The Wishing Garden (8 page)

J
ake Grey would have been pleased to know he was referred to as the psycho. Because of the knives he carried and the dogs he’d never tamed, he was considered one mean son of a bitch. The story went that he hid away on Kemper Peak not because he liked the solitude, but because, in a crowd of people, he went a little crazy. He could not be held accountable for his actions and worse yet, Cal Bentley, the senior Yavapai County sheriff, was his best friend, so there was no sense calling the police when he snapped. You were on your own. Standing six two, with a black beard and eyes as cold and blue as glass, Jake looked like a man you could shoot and shoot and never kill—only make extremely mad.

On an afternoon in early May, when the air swept in from the desert pre-warmed and gritty, Jake drove back from Flagstaff, occasionally glancing at the man sleeping soundly beside him. Doug Dawson had a few
tufts of hair left and bruises all down his arms. Jake turned onto Sage Street, where a thousand newly hatched gnats floated in the steam rising up from the asphalt. He pulled up in Doug Dawson’s driveway and cut the engine. Doug woke up immediately, and turned around to look at the logs in the back.

“My wife doesn’t know it yet,” Doug said sleepily, “but she’s going to love this bench. After I’m gone …” When Jake said nothing, Doug merely touched the bandage he still wore on his forehead, though the incision had been made months ago.

Jake got out of the truck and Sasha, his husky, came bolting for him. She reared up on her hind legs to kiss him.

“Down, girl.” He scratched the belt-strap scars behind her ears until the dog no one would come within three feet of nearly purred.

He let Rufus and Gabe, his chocolate Lab and golden retriever, out of the truck bed and glanced at the sky. There wasn’t a cloud in it, and that put him on edge. He liked a little cloud cover. All the thunderstorms in the area started on Kemper Mountain, where he’d built his cabin. Legend said that was where Lalani, the thunder god, lived; drunk talk said Jake spiked the sky with his own electric spite. Actually, it was the thermals along the summit, combined with the moisture that rose off the alpine lakes, that brought rain nearly every summer afternoon. Down here on the valley floor, it was dry as sand, and already Jake’s lips had split in the corners.

Sasha sniffed the sawdust and chain-saw oil on his fingers and growled. Jake never took the husky woodcutting. The first time Sasha had heard the chain saw, she’d jumped through the sliding glass door of his cabin and run for miles, bloody and razor-sharp with glass. She’d mowed down everything in her path—full-
grown elderberry shrubs, stunned white rabbits and, finally, Lowell Dresher, a two-hundred pound logger and Jake’s nearest neighbor three miles down the road.

By the time Jake got to her, Sasha had clamped her mouth around Lowell’s neck. She could have broken the man in two at any time. As Jake approached, she growled from deep in her throat, from a place Jake hadn’t even known about. Lowell was not making a sound, but Jake could see the whites of his eyes. He flapped his huge, helpless hands on the ground.

Jake had laid his hand on the back of Sasha’s neck. For a moment, she’d clamped down harder, then suddenly she let go. She was shaking so badly, her legs went out. She lay on her belly and pressed her nose against Jake’s leg, and Jake could actually hear her losing her will to him. It was like the cracking of a twig, a snap, and then she was his, she was going to do whatever he said. She would love him whether he deserved it or not.

He drove Lowell to town, while the man’s teeth chattered loud enough to be heard over the engine of the Ford. “You’ve got to put her down,” he managed to get out.

“I’ll keep her away from you. You have my word.”

“I’m telling you, she’s wild.”

“That’s exactly why I’m keeping her,” he said. “What else is going to make me feel human?”

Now, he started unloading the lodgepole out of the pickup. The woods around Prescott were filled with ponderosas, but for Doug’s bench, he had decided to use the straight grain of lodgepole, which grew in thick stands up around Flagstaff. Jake had let Doug come along wood-cutting, though he preferred to go alone. He had also agreed to craft the bench at Doug’s house, so the man could watch over the progress. Jake had agreed to a lot more than he usually
did, and he was regretting it more each minute. How could he deny a dying man anything? He had made beds for spoiled movie stars and never once given in to their tantrums, but for Doug Dawson, who was paying only one thousand dollars for a garden bench, Jake had already gone far beyond the call of duty.

“Beautiful,” Doug was saying, helping him slide out the lodgepole. Then a woman ran around the side of the house. She had on a green ankle-length dress, a Dodgers baseball cap, and bracelets all up one arm. But the most amazing thing about her was that, when she reached the pickup, Sasha came dutifully around the truck and lay down at her feet. The dog put her head on her paws and started to whimper.

“Daddy,” the woman said.

“There’s my girl.” Doug hugged her. “I knew you’d come.”

When she wrapped her arms around him, she must have noticed there were bones where there ought to have been flesh, and a rank odor seeping out of the man’s pores, but she still pressed her cheek against his chest. She overrode the stench anyway, with a mixture of lemons and Juicy Fruit gum.

“Wait till you see what Jake and I are making,” Doug went on. “It’ll be beautiful.”

She pulled back to look at him. Jake watched her gaze pass right over Doug’s fuzzy pink scalp and the bandage, then land on his mouth, which she smiled at.

“How long are you staying?” Doug asked.

“As long as you need me.”

“Well, …” Doug said, toying with the edges of the bandage. “I could keep you here forever that way. You just stay as long as you want. I insulated the garage, did you know that? Put in air-conditioning, a little refrigerator for my plants. You can stay there. Or, of course, in the guest room in the house, though
Maggie uses that for a library. There isn’t even a couch.”

He was toying with the bandage so much, one side of the tape slipped off. Then Jake understood why he had kept it covered all these months. He’d been picking at it, and now a thin trail of black blood slid out.

“Daddy?” the woman said.

He retaped the bandage. “This? This is nothing. I scratched it again. The doctors tell me I can’t scratch and then, of course, that’s all I want to do. Scratch. Scratch. Scratch. Don’t worry about it. Let me show you my ensete.”

He led her to a huge, palmlike tree near the curb. Each leaf was nearly twenty feet long, so sturdy Jake was sure it could hold a man’s weight.

“An Abyssinian banana,” Doug told her. “Incredibly hard to keep alive. Every three to five years it flowers, then the plant dies down to the root. You’ve got to coax new shoots from the crown. Maybe it will live, maybe it won’t. It’s a toss-up. It’s due to flower again. Maybe it will do it while you’re here, and then we’ll see if we’ve got any magic left.”

“But Dad?”

He walked over to another tropical plant, this one with glossy, fanlike leaves. “A Japanese aralia. You can grow these in the Northwest or in Phoenix, believe it or not. They’ll take full shade or sun. An amazing plant. It’ll be getting flowers in the fall, then these little clusters of black fruit. Marvelous. Did you see that wisteria?”

The front door opened and Maggie Dawson stood on the porch, her hands on her hips. “For God’s sake, Doug, she doesn’t want to hear about every goddamn plant.”

“As a matter of fact,” Savannah said, “I do.”

Jake turned back to the truck. He pulled out the
lodgepole and stacked it next to the drive. It was too hot in this valley. He didn’t see how people stood it. The air was thick enough to choke on, stuffed with exhaust smoke and perfume and boiled eggs.

He was having trouble breathing, though he couldn’t blame that entirely on the glutted air. It was always that way when he stayed in town too long, or when he saw a woman way out of his league. His skin began to itch and, for the life of him, he could not think of a single thing to say to anyone.

He’d always been quiet, but a long time ago it had not been considered a sign of something sinister. He’d simply been shy and big for his age, picked first for basketball because of his height and intimidation potential. It got worse after his father died of a heart attack when Jake was only eight. No one could think of a single thing to say to him, especially after he was spotted in the local Smitty’s buying enough frozen dinners to last him and his mother a month.

Jake knew then that he was never going to be popular, so he settled for being smart. Nine years later, he ended up with a scholarship to Arizona State University and, as it turned out, with Joanne Newsome, who was smarter than he was, and certainly more beautiful.

They met on Central High’s cross-country track course, a cemetery in the summer, with runners in various stages of asphyxia and dehydration sprawled across the dusty path. Joanne Newsome, though, was known for running five miles every afternoon, even when the mercury climbed to one hundred and twenty. She was famous for downing three gallons of bottled water a day and looking so sweat-sheened and hot, guys had been known to pass out from the strain of wanting her.

She was easy to spot. Not only was she tall and thin and the only thing moving on summer afternoons,
her hair was flaming red. She was the only color in the desert, and when she jogged past the Central High front lawn, where Jake was studying calculus, he immediately gave up on antiderivatives and decided to join the track team.

He could never catch her. Halfway across the track she’d be coming back the other way, still flying after five grueling miles. First, she wouldn’t even look at him. Halfway through the semester, he was lucky if she smiled. One day, though, she stopped cold. He licked his lips when he saw the sweat trickling down her neck into the shadowed crevice between her breasts.

“You know,” she said, “you could just ask me out. It would be much easier.”

“Will you go out with me?”

“Absolutely not. You can’t even finish this course.”

She jogged off, laughing, and for the first time that semester, Jake finished the course—though by the end of it he was one of those prostrate bodies, his legs and lungs on fire, but his heart burning for more.

He ran the course all season, until the day before state championships, when he was fast enough to catch Joanne’s shadow. Her hair slapped his forehead, and he was delighted to find it smelled like burnt sugar. She showed up at his locker half an hour later. “All right,” she said. “How about Friday?”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes. I just wanted to make sure you were.”

They went to Trudy’s Kitchen, where Joanne ordered everything in sight. Double cheeseburger, onion rings, strawberry milkshake, grilled cheese. Jake just ordered a salad.

“I can’t keep weight on,” Joanne whispered, then glanced around to see if anyone had heard. “Don’t tell
Jill Eardly I said that. My God, she’s crazy about her weight. Throws up after every meal, I swear to God.”

“You going to be a professional runner?” he asked.

Joanne laughed. She had a deep, gritty laugh, as if she’d taken in more sand than she realized on those jogs. “God, no. My parents … they’re
the
Newsomes, you know. My dad’s CEO of At-Tel Electronics. My mom’s, like, this force.”

Jake nodded, even though he had no idea what she was talking about.

“Anyway,” she went on, lunging at the food when it came, “they want me to marry well. That’s, like, their only ambition for me. They think I’ll be studying art or home economics at ASU, but I’m actually signed up as a business major. By the time I graduate, they won’t have a clue what hit them.”

She laughed again, then finished her hamburger in three minutes flat. She started on the onion rings, eating each one whole. Jake couldn’t eat; it was too much of a marvel watching her.

“I know it,” she said. “I’m hideous. But Mom won’t let our cook make anything that isn’t healthy. Did you know there are thirty-six hundred ways to prepare eggplant? My God, it’s sickening.”

Jake reached across the table and grabbed her hand. It was oily and warm. He was about to let go when she squeezed him back.

Joanne never prodded him to say more or talk about his feelings. After they’d dated for three months, she told him she wanted to hear only one thing.

“That I love you?” he asked.

“Oh, please. I’m not thirteen. Tell me it will last forever. Tell me this can never end.”

At the time, he had not hesitated. Now, for the life of him, he couldn’t figure how he had been so certain, but back then he’d had no reason to doubt his good
fortune. He’d seen a lifetime in one skinny girl’s eyes. “This will never end,” he said.

On Valentine’s Day of their sophomore year at ASU, he asked her to marry him. She said yes, with stipulations.

“First, we both have to graduate. Then you go to law school wherever I work.
Then
we tell my parents, and they’ll have no choice but to give us the finest wedding in the history of the pathetically rich New-somes. And never, ever, do you tell me you’re too proud to take their money. Because believe me, they’ve got gobs of it, and I’m entitled to some, for putting up with them all these years.”

“None of that matters to me,” he said. “As long as I can love you forever.”

Joanne uncoiled her fists, and leaned over to kiss him. “Oh, Jake. You are a real doll.”

Now, when a desert wind blew up his mountain, it sometimes reeked of what he’d thought happiness was, of burning sweetness and optimism and wanting. But whenever he swallowed, it went down bitter. It left a bad aftertaste that lasted for weeks.

He unloaded the rest of the wood, then gathered his dogs into the bed of the pickup. Sasha was still mooning over the woman, and Jake touched her head.

“She put a spell on you, girl?” She turned away, as if she didn’t want him to see her eyes.

He got in the truck and turned over the engine. He had backed halfway out of the drive when Doug and his daughter knocked on his window. He stopped and rolled it down.