Carter Clay (47 page)

Wet, shivering, teeth rattling as he drives up the sloppy road—Carter feels like a wet dog.
Let me die and let Jersey live.
His prayer. And,
Forgive me for not waiting for you to cure her, Lord, but I can't tell anymore if I haven't taken her to the doctor because of faith in you or fear of Finis.

Then he wonders: if you do not eat, but drink alcohol, does that still count as fasting? He is beyond hunger now but does feel light-headed.

Also: Would it be best to lower the station wagon's backseat? Make the rear into a kind of bed for the girl? He plays this out in his head. How he will do it. How he will whip the seat down, then run through the rain to the cabin, scoop Jersey up and run her out to the station wagon. Settle her in back on a sleeping bag. So: lay out a sleeping bag before carrying her to the car. Then drive, oh, so gently, to town. But quickly, too. Quickly.

His chest should have doors to throw open so that he could show his heart to Jersey and Katherine. Then surely they would see that he has always meant well.

The cabin is a jack-o'-lantern shining in the rainy evening. It looks cozy from the road, but Carter knows it is bare inside. Bare and cold. A box full of misery, not a home at all. That is what he offered Jersey and Katherine. Was that the best he could do?

Put the wagon in park in front of the door. Make sure the thin red line is set at P.

He steps out into the rain, then opens one of the wagon's backdoors so he can feel around for the hinge that will release the backseat into the cargo position. There. His fingers catch on the thing while he lowers the seat. The skin tears, but he scarcely notices either the bleeding or the rain as he hurries toward the cabin and the stairs to the front door.

The door sticks. Carter yanks on it, hard. It is his enemy, that door. He yanks again, feeling—in his despair—that species of hot panic he felt in the months following his return from Vietnam, when his sleeve snagged on a piece of furniture or a nail sticking out of a piece of wood, and he feared he had caught a trip wire.

This sensation is replaced, however, by a chill pressure that fits itself against his backbone at the moment the door gives, and, surely, under the circumstances, it is not entirely preposterous for Carter to suppose that pressure might be the finger of God?

“That's a gun,” says the voice behind him, and, of course, it belongs to Finis Pruitt, who whispers, when Carter turns his head ever so slightly to look over his shoulder, “Yup, it's me, man. Now, be cool and step inside.”

“Katherine,” Carter calls ahead of himself, but Finis Pruitt raps the gun against Carter's spine and says, “No! You—stay where you are, dear, and be quiet till I tell you to talk.”

Katherine is seated at the picnic table, making herself a peanut butter and honey sandwich. The honey on top of the peanut butter is thick and beautiful, a golden lens that magnifies the swirls and bumps beneath it, but Katherine looks up from her sandwich, and she leans backward on her bench to peek at Finis Pruitt and ask, “Who you?”

Finis Pruitt flicks the rain from his cowboy hat. “Friend of the family.”

From her own spot on the sofa, Jersey does not know what to make of the little man behind Carter. A man in a cowboy hat? Jersey has noticed a number of suspect things lately—lately being this time in which, now and then, the cabin walls slide up and down like the lid on her father's old wooden pencil box. Behind
the walls' sliding pieces, sometimes she spies rows of grinning sheep. That can't be right, so is the man in the cowboy hat really real? Or a cutout delivered by her fever? So hot! So hot!

She takes a chance that the man is real—his face seems somewhat familiar; perhaps he has come with Carter Clay from the hospital—and she raises herself on her elbow to ask, “Can you help me?”

When the man laughs—a mocking, blue-jay laugh—she shuts her eyes against him.
Not real
, she tells herself, and, immediately, she finds that she is in a blizzard, lost, like one of those prairie girls she used to love to read about—or was it M.B.? Wasn't M.B. lost in a blizzard once, in Wyoming? Stuck in somebody's old Ford? But, no, this blizzard is merely the effect of Jersey's having closed her eyes, and she makes herself open them, and she finds herself still inside the damp and dusty cabin, and she says, her voice throwing off odd sparks in her ears, “I need to go to the hospital.”

The elbow that she has been using to hold herself up begins to flop back and forth, like a jib sail, and she must lie down, then, go away, and so she does not see Finis Pruitt draw near to the couch or hear Carter Clay cry, “Don't hurt her!” or her mother's “Car-er! He go' your gu-
n
!”

“Your gun?” Finis Pruitt gives Carter a quick frisk. “Frisk, frisk, frisk!” he says, his voice both giddy and sullen, as if he might suddenly announce that this was all a joke, or shoot every one of them without further ado.

Using the Colt from Post Road as a pointer, Finis Pruitt signals for Carter to take a seat at the picnic table. “Clay, man,” he says while Carter backs toward the bench, “man, the whole scene is so classic! And none of you can even appreciate it! Like, you're trying to hide from me so I won't tell these people the bad news, and, in the process, you do in the kid!”

“I was taking her to the hospital, R.E. Let me take her, and then—after, you can do what you want with me. But let me take her now. You can drive along. I can get you money—”

Finis Pruitt laughs. “So you take people to the hospital these days, hm?”

From the picnic table, Katherine protests, “It's no' funny! Jers's sick!”

Pruitt nods. “Most people wouldn't think it was funny. I know that. I can also see by looking at you that you wouldn't think it was funny if a man hit you and your family on the side of a road. Would you?”

“Qui-et,” Katherine says.

“You might think a man who did that was even more of a bastard if—instead of helping you, or at least calling an ambulance—he just drove off?”

Katherine moans. “Qui-et.”

Katherine does not want to listen to the words of the wicked man. She needs to concentrate on Carter's gun, which is
not
the gun in the little man's hand. She has remembered.
She
has Carter's gun. Carter's father's gun. It was in the pocket of Joe's barn coat, and now it lies in her lap, and makes her knees twitch.

“Am I right?” the little man asks. “I mean, assuming some timely first aid might have made your injuries less—grievous, and maybe even saved your husband's life? How long did you have to wait for somebody to come along? Twenty minutes? Thirty? Of course, you weren't in any condition to know, were you?”

Katherine reaches a hand across the table to Carter Clay. “Tha' what happen 'a us!” she cries.

The way Carter Clay holds his head in his big hands as he sits at the picnic table, you might think that head no longer belongs to him at all, it is a burden he cannot support. “Don't do this, R.E.,” he murmurs. “Please.”

In a blizzard, Jersey remembers, what you must do is hold onto the rope that goes between the chicken coop and the house. That is how M.B. survived the blizzard. Or was it Laura Ingalls Wilder? Or some other girl who went out to collect the eggs and was almost lost in the storm? At any rate, there is a rope. There must be a rope to guide you back, and you must not drop hold of it. If you keep hold of the rope and keep moving forward, you will eventually be safe—

But when Jersey takes a step, she finds there is no ground beneath her, and she tumbles forward, and the air fills with so much electricity that it crackles and rips with shocks.

“Do'-n't hur' Jerse!” That is her mother's shriek, and then someone else shouts, “
Open your eyes, little girl!
”

She opens her eyes.

There are legs in front of her. Blue jeans. The delirious back and forth and up and down of woven cloth. “What?” she says to the cold that presses against her temple, and she turns toward it, and her eyes travel up to the man above her who is saying—his voice a kind of brass gong—“Your friend Mr. Clay has got something to tell you.” When the man sweeps his cowboy hat toward Carter Clay, he leaves beautiful ribbons in the air. Turquoise. Pink. Yellow. He is one big Fourth of July sparkler.

There is silence. Then the voice of Carter Clay, very small, saying, “Please, don't hurt her, R.E. Jersey. Katherine. I'm the one who hit you guys. The driver.”

The gun barrel at Jersey's temple shakes. It skates off into her hair, snags there, then is pulled back to her temple, and the voice at the other end of it says, “That's a start, Clay, but you left out the part about leaving them to die!”

Carter Clay's big shoulders bob up and down. He rides in a tiny boat on a choppy sea. He wants to explain that things are so much more complicated than what R.E. says, and yet—what R.E. says is true.

“You're quite an actor, aren't you, Clay? Playing the good Samaritan when you're really the thief. Stand up and take a bow, man.”

Carter Clay shudders. “Please, R.E.”

Finis Pruitt cocks the gun.

From a very great distance, Jersey watches Carter Clay stand. And her mother cry. The strange man says, “Don't die on me, little girl. I need to know you understand your stepdad here's the one who hit you and left you to die. You got that?”

She does her best to nod; then asks, “Can I go to the hospital now?”

“No!” The little man moves over to the picnic table, where he jabs Katherine with the gun. “Do
you
hear what I'm saying? Do you get it? Clay's the one who hit you!”

Katherine shakes her head. “Tha's not true,” she whispers, but Carter whispers back, “It is. I wanted to tell you. I was just scared you wouldn't let me help if you knew.”

“Oh, Clay.” The little man moves back toward Jersey. “Clay, when these people were all mangled up on the road and maybe the dad still had a chance to live—you think they were in any shape to turn down your help?”

“Not then, R.E., but
after
—if they'd known, they wouldn't have been able to forgive me.”

“Oh, after.” With a hey, and a hi, and a ho, Finis dances a jig in front of the girl on the couch. A jig. He does not recall ever learning to dance a jig, but he feels the need to do
something
to demonstrate that he receives a transfer of power from Clay—though he is disappointed that Clay has such a very little to offer: not even an audience.

“So”—after a neat pivot, Finis spins himself back toward Clay—“tell them how we drove away and left them there!”

“We did that,” Clay whispers.

“Blood all over the place!” Finis bends at the waist. “Oh, sick! And you”—he points to the woman, now staring at him wide-eyed, but weeping—“your fucking head all smashed!”

“Go 'way!” she screams. “Go 'way!”

“Me?” Finis hoots in return. “Are you crazy? Doesn't anybody get this?” Gun trained on Carter Clay, he moves to the closer of the cabin's two front windows, and sees that his guess is correct: that blossoming of the cabin's walls and ceilings means a car approaches the house.

“A better audience,” he murmurs. “Your sister, Clay. And the campground guy. God bless their souls.” He laughs. “Let them in, Clay, but don't do anything goofy, you dig?”

When Finis Pruitt starts toward the back of the cabin once more, he does not give much thought to dull Katherine Milhause as he passes by the picnic table. Katherine, however, watches Finis with all the power that she possesses. Like a driver who waits at a busy intersection until she knows exactly how much time she requires to cross, Katherine has readied herself for this moment, and when she lifts Duncan Clay's gun from her lap, she does so with a sure sense that she cannot miss.