The Garden of Last Days

by Andre Dubus III

  For a flashing moment AJ considered letting go of the plan entirely. Just go to work and carry on, but with a laugh that came from a knowledge he’d forgotten, he lowered his useless hand back to his lap. If he did not go ahead with this, then he’d be out of work with nothing for weeks, maybe months. He might be able to collect but how good would that look to the judge? Cole’s daddy laid up because a bouncer at the Puma thought he was being too rough on one of the girls.

  Too rough.

  Goddamnit but his blood started to shoot through him all over again and he gunned his engine and shot his truck onto the concrete causeway, the rubber expansion joints clicking under his tires steadier than his own jagged heartbeat. Off to his right lay the purple waters of Sarasota Bay, then the early-morning lights, the streetlamps and traffic signals above empty intersections, the fluorescent glow of first-floor security desks of the office buildings downtown, the neon glow of what had to be at least one all-night coffee shop where he could get a cup and a muffin. But there wasn’t time. Already the sky was visible over the buildings to the east, a band of blue lifting to gray to a rose that made him think of Marianne, her black hair, the rose he was going to give her on their night out. A flower for a flower. A man treating her like a lady. A gentleman with a lady.

  What a sorry-ass sack of shit he really was.

  He eased up on the gas and coasted down the causeway and turned left into the asphalt lot of the city pier. With his elbow he pressed his window button and could already smell the salt water and dried fish guts, the pelican shit and shell dust.

  It was chilly without his shirt. He left his window open and rode down to the water’s edge. The Gulf was dark gray under a steel sky and his headlights shone over the wide planks of the pier, its weathered two-by-six railings, the white masts and hulls of boats moored below. They swayed from side to side in the early-morning chop.

  He left his engine running and slid out of the truck and ran down the pathway to the only building around, a one-story hut with new windows and a thatched roof like the old Seminoles’. In front leaned a couple vending machines, Pepsi and bottled water. And at the far right side, bolted into the trim, was an oval sign: PHONE. His arm pulsed and throbbed and he held it up and ran around the corner, saw the half booth attached to the hut, its metal shelf and plastic phone book cover hanging on a brass chain, but no phone. No damn phone.

  He turned and walked fast back to the truck, thinking, Fruitville Road. She was in the first garage in the first alleyway to the left going east of St. Armand’s Circle on Fruitville. Why not just open his cell phone, call the county, and say that? He could do it in less than a minute. But man, that’s all it would take to get his number and him. Why didn’t he leave her something to drink? He could’ve put her melting Slush Puppie right there on the floor for her to find. It’d be cold and sweet, familiar too.

  A breeze kicked up from the east and blew across the lot. It felt good against his face and bare chest, but it was already warming up, the sky clear in its lighted strip on the horizon. It was going to be hot. He had to go back. It was in the same direction as Lido Key and just a few blocks north of his CAT. He’d get the garage door open, leave her the Slush Puppie, then catch the exact street number of where he’d left her. On his way to the ditch he’d call 411, try and get a number from an address, then call the Honda owner directly, tell him or her about the little girl in the garage. Hang up.

  But shit, then his number would be on that phone and anyway it was getting too light now. Neighbors might identify his truck. And what if Francie woke up when he went back in? And goddamnit, he couldn’t get back in anyway, he’d locked her in!

  Shit. He opened the access door, reached in over the empty car seat for his T-shirt and pulled it over his head. He was careful with his hurt hand, nudging gently for the arm hole, the world darker now and smelling like diesel and dirt and his own sour sweat. It was a dead-end smell, the smell of a life that would know only work, work, and more work. But as he poked his head and good arm through the right holes, the Gulf breeze blew back in his face, something shifting inside him: the girl was no longer his problem; he’d done what he could and now it was somebody else’s damn turn. It was that simple. He was just going to have to trust in Mama’s God that this child would be taken care of because he had about twenty minutes before Cap Jr. drove up to make a show of getting the day’s work started, and A.J. Carey still had to get that one-and-three-quarters yard bucket into the ditch where his wrist and hand were supposed to be, this poor good-luck arm he now had to reach by to pull his door shut. AJ put her in reverse and backed up too fast, swinging around to face south, the sky over Sarasota a pale coral, and just moments from the sun.

  THEY CAME JUST as the sun began to light the yard, the Virgin Mary’s alabaster face looking sadly accepting of all things, even the murder of her only son.

  Virginia was still in her robe. She had the morning news on the TV and was in the kitchen making her toast when the buzzer sounded and she thought, Alan, but he has his key and anyway he’s working, and she pressed the intercom button and asked who’s there. And when he told her, the air itself seemed to be without air and she saw her son crushed under an overturned excavator or buried alive in a ditch, and she buzzed the men in and met them in the darkened hallway, her oxygen tube trailing behind her only so far, two policemen from Sarasota County and one from Bradenton, the uniforms different.

  “What is it? Is it my son? Is it Alan?”

  There was a tall one, older and wearing glasses, and he asked if they could come inside, and yes, yes, but you have to tell me. And now they were gone, their visit inside her small kitchen so brief it felt like a bad vision.

  Except there was the tall one’s card on the counter, his name and rank at the Sheriff’s Department, the kitchen air smelling like aftershave and the spearmint gum the one from Bradenton had chewed quietly while the one with glasses had shown her a picture of her own boy holding Cole on his lap, both of them squinting into the sun.

  “Is this a recent photo?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  She’d let them walk through the three rooms of her apartment, and one of them ventured out into her enclosed yard. She didn’t want to tell them anything, but what could she do? She gave them the name and number of the company Alan worked for, and she told them about Lido Key, that he’d been called in to work early out there, something about a broken pipeline.

  Virginia left her toast in the toaster and, careful to keep her tube from snagging under the foldout bed, she walked quickly to her chair by the window. She sat down, muted the television, and picked up the phone. It was Deena she wanted to talk to, Deena she wanted a few answers from, but her finger was punching Alan’s cell phone number instead. She was breathing with some difficulty. On the TV there was footage of a baseball player being hit in the back by a pitch, throwing down his bat and running after the pitcher, punching him in the face before the field was full of players from both sides, punching and kicking and screaming at one another.

  “Yeah, this is AJ. The phone’s off or I’m workin’ so leave a message.”

  “Alan? It’s Mama. Some policemen were just here looking for you. They think you know something about a missing little girl.” Virginia checked the clock across the room. “It’s 7:16 and they just left, honey. I had to give them your boss’s number and they know you’re out at Lido Key. Please call me, honey. Please tell me what’s going on.”

  She pressed the Talk button. She’d forgotten to say she loved him and wished she had. She began pressing the numbers to his home, but they weren’t coming right away. There was a four and seven in it, but was the three first or the five? Her eyes were on the TV, a jumble of sports news of big men in bright colors chasing little balls.

  7435. Those were the last four digits to her son’s home, and of course this had to be one big mistake: she knew her son; she knew he liked his beer and occasional whiskey; she knew he was brokenhearted and missed Cole, that he was spending
money he didn’t have on fallen women in that fallen place, that yes, he’d had enough and slapped that woman and shouldn’t have, but he was no danger to children. Not Alan. Not her son.

  She pressed the numbers of the home he was locked out of and his phone began to ring. On the screen came a photograph of a young girl. It was one of those photo booth pictures, and she was sitting on the lap of a pretty woman. The girl had curly sun-streaked hair and plump cheeks and she was looking into the camera with great purpose, as if she knew taking this picture was meant to be something special. At first Virginia thought the girl’s name was Amber. Then she remembered seeing it quite a few times before for all children with names far different, boys and girls, but mainly girls. This little one was Franny Connors. There was a number to call. Then the image was gone, replaced by a beautiful young housewife loading happy children into a shiny new minivan.

  JUST SEEING THE job site under a brightening sky made him feel halfway normal: the yellow excavator and its tall boom folded in close to the cab, the bucket sitting beneath it like a loosely clenched fist; there were the clumps of clay and tree root he’d dumped yesterday along both sides of the ditch, the stands of cabbage palms and saw palmettos and jack pine between his work and the houses to the west. If it weren’t for his bad wrist and hand, this could be any workday morning, but as he pulled his truck into the clearing behind the excavator, the word reward came to him and he felt all the weeks and months and years he’d worked since he was fourteen years old, his childhood a blur of claustrophobic classrooms and loud, hot construction sites and long fluorescent-lit hours at Walgreens in a tie, then Deena and remodeling their hurricaneproof house and training with her daddy on heavy equipment and being too tired to even play with Cole, then boiling over and having to live with Mama. Well today his reward was coming, and it was way past due.

  He only had about fifteen minutes before Cap Jr. drove up. AJ was out of the truck, walking fast around the excavator. It was too late to put a realistic tear in the hydraulic line. The only thing left was to say the bucket rolled when he went to change it. But couldn’t they say it was his fault then? And how was he going to change the bucket over with one hand anyway? Shit, he’d spent too damn much time and energy on that bitch’s child when he should’ve been thinking more about this.

  With his good hand he grabbed hold of the safety handle and stepped up onto the track and swung open the cab door. He held his hurt wrist to his chest, climbed in, and started her up. It was a comforting sound, the diesel engine rattling with all that power under him. The only thing left was to lower the bucket into the ditch and say the hydraulics failed, which would be highly fucking unlikely.

  His mouth and throat were dry. His entire head ached nearly as bad as his hand he only hoped wasn’t too swollen now to look freshly injured. He checked the side view mirror. The road behind him was an asphalt snake cutting back through sunlit trees, and maybe it was a good sign the right-hand joystick would do all he needed without him having to reach across himself for the other. He gave the Caterpillar some gas and raised the bucket over the ditch, the hydraulics whining. The CAT needed its morning lube and Cap Jr. would have the grease gun with him, though he only took it out half the time he should. AJ uncurled the bucket.

  Something moved in the mirror and he shot a glance at the glass, his face a furnace. A Seminole Spring Water truck cruised by and was gone. He pushed open the cab door and was swinging his legs around when he saw, through the scratched Plexiglas of the windshield and just above the bucket, the bright factory yellow of the new coupler Cap Sr. had installed. He’d just put them in all his machines, not for safety but to change buckets over faster and save his ass some money. It was an upgrade AJ had forgotten about and he hopped out of the cab and ran to his truck for his tool chest and channel locks. With those he could release the coupler with one hand and drop the bucket and say he was down there with his shovel when the new coupler failed and almost killed his ass.

  He just hoped the channel locks weren’t in the middle of the chest or he’d have to climb up into the bed, which would take too damn many precious seconds. He held his hurt hand high and reached over the wall of his truck and pulled the tool chest handle and got the lid up. There was the sound of a far-off car or truck getting closer and he didn’t even want to look out at the road; if it was Cap Jr., he’d stick with his first story about failed hydraulics, say he was lucky to get his hand unpinned.

  He was leaning hard against the truck, pushing aside an old tarp, his tow rope, the broken handle of the weed whacker he’d never gotten fixed, a deflated beach ball of Cole’s, two or three empty Miller bottles till there was the ash handle of his tool box, and he felt past the open-ended wrenches and odd ratchet heads and loose screws and nails till his fingers touched the rubber-coated handles of his channel locks he yanked up and out of the box, the car louder now, its engine like some force that can’t be controlled, won’t be controlled. It was coming from the north, Cap Jr.’s direction, and AJ had to look because what would he want channel locks for if he’d just crushed his goddamn wrist?

  It was a pickup, a creaking piece of shit, the front bumper gone, the hood red, the body a dented sky blue. A shirtless old man was driving it. He was small and brown, his face mottled with gray whiskers, and he lifted a hand to AJ as he passed. A trail of light blue exhaust hung in the air. AJ walked through its carbon monoxide smell for the CAT, feeling vaguely blessed by a stranger. Something about the old man’s eyes taking him in, then the wave of his hand, and AJ knew then that everything was going to be all right, everything would be fine.

  He closed the channel locks around the coupler. He squeezed, jerked downward, and the spring load popped free and the bucket let go with a whump, driving itself into the ditch, its vibration rippling through the ground under AJ’s boots.

  He turned and whipped the channel locks into the trees. He grabbed the short spade shovel off the cab floor, tossed it in the ditch, and jumped down into it. The bucket had wedged itself into both sides and there was a good foot of air between the teeth and the clay bottom, too much to fool anyone; he took up the shovel with his good hand and began stabbing the sandy soil at the side of the bucket. He was sweating a sick sweat, his mouth gummy, his throat dry, a well of heartburn rising up. But he’d gotten lucky with no roots and in no time had carved a small dark hole and he knelt and eased his broken wrist into it. It was cool in there and AJ sat back against the wall of earth, stretched out his legs as far as he could.

  And now he waited. He waited for help.

  THE SUN BEGAN to rise over her garden wall outside, shining down the corridor and into her bedroom, and Jean had tried to rest but she couldn’t. “I had to take her ’cause of you, Jean! You!” April’s face, the hurt and rage in it, disgust even. Disgust. And did she really believe that? Was she taking no responsibility whatsoever? But what she’d said about Jean and work, well those words were now inside her like broken glass, and she’d been fighting it since the policeman and April had shattered her sleep, had held her breath to stop it, had drunk three glasses of wine to stop it, but now she couldn’t hold it back any longer, this image of her dear dear Franny floating in shallow water, her eyes closed, her lovely hair writhing in the current, her throat purple and blue, her arms and legs naked and pale and stiff. A cry welled up from Jean’s middle and she shook her head, but there it was and it wasn’t going away. For seconds or minutes she tried to think of anything else, but she saw only Franny, her mornings with her, her nearly sacred mornings with her, and now the images of her dead were all the clearer and sharper, cutting into her, cleaving her. Then the bed shifted and the ceiling seemed to cant to the side and Jean told herself to inhale deeply through her nose and let the air slowly out her mouth—breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out. She did this for what felt a very long while. Then, like air rising from the deep, there came a black airless calm, Harry slumped in his chair, his narrow chest sunken and still beneath his shirt; she’d told herself it was
the gray afternoon light that was fooling her. Through Chopin’s rising and falling piano chords she called her husband’s name and could hear the lie in her own voice for her heart already knew what the rest of her hadn’t the strength to accept. It was disrespectful, this denial of his true state there in front of her: the least she could do was be a witness to him, or to what was once him, this cooling sculpture of all his years and his last moments too, this body she’d fed and loved and lain beside since she was a young woman; the least we can do for those we love is to look their fate in the eye squarely and with clarity, devoid of manufactured hopes and surface lies.

  Matisse leapt onto the mattress and walked over Jean’s belly. She picked him up and pulled him close, but he pushed his claws into her shoulder and moved to the pillow behind her. And there he settled himself against her head as if she should know better, as if she should know more than she ever did.

  IN AJ’S DREAM, his left arm was stretched out away from him and Deena was naked and sitting on his hand, which was all the way up inside her. It was cool and sandy there, and she wasn’t moving. She kept turning around to smile at him. She looked like he’d never seen her before, like she was finally happy about everything and it had to do with his hand. Something about his hand.

  Cole was sitting off to the right in a plastic lawn chair. He was dressed up in pants and a button-down shirt and clip-on tie. His feet were bare and didn’t touch the ground and Marianne was sitting next to him in a black dress, her lips full and red. They were talking in low voices. There was the slam of a door, boot steps above.

  “AJ?”

  He opened his eyes, saw the ditch wall ahead of him, felt the big iron bucket at his side.