The Garden of Last Days (50 page)

In this picture she didn’t look like a bad mother. Maybe that day they’d gone into the drugstore for toothpaste or more sunblock or tampons. She didn’t know. But she looked confident and full of love for the girl on her lap whose face she couldn’t look at now because she looked so trusting. So trusting of her.

The microwave beeped, and there was a knocking, Jean on the other side of the glass. April opened the door. She felt dirty, guilty of more than she was guilty of; Jean looked awful, her skin pale, a sheen of sweat along her forehead. She was breathing hard from the climb and her sundress was damp under the arms and dirty at the hem. “April, please, I didn’t sleep, you have to tell me what’s happening. I need to
know
.”

“I’m sorry, Jean. I’m sorry for what I said to you.”

Jean shook her head, waved her hand in the air. “Forget it.”

“No, you’ve only been good to us.”

“And you’ve been good to me.”

“No I haven’t. I haven’t.” She couldn’t look at her anymore. Her throat thickened and she opened the door all the way and stepped back. “Please,” she said. “Please, Jean, come inside.”

LONNIE STEERED ONTO
the crushed shells of the lot. It was just after noon, and not a car or pickup anywhere. He pulled up to the canopy and left the engine and AC running and got out with his driving cup of dark roast he’d brewed at home. It had taken him a long time to sleep and then it didn’t last and now he was drinking too much coffee but he felt strong and light on his feet; there was the feeling that the big machine he was enslaved to had sputtered to a stop and spit him out and now he was free.

He walked under the canopy to the front entrance and the X of yellow tape across the door. Tacked to it was a posting from the county licensing commission. He skimmed it, wondered where Louis was. He could be parked out back, he might be inside.

Lonnie walked around to the rear of the club. April keening from car to truck to van to car, him running after her.

A legion of flies buzzed in the Dumpster and around the grease
barrel. There wasn’t any tape across the door casings but the screen and steel door were locked and a hot wind blew at his back. The smell of the place had ruined coffee for him. He uncapped his cup and poured it into the ground. The sky above the trees was graying to the west, thunderheads gathering over the Gulf. They were in hurricane season now, and once they were deep in it where would he be? What would he be doing?

He was glad she’d let him go get them some Chinese last night, but she wouldn’t let him pay for it and had pushed two twenties into his hand. It was a gesture too familiar to them both and they ate quietly on the couch in her living room, though she was done after half an egg roll and a bite of rice.

“Want me to leave, April?”

She looked over at him. She’d pulled her hair back in a ponytail and it made her look younger, her eyes dark and distracted-looking. “Yeah.”

At the door she’d let him hold her but pulled away before it could go anywhere. She looked up at him like she wanted to say thank you but said nothing and without her makeup she looked like someone he’d known a long time without knowing it.

“I’ll call you tomorrow. See how you’re doing.”

She’d nodded at him, smiled faintly.

When he’d called this morning there’d been no answer and no machine. He wanted to drive by the house but didn’t want to be a parasite either.

Grit blew in his eyes. He stepped off the stoop and walked blinking back to his Tacoma, the engine still running like it was poised to whisk him off somewhere in particular. He wished it would. He sure as hell didn’t know what to do next. He had about twenty-five hundred in the bank. He might be able to collect but how much and for how long? Part of him wanted to go home, go back to Austin, maybe stay with his folks out in the bluebonnets and get back into the university.

Lonnie got into his cool cab and sat there awhile. Classrooms
weren’t made for people like him. He’d tried that and worked hard at it and failed at it. He was lying to himself anyway. He didn’t want to go west; he wanted to go about six miles south to April’s place. He wanted to hold her and kiss her and help her any way he could.

He put the truck in gear and headed south on 301. The clouds were blowing in from the water and soon there’d be a cleansing rain. He accelerated and pushed in the cassette April couldn’t bear to hear:

“As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth

Entering the whirlpool
.

Gentile or Jew

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward
,

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.”

JUST BEFORE NINE
this morning two deputies secured plastic cuffs loosely over his cast but tight on his wrist and escorted him downstairs for his bond hearing.

His public defender’s name was Harvey Wilson, a tall, scrawny fucker with curly hair and an expensive tie who stood next to AJ while the judge studied the papers in front of him, his silver hair combed back straight, his eyes steady behind his bifocals. The judge glanced at AJ’s public defender, then he looked at him; he leaned forward on his elbows and took off his glasses.

“It’s written here that you say you were trying to protect the child, is that true?”

“Yes, sir.”

“From what, if I may ask?”

“She was wandering out back of a strip club crying and scared, your honor. I couldn’t just leave her there.”

“Why didn’t you go look for her mother?”

“I guess I didn’t trust her, sir.”

“You didn’t trust her?”

“Yes, sir.”

“About her own child?”

“Yes, sir. I mean she brought her there, your honor.”

“Why didn’t you call the police?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Then why not, at the very least, drive her to the police or sheriff’s department?”

“I’m not sure, your honor. I was afraid somebody’d get the wrong idea. I don’t know, sir.”

“What wrong idea?”

“I don’t know, sir. I guess I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

AJ watched the judge stare at him and AJ saw himself as the judge did, standing before him with a blue cast on his wrist in an orange jumpsuit talking like a fuckup. The judge glanced down at the paperwork, flipped a page over.

“I see you have a restraining order against you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And last night you violated that restraining order.”

“Yes, sir, but she let me in. We just talked.”

“But you violated the order.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Not to mention you were evicted from this club you refer to for manhandling one of the dancers, isn’t that true?”

“I wouldn’t use that expression, your honor, sir.”

“Which expression?”

“Manhandle, sir.”

The judge looked down at his cast, nodded at it. “How did you hurt yourself?”

“An accident with my excavator, sir.”

“The officer’s report says otherwise, Mr. Carey. Your wife says you came to the house injured and intoxicated. So who am I to believe here?”

AJ shook his head, a million red ants crawling behind the skin of his face.
Deena. What’d you do? What’d you go and fucking
do
?
He tried to keep looking the judge in the eye but couldn’t.

“And instead of calling law enforcement for this child, you take her, keep her all night, then dump her somewhere like so much trash.”

“No, sir, your honor. I left her in a safe place, I—”

“You left her in a locked vehicle in a garage where she might well have died from the heat before noon today, Mr. Carey.” He raised his hand. “Enough.” He turned to the public defender. “The charges are as follows: interference with custody, felony of the third degree; false imprisonment of a child under age thirteen, felony of the third degree; and kidnapping of a child under age thirteen, felony of the first degree. Bail is denied.” The judge raised his gavel and brought it down and the sound echoed through the room.

Wilson turned to AJ, whispered, “Bad luck, this one hates wife beaters.” He was zipping up his leather briefcase like that was it, nothing more to talk about.

“How long before I get a hearing then?”

“Hard to say. Could be three months or six, even eighteen. You’re in for a long haul now.”

His escort deputies were on either side of him. Wilson said something else to him, pushing his card into the front pocket of AJ’s jail top, but AJ only heard the words still sitting in his head like toxic waste—
eighteen months
. A year and a half before he even got a hearing, never mind a trial? And for
what
? For doing the right thing? For trying to do something
good
?

It was late afternoon and he lay on his bunk, his cast resting hard over his eyes. He tried to ignore the stench of the shit Daniels just took. He tried to ignore O’Brien tapping both feet against the floor while he played over and over some song in his head. He tried to ignore Edwards’s throat-rattling snores or García’s pages turning one at a time one bunk over. He tried to ignore the slow-healing bone ache
in his wrist and how the NP had only given him Tylenol, which gave him gastritis, his gut a raw fire of acid eating away at him.
Eighteen months
. Even if the public defender was wrong and it was just a few weeks, what then? He needed a real lawyer now, didn’t he? Those guys cost money. And Deena had taken care of that. She sure as hell did her best to take care of that.

His body felt like poured concrete, like it would never sit up or stand or walk again. But the girl. That little girl had to be okay because he’d’ve been charged with more if she wasn’t, right?

There was the tap of O’Brien’s feet on the floor, then his hands lightly slapping his legs. There was Edwards snoring and Daniels or Johnson sliding chess pieces over the board. Every few minutes García would turn a page. But there was something else too. Something rising and falling. Like applause far away, and AJ lowered his cast and opened his eyes. Fifteen feet up the wall, just beneath the iron joists, was a small square window. Tempered glass, unbreakable. Eddie. That one time they’d built a room for a man who didn’t want windows. He was old and stooped over. He wore thick glasses and read a lot of books. He wanted the room to be a cool, dark cave. A place where he could disappear. That was the word he’d used too, smiling with his bad teeth—
disappear
. AJ cutting all the studs and plates under the sun, feeding them to Eddie, who framed the walls with no rough openings for windows, just one big enough for an air-conditioning unit. Eddie chewing his Wrigley’s, his nips wearing off. “
This ain’t to code, you know.”

“What?”

“This fuckin’ cave. You can’t legally call it a room
.”

“Why not?”

“No egress, numbnuts. You always gotta have more than one way out.”

And this window, so high off the floor—the applause was rain, rain blowing hard against the glass.

AJ closed his eyes again, laid his cast over it. Saw his hurricaneproof house out in the wire grass, the tall slash pines jerking and bending in the wind. Far enough away he didn’t have to worry about where
they might fall. How was she going to keep up the payments without his monthly check? They could lose the house, and where would his son go? His grandparents’ place out on the lake? Cole’s daddy and his cinder-block house just fading images in his head? No, AJ could sell the truck. He could have Mama do it. He had enough paid off on it. That’d buy him a few months of mortgages at least. Goddamn this was
wrong
. He shouldn’t have to be worrying about any of this. He’d taken care of that child, god
damn
them.