Carter Clay (4 page)

Footfalls. This is what M.B. registers first. The footfalls come to a stop in front of her. Without raising her head, M.B. looks at their owner's enormous shoes, then sneaks a quick, upward glance: the big bearded man in the red bandanna.

Trkkh, trkkh.
The man's breath labors above her. She lowers her eyes to his timber legs, then raises them to the chest broad as a sidewalk; then—frightened—she looks off to her left, her right. Where are her witnesses? The lady in the silk dress now makes her way through the hospital foyer while the young mother has herded her children across the drive—

Trkkh, trkkh.
M.B. looks up again. The man shakes his head. Little chick feathers of blond hair stick out from under his red bandanna. His eyes wobble—with tears?

“I”—the man leans down. With a hand covered in gauze bandaging, he picks up the army surplus bag at M.B.'s feet and
dumbly holds it out before M.B. “Where'd you get this?” he asks.

Does he take the bag for a purse? What? A wild noise escapes M.B.—a snort that would embarrass her greatly under other circumstance—then, thank heaven, like a blessing, the hospital's doors are flying open with a gassy
chunk.
One hand on his holster, a tiny gray-haired security guard hustles toward M.B. and the man in the bandanna. “Say, fella, unless you got business here,” the guard calls ahead of himself, “I suggest you move along!”

M.B. does not want to hear or see what happens next, and so she stares down at the coloring book in her lap, a page labeled “Sickle-Cell Trait: Defense Against Malaria.” This is a page not yet colored. Black-and-white illustrations of normal cells, sickle cells, a little map of Africa.

Only when she hears the change in sound that the big man's shoes make as he steps out from beneath the echoing portico and into the street—only then does M.B. raise her head once more.

The guard gives her a wink. “Rough-looking character!” he says. He takes a seat beside M.B. on the planter and lights up a cigarette of his own. With a laugh, he leans close to say, “Guess now us smokers know how the niggers used to feel, huh?”

M.B. glances at the street, the diminishing figure of the man in the bandanna. It has been many years since Kitty informed M.B. that, at the very least, the use of the word
nigger
branded the speaker as ignorant,
and surely you don't want to sound ignorant, Mother
? Still, when M.B. turns back, she smiles at the guard because, after all, Lorne continued to say
nigger
until the day he died; all of the men at the mills said
nigger
, and the guard only means to be friendly.

Which is not to say that M.B. wishes to talk to him, no, and to prevent further conversation, she begins slowly flipping through the coloring book.

Gardner Glazier is the security guard's name. Until quite recently, he worked in the parking lot of Southeastern Savings: days spent greeting customers, telling the occasional joke, getting tough with the jerks who had no bank business but wanted free parking while they ran to the pharmacy or met a friend for lunch. Gardner often forgets that the people he meets at the hospital
are, for the most part, worried over disease and injury and death, and so he teases M.B., “You going to do some coloring, there?”

Too weary and worried to register the man's teasing, M.B. replies, “This is my granddaughter's book. I guess this is the sort of coloring books they give the smart ones, nowadays. My granddaughter—” She hesitates at an illustration of a cutaway of the human brain that is distressingly similar to the illustration shown her by the neurosurgeon now attending her daughter—corpus callosum, Broca's area, Wernicke's area—and a second illustration that depicts what occurs in the brain's various regions: Writing. A hand moving a paintbrush. A long-haired girl looking sad.

While M.B. stares at the illustrations, Gardner Glazier tries to recall a joke that someone told him about kids nowadays, but he can remember only the one about the Martians who showed up at the Welfare office. Something about aliens.
We hear you have great benefits for aliens
? Maybe he could tell the woman that one, he thinks, and sneaks a look to see if he still has her attention.

Uh-oh. The white face, the tremor of her lips remind Gardner of where he is. “Miss,” he says, with genuine solicitude, and pats her arm, “you look awful pale, miss. Is there anybody I can call for you?”

M.B. shakes her head. No. And there is no one she can die for, either. No one for whom her death would do a bit of good. She stares across the street at the notorious oncology building, so white it gleams in the morning sun, and, oh, it hits her then what that marshmallow stack of a building is—it is a
joke
that she does not get, a joke that she is not meant to get, and, thus, its white walls of exclusion form the backdrop against which the shadow of her next thoughts play out:

Jesus, at least, could die for people. Jesus could exchange his life for the lives of all mankind. Jesus was
lucky!
People thought: How sad, poor Jesus, dying on the cross. But when you think about it, really, when you really think about it, Jesus was the luckiest of them all.

Granted, the Carter Clay encountered by M.B. outside of Memorial Hospital appeared piratical (beard, bandanna); when clean and clean-shaven, Carter Clay is a man with the face of a choirboy; so much so, in fact, that his face appears somewhat mismatched to the rest of his forty-two-year-old self.

As a boy, however, while Carter was growing up in the green, green sectors of Washington state—despite that innocent face—his height and width of bone made him appear older than his peers. More than once, while at play with classmates, Carter found himself grabbed by a passing grown-up who mistook the boy for some older roughneck pestering the little ones.

Other facts about Carter Clay: he tends to believe that the world is made up of the haves and have-nots.

Also: His hair, though thinning, remains the baby-fine blond of his youth. One large, maroon telltale capillary runs across his left nostril like a piece of fraying thread, but otherwise his skin is good. Women are attracted to his big, bearded woodsman looks, a fact of which Carter seems unaware, though it might be more accurate to say that he is impervious to such attentions. His responses to the world tend to be wary—a little congealed, or
moony
, even. He has been deaf in one ear since serving in Vietnam, which is where he also acquired the minor scars to be found on his neck and right arm, but not the five doozies that
mark his back; those he acquired a little over a year ago, in a stabbing near a picnic shelter designated #6 in the city of Sarasota's own Edmund Howell Park.

More details: Only three nights ago, Carter Clay went off to a Tuesday night meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, and, there, claimed a “chip” for his first year of sobriety. That was in tiny Sabine, Florida, in the Sunday school classroom borrowed from the Full Gospel Baptist Church. The other AA members clapped as Carter went to the front of the room. Carter smiled and flushed as he received the metallic coin from a grandmotherly former junkie named Earla R.

That Tuesday night, Carter
was
on the right road. He was continuing to practice the lessons learned at a halfway place called Recovery House. His basic honesty remained intact while a tendency toward gullibility had been pruned to a more reasonable size. He did not pretend to have entirely lost all interest in the delights and demons that lay, so cozily coiled, inside a helping of methamphetamine, grass, booze, Percodan, cocaine, and/or whatever else might be offered or sold in a bar or a car, at a baseball game, park, public john, even an espresso cart at an indoor mall whose shops featured windows only as a means of displaying more merchandise—

Still, three nights ago, at the AA meeting, Carter's cravings appeared to have shrunk to something relatively small.

Suffice it to say that Carter did not understand this appearance of diminution to be largely a feature of distance, as with a great warship that might be covered by the tip of your little finger when the vessel sits on the far horizon. However, things had improved for Carter. On the occasion of that Tuesday-night meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, for the first time in four years, Carter had a means of transportation: a used van that he had been able to purchase, cheap, from his Recovery House counselor. He had a regular job: cook at a storefront place on Sabine's main street. The owners of the Accordion Cafe had lost a big, blond-haired nephew in Vietnam; when Recovery House called about a job for Carter, not only were they tearfully happy to give a veteran a job, they also helped Carter find a room to rent.

A nice room in a nice house belonging to a nice lady named Mrs. Dickerson. Two double-hung windows, one on the north and facing the neighbors, one on the east and looking out into Mrs. Dickerson's crust of yard and the two orange trees whose fruit was concealed by their own summertime green. Across the hall, there lived another boarder, a friendly younger man with an interest in drawing cartoons about a rat who was friends with a cat.

On top of his room's three-drawer dresser, on a bit of crochet provided by the kindly Mrs. Dickerson, Carter kept a clear bowl, round as a globe, containing a blue and red betta fish that conjured up its own phosphorescent beauty in its circular travels. Sometimes Carter did wish that he had photographs to display next to the fish. At various points in his life, he
had
possessed photographs: a childhood picture of his big sister, Cheryl Lynn, and himself by a manger scene; Instamatic photos of high school friends and friends from Vietnam. There had been a great picture from a softball picnic: Cheryl Lynn, Carter, his friend Neff Morgan, Bonnie Drabnek—the Inuit woman with whom Carter had lived once upon a time—and Bonnie's three little kids.

How all of those photographs leaked from Carter's life, he did not know. A number of the people in them were dead now. Worse, without the photographs,
all
of them seemed dead.

In lieu of photographs, a hardbound copy of
Alcoholics Anonymous
(aka
The Big Book)
sat next to the fish bowl, along with two gifts from Carter's Recovery House counselor. The first gift was an inexpensive gold picture frame that contained a blurry newspaper photo of Howell Park's Shelter #6 and the accompanying article:

“That's so you don't forget where you've been,” said the Recovery House counselor, whose second gift was a copy of
Moby-Dick.
According to the counselor—a muscular former biker—
Moby-Dick
was the best book ever written. Ten pages a day, the counselor advised Carter. Anybody can read ten pages a day, right?

Carter trusted that
Moby-Dick
was a fine thing to read. If you counted the many notes at the back,
Moby-Dick
appeared as thick and full of ideas as
Alcoholics Anonymous
or the Bible. The Recovery House counselor had marked his favorite spots in
Moby-Dick
with a watermelon-bright highlighter, and the pages flashed cheerfully whenever Carter flipped through them. But Carter had never spent much time on books. Reading
Moby-Dick
, Carter was like a thirsty man who holds ice in his aching hands in hopes that, within the leaky cup formed of his fingers, the heat of his body will melt enough ice to provide him with a drink. You understand: sheer physical discomfort makes such a man give up the task over and over again.

Up until three days ago, however, Carter did a good job of following the rest of the routine that the Recovery House counselor advised: each morning, brush your teeth and make your bed. Before leaving for work, kneel and say the prayer on page 63 of
Alcoholics Anonymous.
Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Sunday evenings: attend the AA meetings in the basement of the Baptist church (cotton-ball lambs frolicking on Sunday school bulletin
board; bad fluorescent lights; a sharp, ineradicable odor of mold that reminded Carter of Washington state and gave him a familiar and thus not entirely unpleasant sense of anxiety).

The people at AA liked Carter. He was not sullen. In fact, he was often whistling some bit of old rock and roll as he came through the back door of Full Gospel Baptist (“Stairway to Heaven,” “Badge,” “Light My Fire”). Carter wanted to be good. He spoke often of how he yearned for a Higher Power like the one that lit up the eyes of certain of the group's star members. He earnestly related his past failures and was even able to laugh about a number of them. It did not hurt Carter's case, of course, that he was big and pleasant to look at, if not precisely handsome; or that the story he told of how he came to AA was tinged with the glamour that can attach itself to even sordid disaster (the war, of course, and then the fact that—albeit while homeless and drunk—he had been most grievously stabbed for defending a fellow vet).

After meetings, people often asked if Carter would like to go with them to the new Village Inn out on the interstate. Carter, however, still tended to feel glassy while socializing without a leg-up from chemicals more ambitious than those found in coffee and chocolate cream pie. He did not have much to say once he had told a person where he lived, what jobs he had held (cannery work, hanging sheetrock, roofing, and house-painting); hence, he generally went straight home to Mrs. Dickerson's after meetings. Before sleep, sometimes he did open
Moby-Dick
or
Alcoholics Anonymous.
Usually, however, he lay on his bed with his Walkman and whistled along with the cassettes that one of the waitresses at the Accordion had kindly made up for him from her collection of albums from the 1960s: the Doors, Hendrix, the Who, Credence Clearwater, Steppenwolf. Carter loved to whistle. He sounded sweet as a bird, Mrs. Dickerson said. Sometimes he whistled her up the Hoagie Carmichael “Stardust” that his mother used to request.

All was relatively well, then, until two mornings ago, at which time a customer entered the Accordion Cafe and ordered a bagel.

In little Sabine, Florida—forty-five miles inland from Sarasota—people ate so few bagels that the owner of the
Accordion insisted that the help keep the cafe's bag of bagels frozen and thaw them in the microwave before toasting. The bagel customer of two mornings before, however, had insisted on “no nuking,” and so Carter had attempted to cut the frozen bagel with a cleaver.

“I trained in Massachusetts,” said the clinic doctor who subsequently put seventeen stitches into Carter's finger. “We get a lot of bagel accidents where I come from. I had a patient almost cut off two whole fingers!” The doctor gave the last stitch a tug that, despite local anaesthesia, Carter felt pass along his finger bones and right up into his elbow. Still, Carter liked the doctor, who wore a ponytail and sandals and a strip of rawhide knotted around his wrist. Carter laughed when the doctor said, “Man, you are my first
southern
victim of an encounter with a frozen bagel!”

The surprise of so much blood coming from his finger; the embarrassment of walking over to the clinic with a towel-wrapped hand held over his head; his need for the doctor to like
him
as much as he liked the doctor—all of this left Carter feeling loose, giddy. He assured the doctor that he, Carter, was no southerner either; though he did
not
explain that he had wound up living in Florida because, in 1988, at a party in Seattle, he and a couple of other men had decided to go to D.C. and visit the Wall. At the Wall, the mother of a dead Marine had invited Carter and his friends to Thanksgiving dinner at her home in St. Petersburg, Florida. That Marine's mother touched Carter's heart as she stood there in the windy cold, her gray hair blowing this way and that.
She could be my mother
, Carter thought.
If I'd died in the war and she were still alive, she could be my mother.
While the others drove back to Washington state, Carter had hitchhiked to St. Petersburg—though he never actually did make it up the steps of what turned out to be the lady's very impressive home. No. On the steps, smoking a cigarette, there had sat a skinny young woman—almost a girl—in an enormous sombrero and silver high heels. “You don't want to go in there,” she said, and then she set the sombrero on the steps, and pointed to a car, and drove Carter to an even more dazzling house. She guided Carter through a side
door to a group of rooms that she called her parents' “master suite,” then drew a whirlpool bath for herself and Carter while they drank wine and smoked dope. That girl was cute, but her parents' bathroom—it was as large as the entire first floor of the house in which he had grown up! It had, in addition to the whirlpool, a sauna, polished wood floors, a tiled shower stall big enough for a group, two built-in hair dryers, enormous baskets of red and green towels that—with a sneering drawl—the girl explained were put out by her mother for use only at the holidays. Of course, Carter had blown all that by pissing in the girl's bed while they slept, and so he had to sneak out of the house before she woke up and saw.

“I'm a Washington boy myself.” This was what Carter
did
tell the doctor stitching his hand. “I mean to go back as soon as I save up enough money. A person can still lead a decent life there, you know? Clean air? Trees?”

Head bent over his work, the doctor asked, “Were you in 'Nam?”

“Sixty-nine, seventy.”

The doctor looked up, winked. He was a small man—wiry, with wiry hair. Younger than Carter, or perhaps just better preserved, less damaged. He had plenty of money, Carter supposed. He would have stayed in college while Carter was over there.

“You taking any antidepressants?”

“No.”

“Francie”—the doctor stuck his hands in the pockets of his white coat and turned to the nurse—“call the Accordion Cafe and tell them we're going to give Mr. Clay, here, a shot and send him home for the rest of the afternoon.”

When the nurse left the room, the doctor leaned close to whisper, “Demerol. This stuff'll make you feel so much better, if you went back to work, you might cut your whole finger off and not even know it!”