Carter Clay (41 page)

M.B. does not sense that the Seca house might conceal important sounds from her; nor does she even remember, upon waking the next morning in Katherine and Joe's bed, that she heard a noise like an engine starting the night before.

Really, M.B. is too deeply filled with dread to think clearly about much of anything. The swamp cooler's blast of air has grown bitter-cold overnight; she covers her head with the Indian rug her daughter apparently used as a bedspread, and she shivers and moans.

Waking up in Katherine's bed puts M.B. in mind of waking up that morning beside the stiffened body of Lorne. And the days in the hospital after the accident.

She rolls onto her side, pulls her knees up to her chest, and stares at a carved wooden mask on Joe and Katherine's wall—a red thing, with eyes as big as chicken eggs, horns, and long strands of white hemp spouting out of its head for hair.

A very particular memory returns to her: an awful moment when she lost three-year-old Kitty in Carson Pirie Scott. It was Christmastime. The store was full of shoppers and loud carols. M.B. was looking for a gift for her mother—a robe—and all of a sudden Kitty was gone. After several minutes of calling and rushing up and down aisles—scared to death and so ashamed, too, because a mother was
responsible
for the safety of her child, and
suppose Kitty turned up with her head chopped off, M.B. had read of such things, nightmare things done to innocent children—M.B. cried out to another woman shopper and a clerk,
Help me, my little girl's lost
!

For the half-hour that Kitty could not be found, M.B. vowed that she would kill herself if harm had come to Kitty—who eventually turned up inside a rack of housecoats close by the spot where M.B. had stood when she first noticed her missing. Kitty was pale, gripping the chrome racks. She had been, it seemed, too frightened by M.B.'s fear to make herself known. When a man helping in the search reached into the rack to take Kitty out, she fainted dead away.

Who can M.B. possibly ask for help in finding Kitty? She knows that Carter has family in Washington. A father, a sister.

M.B. forces herself to push her feet out from under the covers and onto the cold concrete.

She tells herself: start somewhere.

“This is the day that the Lord hath made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.” So reads the piece of folded cardboard that Carter has propped on the picnic table that serves for both meals and school; just now, however, the cardboard catches the late afternoon's golden light, and thus burnished, its message is temporarily obliterated.

Carter—not rejoicing himself—peels potatoes in the cabin's dark little kitchen. A week has passed since their arrival in Washington, but he is not sure whether a greater number of days without news of Finis Pruitt signals safety ahead or danger's hulking advance. Also, Jersey has yet to try the parallel bars; and though he has spent the last four days looking for work in the little towns around Fort Powden, Carter has had nothing even close to a bite.

He puts his head into the cabin's main room to check on things. There, at the head of the picnic table, Jersey—in a rattan chair so ancient it wheezes—Jersey pretends to be Katherine's student. Recites for Katherine what Carter knows perfectly well is
the lesson she means to
teach
Katherine: some gobbledygook about how knowing the way in which cartilage is replaced by bone can help a paleontologist (“Such as yourself, Mom”) to determine the maturity of a fossil specimen.

“So, how's school going?” Carter asks. Depressingly tinny, his voice in the little wooden cabin. He steps out to the picnic table, to bring self and voice closer to the pair, but, in response to his question, the official teacher merely sighs and moistens her thumb with spittle. Holds her thumb against Carter's cardboard sign, forming a faint bond between the two. Sighs again. She is easily distracted. Petulant. Messy. Disorganized. On top of this, she is now angry. She flicks a finger at Carter's piece of cardboard. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Katherine and Carter have a deal: if Katherine does not wander out of the cabin while Carter job-hunts, and if she carries Jersey—when asked—to the little closet that holds the cabin's toilet, then she is allowed to listen to the Bible tapes in the afternoon. Today, Carter was to buy batteries for the tape player, and he forgot.

Which was understandable. That morning, after job-hunting in Bain, he decided to drive through Fort Powden while he ate his lunch, and, of course, there were the red brick buildings of his life, and people going in and out of them. The changes he saw upset him (Fuller Drug was now a kite shop called Play It by Air, and the Ben Franklin was selling sporting goods). Still, the office supply store remained. Lillian's Card and Party. Secondhand Rose. He longed to go into Secondhand Rose to see if Teddy would look up from organizing his boxes of jigsaw puzzles and old Avon bottles and say, “Hey, you played football for Fort Powden!”

But Carter drove on to Marpool, one of the little towns where he believed he was less likely to run into anyone he knew. In Marpool, he filled out applications at a dry cleaner and a place not unlike the Accordion Cafe. Afterward, when the van would not start up, he pretended not to notice—a little trick he had used on the van several times before. He just climbed right out of the van, as if he did not really want to leave Marpool then, anyway. Whistled a little “Down Yonder Green Valley” as he walked off.
Maybe while he went for a cup of coffee the engine would cool off a bit, or the wires would get a rest, whatever. But, no, forget the coffee, he decided. A return to the café might be unwise. You didn't want a potential boss speculating about you maybe having vehicle trouble.

He walked down Marpool's little main street. Looked at the offerings in the shopwindows. A hobby shop. An extermination service displaying a lot of boxes and cans of bug and slug killers. He stopped to consider a layout of fishing supplies in the window of a sporting goods place. Someone had taken care with the display, making it appear to be a spot to which a fisherman would soon return, perhaps to have a drink from the thermos that stood between the camp stool and the bait box, and Carter stared at all of this, and thought that there might never again be a thing he wanted. Or else he would want everything—all of the bright and tiny flies, and the fat lures painted bold as totem poles, and the jars of coral-colored bait, and you name it. Then he saw himself reflected in the store window, and before he even had a chance to absorb himself—so big and faded—behind him a Native American woman with waist-length black hair hopped out of a UPS truck with a package.

Bonnie Drabnek.

Carter had spun around and even yelled her name before it dawned on him that the startled young woman who turned his way was probably the age of those babies of Bonnie's whom he had known twenty-some years before.

“Sorry,” Carter called. “Sorry, miss.”

The whole incident upset him, though, and so he forgot the batteries.

And now Katherine is upset.

In an effort to cheer Katherine, Carter says, “Jersey's a good student, ain't she, Katherine?”

Katherine looks up from fiddling with the cardboard homily on the picnic table, and demands, “Wha-
t
a
bou' me
, Car-er?”

“Well, hey”—he smiles—“you're the teacher, Katherine!”

Somewhat absently, Jersey says, “My dad called me Biblio sometimes. Short for Bibliophile.”

Carter nods and continues to smile. He always does his best to smile when the girl mentions her father. Which is not always easy. Because, sometimes, Carter envies the girl's love for the dead man; and he forgets—yes, it's true—he forgets that he caused the death that caused the circumstances that make him wish the girl loved him, too.

“So, what's that biblio-thing?” he asks.

The glance she casts his way is almost suspicious—as if he has joined in on her conversation with someone else. “A book lover. It's—like, from Greek.
Bible
, ‘book.'
Phile
, ‘lover.'”

“So the Greeks got their word for book from the Bible?” Carter nods and smiles to convey interest and enthusiasm. “That's neat, isn't it?”

The girl gives him a blank stare, then reaches for Katherine's hand on the table and squeezes it, and he retreats to the kitchen and his potatoes.

In the moment between his striking of the match and the catch, the smell from the stove always makes Carter think of the time his mother tried to gas herself. The little
whomph
that sounds as the parrot-blue flames leap to life: it makes his heart clench.

Today, in the want ads, the best-paying of those jobs for which Carter qualified was live-in aide to a handicapped person (seven dollars an hour). But how could he be a live-in aide and take care of Jersey and Katherine? Each time he left the pair alone while he went on his job-hunts, he felt uncertain about who was watching whom. He could, and did, apply for jobs in Bain as a cook, server, or busser at five dollars an hour. Kennel cleaner. Pest control worker. Lumberyard driver.

He liked the lumberyard—the smell, the cutting sounds, and the way it seemed the men in the yard had time both alone and together. The manager of the yard, however, was no more than a kid. A little guy with a big class ring on his finger. Maybe the boss's son?

“There's some years on there that might not look so good, but since I become a Christian, I been real responsible on the job,” Carter explained.

The manager tapped his pencil against his teeth. Good straight teeth. Braces, Carter guessed. “How long's that been?” the manager asked.

“A year now. And I was straightened out even before—a year before that. I got on track. I'm on track now.”

With the eraser of his pencil, the manager rubbed at a spot on his desk top. “That's good,” he said. Then he stood. “We'll be looking over applications starting next week.” He nodded and held out his hand to Carter.

“I got a wife and daughter,” Carter said. “I need the job.”

“Hm-mm,” the manager said.

“My daughter's handicapped.”

“I'm sorry,” the manager said. He sounded as if he meant it, but Carter still knew he would not get the job.

“So, Jersey”—Carter covers the pot and turns up the gas under the potatoes before he steps back into the main room—“Jersey.” He taps on the illustration of mammal and reptile bones that Jersey now traces for Katherine—“how about you leave off that and we do our Bible reading and then have prayers?”

Without lifting her eyes from her work, Jersey shakes her head. “It's still schooltime.”

Carter crouches to poke through the scant remains of the boxes of groceries he packed up at the Seca house. A sixty-four-ounce can of tomato juice, a tiny tin of mandarin oranges. He bounces the tin of oranges in his hand and tries to look casual. “Did you read that section I told you?”

“I read it.”

“You like it?”

“Sure.”

“So, you think we should forgive everyone so we're forgiven, too?”

She leans forward in the creaking chair to rifle through the books spread out upon the picnic table, then lays her hands upon the Bible from the Turquoise Motel. The book is now well feathered with her own as well as Carter's page markers (scraps of
paper bags, bits of the margins of Jersey's journal pages, gum wrappers). “You mean, should I forgive Hitler? Should I forgive the guy who hit us?”

She looks Carter right in the eye, as if he ought to answer (a sickening moment; his right knee begins to jiggle), but then she continues, “Do you feel like you're forgiven by God for—well, in the war, even if
you
didn't actually kill anyone, you were part of killing people, right?”

Carter lifts the edge of the Geisha label on the tin of oranges and carefully peels it back. “That's right.” He senses that the girl continues to look at him out of some sort of politeness; as if she wants to let him know that she does not consider him an outcast because he killed people.