Carter Clay (6 page)

R.E. turned his head to one side, listening, then hunkered down beside the cart. “You tell me, Clay,” he muttered, “you tell me.” From the cart's bottom shelf, he began to yank all manner of plastic bags, shoe boxes filled with pens and pencils, packets of restaurant ketchup and wooden clothespins, egg cartons, a bundle of Post-It notes, gloves, several Wonder Bread bags filled with bundles of newspaper clippings, audiocassettes. A Tootsie's Bread bag contained three books:
The Birth of Tragedy, A Christmas Carol
, and
The Analects of Confucius.
Here were two packets of queen-size panty hose crushed against several small Styrofoam buckets of instant oriental noodles and something that appeared
to Carter to be the pressure mechanism designed to keep a screen door from slamming.

Without looking up, R.E. handed Carter a record album that Carter recognized immediately: the Electric Prunes. “Your favorite, right?” R.E. whispered.

Carter was touched. “I told you that?”

“Ha!” R.E. made a face that looked to Carter almost like a face of disgust, but then R.E. continued in a soft rush, “‘I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night'! The anthem of your salad days, man! Oriental whirligigs, crashing drums, lyrics delivered with hazardous glottal stops, drunken longing, and fury!” A fleck of spit bounced on R.E.'s tattered lip. “And you were in love with—let's see, some sweet thing with the limply lovely long blond hair of those distant days?”

“Amazing!” The name of the girl R.E. referred to eluded Carter for a moment—a lawyer's daughter.
Becky Pattschull.
He could remember entering her house for the first time. An enormous dove-gray house cantilevered over the bluffs of Fort Powden. Before he had entered that house, Carter had assumed all houses smelled like pulp from the paper mill where his own and all of his friends' fathers worked. A miracle that Becky Pattschull had gone out with Carter at all. Of course, it didn't last. Nevertheless, Carter had felt irreparably damaged by the fact that it didn't last; in an effort to give the girl a small taste of such damage, he had poured a five-pound bag of C and H sugar into the gas tank of the baby-blue Mustang coupe she received for her sixteenth birthday.

“So you want it or not, Clay?”

Carter turned the album over in his hands. Its cardboard cover gaped in a way that suggested the record within was impossibly warped. Who knew? Perhaps it was Carter's own long-lost copy of the album? While Carter had been in the service, his mother had finally managed to remove herself from the planet. As a response—in one of those drunken rages that had surely fanned Betty Carter's desire to die—Carter's father, Duncan, tossed every item from their little rental house onto the broken curb, alongside a large sign that read FREE! ALL MY WORLDLY GOODS!

In fact, not all of those goods had belonged to Duncan Clay. The heap included the family furniture, cigarette-burned and battle-scarred though it was; the rosebud dishes Betty Clay had received from her own mother and would surely have left to Cheryl Lynn; an old RCA Victor TV; the childhood dolls that Cheryl Lynn had meant to save for
her
children; a little suitcase record player and all of Carter and Cheryl Lynn's record albums.

A part of the group photo on the cover of R.E.'s album was missing—torn away by a piece of tape or a large price tag, but enough remained that Carter marveled over the appearance of the band members: swags of bangs, bad skin, absurdly skinny legs in striped trousers. And he had wanted to look like them, once upon a time!

Out of a sense of charity, Carter asked his old friend, “How much you want for it, R.E.? I mean, I don't have a record player, but—”

R.E. looked up from fiddling with the wheels of the grocery cart and made a face. “It's a
present
, man. Jesus. You want me to get down on my knees and beg you to take it? And if you're not going to drink that rub-a-dub, pass it here.”

“Well, thanks, R.E. You know?” After another moment's hesitation, Carter unscrewed the cap on the rub-a-dub. An eye-watering smell. He set his tongue as a dam across the lip, tipped the bottle, pretended to drink. Maybe taking the Demerol had been stupid, but at least he was not going to
drink.

“Now you're talking, man!” R.E. grabbed the bottle and raised it for a hit. “Okay! And, hey, you got the dough for something better than this shit, we can get properly fucked up! Have a high time while you haul me and my shit down to Solana in your van.”

“Oh,” Carter said. For a moment, the world looked a little too green. Things were bubbling away from him. Yes, he still held onto some notion that he should not buy alcohol, but even this notion was shrinking to a notion that he should not be
seen
buying alcohol. He needed to buy some time. He asked, “How'd you know I had a van, R.E.?”

“Hey, Clay”—R.E. grinned, revealing the unfamiliar and unnerving gaps of gum and tongue once more—“you went to Recovery House, man, not Witness Protection!”

Carter tried to laugh. “Well, it's over by the 7–11.”

“All right!” R.E. began to work the shopping cart out through the hedge. “Good place to buy us a bottle, too!”

How about I just give you a ride?
This was what Carter wanted to say, but how could he, without appearing to insult or deny R.E.? Well, he could not, and so he found himself taking out his wallet and handing R.E. two ten-dollar bills. “Here.” He looked back into the wallet, stalling. “You go pick out what you like. I'll catch up with you in a second.”

R.E. hawked and spit on the alley's hot dust but did not move, and, finally, Carter had no choice but to look up again.

“You ashamed to be seen with me and my cart?” R.E. asked with a grin. He sounded as if he were teasing, but Carter felt guilty all the same, and so he started off down the alley, saying, “Hey, I'm coming, man. I'll even wait with your damned cart while you go in and pick us out something good.”

In the shade of a clump of oleanders, while he waited for R.E.'s return, Carter gave the shopping cart little pushes and pulls, back and forth, as if it were a stroller that held somebody's baby.

“Hush-a-bye,” he crooned. Then laughed, and crooned some more, “Something something pretty horses.”

In the swirl of baseball cap and flannel shirt and plastic bags heaped on top of the cart, the Florida sunlight reflected off a disk of shiny white: the very top of the white cap on R.E.'s bottle of rub-a-dub. A little white cap with tiny grooves all around to make the cap easier for fingers to grip, turn, and remove. That cap—Carter had a notion about that cap that made him smile; that cap covered an entrance to a hidden place as large and wonderful as the cave made famous in
Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves
was dear to the heart of Carter, who remembered, as a boy, watching on his family's new television Sal Mineo in the role of the poor woodcutter who gains
entrance to the treasure cave of the Forty Thieves by learning the magical phrase “Open, Sesame.” The thrill of the cave opening upon shining urns! Trunks overflowing with gold coins! King-size heaps of precious lamps! Casks of gemstones fracturing the light! (Mistaking the realities of stage sets for a failure of story, Duncan Clay had scoffed from his big vinyl chair, “What do you bet that jewelry ain't real, and they got lumber or hay bales propping all that other stuff up too?”)

“Open, Sesame.” Carter—now dappled gold and mauve by the sun coming through the oleanders—laughed at the funny phrase, and, really, since he had already received the Demerol from the doctor, who could hold it against him if, today, he took a sip of the rub-a-dub? And wouldn't taking a real sip of rub-a-dub correct what had been, in fact, a kind of lie told to his old buddy R.E.? If anything, Carter's affection for R.E. had grown since he had last seen the man. Okay, maybe they could not spend a lot of time together. Okay, maybe that would be unwise. But what kind of shit was he to lie to a fellow vet about something as stupid as a swig of rub-a-dub?

Carter set the fingers of his good hand around the neck of the bottle and pulled it from the folds of blankets. A noise followed the bottie's removal—a rustle, a skitter. Carter started at the sound, but then a mockingbird flew out from the nearby oleanders and Carter assumed that his lousy hearing had tricked him about the noise and its location.

It was not until after Carter and R.E. roared down Post Road—drunk, drunk, drunk, the Who singing “Magic Bus”—and one wheel of Carter's van went off the berm, and then two, and R.E.'s shopping cart slammed into the wall of the van and tipped over; it was not until then that there was proof that the sound Carter had heard in the alley had indeed come from the cart: it was the sound of a pet ferret belonging to R.E.

After the cart tipped—enraged, one paw crushed—the ferret, Nietzsche, managed to scamper across the van floor and up the big body of Carter, who was, by then, too blotto and numb
and busy trying to steer the van back onto the road to notice the animal until it took his earlobe between its sharp, sharp teeth.

It was the ferret that Carter was battling when the family turned up in front of his van. A nightmare of boom, and boom, boom.

That accident—it was blood spilled and damage done to tissue and bone and lives changed forever. Worlds of
hurt
, hurting.

But it is necessary to ask: Is there a difference in your experience of this horrible event if you proceed from
here
, rather than some later
there
, with the knowledge—still unavailable to Carter Clay—that his old friend R.E. had come to Sabine that August morning with the express intention of killing Clay? That, in fact, it was R.E. (
né
Finis Pruitt) who had done his best—one year ago—to stab Clay to death in Howell Park?

Also, consider: how much will you make of the fact that the unwillingness of Joe Alitz to ask directions placed his family in the path of a man, Carter Clay, who was unwilling to refuse the chemicals that would contribute to his driving his van into Joe Alitz's family?

Unlike R.E., neither Carter nor Joe meant to do evil, or even ill. Of course, neither could be strictly said to have been doing
his best
—if his best was something over which either man truly had control. And granting that Joe's being hit by a drunk driver as he stood, lost, on Post Road is even more fortuitous than, say, Joe's being hit by a driver to whom he had “flipped the bird.” And that refusing to ask for directions falls into a different category of failings from driving while drunk.

The preceding considerations, of course, did not occur to the first motorist to happen upon the accident scene. She—having gone through a life in which, at first glance, she often mistook roadside garbage (seed bag, sweatshirt, tarp flown from a camper's roof) for injured human or pet—this time mistook actual bodies for rills of spilled industrial rags.

By then, almost half an hour had passed since Carter Clay's van hit the family.

Immediately following the accident, when Carter Clay brought the van to a stop, R.E.—frantic, his plans for killing Clay falling apart before his eyes—R.E. began to scream, “Drive! Get us out of here, fool!”

But Carter Clay could not stop himself from bursting out of the door of the van, batting off the ferret as he ran back toward the bodies in the road. He screamed and flailed his arms about—

Someone else screamed, too, but then that strand of sound disappeared and there was only the thunder of radio preaching entangled with “Magic Bus”—

“Get back in the van!” R.E. yelled. “You're hurt, man! Your head's bleeding! Come on! We got to get out of here!”

R.E. had recaptured the furious Nietzsche by the time he drew even with Carter and the first victim. R.E. struggled to hold the ferret with one hand while trying to pull Carter toward the van with the other.

“He's dead, man! Come on!”

With a moan, Carter ran to the next victim. He knew such things could happen to a human being, of course—he had seen bodies transformed into trash again and again during the war—still, Post Road tipped when he looked at what he had wrought on that sunny day. His knees buckled, and he grabbed at the roof of the blue sedan where its door stood open to the backseat.

“Jo-nah was afraid to do God's bidding,” clamored the sedan's radio, “now wasn't he, friends? Jo-nah tried to run from the task given him, but he could not hide!”

“Where's the other one?” Carter wailed. Boom, boom, boom. Three, he knew for certain. His knees hit the metal rim of the sedan's threshold. Horror at his deed had set the world ablaze. The sedan's backseat and its contents glowed: radiant hairbrush, lady's purse, colored pencils, army surplus knapsack with a homemade maze decorating its green canvas flap.
JERSEY ALITZ
: the name written in the center of that maze.

R.E. used his free hand to reach past Carter to grab the lady's purse from the spot where it sat on the car floor.

“Put that back!” Carter wailed. “We got to look—I think there's another one!”

Carter started down the bank of the ditch. Had he taken a few steps more, he would have found Jersey Alitz, who lay in a tall stand of cattails, but something struck his shoulder then—hard enough that he turned.

R.E. In one hand, R.E. held the twisting ferret; in the other, a gun with which he motioned wildly toward the van. “Move it, Clay!” he shouted—ferret dangling, purse swinging. “Get back in the van!”

Carter stared at the gun, and what he felt just then was not so much fear of the gun as anger that someone asked him to put up with greed and impatience at this nightmare moment, and the blow that Carter delivered to the jaw of the astonished R.E. pumped straight out of Carter's heart, and it made R.E. crumple, contract like a concertina.

Carter moaned and rubbed his hand and sank down on his haunches while the ferret slunk off across the road and disappeared.

For a time, then, time stopped for Carter on Post Road. To keep from seeing the woman beside him—she looked as if she had shot herself in the head with that gun that now lay between herself and R.E.—to keep from seeing her, Carter stared at the gun. A Colt .45. The gun Carter knew best in all the world, and not just because the .45 had been standard issue in Vietnam. No. Carter's father, Duncan Clay, had brought home a Colt .45 from World War II. He always kept it sandwiched between his T-shirts
in his underwear drawer. “Why didn't you use my gun?” Duncan Clay had demanded of Carter's mother after her penultimate suicide attempt. “You wouldn't be whining around if you ever thought to use something that'd get the job done!”

With the tip of R.E.'s gun's barrel, Carter pulled the purse off R.E.'s arm and returned it to the backseat of the sedan.

Impossible to fit the long-barreled Colt into the pocket of his pants. There was blood on his shirt and pants, but that was his own blood, from his forehead. That blood did not matter.

The moment he finished thinking this thought, a second thought occurred to him: he should have
made
R.E. shoot him. Administer immediate justice.

“R.E.” In his own ears, Carter's voice was strange, small and trembling, an echo. “Hey, buddy! Wake up!”

R.E.'s eyeballs rolled behind their lids, but the lids did not open.

Carter pulled his sticky shirt away from his chest in order to drop the big gun down the shirt's open neck. He did not hear the song that played on the van's cassette—“My Generation”—or any other noise. He looked around—for a hook to draw him up into the white-bright sky? But everything was as it was, ruined, and he saw his van hit these ruined people again (boom, boom, boom), and, then, a new terror overtook him. The woman on the ground was no longer just his victim—she was evidence, and so was the man back further down the road.

“Hey, man,” he murmured as he hauled R.E. up from the ground and slung him over his shoulder and hustled toward the music-blaring van. “You're going to be okay, man,” he said. And it all felt reassuringly familiar. The rescue of a downed man from the field.

Careful, careful, Carter placed R.E. upon the softest of the litter that had spilled from the shopping cart and onto the van's ribbed floor; then, with an eye on the road, he pulled a flannel shirt from the litter and wrapped it around his own bleeding head.

Once, when Carter's mother had cried over some meanness done by Carter's drunken father, father turned to son to say, “
I
only cry when I'm killing someone.” Carter was nine or ten at the time. He took his father's words as instruction, as he was, no doubt, meant to do. Since the war, Carter had not cried. Now, crying, shuddering, he climbed behind the wheel of the van and he drove.