Carter Clay (5 page)

For fear his face might give him away, Carter covered his mouth with his good hand and tried to look merely curious, sociable. Which was not easy. In Carter's good ear,
Demerol
was a hymn so lovely its pure vibrations ignited and burned to ash the
message that Carter carried with him from the poster in the front hall of Recovery House:

NO PAINKILLERS, DIET PILLS (or other stimulants),
SLEEP AIDS, TRANQUILIZERS, COUGH SYRUPS,
MOUTHWASH, and/or MUSCLE RELAXANTS.
What does
no
mean?
NO MEANS NO.

Once the smoke from his little fire cleared, Carter reflected—heart thumping—that surely, if it was normal for a doctor to prescribe a shot, it was normal to take it; and when the nurse returned with the syringe held up before her like a holy candle, and the doctor told Carter to lie back for a minute, Carter did not allow himself to think of the chip ceremony of the night before or how, while everyone else clapped, Earla R. had hugged him to her old-lady breasts—big and loose as feather pillows—and whispered, “Think,” and then as she released him, “A word to the wise is sufficient.”

“Man”—the ponytailed doctor raised Carter's chart to his forehead in merry farewell salute—“man, your hand may still hurt, but you ain't gonna give a damn!”

Blessings. By the time that Carter got his shirt on, and spoke with the woman handling the paperwork, and stepped out into the waiting room, he felt suffused with blessings. Best of all, he was quite certain that those blessings had nothing to do with the Demerol. They had to do with the friendly doctor and the kind nurse and the
world.
He smiled at the fish in the aquarium who wafted by the bubbling deep-sea diver and his trunk of treasure. Yes. The world gave off blessings at every moment, and Carter had simply been stupid not to have noticed this before.
This
was what the old-timers at AA spoke of!
Life
was a blessing, damn it! Life was great! People were great!

The receptionist looked up from her desk. When Carter lifted his bandaged hand in a salute that was a close copy of the salute of the doctor, she grinned and shook her head as if she knew Carter well—as if he were a familiar, lovable troublemaker.
“You take care of yourself now, Mr. Clay,” she said, “and don't think you have to be bleeding all over the place to come by for a visit!”

Outside, the bright blue day blazed, but the heat did not bother Carter. Rather, it was bracing, a sweet stimulation of his cells, and so he stopped at the top of the clinic steps and breathed and felt privileged to give his attention to the world.

91
°, read the digital marquee on the bank across the street.
11:38 a.m.

He tried to whistle—“Take Five” was on his mind—but his mouth proved too dry, and so he looked down Sabine's main street, Crown Street, a quiet place, with roadway and buildings bleached pale as soda crackers in the midday sun. One block up and on the corner sat the Accordion Cafe. Closer to the clinic: Bilby's Drug, Marty's Photo Studio, a 7–11, Hasseloff's Florist—where, just then, a small boy and his mother struggled to raise an uncooperative banner of neon-orange paper.

Should he help them? Carter wondered.

He should have helped them. Helping them, he would have had to turn his back to the street. With his back to the street, he would perhaps have been missed by that desiccated creature who now tacked this way and that down Crown Street, like some old Christmas tree, needles gone, meant for the trashman but carried off, instead, by a stiff breeze.

By nature, Carter was a slow man. The Demerol made him slower. While he considered whether to offer the boy and woman help, he remained at the top of the clinic steps. While he tried to make out the message obscured by the drooping folds in the orange banner—
ZEN RED OSS
$99—the odd creature tacked nearer to hand, and then he stopped at the base of the stairs, and he called out, “Clay! Jesus Christ, you're not just
alive
, man, you're getting a gut on you!”

Carter looked down the steps to the little man. Something familiar about those large, pointy ears, that mossy sail of a windbreaker. Oh! Carter's heart expanded in pleasure and pity when he realized that the battered wreck before him was his old pal
from Howell Park, Private Rear End, or, as Carter felt it more polite to call the man, R.E.

Half an hour before, Carter—perhaps—would have heeded his Recovery House counselor's warning: avoid buddies from your bad old days, fellow veterans or not. Now, however, Carter was all aglow with excellent pharmaceuticals, and his good sense stepped right out of the way of his much more gratifying twinges of sweet friendship and concern:
Who the hell had made such a mess of his old friend R.E.?

“Hey, bro,” Carter called—doing his best to appear unaware of R.E.'s lost teeth and skewed nose—“what you doing in Sabine?”

R.E. grinned. “I heard you were straight, man, so I came as fast as I could!”

Laughing, drifting, chubby clouds of sweetness ringing his wrists and ankles, Carter came down the steps. He had always been flattered that someone as smart as R.E. had befriended someone as uneducated as himself.

“Man”—R.E. extended his hand for a shake—“Clay, I know I fucked up, man, not coming to see you at the VA! You don't have to tell me! I did get my ass over there finally, but they'd moved you, man!” He hesitated, then said in a lower voice, “And, damn, it was probably 'cause of me—you taking my part, man—that's probably why that fuck stuck you, you know? Don't think I haven't thought about that, man. Plenty of times.”

Carter rubbed his hand across his cottony mouth and grinned and tried to think of what his counselor had said once:
Carter, getting stabbed may have been the best thing that could have happened to you! Some of us have to get stabbed or shot before we get the message that it's time to get our shit together!
Just now, however, Carter could come up with only, “Hey, man, you're like a brother to me.”

“Man”—R.E. looked off down the street—“I thought I'd lost track of you for good, but then I met this guy—Hayes? He said you guys had lived at some halfway house together, and he'd heard you'd landed over here.” R.E. made a doubtful face, then
mimicked working a spatula on a grill, giving a pancake or a burger a flip. “
Cooking
, man?”

“Hayes! Sure! From Recovery House!” Carter smiled and ran a dreamy hand back and forth across the top of his head. His muscles contained little silver streams. He imagined his heart: cool and gaily colored as those gel-filled pacifiers that dark-eyed Bonnie Drabnek used to keep on ice for her babies.

“Man, you should have let your old buddies know where you'd gone, Clay!”

Carter blinked at this reminder that he was, in fact, not supposed to be with old buddies at all. Still, he would have cut off the finger he'd just had repaired rather than have R.E. imagine that he, Carter Clay, now believed himself somehow superior to an old friend; and, just to make certain R.E. understood that this was
not
the case, Carter added a self-depreciating, “I'd hoped to be back in Washington by now, but so far I ain't saved up enough for a Port-a-Shed, let alone a cabin!”

Disappointing to Carter: R.E.'s failure to laugh at his little joke. The spring before last, Carter and R.E. had sometimes slept in a Port-a-Shed in the backyard of an Iowa couple who came to Sarasota only during the winter months. Carter had always appreciated the fact that R.E. characterized their Port-a-Shed nights as “goofing,” something funny, as opposed to desperate.

“So, how about Louie and them guys, R.E.? How're they doing?”

R.E. bobbed his head up and down. Chewed his crumpled lower lip. “You haven't seen them, huh? Well, they were good, man, last time I saw them. Real good.” R.E. stretched his arms out in front of himself and yawned. “It's been a while, though.” He entwined his fingers. “I'm not hanging in Sarasota these days.” Pushed the entwined fingers outward with a quick crack of the knuckles. “But, hey”—he motioned for Carter to follow him up the street—“come on, man. I got a present for you. You were out of it when we first visited you at the hospital in Sarasota, but I got this for you—a get-well present—before I knew they were going to move you up to the VA in Tampa.”

Carter hesitated. Across the way, the woman and boy in front of the florist's shop had succeeded in hooking one end of their banner over an old flag standard. Now they tossed the banner's other end at what seemed to be sheer brick—as if they hoped the banner might just stick to the building of its own accord.

Schirmer, B. Paige, G.
Names written in marker, in different handwriting, on the heels of R.E.'s mismatched running shoes.

It was not Carter's nature to speculate upon what sort of mess his old friend had got himself into, but he understood that something had happened. R.E. had been the one who shamed the rest of the Howell Park vets by doing five hundred sit-ups each day. Push-ups. Pull-ups. R.E. had been the smartest of them, and the best storyteller. Though to Carter's way of thinking, too many of R.E.'s tales involved the worst sort of details of the war (heads on spikes and dead babies and rapes, blood spouting from a bullet to the brain like water from a drinking fountain), Carter also found irresistible R.E.'s praise of the man who was a soldier as opposed to a scholar—

“Wait up!” As he drew abreast of his friend, Carter lowered his voice to say, “I really am straight, R.E.”

R.E. gave Carter an appraising look. “Could have fooled me,” he said, then laughed and started down an overgrown alley.

Carter knew his Recovery House counselor would say not to follow R.E.

Carter had read this highlighted paragraph from page 45 of
Moby-Dick.
Also: Carter received a clear signal of warning from the alley, a jungly corridor in which Cape honeysuckle engulfed the telephone poles and wires, and large dogs barked and leaped up against a length of chain-link fence that twanged with the dogs'
weight, and framed in metallic diamonds the flash of canine eyes and teeth.

Still, when R.E. disappeared through some invisible break in a tall hedge of privet, Carter felt as he had when he was a kid and he witnessed a friend's dangerous tricks: he
had
to duplicate the trick, hurl himself along, or be lost, and so he called in a low voice, “Hey, R.E. Where'd you go?”

A hand emerged from the privet to give Carter a yank. Twigs from the hedge poked and scratched Carter's face, his neck. He found himself in a shady slot between the hedge and the back of a garage the color of orange sherbet. A crammed-full Winn-Dixie shopping cart sat by the garage's back wall, and Carter was just taking this all in, when a bug—some big ball of black and buzz—caromed off his eyebrow. “Rh!” he said, and leaped to one side, setting the logs of a tumbledown woodpile to knocking one against the other.

“Quiet!” R.E. hissed. “Somebody's in the garage, man!”

R.E.'s gravity—the way he stood stock-still, wide-eyed, absolutely
furious
—struck Carter as goofy, and he had to cover his mouth and turn away.

A surprise: he recognized that stitchery on a dark fold of cloth in the Winn-Dixie cart. In the past, it was a point of honor with Carter and R.E. that they did not push carts, but Carter knew that stitchery to be part of the insignia on R.E.'s prized Yankees cap, and so he was not startled when R.E.—after first making a kid's “zip your mouth” gesture—pulled a plastic bottle from the cart and tossed the bottle to Carter.

Whose bad hand missed the catch.

“Sorry,” Carter mouthed as he stooped to retrieve the bottle from the dirt. Rubbing alcohol. He knew even before he read the label. The party-time tint of the contents suggested that its cut was orange soda. Rub-a-dub. Commandant of the skid row dream, gastric distress, chills and spills. Carter had drunk rub-a-dub several times in his own hazy past but never knew R.E. to do so. Carter had always considered R.E. too smart for that. A rub-a-dub drunk was a bad trade; turning over a piece of today's misery for a bigger chunk of tomorrow's. Carter used to bracket
his own rub-a-dub drunks much the way he had bracketed certain memories: his father raining kicks and blows upon the family; his mother's attempts to kill herself; the moment when Tim Kramer turned to smile at Carter and the barrel of Tim's M–16 caught the trip wire that blew him into thousands of pieces, a number of which penetrated Carter's ear (a fact so sad and shameful—the terrible intimacy of it—that Carter's reports regarding his subsequent hearing loss were purposefully vague). There was worse from the war. Coming upon a trio of men he
knew
—men he had to live with afterward—and what was left of the girl those men had raped, then finished off with a flare up the vagina—

A door slammed. “I think they went in the house,” Carter whispered to R.E.

“Sh!” R.E. extracted what appeared to be a piece of bread from one of his windbreaker's enormous pockets. He poked it through the shopping cart's gridwork sides—was he saving scraps of food?—then he pointed, frowning, at the bottle of rub-a-dub, still unopened in Carter's hand. “What's with you, man?” he hissed. “You gotten too good for rub-a-dub?”

Little coins of sunshine danced through the privet and onto Carter's shoulders. He could not recall the last time that the dappling of light and shadow on his skin had felt so fine, so—full of the precise meaning that life was good. Still, R.E.'s words hurt Carter. Carter was no snob, and he never had been, and so he said, “Hey, man, when was I ever too good for anything?”