The Night Gardener

CHAPTER 3

Dan Holiday signaled the bartender, making a grand circular motion with his index finger over glasses that were not quite empty but empty enough.

'The same way,' said Holiday. 'For me and my friends.'

The men at the bar were three rounds deep into a discussion that had gone from Angelina Jolie to Santana Moss to the new Mustang GT, their points argued with vehemence, but all of it, in the end, about nothing at all. The conversation was something to hang the alcohol on. You couldn't just sit there and drink.

On the stools sat carpet-and-floor salesman Jerry Fink, freelance writer Bradley West, a residential contractor named Bob Bonano, and Holiday. None of them had bosses. All had the kind of jobs that allowed them to drink off a workday without guilt.

They met, informally, several times a week at Leo's, a tavern on Georgia Avenue, between Geranium and Floral, in Shepherd Park. It was a simple rectangular room with an oak bar going front to back, twelve stools and a few four-tops, and a jukebox holding obscure soul singles. The walls were freshly painted and unadorned with beer posters, pennants, or mirrors, instead showing photographs of Leo's parents in D.C. and grandparents in their Greek village. The bar was a neighborhood watering hole, neither a bucket of blood nor a home for gentrifiers. It was simply an efficient place to get a pleasant load on in the middle of the afternoon.

'Jesus, you stink,' said Jerry Fink, sitting beside Holiday, rattling the rocks in his cocktail glass.

'It's called Axe,' said Holiday. 'The kids wear it.'

'You ain't no kid, hombre.' Jerry Fink, raised off River Road and a graduate of Walt Whitman High, one of the finest and whitest public schools in the country, often spoke in double negatives. He felt it made him more street. He was short, had a gut, wore glasses with tinted lenses indoors, and sported a perm, which he called 'my Jewfro.' Fink was forty-eight years old.

'Tell me something I don't know.'

'I'm just askin you why you're wearing that swill.'

'Very simple. Where I woke up this morning, I didn't have my own toiletries close by, if you catch my drift.'

'Here we go,' said West.

Holiday grinned and squared his shoulders. He was as rail thin as he had been in his twenties. The only indicator of his forty-one years was the small belly he had acquired from years of drinking. His acquaintances called it 'the Holiday Hump.'

'Tell us a bedtime story, Daddy,' said Bonano.

'Okay,' said Holiday. 'I had a job yesterday, a client from NYC. Some big-shot investor looking at a company about to go public. I drove him out to an office building in the Dulles corridor, waited around a few hours, and drove him back downtown to the Ritz. So I'm goin back to my place last night, I'm feeling thirsty, I stop in to the Royal Mile in Wheaton for a short one. Soon as I walk in, I notice this brunette sitting with a couple other women. She had some mileage on the odometer, but she was attractive. We made eye contact, and her eyes spoke a million words.'

'What did her eyes say, Doc?' said West tiredly.

'They said, I'm hungry for Johnny Johnson.'

This drew head shakes.

'I didn't make my move right away. I waited till she had to get up and take a piss. I needed to get a look at her bottom half, see, to make sure I wasn't settin myself up for some horror show later on. Anyway, I checked her out and she was all right. She'd had babies, obviously, but there wasn't any severe damage to speak of.'

'C'mon, man,' said Bonano.

'Be patient. Soon as she gets back from the head, I cut her from the herd real quick. It only cost me two Miller Lites. She didn't even finish her beer before she tells me she's ready to go.' Holiday tapped ash off his smoke. 'I figured I'd take her out to the parking lot across the street, let her blow me or somethin.'

'And they say romance is dead,' said West.

'But she wasn't having any of that,' said Holiday, missing West's tone or ignoring it. 'I'm not doing it in a car,' she says. "I'm not seventeen anymore." No shit, I'm thinkin, but hey, I wasn't gonna turn down some ass.'

'Even if she wasn't seventeen,' said Jerry Fink.

'We go back to her house; she's got a couple of kids, a teenage boy and his younger sister, they barely turn their heads away from the television when we come in.'

'What were they watching?' said Bonano.

'What difference does that make?' said Holiday.

'Makes the story better. Makes me see it, like, in my head.'

'It was one of those Law and Order shows,' said Holiday. 'I know 'cause I heard that duh-duh thing they do.'

'Keep goin,' said Fink.

'Okay,' said Holiday. 'She tells the kids not to stay up too late, 'cause they got school the next day, and then she takes me by the hand and we go up to her room.'

The cell phone set on the bar, before Bob Bonano, 'the kitchen and bath expert,' rang. He checked the display number and did not move to answer it. If it was new business, he would take the call. If it was a customer he had already screwed, he would not. Most of the time he did not take the call. Bonano's business was called Home Masters. Jerry Fink called it 'Home Bastards' and sometimes 'Home Butchers' when he was feeling expansive.

'You fucked her while her kids were downstairs, watching TV?' said Bonano, still looking at the cell phone, its ringer playing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly theme. Bonano, dark with big features and hands, fancied himself a cowboy but looked Italian as salami on a string.

'I put my hand over her mouth when she started to make noise,' said Holiday with a shrug. 'She almost bit through my paw.'

'Quit braggin,' said Fink.

'I'm just stating a fact,' said Holiday. 'This broad was an animal.'

The bartender, Leo Vazoulis, wide and balding, with thin gray hair and a black mustache, served them their drinks. Leo's father had bought the building, cash, forty years earlier, and operated it as a lunch counter until he was felled by a heart attack. Leo had inherited the real estate and turned the diner into a bar. He had no nut beyond the taxes and utilities, and made a good living working less strenuously than his father had. This was how it was supposed to go from fathers to sons.

Leo emptied the ashtrays and walked away.

'That doesn't explain the perfume you're wearin,' said Fink.

'It's deodorant,' said Holiday. 'Well, the can says it's a combination of deodorant and cologne. Some shit like that.'

'I read an article on it,' said West. 'It's like a phenomenon.'

'This morning,' said Holiday, 'I'm lyin in this woman's bed, waiting for her to get her kids off to school, figuring out my exit plan. I hear the door slam and her SUV fire up, I get out of the rack, go to her son's bedroom, and spray whatever he's got on his dresser under my armpits. I sprayed some down there, too, you know what I'm sayin? To get her smell off me.'

'Axe,' said Bonano, like he was trying to remember it.

'Axe Rejuvenate was what the can said. It's real popular with the young men, apparently.'

'You smell like a whore,' said Fink.

Holiday stubbed out his smoke. 'Your mother does, too.'

They finished their drinks and were served another round. Bonano ignored his cell calls, and Fink took one, promising a Palisades housewife that he would be out 'sometime next week' to measure her rec room. Fink ended the call and went to the jukebox, dropped in quarters, and punched up a couple of tunes. They listened to an Ann Peebles tune, and then a Syl Johnson, and when the Hi rhythm section kicked in, they all moved their heads.

'How's the novel going, Brad?' said Holiday, shaking a cigarette out of the deck, nudging Fink on the elbow.

'I'm working it out in my head,' said West, who had a gray beard and long gray hair. He had grown the beard after Fink told him he looked like an old lady with all that hair.

'Shouldn't you be up at NewYorka, or whatever that place is?' said Fink. He meant the touchy-feely coffeehouse over the District line, on the corner past Crisfield's. 'I see those dudes from your neighborhood up there, sittin with their double lattes, tapping away at their keyboards.'

'Wearing berets,' said Bonano, embellishing.

'Those guys aren't writing anything,' said West. 'They're jerking off.'

'Not like you,' said Holiday.

They talked about the new kid Gibbs had picked up at quarterback. They talked about which one of the Desperate Housewives they'd like to fuck, the reasons they would kick the others out of bed, and the Chrysler 300. Bonano said he liked the lines, but it looked too 'booferish' with aftermarket rims. In his mind, it was simply the best description of the wheels. Still, he looked around before he said it. At night the bar patrons here were mostly black, as were the employees. In the afternoons, it was often just them: four aging white alcoholics with no place else to go.

The car thing naturally led to a discussion of crime, and a turning of heads toward Holiday, who had the most firsthand knowledge of the subject.

'It's getting better,' said Fink. 'Murder rate's half of what it was ten years ago.'

"Cause they put most of the assholes in jail,' said Bonano.

'The violent criminals moved out to P.G. County, is all it is,' said Fink. 'They got more homicides out there this year than they do in the District. And that don't even begin to talk about the carjackings and rapes.'

'It's no mystery,' said West. 'White and black people with money are moving back into the city and pushing the poor blacks out to P.G. Shit, those areas between the Beltway and Southern Avenue? Capitol Heights, District Heights, Hillcrest Heights…'

'Heights,' said Bonano, shaking his head. 'Like they got castles on the hills and shit. Jesus. And don't even mention Suitland. A fucking armpit.'

'It's Southeast all over again, ten years ago,' said Fink.

'It's the culture,' said Bonano. 'How the fuck you gonna change that?'

'Ward Nine,' said Fink. It had become either an affectionate or a pejorative term for P.G., depending on who was using it. It meant the county was no different from, and just as bad as, the eastern, crime-ridden, black-populated regions of D.C.

'What do you expect?' said West. 'Poverty is violence.'

'Really, Hillary?' said Bonano.

'No one respects the law anymore,' said Holiday very quietly. He looked into his glass, rattled the cubes, and downed the rest of its contents. He picked up his cigarettes and cell from the bar and got off his stool.

'Where you goin?' said Fink.

'Work,' said Holiday. 'I got an airport run.'

'Take it easy, Doc,' said Bonano.

'Gents,' said Holiday.

Holiday walked out of Leo's into a blinding light. He wore a white dress shirt under a black suit. His hat was out in the car.