Carter Clay (46 page)

The BA is how many of the Fort Powden locals refer to Rex's Bowladrome. A modest alley. Cement block outside and in. Curiously, though the building was constructed to house the Bowladrome, the place has always looked makeshift, as if alley and grill and bar were cobbled on as afterthoughts. Fifteen years ago, at Cheryl Lynn Clay's suggestion, Rex and Maggie Fishbeck changed the interior paint from pale green to pale yellow, but otherwise the place looks the same as it has looked for the last thirty years.

On slow nights, like tonight, when no one feels like coming out in the rain, Cheryl Lynn can tend both the bar and the alley, and the Fishbecks can get off their feet and sit in booth #1 and maybe even do the books in between making up the occasional order at the grill.

Cheryl Lynn will never leave the bowling alley. It is by working at the alley that she has learned a large part of the good things she knows about how to be a mother and a friend. Also—as if it were a boy she fell in love with thirty years before—the alley's particular aroma has never entirely ceased to remind Cheryl Lynn of how happy she felt that first time she stepped inside the Bowladrome, and saw the dark and romantic bar juxtaposed so enticingly with the clean blond beauty of the lanes, and heard the crisp
pockpockpock
of pins falling while Freddy Scott sang “Hey,
Girl” on the jukebox. Cheryl Lynn received her first kiss in #2 of the grill's five booths. Bought her first package of cigarettes from the machine in the foyer. She feels tender toward the aging of the place, the way she feels toward Rex and Maggie, and tries to feel, now, toward her own face in the mirror over the bar.

How did she get so old? When was it her skin started to drape around her chin like that—like a spread hanging over the edge of a bed and pouching out a little above the spot where it hits the floor?

Undeniably, some of Cheryl Lynn's gloom this evening has to do with the fact that she received another call from M.B. Milhause earlier in the day.

“Any news?” M.B. asked. M.B. sounded perky until Cheryl Lynn said no. Then she began to cry. “I'm flying up there tonight!” she said. “Them disappearing like this—and did you know they never went to that clinic they were supposed to go to? You know about that? For Jersey? I called the clinic and checked and they never went there, Cheryl Lynn.”

Cheryl Lynn
, M.B. Milhause said. As if they were friends, or even relatives, and in this together.

Well?

Cheryl Lynn is happy to be distracted from the thought of Carter's mother-in-law arriving in Fort Powden by the entry into the alley of a little cowboy. “Ma'am,” he says, and tips his hat her way as he approaches the bar.

You would recognize that cowboy but Cheryl Lynn does not. You would also notice that the costume he wears (ten-gallon hat, jeans, cowboy boots, snap-button shirt) is remarkably like the one that Carter Clay adopted for himself after the accident. Perhaps this is ironic, perhaps not, given how many boys once wanted to grow up to be cowboys.

Today, at any rate, Finis Pruitt would not be amused to discover that he wears the same brand and style of cowboy shirt that Carter Clay himself picked out for Sundays at Vineyard Christian. Finis Pruitt is in a foul mood. None of the people to whom Finis has spoken about Carter Clay have seen him—no, not in years!—but each has a little tale to share about that former citizen of Fort Powden.

Remember how he drove Neff's car into the mud at the fairgrounds? That was when he was in love with the Indian girl, and he brought her and her kids to town to meet his dad? Drunk as a skunk, and he's trying to fish these little kids out of the mud, and the girlfriend's lost her high heels, and then Carter falls in—

Oh, yes, that story made the people at the bar snort and laugh with their eyes all crinkled up and their gums exposed—so ugly Finis would have imitated them, then and there, if to do so would not have spoiled any chance of learning something useful.

Someone else offered:
Remember when he poured sugar in that Pattschull girl's gas tank?

Which meant Finis had to listen to people debate just how rotten and despicable Becky Pattschull was for breaking Carter Clays heart. Becky Pattschull—Finis could not believe it! A person named Becky Pattschull existed. And these people remembered that Clay had loved her twenty-five years before!

At the grocery store where he stopped on the pretext of buying a six-pack of beer, an old lady—her sweatshirt reading
ONE LIFE
'
S ENOUGH IF YOU DO IT RIGHT
—lowered her voice to say that she had taken the Clay kids in for a couple of weeks when they were little.
The dad was on a rip, and it was after one of the times the mom tried to kill herself.

The geezer bagging Finis's beer shook his head.
A suicide spoils a house
, he said.
Even if it don't take, it spoils it.

And the hag in the sweatshirt:
He was a good-looking kid. Of course, everybody wanted to fight him 'cause he was big, you know?

Another woman, a customer eavesdropping from the candy rack, edged closer to the checkout to say,
He was a pretty good fella, 'cept for the booze. That was the war. Everybody says he was never the same after he came back.

Oh, hell!
said the bagger.
Two purple hearts, he got. At least. I'd say he did fine in the war.

Finis produced a simpering smile as he took his bag and sent a mental telegram to the gathering:
Yes, yes, and he killed a little girl's daddy and crippled her and turned her clever mom into a ghoul.

Needless to say, when Finis slides onto a stool at the bowling alley bar, it is not his intention to ask Cheryl Lynn Clay about her baby brother. Finis is ready to rock and roll. Give me the map, Jack. Let's go to the show, Joe.

The nervous jitter of cowboy heels against bar stool: Cheryl Lynn picks up on that. Slimy little dude, she has decided, and feels glad to see Neff Morgan come through the door, and shake the rain from his hair, and stomp the rain from his shoes, and flap the wings of his rain poncho. After M.B. Milhause's phone call, Cheryl Lynn thought of calling Neff, but was embarrassed at having to admit that, once again, she did not know where her own brother had got to.

“Hey, Neffer! I been thinking about you!”

Neff grins and calls out, “Well, all right! Hope it was something flattering.” The rain poncho—transparent, blue—rustles and gives off a gassy chemical odor as Neff scoots himself up to the bar. “But listen”—he bends close, suddenly serious—“have you seen Carter lately?”

She shakes her head. “That's why I was going to call you—”

Neff interrupts her with a raised hand, but then he does not speak, just looks down at the bar top, where he begins to work his fingernail into a pair of initials carved into the wood.
A.D.

“Neff?”

Still not looking up, Neff asks, “Did you know he took away the wheelchair from the little girl? 'Cause he's thinks his faith'll make her walk?”

A cold cloak of horror and shame settles on Cheryl Lynn's shoulders, moves on down her spine, then gets serious, and gives her a shake:
I told you so.
“Hey”—her voice breaks as she calls down the bar, “cowboy, you okay there?”

“Just fine, ma'am.”

“Cheryl Lynn?” Neff says.

“Jesus, Neff.” She fumbles for the pack of cigarettes in her shirt pocket. “I thought he'd gotten a little weird with that stuff—”

“I don't want you worrying, but I got him doing some odd jobs for me, and this afternoon—his van's out so I drove him back to the cabin—well, have you been out where they're staying?”

No.

“It's out by me. Just this little cabin I'm fixing over in bits and pieces. I said they could stay there a while, and—anyways, today I dropped him off and his wife comes running out. She says the girls sick and needs a doctor, and Carter's, like, ‘I'll take care of it, Neff.'” Neff goes back to digging at the initials in the bar, now with the help of a toothpick. Cheryl Lynn watches until the toothpick breaks, and he looks up again, and asks, “So what do you think, Cheryl Lynn?”

Cheryl Lynn stubs out her cigarette. She thinks of Jersey, possibly sick, and then of her own boys at home with their not entirely wonderful baby-sitter, a fifteen-year-old by the name of Marissa McPhale. She would like to call the boys, right now, and make sure they are okay, nobody is burning down the house or smoking cigarettes or watching dirty movies while Marissa gabs on the telephone; but, of course, Neff Morgan is waiting for her to answer. Lacking words of her own, she echoes his. “What do
you
think?”

“I think you should ask him what's up, Cheryl Lynn. He came by last night, drunk. He didn't talk much but he was upset about something. He slept on my porch. I don't know. I think he trusts you.”

“Not enough to let me know where he's living! And that Katherine's mother—she's flying up here, Neff! Maybe even tonight—she's all flipped-out 'cause Carter was supposed to take Katherine and Jersey to Arizona so's Jersey could go to some doctor there, or something, and he never did.”

“Geez, I got my own private sauna here,” Neff says, and plucks the rain poncho away from his torso, lets it fall. “At least Carter can't run off, though. We hauled his van into Hansen's this morning, and he can't afford to get it fixed.”

“Okay. Okay.” Cheryl Lynn squeezes the rim of the bar. “You headed back to the campground?”

Neff nods.

“OK. Give me a minute. I'll see you out there. You can show me how to get to their place and—I'll run the wheelchair over and—”

Is that cowboy listening in? Cheryl Lynn gives the man a cool stare. To which he tips his hat before stepping away from the bar to consider the brightly lit song titles listed under the glass front of the jukebox.

Finis Pruitt reaches Joe Alitz and Katherine Milhause's Scout just after Neff Morgan—real estate flyer tented over his head—climbs inside the Boulders station wagon.

To follow the white station wagon through Fort Powden's rainy streets is relatively easy. Once the wagon heads out of town, however, Finis feels more visible. He must hang back a bit, and, then, the downpour becomes more of a hindrance. Also, the outskirts of Fort Powden dip in and out; on several occasions, just when Finis believes the station wagon has left town for good, up comes another clump of houses, grocery store, gas station—all seeming like ghosts of themselves in the rainy night.

As he drives—to soothe himself, agitate himself—Finis recites:

Would you expect Neff Morgan to signal as he reaches the campground? He does not signal, and, thus, Finis misses a chance to stop further back on the road, and, instead, must drive beyond the entrance.

There, on the narrow shoulder, with a curse, Finis flicks off the Scout's headlights and parks.

Ah, but what a sight greets him when he turns in his seat! For who should hurry out from the campground office but Carter
Clay himself? Instantly, Clay commandeers the campground station wagon, backs it up, and swings out of the lot, sizzling the gravel as he drives by Finis, now ducked low in the Scout.