Carter Clay (36 page)

Out in the Sound, the ferry's lights make misty halos in the predawn fog. They suggest a many-eyed creature on the prowl—something magical that advances, rumbling, toward the shore, to deliver or to destroy.

The van sits in the ragtag line of vehicles that wait to board the ferry. Carter has stepped out of the van, alone. He is exhausted, but also pleased at having come so far, so fast; at being so close to home and the familiar damp and the evergreen smell. With swigs from the gallon of distilled water he keeps in the van for the battery, he tries to swish and spit away the metallic taste of the trip. All those miles—they have worn him down. His thoughts come like simple, terse instructions.

Keep the money for the ferry in your right pocket.

Know where your keys are so you don't hold up the line.

It seems necessary to visualize himself driving the van onto the ramp. Thump. As if, otherwise, he might make some crazy turn and drive the van over the edge and into the water where they would drown.

In the mid-seventies, when Katherine Milhause was a graduate student, her paper “Estimating Dinosaur Speeds” was accepted for presentation at a convention of the American Paleontological
Society in New York City, and so she was finally able to make a visit to the famous American Museum of Natural History. To her surprise, her favorite exhibit was the great hall of totem poles and masks and carvings of tribes from the Pacific Northwest—among them the Bella Coola, Tlingit, and Salish. On the return flight to Arizona, leaning over the back of her airline seat, Katherine tried to explain to her professor, Joe Alitz, and another student how moved she was, not just by the artistry of the work, but by the idea that, say, eating with a spoon carved with a certain clan sign could make you feel linked to your ancestors and nature and the supernatural. Although Joe did not know it at the time, he was falling in love with Katherine, and—hoping to impress her with a bit of arcane knowledge outside his own field—he said, “Not the most gentle folks, though, Katherine. Did you know, when they really wanted to show off at a party, the hosts would kill a couple of servants for their guests to use as rollers—to keep their canoes on the shore, you see?”

Katherine does not remember that conversation as she sits in Carter Clay's van, waiting for the ferry, but something stirs in her when she considers the contents of the pickup truck parked ahead of the van. The truck bed holds several decorative totem poles and a sign that will apparently be erected somewhere later in the day:
FOR SALE
!

“To-em poles,” she says aloud. “I saw 'em.”

Under normal circumstances, Jersey would ask what her mother meant, but after forty-some hours in her wheelchair—in pain, frazzled—Jersey is not feeling particularly solicitous of anyone. Since Salt Lake she has not spoken to Carter Clay except to say “I'm hungry” and “I need to use the rest room” and “I need to see a doctor. From my fall—and the sitting. I'm getting a sore.”

“I'm going to have a stretch and look around.” Carter Clay's last words before he climbed out of the van. Maybe it was the heavy moisture in the air, or his weariness—or some weariness inside of Jersey's own head—but Carter Clay's voice seemed to twang like a saw that had been flexed and then let go.

I'm going to have a stretch and look around.

Jersey replays the words as she sits in the van, and Carter Clay goes on chatting with some other driver who awaits the ferry.

I'm going to have a stretch and look around.

So what?
This, Jersey decides, would be the perfect unspoken response to any remark Carter Clay might make at any time in the future, near or distant.

So what? Who cares? Fuck you. Fuck you, Clay.

As they drive up the peninsula toward Fort Powden, Carter does his best not to see what the dawn reveals, here and there, between the little towns north of Bremerton: the narrow bands of trees left as a kind of screen to conceal the disasters of clear-cutting. Dirt churned rough and raw with bits of stump and sprays of root. Nature made junkyard.

He tightens his hands on the steering wheel. In the damp, the layers of grime and skin and oils that have built up on the wheel over the years begin to loosen, come off in crumbs against his palms. He whistles a little of a song that Jersey persuaded Katherine to sing earlier—something Jersey sang harmony to: “Down Yonder Green Valley.” A new song for him. Carter whistling a new song in his new life.

How like Carter that he imagines the life of his sister will not have changed since he last saw her! Thus, when he leaves Jersey and Katherine in the van and hurries up the sidewalk to the duplex where Cheryl Lynn Clay lived when he left town, Carter ignores the fact that the duplex, which was brand-new in 1989, now needs paint; that the tidy landscaped yard of six years, past has been largely replaced by ragweed and bramble.

It was all a terrible mistake, a terrible accident.
This is what he will tell his sister. But
not
to try to excuse himself. A
terrible accident. But my fault.

How can an accident be someone's fault?

So it wasn't an accident?

But he did not
plan
it. He did not
want
it to happen.

Then—an accident.

I know it was my fault, but it was an accident, and I don't know how to tell them, and if I don't tell them, this other person may, and then they'll hate me even worse.

JIM MINER
is the name on the mailbox: a relief. The father of Cheryl Lynn's little boy, James.

Maybe Cheryl Lynn can tell Jersey and Katherine about the accident. Maybe it will be better if it comes from her.

Despite his worries, a silly grin threatens to break out on Carter's face as he waits at the duplex's front door; though, of course, it could be Jim Miner who answers, and Carter never did get along with Jim—

Not Jim Miner or Cheryl Lynn. Still, the woman—scowling, bathrobed—who comes to the door seems vaguely familiar. “You looking for my husband?” she says.

Carter hesitates, then asks, “Jim Miner?”

Carter and the woman proceed to wait for Jim Miner in a hall narrowed to a footpath by, among other things, many five-gallon buckets of paint, a bonnet hairdryer, lots of ladders, a number of disposable diaper boxes filled with what appear to be canning jars, and an artificial Christmas tree—partially disassembled and still bearing a red glass ornament that yields a reflection of Carter quite similar to the one he spied in the convenience mart's security mirror. Carter does his best to step out of the reflection, or at least to position himself in such a way that he does not have to see the thing.

“I worked for Jim once,” Carter tells the woman. “Painting.”

She nods. “I know who you are. Jim and I got to send a hundred twenty-five dollars to your sister every month of our lives.”

Heavy footsteps sound at the other end of the duplex, and then a large figure blocks the light from the kitchen.

“That you, Clay?”

Jim Miner limps down the hall. Once heartbreakingly handsome, Jim is sensitive about the fact that he has gained sixty
pounds since high school; to make matters worse, his gout is acting up after a recent tryst with summer sausage and burgundy. In no humor to be hospitable, he regards Carter's shaved head with a look that says: bad joke.

It is Jim's own bad joke that he sends Carter to look for Cheryl Lynn Clay at the house of Del Kelly, the arc welder in whose bed Jim found Cheryl Lynn some years ago.

From the Kelly porch, Carter can see into a kitchen lit by only the weak fluorescent light from the hood above the electric stove. At a small table, a man and a teenage boy, and a woman who is clearly
not
Carter's sister, eat bowls of some sort of gray food. All three members of the little family look as if dawn itself leaves them discouraged, and Carter is grateful that none of them chance to look up and see him on the porch before he sneaks away.

“I'm not going to explain everything just yet.” So Carter tells Cheryl Lynn from the pay telephone at the Tip Top Laundry where he has found her listing in the Fort Powden telephone directory. He wants to tell Cheryl Lynn he is born again—or maybe he should say “I've found the Lord”?—but he fears the words would sound phony to her, and he settles on a simple. “You can trust me, Cheryl Lynn.”

Trust me.
Always alarming words in Cheryl Lynn's book. But this is her baby brother, Carter, and Cheryl Lynn is almost sick with happiness at the sound of his voice. Carter. After he hangs up, she stubs out her cigarette and rouses her handsome boys, ages six and ten, from their bed:
“Alfred! James! Your uncle's coming! Your uncle's coming!”

The bare-chested boys reluctantly shuffle from their bedroom to the little front room and there lie down to watch early-morning cartoons on the television. Should they care about the arrival of their uncle? James does not recall him. Alfred has never met the man. Their mother wails over the state of the house, a small wooden rental not so different from the rental in which she and Carter grew up (two bedrooms, rusty screens, roof with shingles
sticking up like so many cowlicks, pervasive mildew scent that Cheryl Lynn does her best to conceal with a collection of aerosol sprays).

If Cheryl Lynn had known Carter was coming—well, she could not have done anything about the carpet, which always makes her think of a dirty ace bandage, or about the fact that the walls of the front room are lined with boxes of the boys' toys, but maybe she could have figured out a way to conceal the wads of yellow insulation tucked in around the frame of the front room's sliding glass door—a nice thing to have, that glass door, but it does look as if someone with an itch for more light simply
rammed
the unit into the wall with a forklift.

Cheryl Lynn sneaks a glance at herself in the mirror over the bathroom sink. Should she tuck in her shirt? No, that would only emphasize her hips, and she bought the shirt to cover her hips. Cheryl Lynn is bigger than she would like—taller, wider—though size is useful to her when she mans the bar at Rex's Bowladrome. She sets her hands on her hips and gives her reflection a tough look: want to make something of it? Then laughs and heads for the kitchen. She wants to call the Bowladrome, to tell Rex and Maggie Fishbeck her good news, but even before she finishes dialing, she sees a large, bald-headed man disappearing around the side of a rusty van parked in front of her house.

Carter?

Both shy and eager, Cheryl Lynn bangs out the screen door and sets off down the walk.
Trust me.
Why would Carter say “Trust me”?

Someone—a stone-faced woman—sits in the van's front passenger seat, and, automatically, Cheryl Lynn lifts her hand in greeting.

The woman—a hitchhiker?—does not respond, but her gaze follows Cheryl Lynn's passage around the front of the van, as if Cheryl Lynn might be a fish, just swimming past.

The cargo door of the van stands open, but Carter is not in sight. The woman in the passenger seat, however, turns as Cheryl Lynn sticks her head through the open door, and the woman says something Cheryl Lynn does not understand—

“Oh!” Cheryl Lynn cries out at the sight of the wheelchairbound girl in the back of the van; then she laughs and presses her hand to her chest. “Excuse me!”

“Cheryl Lynn?” From the rear of the van, there emerges a big bald head. “Hey!” Carter ducks forward to grab her hand, give her an awkward hug.

Cheryl Lynn's eyes fill with tears. “I'm his sister!” she says to the girl in the wheelchair, who smiles and nods, but also looks a little sick.

While Carter sets about hauling out a ramp for the wheelchair, he rattles on: how he met the stone-faced woman—
That's Katherine, up front, and this is Jersey
, and the Lord this, the Lord that, and he and Katherine decided to tie the knot, and now they're all three going on a kind of camping honeymoon—

Cheryl Lynn nods. Though years and years of bar work have dredged her deep enough that she can accommodate most situations,
this
one spins her for a loop. Not so much the pale little girl and her wheelchair, but the woman—Cheryl Lynn cannot help but hope that maybe this Katherine seems like a zombie because she's whacked out on one of the heavy-duty drugs Carter liked to pop, now and then.

Cheryl Lynn teases Carter about his Yul Brynner look while he gets the woman out on the sidewalk, and the girl and her chair down the ramp. She bites her tongue about the scar on his forehead. Instead, she sets a hand on the girl's shoulder and says, “I bet you're hungry, Jersey! Listening to Carter always made me hungry.”

The girl appears to try to smile. She stretches her eyes wide open, as if to force herself awake.

“How about you, Katherine?” Cheryl Lynn asks. “D'you ever feel like you burn up calories just being in the company of Carter's jaw?”

Carter laughs, but Katherine drops her head back and stares up. “Ni' trees,” she says to no one in particular.

Once Carter has hoisted Jersey's chair up the three steps to the screened porch, Cheryl Lynn introduces Alfred and James.

“Handsome, ain't they?” she says to Carter—she cannot help herself—and he nods and smiles.

“You bet.”

A pleasant moment, but then the group clusters and swells and breaks apart in a nervous effort to clear a path for Jersey, who has begun to slowly wheel herself toward—“Cheryl Lynn? I'd like to use your rest room,” she whispers.

“Oh! Sure!” Cheryl Lynn gestures toward the bungalow's inner hall. “Do you need—”

“Let me go ahead,” Carter interrupts. “To see about her chair—”

The little hall that leads to the bathroom is dark enough that Jersey feels she can whisper to Carter, “Would you ask your sister—does she know a doctor? It's—there's something happening. And could you ask if she's got a hand mirror?”

Carter pats the girl on the head. “I got an idea about all that. I been—well, I'll tell you later.”

After he leaves, Jersey stares out the bathroom window. In several spots the screen has rusted away. Beyond the screen lie clear sky and grass, and she tries not to think about her strange sore; to think, instead, only of that rusted screen, and how in one of Joe's favorite movies,
The Incredible Shrinking Man
, mere window screen imprisoned the shrinking hero—until he grew so minuscule that he could step right through one of the tiny squares formed by the threads of the screen.

“Jersey,” Cheryl Lynn calls from outside the door, “there's a little mirror in my compact? Would that work?”

“Never mind,” Jersey says.

Really, just now, she is not so sure she wants to see.

At Cheryl Lynn's house, breakfast is coffee and a marshmallowpacked novelty cereal that the old Katherine did not allow in her house, but that the new Katherine devours enthusiastically. Jersey, slumped in her wheelchair, stares at the vinyl cloth covering the kitchen table (roosters and hens and chicks worn to ghosts
by years of elbows and plates). At her side, pretty little blondhaired Alfred whispers, “I save the marshmallows out for last,” and touched by his attention, his sweet blue eyes, Jersey whispers back, “Good idea.”

On her other side, Carter says, “Looks like you got an admirer there, Jersey.”

“Hoop Tate's his dad,” Cheryl Lynn tells Carter, and leans over the table to rumple Alfred's fair hair before continuing. “Was. He dumped me for some
boy
, I swear to God, a kid who played football at St. Jude, and I hope to hell we never lay eyes on the son of a bitch again.”

When Carter's face grows somber, Cheryl Lynn gives a wave of her hand in his direction. “The Lord is not
my
shepherd, and I got
plenty
of wants.” She rises from the table and begins to push things noisily about in one of the cabinets. “Actually, Carter, about once a week people come by pushing
Watchtower
or some other damn thing, and I'm such a heathen I don't even let them in the door!”