Carter Clay (10 page)

There were Bibles, Carter knew, in the bedside tables of motel rooms; still, he felt shy, like an imposter, as he checked the little shelf below the bedside lamp—

Naked girl bound to an office swivel chair. Giant brown nipples. Thighs spread—

Carter hurried the magazine into the trash before he returned to the Bible that had lain beneath it.

The motel Bible was a fancy thing with a golden cover. In the front was a list of readings under the title “HELP IN TIME OF NEED.” The first item on the list was “The Way of Salvation” with suggested readings of Acts 16:31 (“Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved, you and your household”) and Romans 10:9 (“That if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved”).

“I believe,” Carter said, going down on his knees beside the bed. He strained toward the meaning contained in the words. The words were a kernel he needed to apply heat to, to make it pop. At AA, people said it was okay just to be willing to believe, but surely God knew the difference, and judged accordingly. Maybe being willing to believe got you on the right track, but if God was going to forgive your sins, surely you had to give God the real thing.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

And how were you supposed to know if God forgave you? Did you feel it in your bones? Did a light switch on in your head?

But a light had not burned in him
before
the accident.

He read from the motel Bible. On his knees. To show he was
trying. Trying showed that you at least believed there was a good chance somebody watched, right? He listened to the Christian channel. Prayed. All three activities were preferable to what filled his mind when he stopped.

Boom, boom, boom.

At first light, when he finally tried to rise, he found that he felt weighted down, as if he had burrowed into the mattress, and now had to struggle to the surface. On his knees, he made his way to the window. Peeked out from behind the curtains.

No police. No nobody. One car down by the motel check-in. His van parked under a big old cottonwood across the quiet road.

Dawn
, he thought as he moved out from under the motel's overhang. He carried the gold Bible under his jacket—though it was true the stamp inside the cover read T
HOSE IN NEED ARE FREE TO TAKE THIS BOOK
. He gave a shiver. Low on the horizon, a molten spoonful of light tipped toward him.

An extravagant word:
dawn.
Carter was not sure he could afford to use it. Somebody might pull the rug out from under a man like Carter while he thought about himself using a word like
dawn.

Dawn. Salvation. Eternity.

Several birds shot past overhead. Flying west, Carter thought. Pointing the way to Bradenton. It made sense to him, just then—granted, he was sleepy, hung over—it made sense to him that the birds might know that he had hurt innocent people,
killed
a good man, and that the only thing he could do now was try to make things right.

There have been times in Carter Clay's life when, for no discernible reason, Carter has thought of a minor intersection where one of the several roads that enter his hometown of Fort Powden changes from fifty-five miles an hour to twenty-five. He sees the complete background of the spot (trees in leaf, their great trunks rising from grass to sky; a food distributor's warehouse; a small bridge topping a drainage ditch). There will never be revealed some deep or hidden reason for Carter's thinking of this spot, whose only claim is that it is a place where, if a person travels in one direction, he must slow down; and, if he travels in the other direction, he is allowed to speed up.

Still, Carter thought of that intersection as he drove toward Bradenton and the hospital holding the girl and her mother. He noted that unbidden memory. Then—because he was on the way to a hospital?—he tried to remember his own stay, a year ago, at the VA in Tampa, and the events around the stabbing.

While Carter was at the VA, and for a time afterward, he believed that his memory of the night he was stabbed—clearly an important night—would come back to him if he worked at it. However, try as he might, he never could piece the thing together. Too many holes too full of alcohol riddled the view. He had not paid much attention to the stranger who was supposed to have been his assailant; embarrassing to admit to the police that
all he really remembered was that the guy had worn one of those silky Indy 500 jackets that Carter had always admired.

The evening of the stabbing, when Carter arrived at Shelter #6, the new man was roasting hot dogs over the garbage barrel, passing them out to anyone who was hungry. A nice thing to do, and Carter felt bad that he had to point out that the roasting sticks came from oleander bushes, and, thus, were full of poison. Some of the men—R.E. and a few others—had already eaten the hot dogs by then. They were angry with the new man, and then the new man was angry with Carter. Carter offered the man a drink. He had just been paid for several days of yard work, and he had three bottles of Cuervo Gold to share.

“Fuck off,” the newcomer said.

Carter let the matter slide—when you were as big as Carter, you often let things slide. Carter and another regular, Louie Konigsberg, took two of the bottles of tequila and the carton of salt they kept stashed in the shelter rafters, and they set out to scout lemons and limes in the neighborhood trees. Louie—Slim Louie—was wearing a Confederate soldier's cap, and he was getting into that hat, talking with a southern accent. He and Carter managed to end up lying around in the grass with a couple of women who had wandered off from a family reunion.

After that, Carter's memories of the night were vague. According to the police who came to question him at the hospital, Carter had defended R.E. in some argument with the man in the Indy 500 jacket. Supposedly the stranger pulled a knife on Carter. Carter decked him. Then the man lay in wait for Carter and stabbed him on the service road.

As for Carter: when he came around at the hospital, he believed he was lying on top of a burning Willy Pete, and all that mattered was to squirm away from the thing before it blew.

Certain men—R.E. and Louie Konigsberg and a few others—Carter had a vague memory of them visiting him in the hospital in Sarasota before he was transferred to the VA in Tampa.

But Carter did not even remember how the fight at Shelter #6 started. He did not remember the wind high and blowing moisture from the nearby canal; or how, when he and Louie
returned to the shelter that night, the man in the Indy 500 jacket stood on one of the concrete benches, holding forth on the storming of the Citadel at Hue. He did not remember interrupting the man in the Indy jacket in order to say, “The Citadel? Did R.E. tell you he was there, too? He's got great stories about fighting in the wrecks of all those bombed-out buildings. And the fire—there was fire on the river there, right, R.E? The Perfume River, right?”

“What kind of bullshit's that?” The man in the Indy jacket took a seat on top of the picnic table. He was still mad over that hot-dog-stick business. “Half an hour ago, R.E. here was telling me how he was a big shot at Khe Sanh with Colonel Lownd's 26th.” The man shot a quick glance in R.E.'s direction. “You couldn't have been at Hue
and
Khe Sanh. They're two different places, man. One of you—or both of you—is full of shit.”

R.E. laughed his distinctive laugh—a kind of old man of the West whoop and cackle; then, as if the man in the Indy 500 jacket had rendered him hopelessly amused, R.E. let himself roll right off his own piece of bench and onto his knees. “Must have imagined all those people shooting at me, man!” he said, still laughing. “Oh, man! Better check your history book, man!”

Carter and the man in the Indy 500 jacket glared at one another. “You owe me and my friend an apology,” Carter said.

The man in the Indy jacket looked scared, but determined. “I don't apologize for other people's bullshit,” he said.

R.E. rose to his feet. Waved a hand in the stranger's direction. “Let it go, Clay,” he said.

“Fuck him, R.E.! He's calling you a liar, man!”

The man in the Indy jacket trembled—his hands, his shoulders, even his cheeks. “Anybody that was over there without his head up his ass would know you couldn't be at the Citadel and Khe Sanh at the same time,” he said.

Carter's neck tugged at his collar. He recognized that feeling and the tight rocking that accompanied it. Rocking in time with his pulse. His shoulders and chest and head tilted back, then rocked forward, back. “I was over there,” Carter said.

The man looked at Carter and away. Looked back. Eye to eye. Murmured, “Like I said, man.”

The men at Shelter #6 often carried weapons or had a weapon tucked away somewhere, so it was no surprise that the man in the Indy jacket carried a knife, or that he pulled it out when Carter stepped close; but, that night, Carter was drunk and energized by his defense of his friend and himself. Just as R.E.'s gun would later infuriate him on Post Road, the knife of the man at Howell Park infuriated him, and he caught the wrist of the man's knife hand and snapped it back before he whipped a boot-kick into the man's groin.

Carter remembered almost nothing of that fight, or what followed: the newcomer's bellow of pain, the knife flipping into the dirt, the letting loose of a blow that cracked shut the man's teeth and dropped him in the dirt next to his knife.

The other men who had been drinking and smoking at the shelter stayed back while Carter, R.E., and Louie looked down at the man.

“Don't pull no fucking knife on me,” Carter spat. His lips and tongue were swollen with anger. He kicked at the knife where it lay in the dirt and pebbles and bits of grass.

“Woo-whee!” R.E. cried. “Fucking A-team, man!”

Louie Konigsberg, however, said a slurred but somber, “That's enough,” then held out the remains of one of the bottles of tequila to Carter. “Here.”

Carter took the bottle; but before he drank, he bent down and picked up the knife and flung it off in the direction of the canal.

“Bastard,” R.E. said. He gave a kick at the downed man, nothing too brutal, but Louie raised his elbow, hard, into R.E.'s chest, and said a gruff, “Leave him be.”

“He's a fucking liar!” R.E. protested.

“Maybe so,” Louie said. “Maybe so, R.E., but right now, we want to keep things quiet. We don't want cops.”

Louie took the bottle from Carter then, and sat on one of the picnic tables. Carter—trembling, sore with tension—joined Louie, but R.E. stayed where he was and leaned against one of the shelter's support timbers and rubbed at the spot where Louie had elbowed him.

After several minutes, the man in the Indy jacket opened his eyes. He got up on his hands and knees but could not quite raise his head. “Fucking bullshit,” he mumbled.

“You better take your ass away from here,” called a voice from inside the shelter, and someone else agreed, “Haul buns, man!” There were a few laughs, but they did not come from Carter or Louie or R.E.

Awkwardly, the man in the Indy jacket made his way to his unsteady feet. Then he stuffed his pack with the things he had taken out, slung the pack over his shoulder, and straggled off into the bushes.

Carter raised the last of the bottle of tequila toward R.E. He felt bad about Louie elbowing R.E. so hard. “Cheers,” Carter said, as if they had just shared a memorable occasion, but, basically, all he would remember was a man in an Indy jacket. Not the fight in which people said he defended the honor of his friend and fellow veteran R.E.

According to Jersey's occupational therapist, M.B. Milhause really should think about taking one of the hospital's classes on home care for the paraplegic. The doctor—young, overweight, poorly shaved—nods in vigorous agreement:

“The time she spends at the rehab center will go by fast. You want to be ready.”

The three of them sit in a room of the hospital that does not seem to belong to anyone—a gray-carpeted space with a long table, chairs, a rubber plant that has outgrown its pot and now tilts precariously toward the room's single, narrow window. M.B. and the perky therapist drink coffee from disposable cone-shaped cups suspended in reusable plastic holders. M.B.'s holder feels rough in her hand, as if someone has chewed on its handle.

“She's so lucky to have you!” the therapist says.

M.B. makes a thin smile. She knows that the therapist knows that she is twisting M.B.'s arm. Trying to force a yelp of enthusiasm from M.B.

For what?

On one of M.B.'s favorite television shows, real people experiencing gruesome trials—broken spines, amputations, an assortment of horrors—
those
people pray for, and regularly receive, miracles. Loved ones recuperate, wonderful healing occurs in the
family, renewed relations, faith in God—while
her
daughter remains in a coma and
her
granddaughter is crippled and sullen with no end in sight.

So wend M.B.'s thoughts as she makes her way down the corridor to Jersey's room.

And Jersey? Just then Jersey is wondering, could the laugh she has just heard from the corridor—a laugh that sounded so much like the laugh of her father!—could it have been some sort of mental ventriloquism? A message to Jersey that her father could deliver only via some more functional passing body?

Once, Jersey's mother said to Jersey, “Just remember, honey, the way your dad and I love you—even if we die—our love will be with you.”

Jersey protested, “But you don't even believe in that stuff!” To which Katherine Milhause replied with a laugh, “Well, I do when it comes to you!”

Sometimes now, it is true, Jersey does feel her mother's and her father's love. At the same time, however, she suspects that this feeling may be a trick she plays upon herself. But suppose it is
not
a trick. Worse: suppose that from some notion of intellectual integrity, she were to actually extinguish a wonderful gift? Such thoughts make the girl grind her teeth, wake in the mornings with a sore jaw and raised welts running along the insides of her cheeks.

“M.B.,” she says, “did you hear that laugh?”

M.B.'s no is no surprise. Lately, it seems to Jersey that the universe has selected her as a test case of some sort. Nights, in her own hospital room, she hears sounds hidden from her in the past: the chatter of air molecules in collision, plus certain terrible gnawing and digesting sounds that she fears are the din of full consciousness.

Who can she ask about such things?

In the night, the dark sparkles. The bedsheets are granular. She understands the bitter scent that rises from the stiff wrappings on the hospital mattress to be the odor of betrayal.

“I heard a laugh. It sounded just like my dad.”

“Hm,” says M.B.

That evening, no sooner are the lights turned off in her hospital room than an image arrives, unbidden: herself bringing down a hatchet on a neck that she knows belongs to the driver who hit her parents and herself. Chop, chop, chop. It is no dream but she cannot stop the image—chop, chop—and when the night nurse comes into the darkened room, Jersey whispers,
May she, please, have more medicine? To help her sleep?

Not without doctor's orders.

The night nurse—Nurse Aguasvivas—is a young and very pretty Cubana whose Negroid hair forms a saintly nimbus in the light from the hall. Nurse Aguasvivas has come to check Jersey's catheter, and to turn her.

Turn her?

To prevent the pressure sores to which Jersey is subject now that messages for movement and feeling are no longer transmitted through her spine to her legs, every two hours a nurse or aide must move the girl into a new position.

So hard to imagine: that simply
not
moving can lead to damage, amputation, even death. Later, while staying at St. Mary's Rehabilitation, Jersey will learn how to shift and elevate her weight in her wheelchair for one minute out of every fifteen. She will begin her own daily inspections of legs and feet and—with a hand mirror—buttocks and hips for that first hint of red that can go dangerously fast to the bluish-black that means a trip to the hospital and possible surgery. At present, however, she is still new to all of this, and shy, and to absent herself from Nurse Aguasvivas's ministrations, Jersey now concentrates on the tiny plastic flashlight that sways from a string around the nurse's neck. In the dark room, the light shining through its translucent blue rim reminds Jersey of a magical glow-in-the-dark Virgin a classmate once displayed at show-and-tell.

Does Nurse Aguasvivas disapprove of Jersey for asking for more medicine? Jersey hopes not. She wants the nurse to think she is fun, to stay and talk, and so she teases Nurse Aguasvivas about her anesthesiologist boyfriend. “How's Dave?”

When the nurse only snorts in reply, Jersey continues, “Better be careful! He probably never told you, but the first person
to ever become addicted to IV drugs was the wife of the guy who invented hypodermic needles!”

Another snort from Nurse Aguasvivas. “Now where'd you hear that?”

Because she detects a note of censure in Nurse Aguasvivas's voice, Jersey says, “I don't know.” But she does know. It was in her family's very own kitchen, back in Seca. Jersey's mother laughed as she read the tidbit to Jersey's father—but
not
as if what she read were silly; rather, as if she hoped both to prove something serious and to entertain at the same time.

“So, your grandma come to see you today?” Nurse Aguasvivas asks.

In the dark, hidden, Jersey dares to make a face when she says yes. She knows what the hospital nurses think: grandma, granddaughter, cookies and milk, and isn't M.B. a kick with her snappy clothes and bright red hair—

“That's cute, the way you call her ‘M.B.,'” says Nurse Aguasvivas.

Jersey does not explain that M.B. forbids Jersey's calling her “Grandma”; that M.B. made Katherine stop calling her “Mom” as soon as Katherine turned ten years old. Instead, Jersey explains to the nurse that Katherine can—could?—fill her mouth with sugar water and let a hummingbird hover right before her lips as it feeds.

“Girl, you got too much imagination!”

“No! I have a picture! Back home! You know what a broad-tailed hummingbird is? Their wings make a whistling noise, they beat so fast. Their backs are iridescent green. You know how come? You know how iridescence works?”

“How iridescence works?” The young nurse laughs, then takes a deep, appreciative whiff of the bouquet of red roses that sits on Jersey's bedside table. “So who's your sweetheart that sends you all these roses, hm?”

“Oh,” Jersey says. “Anonymous.”

A
freind
, the sender signs his cards—which excites Jersey's grandmother.
Look at the way the person misspells
friend!
That's just the way your grandpa did it:
f-r-e-i-n-d. As if she wants to believe the roses come from Jersey's grandfather Lorne.

Well, who is Jersey to sneer at such wishes? Still, she hates the roses; the way, all day long, they form a terrible clot in the corner of her left eye. At night—dark and jagged and menacing—they become a demented watchdog that hangs above her, insisting she acknowledge its unfailing loyalty.

During her first week in the hospital, many people from Seca—family friends and classmates, even strangers—sent boxes of candy, flowers, tiny blue and yellow teddy bears clutching shiny Mylar balloons: GET WELL SOON! The weekly bouquets of roses, however, have never stopped coming.

“Hey,” Jersey blurts when Nurse Aguasvivas starts to leave the room, “what if—since I can't sleep—could I write in my journal for a while?”

“Fifteen minutes.”

“Half an hour? 'Cause it's a story.”

“Demon Hands,” Jersey writes in that journal her father once bought her on a trip to Chinatown. “Demon Hands” was a story her father told as the family drove to Florida. Joe remembered “The Demon Hands” from an old radio show; a little 1940s spookiness that felt tame in the nineties. In her recording of the story, Jersey hopes to capture something of her family; not just Joe and his exuberant tale, but also a whiff of that magic that came off herself and her mother when they sang “Down Yonder Green Valley” or made their lists (every candy you can name, the ten books to take to a desert isle, plans for perfect days).

The car that Joe and Katherine rented for the trip had air-conditioning, but the family took in the sea breeze of nighttime Biloxi while Joe told of that genial but mediocre pianist whose hands are crushed when his carriage collides with the carriage of a murderer—just then attempting to flee the scene of one of his many dastardly deeds.

“Working feverishly through the night,” Jersey writes—didn't her father say that? and give her a parodist's wink?—“the brilliant but slightly mad Dr. Von Hegelstein replaces the pianist's hands with the hands of the deceased criminal!”

Should Jersey insert into her journal story the way her mother whooped in delight at the Pepe le Peu accent Joe gave to the pianist, Bernard? Maybe it is enough that, on the same day, over breakfast in a Texas café, Katherine seized Jersey's journal in order to record in the margin (page 17) a remark that had made her snort coffee through her nose:

“Crrreak,”
said Joe as, under cover of night, Bernard entered the conservatory. Joe hummed a bit of the “Moonlight Sonata,” then cried in the voice of Bernard,
“‘Mon dieu!
My playing is filled with a fire I could only dream of in ze past!'”

At this, Jersey's mother groaned, but Joe continued on, relating how Bernard's new hands allowed him to play music that won the love of the beautiful Marie. Alas, the hands also began to distort his good nature. He stole a priceless diamond necklace, then penned a note that implicated his talented rival, Jacques. “CLANG!” cried Joe as the prison door swung shut on Jacques.

‘“What a zhame!'” said the secretly delighted Bernard. “‘Now Jacques's great concert must be canceled!'”

But, no. As head of the conservatory, the beautiful Marie's father insisted that Bernard perform in place of Jacques.

Joe whistled and thundered his feet against the floorboards of the car to suggest the appreciation offered by Bernard's audience, and, alone in his dressing room, Bernard declared,
sotto voce
, “‘Ze actions of ze hands are evil, but surely zey are not my responsibility! I have triumphed!'” Just then, however, Marie entered the room, weeping. She and her father had learned the truth about both the hands and the necklace. “‘Bernard, you must confess!'”

Jersey does not record that Katherine interrupted Joe to ask, “Why does Marie have to sound so wimpy?” or that Joe did not answer, but continued in that same voice: “‘Bernard—your hands! You're—choking me!'

“‘Marie! I—I can't stop! Help! Zomeone! Murderer!'”

While Katherine and Jersey giggled, Joe pummeled the steering wheel to indicate the knocking of Marie's father and the musicians at the dressing room door:

“Put a shoulder to the door, men! Break it down!'”

There followed a brief round of terrible choking noises, then a crash followed by gasps of both horror and relief. Marie was alive! Joe explained, but Bernard—Bernard was dead, strangled by his own hands.

“‘F-father?' said Marie”—Katherine began to protest the voice again, but Jersey broke in, “She just about got choked to death, Mom! You can't expect her to sound too lively!”

Joe cleared his throat: “As I said: ‘F-father?'

“‘Yes, Marie, it is I. But do not look at Bernard. Best for you to remember Bernard as your savior, for it is certain our old friend managed to call upon his best self to subdue the hands that meant to rob you of your life!'”

Jersey does note the question her mother asked after the story—“So what's it mean, guys? Mind over matter or matter over mind?”—and her own response: “Just—you can't be what you aren't. If you try to be, you'll end up paying for it.”

“Well, that's good,” Katherine said. “I can accept that.”

“But no need to make it a morality tale,” said Joe.

Katherine laughed. “Of course it's a morality tale! And what do you think would have happened if the criminal had received the hands of the pianist? Would he have become a better man? How come we never get that story? Why aren't people even interested in that story?”