Carter Clay (39 page)

Katherine turns from the window. The frown on her forehead looks fake, applied like a postage stamp. “Di' you take my car's, Car-er?” she asks.

Both panicky and proud, Carter nods and says, “I'm going to take care of you two. I don't want no cards in the way of that. And I'll haul you anywhere you want, Jersey. Hey, we're rich in God's love and prayers, ain't we? After we're settled in, I'll take you two to town again. You didn't really see much of it. It's pretty. The courthouse's like a castle out of a fairy tale, and we got this famous tree—a Tree of Heaven that a China emperor gave to the town a
long time ago. The flowers stink—if you step on them—but they're pretty.”

To escape the girl's wobbling eyes, Carter goes down on his knees where he stands. “Katherine? Jersey? Can we say a prayer now? Start the morning right in our new home?”

While Katherine steps to Carter Clay's side and joins him in kneeling, Jersey lies back in her sleeping bag. The ceiling above is made of sheets of unpainted drywall, marked here and there by footprints: prints from two different pairs of boots, and prints from a dog, and then, across the corner of one sheet, prints from something very tiny—a mouse? a squirrel?

While Carter Clay and Katherine say their prayers, Jersey stares up at that patterned ceiling, and does her best to have faith in its message that those who were here before her, in one way or another, managed to escape.

These are the items on Finis Pruitt's current list of wants:

While it is true that (D) is not strictly necessary, Finis Pruitt cannot quite resist the idea of fouling Clay's image, and D would have to be before A, and C before D. So: C, D, A?

Has Clay shown Finis Pruitt that he can never be safe with B again? Perhaps. But perhaps there are other possibilities for Finis.

“Hey”—he turns to the driver of the big rig that stopped for him in El Paso—“you ever see
The Wizard of Oz
when you were a kid?” Without waiting for the trucker to answer, Finis produces an imitation of Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch that makes the trucker laugh: “These things must be done delicately. Delicately!”

As the day progresses, the driver—Donny Espinoza of Sacramento—reveals that he sympathizes completely with his
anonymous passenger's membership in the Militia. Hell, he wishes he could be part of the movement himself! But the wife—

“I understand, man,” says his passenger. “I walk with God one way, you walk with Him another, but we're both serving.”

How thrilling for Donny Espinoza, then, when his passenger asks him to handle his telephone call to another Militia member. This occurs at the pay telephone in the Seca loading yard where Donny Espinoza is making his drop.

“You get an answer, you ask for Jersey, then hand it to me.”

Donny is almost misty-eyed when he turns to Finis to report: no answer. “What does it mean?” Donny asks.

“I don't know yet,” Finis says, “but I thank you for your help to the cause.”

What a disappointment Finis finds the neighborhood in which the Alitz/Milhause home sits! On his way there, he passed through a section of big, creamy places so exquisitely appointed and manicured and contained that even the lawns appeared to grow in pots.

Finis considers himself a connoisseur of such sights, one who knows how to appreciate, simultaneously, both their perfection and their absurdity.

The family's neighborhood, on the other hand, is a typical aging southwestern subdivision with neither curbs nor lawns. Various colors of gravel—one yard has been spray-painted turquoise—spill out of front lots and mix with the crumbling asphalt edges of the road. The outstanding feature on most of the properties is a monster eucalyptus or aleppo pine that has survived since the subdivision's birth and now dwarfs the modest home below.

“From Bauhaus to Our House,” Finis sneers as he presses his nose to the glass block of the front entry, but when he ventures around back, he cannot help applauding the choice of floor-to-ceiling windows, one of which is broken and eliminates the necessity of any arduous entry.

“Hello?” he calls through the hole, then edges his way past a few nasty shards of glass and into the living room, where a set of silvery tracks on the floor lead to a dead mallard, head beneath some sort of sideboard.

“Carter? Dr. Milhause? It's Finis! Just an old friend come to call!”

Conflicting signs: the hum in the kitchen signals electrical current, yet he finds nothing in the refrigerator but a leftover piece of steak that smells a little funky, and a cucumber that shows the beginnings of a coat of delicate blue fur.

Again: “Hello!”

Unlike Carter, Finis recognizes the charms—and pretensions—of the house. Dark wood. Old rugs. Middle Ages, Finis thinks. A bit of ye old monastery tempered by the row of Mexican masks on the dining room wall (man with a lizard clamped to his face, etc.). Many bookcases filled with fossils and rocks and, of course, books. Books, books, books.

Could he have enjoyed talking to these people?

He runs the back of his nails along the spines—tick, tick, tick—as he reads aloud:
“The Birth of Tragedy. Cult Movies. Psychology and Religion. Wonderful Life. The Evolution of Consciousness. The Writings and Drawings of Bob Dylan. Coming of Age in Samoa. Texas Crude. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ever Since Darwin. Cruden's Complete Concordance. Zen Mind, Beginner Mind. The Sacred and the Profane—“

To be suspicious of a thing because it comes easily—that is unreasonable, and Finis knows it. Thus: after he sees that his hand is covered with the prickly pear stickers that he picked up as he made his way around the outside of the house; and he steps to the kitchen to look through the drawers for something to remove the stickers; and he finds a number of keys and a small deck of credit cards—several still unexpired—well, he is not entirely skeptical. He
does
, however, start when the Scout parked in the attached garage leaps to life with the first key that he tries.

So: back to the kitchen, where he folds himself into the window seat. During his days at the mission in Oneco, he perfected a
blank look—something like stupidity—and that is the look he wears now. But his brain works.

Could Clay somehow be forcing a car upon him? Could this be a trap? In all of his years as Rear End, Finis never allowed himself the weight of a car, a credit card. Does the great gloved hand of his life's story mean to reach down and tempt him with ease in his hunt for Clay?

Or is this a gift bestowed by an appreciative audience?

There is nothing to sooth his nerves in the family's bathroom medicine cabinet—a true pharmacological wasteland—but, for the sake of certain aches and pains, he swallows several aspirins, then lays himself down for an afternoon nap.

In the daughter's room, as it turns out. Finis eyes the mural of the
Archaeopteryx
, the copy of
Six Easy Pieces
on the bed stand, a photo of two girls, one of whom is Jersey Alitz.

The bedroom of Goldilocks.

He is going to sleep in Goldilocks's bed.

The idea of himself as one of the avenging bears makes Finis smile.

Several hours later, when the front doorbell rings, he does not come completely awake, but the noise arouses him sufficiently that when he hears footsteps in the hall, he sits bolt upright, and then—precisely as Jersey could
not
do several days before—slides over and down the side of the bed and onto the floor.

“Kitty? Jersey?” A woman's voice. Older. Loud, but tentative. “Carter?”

With a flick of his wrists, Finis removes a screen from a curtained bedroom window, pushes the thing out ahead of himself, slips into the backyard and behind a toolshed.

“Do you know you've got a dead duck in your back room, there?”

M.B., just arrived from the airport. Though she is still favoring last week's sprained ankle, she hopes her voice sounds strong. Full of confident amusement. A little like the voice of Patsy
Glickman, who has been giving M.B. much-needed pep talks ever since the morning she came to M.B.'s rescue in the master bath.

You can do it! She's your daughter! You gotta be strong for her and then you'll respect yourself and you won't feel like you have to hide out like an old fool!

M.B. has never in her life ever traveled anywhere on her own, let alone flown on an airplane. The experience has left her feeling—all at once—plucky and tired and spooked.

A peculiar experience for M.B.: to walk through the home of her child for the first time. A child who is no longer a child, or even the adult who lived in the home. In a way, the house is a museum, isn't it? With its tile and concrete floors, white walls, and old furniture, doesn't it look like one of those places M.B. and Lorne sometimes visited? A pioneer homestead, say, or an old schoolhouse? M.B. finds herself stopping at the doorway to each room as if a velvet rope blocks her entrance. In the narrow hallways with their shelves full of books and fossils, she holds her arms tight to her sides, afraid she may cause breakage or leave evidence that could be used against her.

God is in M.B.'s heaven, yes; still, she worries that He might not realize that she is not responsible for the slovenly housekeeping around her, and so she runs a hand along a dusty window ledge and asks,
sotto voce
, “Is this what I pay six-fifty an hour for, Mrs. Hinkey?”

Initially, the refrigerator door resists her pull—
FLASH: NEWS STORIES OF BODY PARTS ON ICE
!—but then the door pops open, and it offers evidence far less horrific but not entirely reassuring (spoiled meat, fuzzy cucumber).

The important thing, of course—M.B. reminds herself of this as she dials the housekeeper's telephone number—the important thing is not to criticize Mrs. Hinkey, but to learn whether or not the woman has seen Katherine and Jersey.

Mrs. Hinkey takes several whistling breaths before she says, “Let's see. I got my team doing that house. I'd have to ask my team about that one, ma'am.”

M.B. sniffs, then cannot stop herself from muttering, “
Not
doing it would be a better description!”

“What's that?”

“It's filthy! There's—a dead duck in the living room!”

“I thought you said your daughter'd been there, ma'am.”

“I don't know if she was here or not. That's what I'm trying to find out.”

Rather sharply, Mrs. Hinkey informs M.B. that if there were a dead duck in her living room, she would not wait for somebody else to come by to clean it up.

“Kid,” says M.B., “if you keep your house the way you keep my daughter's place, I suspect you'd miss a cow if it died in your living room.”

This testy conversation derails M.B.'s original panic somewhat, and after she hangs up the telephone, she uses a thick pad of newspapers to pick up the duck—albeit with shivers and shudders—and to set it in the kitchen trash basket, which she then sets outside the front door.

She could call the university, maybe. Or that couple that came to visit Katherine at Fair Oaks. What was their name? She could speak to the neighbors?

Damp hay. That is the taste of the herbal tea—Silk Road?—that M.B. finds in the cupboard.
Sugar, sugar
, she mutters aloud, opening and closing cupboards, poking her head here, there, pursing and unpursing her lips.

How mortified she would be if anyone could detect the upbeat of her heart when she opens the door to a cupboard holding a large bag of pinto beans, cans of chicken broth, and an assortment of bottles of liquor: rum, Kahlua, vodka, sherry—

Immediately, she slams the door shut. Carries her cup of Silk Road into the dining room where she stands erect at the window and watches for Carter's van to appear. A watchdog. So she sees herself. The watchdog guarding the house. In Wyoming, when she was a girl, her family had a dog. Big tan and black Dolly sat on the front lawn, erect and proud, tail lifted high when she barreled down upon intruders. A shepherd. Loyal and true. Of course, it was M.B. and Dicky whom Dolly most staunchly defended. Her flock.

M.B. shivers. Perhaps she is just the old fool guard dog, the one who woke to defend the pasture only after the sheep were already lost.

From room to room, she wanders. How can it be that every view in her daughter's house contains a sunset?

Back at the dining room window, she watches several neighbors come and go: a man parks in the drive across the street and, suit jacket hanging from one finger, begins to water a tree. He reminds M.B. of the boss from
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
—what was his name? When a little red car pulls up in the driveway next door, a second man trots over from across the street to talk at some length with the woman who emerges from the red car. M.B. supposes the woman must be about Kitty's age. A friend of Kitty's? Probably not. This woman has professionally styled and streaked hair. She wears nylon stockings and cobalt-blue high heels and a matching suit that M.B. herself would not mind owning. Trim. Organized. While she unloads a number of brightly colored file boxes from her little car, she chats animatedly with the man from across the street. A friendly person. Still, how could M.B. step out and say, “Excuse me, miss, but I seem to have lost my daughter. Would you happen to know where she's gone?”