all. It’s not your heart, you fat old goat. Just your nerves.

  On either side of the boulevard were the black reaches of the countryside. All weed and trees that in a few years would be transformed into subdivisions. She knew that was April’s dream, to buy a place for her and her daughter. She’d never talked about it with Jean, but Franny did; rolling red and yellow Play-Doh in a ball she poked window holes and a door into, she said, “You’ll visit us when me and Mama buy our house, right?” Or early one morning when she was helping Jean water the plants and flowers, upending a small pitcher Jean had bought her, “Will you make us a garden like this in our new house?”

  Of course I will, sweetie. Of course.

  Up in the distance the security lights of the industrial park glowed brightly over low concrete buildings, businesses that probably made microchips and Styrofoam padding, plastic brooms and office chairs, the kind of objects one eventually needed but rarely thought about. The compound was devoid of any beauty whatsoever and put Jean in mind of prisons and punishment and bad behavior. She felt afraid for Franny all over again and ready or not, panicked or not, she was going to drive back to that place and walk through that obscene pink door and take her.

  LONNIE LOOKED OUT over the crowded floor, past the smoky blue lights of the VIP half wall where Zeke was leaning with Paco, pretending not to watch any of the girls. Andy sat on his stool, just a black shape with a big, pale head. What could Spring have done for two hours in there with her little customer? Her daughter. She’d asked him to check in on her and he hadn’t had time to. But Tina had. She’d come down from Louis’s office and gone back there. Then she was in the VIP bar for a while talking to the new girl in the shadows. Then she went back up to Louis’s office. Maybe Lonnie should go take a look. How old could Spring’s daughter be anyway? And did that mean she was married? Did Spring live with someone?

  Lonnie pushed himself away from the bar, but down at the apron of the stage one of the Portofino boys was raising his voice at another, his eyes dark and narrowed, and Lonnie waited to see if it was a pocket or just drunk bullshit he could ignore.

  How tired he was becoming of all this. Used to be he only thought about moving on during his off days, when he was alone and a great yawning emptiness would blow in on him and with every breath it’d be deeper inside him, this wide-open question as to just what he was doing here? Not in the club or even the Gulf Coast, not in all the places he’d drifted to and from—three universities, one in Austin where his old man worked, the others in New Jersey and here in Florida, all the class discussions where he held his own, questioning everything from Weber’s “Theory of Bureaucracy” to the interlocking directorates of corporate boardrooms to the rise of postmodernism, whatever the hell that was, because he hardly knew. Whatever he knew, or thought he knew, came not from books but from class lectures he dutifully recorded in all the misspelled words only he could decipher. Such an irony, the son of the bookish man not being able to read books; but words were beautiful to Lonnie, as sounds, as airy vowels and iron consonants, as things to memorize and chew on later because he couldn’t read like the others, never could. A word another’s eyes passed over easily—thorough or skate—became math problems he had to solve before he could move on. Instead of seeing a graceful row of letters symbolic of specific sounds, he saw the broken arms and legs of insects, a pile of them that had to be put back together before their message could move and shine.

  He loved music, though, and listened to it all the time. Tall and flunking at nearly everything but algebra and geometry, he walked the halls of his youth wearing Walkman headphones, his world suffused with Springsteen, Berlin, Mozart, ’Til Tuesday, Albinoni, the Clash. And Lonnie attracted women. Not those who shined so prettily at the top of the heap but the castoffs at the bottom like him, smart girls who smoked too much and didn’t mind a warm beer on a cool afternoon out in the sage grass, who liked music as much as he did and liked even better how he moved to it, gently pulling them in one at a time, one or two seasons at a time, rocking to it, pushing himself inside till they were just one thumping note reaching a crescendo and he’d let go.

  Some loved him, and over the years, as high school gave way to colleges which gave way to work, he came close to loving them back. In their presence, sitting in a booth over eggs and coffee or driving down the highway together or just lying in bed right before sleep, most times he felt a great tenderness for whomever he was with, for each hair, each blink of her eye, each tiny blemish or line in her skin. He’d be drawn to her voice and the smell of her breath, the sound of her car pulling up in front of the house, her dirty underwear balled up on the floor, her dusty bureau cluttered with whatever filled it: with one it was useless receipts, a hairbrush and coated rubber bands, an overflowing ashtray; with another it was tip money, a cell phone and pack of cigarettes; with one other, no clutter at all, just a cotton doily spread across it ready to receive nothing. And still, he loved them, or thought he did till they needed gold proof, and in days or weeks he’d be gone.

  He planted trees in shopping malls in New Jersey. Drove a vending machine truck in Austin. Flipped rugs for prospective buyers in a carpet boutique in Houston. He’d rent one- or two-room places in neighborhoods people seemed to avoid, and at night he’d listen to music or books on tape.

  Early on he discovered he had a high tolerance for being alone, preferred it really. Though come Saturday night that always changed. He’d want good live music, bourbon and cold beer, and when he found all three, he needed a woman to dance with, maybe take home if she wanted; sometimes he’d want it too, but that was hardly ever his first intention when he went out at night. He saw men like that all the time, though. At the bar or lounging around the pool tables or sitting near the band, they wore too much jewelry around their neck and wrists, their work watches left at home for a shinier mall model. Their shirts were ironed and their hair was cut just right, a lot of them carefully gelled and spiked. You could smell their aftershave above the cigarette smoke and they had the furtive, calculated look in the eye of young hunters.

  And maybe because he did not look like them, maybe because he’d go out in a T-shirt, loose jeans and work boots, sometimes needing a shave, always needing a haircut, because he was so intent on the lead singer singing and the bass guitarist and drummer keeping time, he attracted women he wasn’t even looking for; alone or taken, pretty and otherwise, they’d dance and drink and dance some more. He’d buy drinks and light cigarettes and they’d lean toward each other and talk. One of the lone dogs might come near right about then, another of them once again not seeing much when they looked at tall, rangy Lonnie who’d gone and snared their prey without the license they’d dressed and preened for.

  And let them come sniffing. If she wanted one of them instead, if she went out on the floor and didn’t come back, that was fine, too. He’d return to his music and Maker’s Mark and let the night go where it went.

  But if she didn’t want the LD, Lonnie didn’t mind asking him to move on. Some of them did. Quite a few didn’t. He’d wait, say it again, and so often there’d be no more waiting and what he said got lost in all the movement after, the lone dog falling backward into a parting crowd in the joyful noise of a Saturday night band in a dark barroom, his arms spread all loose-jointed and useless, his mouth an oval hole of shock and surprise, the last thing Lonnie usually saw before he’d be asked to leave or leave on his own. Sometimes the woman would follow him out, more interested in him than before. Other times she’d move away as if he were the dog, one you thought you wanted to pet until it bared its fangs.

  One, a short, muscular beauty up in New Jersey, followed him out and took him home. She lived in a condominium complex called Jersey Shores, and on her walls were framed photographs of her two grown children. In the fluorescent light o
f the kitchen where she poured them wine, he could see her face fully for the first time. She was ten years older than he’d thought, fifty-three or -four, her curly hair touched with gray. She washed his cut knuckles in the kitchen sink, his blood running over a plate and glass, and she dried his hand with a clean dish towel, squeezed his fingers, and led him down a hallway to her room where she undressed him as if he were a boy.

  Later, lying in bed, their sweat drying, his arms and legs spent and tired, she said, “Where’s all that anger come from?”

  “Anger?”

  “When you hit that poor slob.”

  “I wasn’t angry.” He noticed how the light from the hallway cast itself across the bed, how it cut them each in two.

  “You weren’t? You hit him really hard.”

  “Just to take the fight out of him.”

  “You fight a lot?”

  “I wouldn’t call it that.” And he wouldn’t. Just punching. Throwing punches at a live target because it had presented itself that way: a man’s face reduced to two moist eyes, a beckoning nose, and inviting teeth; so you set your weight on your back foot and drop your shoulder and let it fly, for once nothing complicated or interrupted or pent up in you, just the sweet thrust of forward momentum that could make your point like nothing else.

  Mornings after, he’d have a dry mouth and heavy head and feel badly about hurting another human being, though the clarity of his remorse was always clouded by some degree of athletic pride, knowing he’d hit his mark with the exact right force at the exact right time. Still, he’d tell himself to avoid doing it in the future and he’d go weeks, sometimes a couple of months, without any trouble. But there were so many men out there looking for it, he was like a dieter stepping each Saturday night into a full-course buffet of steaming entrées and desserts spread out before him on pressed linen.