Carter Clay (48 page)

Who screams at the firing of the gun?

Cheryl Lynn. Who drops the wheelchair she was removing from the trunk of her car, and now runs through the rain to the cabin.

Where Finis Pruitt chokes on blood and bits of shattered bone.

Carter and Katherine stare as Finis Pruitt crashes into the length of aluminum chimney that makes a crooked connection between woodstove and ceiling, and the chimney collapses, and Pruitt crashes to the floor.

Unmediated surprise: the look on his face. Perhaps the noises he makes contain a message; if so, it is rendered nonsense by the swift spin of death and a mouthful of blood.

“Carter!” Cheryl Lynn is yanking on the door. “Are you okay?”

“I di-n't shoo'
Car-er!
” Katherine protests. She scrambles out from the picnic table and waves the gun toward Finis Pruitt as Cheryl Lynn and Neff Morgan step inside and look about themselves. “I sho' the ba-d guy! But, Car-er”—Katherine points at Carter, who snivels into his hands as he makes his way toward Jersey on the couch—“Car-er's a bad guy, too!”

Cheryl Lynn is too distressed by the scene to recognize the man on the floor as the cowboy from the bowling alley bar. It is all that she can do not to gag as she steps around the dark mess that spreads out from the body and across the pine boards, but Neff Morgan prudently takes the gun from Katherine, and asks, “Who is he?”

Katherine shakes her head. “He tole us Car-er hi' us! It's true! Car-er hi' us! An' lef' us a die.” She rushes at Carter then, and begins to pummel him on the back. “Car'er's the one!”

“It's true,” Carter keens from beneath Katherine's rain of blows, “but, right now, Jersey needs a doctor, Cheryl Lynn.”

Cheryl Lynn's teeth chatter as she steps to the sofa. Her brother looks up at her from where he kneels beside the girl. “See what I done,” he moans. “I'm a monster, ain't I?”

Cheryl Lynn gasps at the sight of the child, the rotting smell. That neck under which Cheryl Lynn immediately slips her arm—Cheryl Lynn wants to cry out at that skinny neck, its heat, but she says only, “We're going to get you fixed up, honey. I got your chair for when you want it, and nobody'll ever take it away again, okay? Right now, though, I'm going to get you to a doctor, okay? 'Cause I know you're not feeling good.”

Whether Jersey merely stirs or actually nods, Cheryl Lynn is not certain, but as she rises with the girl in her arms, Cheryl Lynn says, “Did you see her nod, Carter? She knows we're going to get her help. Did you see?”

When Carter does not respond, Katherine leaves off cuffing Carter's back to say a passionate, “
I
saw.”

“Me, too,” says Neff Morgan, and steps briskly to the front of the cabin to hold open the screen door for Cheryl Lynn. “She knows we're getting her help, Carter.”

“I ha' a shoo' him,” Katherine says as she follows the others to the door. “He wa' ba-d.”

“You should've shot me, too,” Carter says, but Cheryl Lynn hushes him, and, Jersey in her arms, she and Neff Morgan and Katherine move out into the rain, and toward the station wagon—still running in anticipation of the trip to the hospital.

“I'll just leave my car for now,” Cheryl Lynn tells Neff Morgan. “I can ride back here with Jersey, and Katherine and Carter can ride up front with you.”

Neff Morgan nods. “Come on, Carter,” he calls toward the open door of the cabin.

All three adults turn to watch for Carter to come to the door. They imagine him there even before he arrives: a silhouette outlined
by the cabin's light. They do not anticipate, however, that the silhouette will raise a hand and say, “You go on,” then pull the door closed.

Carter! Come out of there! Come on! What're you doing?

Crouching beside the body on the floor. Fishing Finis Pruitt's gun from that sad, rank puddle.

R.E.

“Carter!” It is Cheryl Lynn who calls from under the front window.

“Cheryl Lynn,” he calls back, “take Jersey to the hospital and go.”

“Don't you dare hurt yourself!” Cheryl Lynn yells. She gives a little jounce to the limp bundle in her arms. “Jersey.” She presses her face close to Jersey's face. She pleads, “Help me, Jersey! Katherine! Tell him not to hurt himself!”

And, voice warbling, Katherine calls, “Car-er! Do-n't hur' yourself! Come ou'!” and Neff Morgan, at the back of the house, “Don't do something crazy, man.”

Really, Carter does not want to talk anymore, but he sits back on his haunches, and he looks away from Pruitt, and wets his lips, and calls, “You forgive me, Jersey?”

Jersey? Jersey is lost in the blizzard, her ears so full of snow and high winds that she cannot hear even the shrieks of Cheryl Lynn: “He's going to shoot himself, Jersey! Wake up! Please!” Cheryl Lynn kicks at the cabin door. “She can't hear you, Carter! It's not that she's saying no! It's just she's—asleep!”

“Carter? It was an accident, right?” Neff Morgan calls. “And you believe God forgives all your sins, right?”

Carter looks down at Finis Pruitt, and he nods. That's right. God forgives him. God
has
to forgive him. Like what Jersey told him Katherine had said years before: If there is a God, he
has
to forgive you because He knows He didn't make you or the world quite right.

The cabin's one closet sits off the kitchen, and that is where Carter takes himself, to hide and contain the mess. His foot rustles against a plastic garbage bag when he steps inside, but he kicks the bag further back into the closet as he closes the door, and then there is only the dark, pure dark, and the dark extends out from him, infinite black emptiness, as if there are no walls eight inches or so to either side of him, nothing contains him, he can join that black nothing, pierce the balloon of his brain, let out dark into dark.

He is quite right in believing his mother felt something similar when she set the Colt in her mouth in 1970. The same juddering passed through her. The same taste of saliva reacting to metal. But the gun in Carter's mouth is not the gun Betty Clay used. The gun that Betty Clay used is the one that Neff Morgan now lifts to break the glass at the cabin's back door, while Carter employs the gun that he took away from Finis Pruitt back on Post Road and, later, returned.

There is a world in which, after the dust settles from the above sequence of events, you see a young blond-haired woman—fifteen years old? sixteen?—hard to say as you only see her from behind. At any rate, you see her walking up the stairs of a building that you recognize as Earth Sciences at Arizona University. The young woman has a slight hitch to her step, but this does not prevent her from topping the stairs and heading into the building, proceeding down a dark hall that you also remember: yes, those fish-scale glass doors that transmit a bit of milky light from the offices they conceal. The young woman stops at one of the doors. Knocks. A female voice within says, “Come in,” and the young woman opens the door. In the now-exposed office, a woman—hair drawn into a graying bun at the nape of her neck—sits bent over a desk. She turns, however, and she smiles and she is Professor Katherine Milhause, who stands to say, “Oh, honey! It's you!”

That is not this world. In this world, two women—one middle-aged, one a generation older—sit in molded plastic chairs with metal legs and stare at a hospital bed that holds a girl who is decidedly frail, adolescent.

Katherine. M.B. Jersey.

Sometimes, Cheryl Lynn Clay and Neff Morgan come to sit in the molded plastic chairs, too, and, once, Cheryl Lynn was allowed to bring James and Alfred. Alfred carried a gift for Jersey: a sugar-fogged plastic bag that contained all of the marshmallows he could find in a box of Lucky Charms.

On Jersey's fourth day in the hospital—another wet day—while Jersey is transferred to a gurney and wheeled to a debridement session, Cheryl Lynn and Neff Morgan and the boys drive through the rain to Hendrick's Mortuary.

Many townspeople show up at the mustard-yellow mansion that houses the mortuary. Though most have come to pay honest respects, a few are curiosity seekers, and as such they are disappointed by the simple service—until Duncan Clay arrives, swearing, incoherent, pants unzipped. It is Neff Morgan and Rex Fishbeck who escort Duncan to the wet curbing in front of the funeral parlor and keep him there while he babbles on about Carter and Betty and how he'd like to get a dog—just a little one—but Brent's Rooms don't allow pets.

Eventually—with the rain still coming down—the mourners begin to emerge from the mortuary, and Duncan looks up to ask, “Is it over now?” Then Rex and Maggie escort him to Brent's Rooms, and Cheryl Lynn and the others drive to the cemetery.

After the debridement session, an aide wheels Jersey back to her room. “Your mom and grandma went to the cafeteria,” calls a passing nurse. “They'll be back in a bit.”

Jersey nods. She is exhausted from the debridement session and dull with pain medication. After the aide finally leaves, Jersey stares out the window at the rain. Her room in little Fort Powden General—ground floor, sliding windows, print curtains—it reminds her a bit of Katherine's room at Fair Oaks, but the green light that comes through the rain and the trees outside is like the light that came through the windows of the cabin.

Which was a beautiful light, despite the rest.

“I need to get home as soon as I can,” Jersey tells the doctor when she comes by that evening, and the doctor knows enough of
Jersey's story to say, sure, and she can help make arrangements with the airlines, and so on. “But Jersey”—the doctor strokes Jersey's hair from her forehead in the loveliest, loveliest way—“you have to understand, Jersey: even there, you're going to need at least six weeks more in the hospital.”

M.B., Katherine, and Cheryl Lynn are in the room, and, impulsively, Cheryl Lynn asks, “So why not stay in Fort Powden till you're out for good, Jersey?” and M.B., picking dead blooms off a cyclamen she brought the girl, looks up to pipe, “Or go back to Florida? We got good hospitals in Florida.”

Jersey does not scream at M.B., but the look on her face makes M.B. say an immediate, “Okay, okay, we're going to Arizona,” and Cheryl Lynn adds, “Right, 'cause she wants to get home.”

Cheryl Lynn is all for promoting harmony between M.B. and Jersey and Katherine, and when M.B. steps out into the hall with the doctor, Cheryl Lynn draws close to Jersey's bed to whisper, ‘Your grandma—she cried and cried when she found out you were sick and Carter had you and your mom in that awful place. She feels so bad about things.”

In the corner of the room, Katherine looks up from reading a tattered lady's magazine she found somewhere or other. “I sor-ry, too, Jers,” she says.

“I know, Mom.” Jersey smiles at Cheryl Lynn. She understands that part of the reason that Cheryl Lynn wants to promote peace among M.B. and Katherine and Jersey is that Cheryl Lynn also wants Jersey to forgive her brother.

“I gla' we go-ing Ar-zona,” Katherine says. She comes up on the side of the bed opposite Cheryl Lynn, and she pats Jersey's foot. “And you ge' we-ll there, o-kay?”

Jersey squeezes Katherine's hand. Then she squeezes Cheryl Lynn's hand, too, because Cheryl Lynn has just lost her brother, after all, and surely the way Cheryl Lynn felt about that little brother is a bit like the way that Jersey herself felt about the pre-accident Katherine: for so long, it seemed to Jersey as if the pre-accident Katherine were inside, waiting to get out. Now she
understands that
this
is the mom she has, and even if this mom does keep getting better, she will never actually be the old mom again. She will be this mom, getting a little better.

You can hope, but not too much.

On the day that Carter Clay is buried, the body of Finis Pruitt remains in the hospital morgue, unidentified. Perhaps Finis Pruitt would have been happy to know that he remained anonymous after death as well as before. For a time, the police thought—on the basis of credit cards found on his body—that they dealt with a man named either Alitz or Milhause. This error, however, was cleared up soon enough.

Once upon a time, there was a person who would have been sad to know that Finis Pruitt—in the guise of R.E.—was dead, but that person was Carter Clay. No one at all will mourn Finis Pruitt. In the years that she will live beyond Finis's death, his mother—never knowing what became of her son—will occasionally point to his photo among the many on her walls. She will tell visitors that she cannot remember the name of the profession of that brainy, long-absent boy, but will readily agree to sibilant suggestions ranging from statistician to therapist, when what she really seeks is the word Finis himself once gave to her, and pronounced with a parody of swishy delight:
thespian.

Mother, I want to be a thespian!

The paradox of Finis's ambition to play the role of Everyman: he believed himself superior to every audience.

And what is the difference between ambition and hope?

How much hope does a person need to stay in his own skin in the world? What's the deadline for its arrival when you are suffering?

If you agree that Carter Clay
deserved
to suffer for his actions, could he hope to be redeemed by such suffering? Especially when—in his suffering—he made Jersey's undeserved
suffering so much greater. Does her suffering, then, cancel out his possible redemption? And does Jersey, as an innocent party, earn something beyond redemption?

What would that be? Glory?

Jersey certainly does not think so. But then Jersey does not think in these terms at all.

The truth is, Jersey likes Carter Clay
more
once she knows that he was the driver. Which is not to say she would have welcomed him into her life had she known before. But it is as she told Carter once; at a distance, the driver is bearable, and, as it turns out, even pitiable. Also—she feels grateful that she now knows how she and her mother fit into Carter Clay's story, and how he fit into theirs.

It is true, any person who looks at Jersey might guess that she has a more complicated story than average simply by virtue of the fact that Jersey rides while most of us walk. Jersey, however, is and will remain a private person. Unlike M.B., with her story of the Ferris wheel, Jersey will tell the story of Carter Clay to only a few people (a college roommate, two lovers, her own children when they are grown). After all, she tells herself, there are many events and thoughts that have shaped her life, and she has no intention of letting Carter Clay be the defining one.

Enough that he continues to take an occasional role in her dreams. Enough that he now exists in that world of possible ghosts that can be attached to a laugh in a hallway or a whistle outside a window that makes her raise her head, and listen for the tune.