Carter Clay (38 page)

“Well,” she says, trying to sound oh-so-casual, “we could call regular long distance, Cheryl Lynn. Leave a message. You could leave the message, if you liked.”

Cheryl Lynn reaches behind herself to the counter where she knows her pack of cigarettes sits.
Time out
, she thinks.
Time out, Cheryl Lynn.
She has been suckered by enough guys over the years to recognize a potential trick. “Let's wait till Carter wakes up,” she says.

Without argument, Jersey returns to the front room, leaving Cheryl Lynn to call the bowling alley:

Carter is home! Yes, really!

Will Rex and Maggie be okay if she doesn't come in?

They are a couple of sweeties!

Sure, of course she means to bring him and his family by.

After the call to the bowling alley, Cheryl Lynn calls Brent's Rooms for Duncan Clay—who is disappointed to find that the caller is his daughter. Duncan was hoping he had won a sweepstakes or that the caller was one of the radio shows that gave you money if you knew their slogan:

Today's best music mix.

Big band sounds for the nineties.

All the news, all the time.

In order to take the telephone call, Duncan had to leave his Cup of Noodles in the microwave, and there is a possibility that someone may steal it.

“Carter's here, Dad!” says Cheryl Lynn. “He's got his new wife and daughter with him. I'm making chili for supper. Want me to come get you?”

Duncan breathes heavily into the phone. Driving her back. Her and Carter and their mother—they were like a radio you could never turn low enough to keep your sanity. “I told them I'd be here for supper,” he says. “You got to tell them the night before if you're going to be away.”

“Just this once couldn't hurt! Don't you even want to see your own son?”

“He'll come see me if he's interested. I got to go eat my noodles.”

Cheryl Lynn lights up a cigarette and looks out the kitchen window that opens onto the porch. Sometimes, she focuses on the trees and pretends she lives out in the country: no streets, no sidewalks, no cars. Just now, she doesn't mind seeing Carter's van, of course, because she is happy to see Carter, and his van reminds her of the days of hippies. Cheryl Lynn would have liked to have been a hippie, but that would have required her to reinvent herself. Hippies did not go to beauty school or support the war in Vietnam, and Cheryl Lynn had her heart set on beauty school, and she did not know how she could oppose a war while her brother fought in it. Still, she was almost a hippie once; all she would have needed was a push. That was in 1970. She was pregnant with the baby of a mill worker named Ray Cole. It was Christmastime. Everyone was doing a lot of drugs and some people had moved onto farms, but the thing that really convinced Cheryl Lynn that she could be a hippie was the arrival in Fort Powden of a girl in an old VW van. Cream, this girl called herself, and boldly informed everyone that she was a Gypsy. A Gypsy! Cheryl Lynn, who felt wise in her pregnancy when she did not feel like a fool, wanted both to laugh at Cream and to be her. It embarrassed her that the boys in Fort Powden were fascinated by Cream, whose heavy makeup did not hide the fact that she had snaggleteeth and a chin swallowed up by her neck. Cream was the name of a rock group that was popular at the time, and another group, just then, had a hit song called “Gypsy Woman.” The man in the Gypsy-woman song loved the Gypsy woman; he and all the other men were entranced by her dancing and her hypnotic cat eyes. Ray Cole—who had cooled toward Cheryl Lynn as soon as she told him she was pregnant—Ray danced with Cream at the Christmas party he had gone to with Cheryl Lynn. Cheryl Lynn went outside to cry. Cream's van was parked alongside the party house, and Cheryl Lynn crawled into the back of the van and, there, put on Cream's clothes and Cream's makeup. Amazing! Her skin looked tanned, her outlined eyes in the van's rearview mirror were huge. She put on one of Cream's long skirts and draped one of Cream's scarves about her neck.

The people at the party howled when Cheryl Lynn came in. They thought she meant to be funny, so she played it funny.
I'm a Gypsy! Let me tell your fortune!
Ray Cole was not there, however. He and Cream had left the party, and Cheryl Lynn ended up in bed with his best friend, and a few days later—despite pleading with the doctors to help her, help—she miscarried Ray Coles baby at Fort Powden General.

The Incredible Shrinking Man
is Jersey's lunchtime video selection. Roundly opposed by James and Alfred (“Black-and-white!”) and enforced by Cheryl Lynn (“I got you Cheetos and Kool-Aid, so no more complaints”).

“Hey, Mom,” Jersey says, “remember how Dad started doing pull-ups after we watched this?” She glances over at Katherine, but, because the boys have pulled the curtains on the day, she cannot tell whether Katherine's eyes are open or not, and she turns to Cheryl Lynn as she continues, “Because the hero gets out of so many jams by being strong, see?”

Her eyes on the screen—where the diminutive hero now battles a rat—Cheryl Lynn says, “Pull-ups. Sure. Good for upper body strength.”

“Cheryl Lynn,” Carter calls from the bedroom, “what time is it?'

“You don't have to get up.” Cheryl Lynn goes to the bedroom door. “We're all fine. I called in to work. I'm making chili. Remember how you liked my chili?”

“Sure. Hey, have you seen Neff?” Carter pushes himself into a semi-upright position, his shoulders against the wall at the head of the boys' bed. “I thought maybe he'd let us camp at the Boulders till I get a job.”

“Carter”—Cheryl Lynn wants to warn her brother against trying to camp with a girl in a wheelchair, but she senses this is not the time, and so she continues—“Neff's fine. Same old same old. He still comes in the alley now and then to say hi.”

“I'm going to call him.” Carter scootches down on the mattress, closes his eyes. “Just give me a few more minutes.”

“Sure,” Cheryl Lynn says, but she is too hungry for the sight of her baby brother to leave the room, and so she stays, tidying things, sneaking glimpses of that scar on his forehead. Her brother. Carter Clay.

Katherine looks up when Cheryl Lynn finally steps out of the bedroom. “How you doing?” Cheryl Lynn asks, so surprised by the loopy smile that Katherine offers her that she misses the fact that Jersey and her chair no longer sit in the living room's dark back corner. It is sheer luck that Cheryl Lynn returns to the kitchen in time to hear an odd noise by the screen door, and to find that Jersey—using the tip of Cheryl Lynn's broom handle to spring the hook on the screen door—has managed to slide out of her chair and haul it and herself down the three steps from the porch to the sidewalk.

“Your brother should not be married to my mom!” So Jersey shouts once she is back in the kitchen. Tears spill down her cheeks, but her voice is full of fury. “He should leave us alone. I don't know why he won't leave us alone!”

“What the hell are you talking about? You ought to be grateful—”

“We have a house in Arizona. He was driving us there so I could go to a special clinic in Phoenix. But all of a sudden he's married to my mom and we're not going to Phoenix after all, we're going here!”

“Well—”

“Don't you see?” Jersey whispers. “It doesn't make sense. Why did he marry my mom? Why won't he take me to a doctor?”

Cheryl Lynn shakes her head. “He'll take you to a doctor if you need one, Jersey. There's good doctors here.”

“My mom”—Jersey pulls her journal from her carryall—“I have a picture of my mom before the accident. From the cover of a book she wrote. You want to see?”

Cheryl Lynn shrugs, noncommittal, but Jersey hands over the photo anyway.

“She's a paleontologist.”

Cheryl Lynn shies at the long word. “That's—what's wrong with her?”

“That's what she
did.
Before the accident. She and my dad. They studied fossils?”

“I see.”

“That's our house, behind her.”

“In Arizona.”

“Right.”

Though she has not quite admitted to herself why this should be so, Cheryl Lynn feels a glimmer of hope at the fact that the girl's family is from Arizona. “So—you got hurt in Arizona, and your grandma moved you to Florida to take care of you?”

Jersey shakes her head. “The accident was in Florida. We were there, visiting my grandma.”

At a noise in the doorway behind them, the two turn: Carter, in his stocking feet, blinking against the bright lights of the kitchen. “Cheryl Lynn,” Carter says, “did you give Katherine beer?”

Cheryl Lynn rolls her eyes. “One beer. Is that a problem?”

“She ain't supposed to drink alcohol.”

“Well,
I
didn't know that! And she”—Cheryl Lynn points at Jersey—“she tried to run off!”

Carter gives Jersey a long, injured stare. “I suppose we better be taking off,” he says.

“What are you talking about?” Cheryl Lynn hurries to the pot on the stove and begins to stir. “I'm making supper for tonight! Chili, remember?”

All of a sudden, Jersey herself is afraid of leaving, and she says, “I was just going to call M.B., Mr. Clay. Is that so awful? I thought we should let her know where we are. She might be worried.”

Carter takes a seat at the wobbly kitchen table. He sets his big head in his hands.
Dear Lord, help me not be angry
, he prays.
Let me do your will.

In the front room, where Cheryl Lynn takes Jersey so that Carter can make his call to Neff Morgan in private, the boys and Katherine now watched the TV (“St-op ther'!” Katherine commanded when the remote control brought up the black-and-white
Moby Dick
, and the boys were too intimidated by their odd guest to disobey).

Gregory Peck in the role of Captain Ahab.

“How you doing, Mom?” Jersey asks, and while Katherine appears to consider a response, Cheryl Lynn says, “That Gregory Peck's handsome, but in that funny way. Like, you can't say why he's handsome. Like with Kevin McCarthy. Remember him, Katherine? I could never quite say if Kevin McCarthy was handsome
because
his chin was so big, or in spite of it being so big.”

Katherine leans into the light and smiles and nods. “Ab-aham Lin-con.”

“Right,” says Cheryl Lynn. “I always thought there was something sexy about Lincoln, too.”

At first, James and Alfred want to change the channel, but by movie's end they are converts of a sort. They are so happy to see Captain Ahab lose that they cheer the final image: Ahab bound in his own harpoon lines to the side of the great white whale.

Jersey understands why Cheryl Lynn shushes her sons—“Boys, that's not nice!”—but Jersey, too, prefers the whale to the captain. The whale, after all, did not ask for the fight.

When the van finally pulls away from Cheryl Lynn's street, the sky is growing dark. Jersey does not mean to fall asleep, but the woman on Carter Clay's Bible cassettes invests her voice with such singsong awe that even when she tells of Saul's jealousy of David—

—against her will, Jersey's eyes grow heavy.

So it is that when she first awakens in the dark of the van, in the check-in area of the Boulders Campground, she does not understand what she sees. Half-asleep, she interprets the cone of lavender light in which the van sits as extraterrestrial: something emitted from the belly of a flying saucer rather than a mercury lamp. Its bright chinking all aglow, a nearby log cabin appears a skeleton of a cabin that might get up and dance a jig. Moonlight renders scattered camping paraphernalia alien, menacing, until a heavenly turquoise cube reveals itself to be a tent in which a family of campers have set their lantern burning as they prepare for bed.

“Mom?” Jersey says. “Where are we? Where's Carter?”

Katherine sits slumped in the passenger's seat, her cheek at rest on the rubber rim of her rolled-down window. She raises her head and points toward the log cabin, as Carter—followed by a man holding a large thermal mug—now proceeds out the door.

The man is Neff Morgan—a short, bearded fellow who, except for his cardigan sweater, looks remarkably like Ulysses S. Grant. Neff Morgan calls, “Hello, ladies,” as Carter opens the side door of the van. Though Jersey has closed her eyes, intending to feign sleep, the moment Neff Morgan is aboard the van, he begins to chat. “Guess I'm going to travel back here with you, Jersey, right?” He leans forward to give Carter directions perfumed with whiskey and a fruity chewing gum.

“Just head down to the dead end, Carter. Yup”—Neff pats the back of Carter's headrest, then grins at Jersey—“Carter and me are old buddies.”

“Neff's got a place for us to stay,” Carter says.

A cabin that he's hoping to fix up, Neff explains. “Just turn right at the gravel road, then we got a half-mile drive. There's no electricity yet, but it's got a gas oven I could get you a cartridge for, and a wood stove and water. And a toilet! And, hey, there's even a little chicken coop out back! You want to raise chickens, Carter?”

Jersey tries to shut out Neff Morgan's chatter. After Carter turns the van onto the gravel road, the headlights catch a bright yellow
DEAD END
sign. Then they leave the world behind and, together, the dense woods and the headlights make a soft yellow tunnel.

Could it be only a half-mile? She tries to note some sort of details beyond the tunnel, but her position in the van and the night conspire against her, and then Neff Morgan—who also watched
Moby Dick
that afternoon—cries out, “Thar she blows,” and the woods on one side of the road suddenly stand open to brush and moonlight. “Turn in here, Carter.”

For Jersey, the rough little cabin conjures up a memory of a shanty she remembers from a certain ride at Disneyland—a
shanty that appeared always to be in the process of burning down. “Do I get out, Car-ter?” Katherine asks.

Carter pats her knee. “You two just stay put for now,” he says, then turns to Jersey and smiles. “Let me and Neff set up a little.”

“Sure!” says Neff Morgan—who is so happy to be helping his pal, albeit a bit confused by the makeup of this new family. Neff pops the handle on the side door and climbs down. “You all understand, it's in progress, right?”

Like a kid, Katherine climbs up on her knees to talk to Jersey over the seat back. “I don-t like this place!” she whispers.

“So tell him.”

Katherine's eyes widen. “No way!” she says, and drops back in her seat.

Inside the cabin, a flashlight beam skips here and there, now and then offering a view of Carter Clay in the dark: Carter looking at a big piece of metal tubing that must be the chimney for the woodstove. Carter outlined by flashlight as he heaves open one of the double-hung windows.

When Carter returns to the van, Jersey closes her eyes and pretends to sleep. “Oh,” Carter says, then instructs Katherine to climb out so that he can hand Jersey down to her. “So's we don't have to get out the ramp,” he whispers, and Jersey is more than grateful to snuggle into what could almost pass for a motherly embrace.

“This way,” Carter says.

The small sounds of their entry to the cabin—Carter's whispers to Katherine and Neff Morgan, the adults' footsteps on the wooden floors—strike Jersey as highly theatrical, exaggerated, like sound effects from a radio drama.

“I got you two's sleeping bags and pads laid out here in the bedroom,” Carter whispers to Katherine. “I'll use the main room.”

Jersey opens her eyes to slits once he has zipped her inside her bag and explained to Katherine that he means to run Neff to the campground: “I'll be back in a flash.”

It is possible to make out that the walls of the little bedroom are uncovered insulation, the yellow fiberglass faintly green in
the light from the window. A mostly empty room. The only object she can make out is a bag of concrete with an all-too-human aspect: its upper half slumped over the lower, like a fat man napping.

Along with the cabin's odors of mice and old wood and new, Jersey smells the familiar odor of her own sleeping bag. She lays her tongue on the silky cloth covering of the bag, and even before she tastes it, she remembers its flavor: both bitter and pleasantly milky, like the hair ribbons she sometimes chewed upon when she was little.

“Mom?” she whispers when she can no longer hear the van's motor. She raises herself up on her elbow to look at Katherine. With eyes closed, Katherine looks more like her old self, doesn't she? That is, more like her old self, asleep?

“Mom?”

When she receives no answer, Jersey raises her voice to a volume that would surely waken anyone.
“Mom
?
”

A depressing moment, that: when she realizes that her mother, too, can pretend to sleep.

And Carter: Carter feels half nuts as he removes Jersey's wheelchair from the van and carries it up the steps of Neff Morgan's cabin. What is he doing? All the way to the campgrounds, he has had to listen to himself ramble on about his faith in God's power to heal Jersey, and he is now at the point where he would as soon jump out of his own skin and run down the road before he heard another word. Still, he cannot stop.

“See, Neff”—he sets the wheelchair against one of the walls of the little screened porch—“it's, like, up here we'll have a kind of retreat, where I can build up her faith.”

The doubt on Neff Morgan's face is not pleasant to see, but Carter can bear it, and he plunges on, hoping there is some coolness or relief ahead, “Remember the Last Supper, Neff?”

Neff shrugs, and looks off into the woods.

“At the Last Supper, how Jesus told His disciples they could ask things in His name and He'd do what they asked?”

“To tell you the truth, Carter, I'm not much of a student of the Bible. But I don't see how leaving her chair here—”

‘“Whatever you ask the Father in My name He will give to you.' That's what He said, and you can see it all over the place. There's a lame beggar, and Peter says to him,
‘Silver and gold, I have none; but what I have, that I give thee. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, arise and walk,'
and the guy walks. Because of faith, pure and simple.”

“Uh-huh,” says Neff, though without much enthusiasm—a little uncomfortable even, Carter can tell, and to change the subject, Carter stretches his arms high, and turns in a circle under the campground's mercury lamp. “Neff,” he says, “I love being back here!” He sniffs the air. “The pine needles—can you still smell them?”

“That's why I live out here, buddy. You sure you won't have a nightcap? Help you unwind?”

“Not me.” Carter laughs. “I'm Mr. Natural, these days.”

Still, after Carter returns from the campground, he finds that he is, indeed, too wound up to even consider sleep. Too wound up to even go inside.

Boom, boom, boom.

It comes back to him, and he sits on the wooden step leading up to the cabin's front door and he squeezes his hands together and he prays.
I turn my life over to you, God. I cast the burden of Finis upon you, Lord. Thy will be done. Thy will be done
, he prays, then he heads around the cabin and retrieves M.B.'s bottle of wine from the black plastic bag he earlier placed inside the cabin's back door. Eventually, he thinks, he will get rid of the wine. He will. But right now it feels like insurance, and—casually, slinging the bottle between two fingers—he carries the bottle back to the chicken coop.

A cute little place, really, like a kid's playhouse with its peaked roof and white paint.

There is no padlock on the door's hasp, only a nail thrust through the latch and swivel eye, and he slips out the nail and lets himself inside.

For a moment, that close, dusty space, the highest spot of its
peaked roof not much taller than he is—it makes him nervous and he almost backs out again; still, the coop does seem the perfect spot to stash the bottle, and so he stays put and lets his eyes adjust. Two windows. The one beside the door casts a square of fluffy light on the floor. At the back, and to the right, are the nesting boxes, and he tucks the bottle of wine behind one of them. Maybe Jersey would like to use the coop as a playhouse? Maybe then she would not be so angry when she finds out about not having her chair? Stooping to avoid the ceiling and its cobwebs, Carter sweeps the coop with a broom he finds in the corner, and murmurs a rehearsal of his speech.

Yeah, I gave it to Neff for just while we're here. For—collateral.
Is that the word he wants?
Collateral?

Yeah. It's cool, Jersey, don't worry. Your chair? Yeah, Neffs got it—

Yeah, I left it at Neff's as collateral on the cabin. Just for a little while. Hey, why don't you use the time to build up some strength and practice walking? I'll build you some parallel bars if you'll work on building faith in your recovery.

ACTS: Adoration, Confession, Testimony, and Supplication. The four things Pastor Bitner said were essential to a Christian.

Yeah, Neffs got your chair for now, Jersey, so this morning why don't we practice having you stand?

Why not? Why not combine practice and prayer? It's not as if she is likely to get so good she can run away. And if she does have a miracle, then she'll be grateful, and not even want to run off, right?

As dawn comes on, more awake than ever, Carter uses his pocket knife to clear the berry brambles away from the coop. Though the air is cool, he sweats—not merely an effect of his work, but also of his worry.

Huh-huh-huh-huh! he puffs. Huh-huh-huh-huh! He slashes at the brambles in time with this little worker's chant until the sky is blue enough that he can force himself to make a mad dash at the cabin, pop open the door with his shoulder, and call in a noisy voice, “How about some breakfast, you two?”

His show of good cheer does not, however, prevent Jersey from calling back, “Where's my chair?”

“Your chair.” Carter stands stock-still in the main room. Its furnishings consist of a peeling picnic table, a squat woodstove connected to a metal chimney, and a couch and a cane chair that look as if they came from the dump. But it is a beautiful day, damn it! Beautiful. This is the day that the Lord hath made, let us rejoice and be glad in it, and Carter makes himself laugh, though his heart beats hard before he asks—“Are you girls decent?”

From Jersey, a glum, “We're decent.”

“Okay!” Carter smiles as he sticks his head through the bedroom door. “Neff's got your chair, just now, Jersey. For collateral. For the cabin. But I'll get it back when I get a job. And we can work on your walking in the meantime, you know?”

Dumbfounded. That's what she is, all right. She stares at him, not saying a word, while Katherine clambers from her sleeping bag and shuffles across the room to look out the curtainless windows. “I hear birs,” Katherine says.

Carter nods, glad of the distraction. “Sure. And you got to see the chicken coop! I swept it out.” He turns toward Jersey. “I thought you might like to have it as a place to play—”

“You used my
chair
?”

“Only till I get a job. And, hey, you may not even need it! By then, with the help of the Lord, you may be walking again—”

“Mr. Clay, we
have
money!” the girl says. “My mom's got credit cards! She could get money at a bank!”

He shakes his head. “Nope, she couldn't, Jersey. I left those things back at the house in Seca. They ain't nothing but trouble.”

“Mom? Is it true? You let him take your cards?”