Carter Clay

For Jesse and Nora
,

forever and ever

One cannot be a man in a generalized sort of way.

—T
HE
F
AITH OF THE
C
HURCH

This is before the accident. No one is dead yet. Blood circulates just as it should, two ounces per pump of the heart. Watch the man who stands on this piece of Florida roadside. Watch for the scarcely visible tick in that vulnerable inch of neck just inside the open collar of his blue shirt. You know the location of that inch of neck—his neck, our necks—the spot to which hands might fly at an unexpected noise or tap on the shoulder.

The man is lost, and so he scowls a little as he stares out at the Florida grasslands and the grand steers that feed there. Aberdeen Angus. Beef cattle. Black. Hornless.

If you do not believe in accidents, if you hold everyone responsible for everything, then the events that follow will appear tidier but more hideous. God is let off the hook then, yes?—if, after all, God is to be allowed? Some sort of God? Perhaps responsible for no more than these props, this setting?

What a white, white ache of sky! Beneath it, the primary-green grasslands go to chartreuse as the man's view/our view contracts, and we move closer, closer still to the ditch at his feet. The ditch—a halvah swirl of sand and broken shells—has been quite recently ripped open by the yellow earthmoving equipment parked on its banks. Ancient monsters, dinosaurs; of course, that is what the pieces of equipment resemble, snouts down, as if the great beasts feed. But this is Florida, 1993. Any sediment on
which a dinosaur might once have walked now lies buried thousands and thousands of feet beneath our man.

Joseph Alitz. Professor. Fifty-seven years old. Paleontologist at a respected southwestern institution. Dr. Alitz. Basically a good man. Joe. Caught just now in this sour moment of his life.

On his head, Joe wears a red canvas hat, its brim turned up like that on the hat of a sailor. The hat belongs to his widowed mother-in-law, Marybelle Milhause, aka M.B., who is the reason for Joe's trip to Florida. Taken together with Joe's shoulder-length hair and careful beard, M.B.'s red hat gives Joe a somewhat fantastical look. He might be the king of diamonds in the deck of cards that—just now, back at her pink stucco condominium—M.B. lays down in one of her perpetual games of solitaire.
Sip, sip, sip
go the cards as M.B. pulls a trio from the pile in her hand, gives the top card a steely inspection through the enormous designer eyeglasses that transform her otherwise human face into the mug of Jiminy Cricket.

How many miles is it to M.B.'s retirement condo from the roadside where Joe stands? Suppose Joe could calculate the distance. Would it help him find his way back?

No. Knowledge of distance is no substitute for direction. Uselessly, Joe scans the useless horizon, then glances to his left. There, just a few feet away, stand his adolescent daughter and his wife—the latter, Katherine Milhause, Joe's former student, now a paleontologist in her own right. Mother and daughter share a pair of binoculars through which they study certain large birds that weave in and out between the feet of the Angus.

Perhaps it would be better—more accurate—to say that Katherine is the reason for the Florida trip: a visit to her mother. Without doubt, Katherine is the reason for the Christian radio program that booms through the open door of the family's rental car:

“Devil's bigger than you, friends, and you all know what happens when you get in a fistfight with a fellow what's bigger than you, now, don't you? You get beat up! That's right! You get the stuffing knocked out of you, now, don't you?”

Earlier in the afternoon, after tuning the radio to this particular program, Katherine gave Joe a light punch in the shoulder and
grinned. Back then, broccoli-green trees still pressed close to the road, and the rental car took the family past the occasional rickety tricks of wood and tar paper that certain Floridians had no choice but to call home. Back then, Joe had not yet admitted that the family had driven down the wrong road, and Katherine was laughing about the radio show, and saying, “One thing you have to admit about these shows, Joe; they may parade self-righteousness as humility, but at least they talk about things of consequence!” At the time, poor Joe was preoccupied with finding signs of their location and did not point out that Katherine made much ado about covering her ears whenever M.B. listened to the very same program back at the pink condominium. Poor Joe did not know then—he will never know—that when he left Arles' Mineral Springs, he took the wrong turn. Yes, at the time that the poodle-faced clerk at Arles' Mineral Springs gave Joe directions, she was mentally reviewing the contents of the patio's vending machine—which chips should she buy on her break?—and so, with no malice intended, the clerk told Joe
left
when she should have said
right.

To clarify Joe's appearance, let us add that as he stands on the Florida roadside his present worries make him appear a worn king of diamonds. A face card once stashed in a back pocket against an emergency, then forgotten and sent through the washer, and the dryer, too.

Joe could have stopped a half an hour ago to ask directions at the occasional store or café they passed. He has known for at least that long that they travel the wrong road. But Joe is a man who prefers to solve his own problems.

Now, as he stands on the shoulder of the road—Post Road, its name, though Joe does not know this—Joe wrestles open a map purchased that morning at the Exxon station in Bradenton. The crack and explosion of crisp paper drive his wife and daughter back a step. A bright, bright yellow map. On certain panels it holds colorful graphs and drawings and photos: Ponce de Leon and the Fountain of Youth; sprays of orange blossoms; distances from here to there; portrait of the state's smiling governor who, owing to the printer's poor color-processing, appears to have just quaffed a mug of clotted blood.

Perhaps it would be more pleasant to focus on the birds that Katherine Milhause inspects through the binoculars?

“Are they some kind of vulture?” asks her daughter.

Katherine laughs kindly. Though she wears a soft bun, long skirt, silver hoops in her ears, she bears a superficial resemblance to her husband. Sinewy forearms, sun-bleached hair, skin flecked like granite (pink, ocher, white) from a working life often spent out-of-doors. “Not
vultures
, sweetie,” Katherine tells the girl, “cattle egrets.” Then flips open the bird book in her hand to Vultures, and explains that vultures would surely be found as handsome as eagles but for their lack of head feathers. Small, mean, an infected red; that is, indeed, how the featherless heads of the turkey vultures appear in Katherine's bird book.

“Lack of feathers protects them,” Katherine explains. She and Joe are forever offering their daughter—Jersey, age twelve, long hair the color of unsalted butter—information about the natural world. Hoping that a store of such delights will inoculate her against life's ruder aspects. It may be, of course, that it is these heaps of information that have caused that slight rounding of the girl's shoulders. Or perhaps she is merely self-conscious about her height, the jutting knees and elbows of adolescence. She bites her nails. See how her poor fingertips resemble baby mice.

“Being featherless makes their heads less accommodating hosts to the parasites on carrion, you see?” Katherine explains.

Katherine cannot know, of course not, that later in the day several vultures
will
arrive in just this spot, circling down in their mossy undertakers' coats. When the ambulances finally arrive—summoned by a sobbing caller who, ironically, will find the first available telephone at Arles' Mineral Springs—a vulture identical to the one in Katherine's book will be engaged in an exploratory stroll across poor Joe's back. Distraught, the lead ambulance driver will run toward the bird and scream, “Get off, you fuck!” as the great wings rise with a horrible soft sucking flap.
“Get!”

Now, however, the landscape is quiet. The cattle egrets feed on bugs roused by the movements of the steers. They dart so close to the ponderous hooves that Katherine calls, “Look out, birds!”—then laughs at herself.

“Did I ever tell you about playing ‘Castro,' Joe?” Katherine erects a smile meant to show Joe that she does not worry over their being lost. Twice in the last twenty minutes—three times?—she has assured him in a wife's consoling tones that to be lost on an American roadway today means that one is only a short distance from being found.

“Remember the dunes I showed you in Indiana? That was Cuba.” Katherine bends to pick up a shell, something turned over by the big pieces of earth moving equipment. Sand—impossibly fine, tan, silver—falls from the shell in a sugary sweep as Katherine runs her finger around its interior. “We'd run up and down the dunes for hours, pretending Castro chased us!” She smiles.
“Pelecypod,”
she says, and hands the fossil shell to Jersey, who gives the thing a dutiful if slightly bored glance before sticking it in her pants pocket.

Katherine laughs. “Remember the Cuban missile crisis, Joe? They made us pray. At school, they made us put our heads down on our desks and pray.”

Later—a blessing?—Jersey will remember nothing of standing on this road or the accident. She will know only that at some point during the drive she broke off her coloring of Plate 11 in
The Human Evolution Coloring Book.
Before the trip to Florida began, when the family was still at home in Arizona, Jersey's parents assigned her the completion of one plate a day. Plate 11 featured small illustrations of human, monkey, pig, chicken, and salamander at various stages between, and including, fertilized egg and full-formed adult. “Limb buds appear” was the stage at which Jersey stopped coloring, and, after the accident, every now and then, an image of Plate 11 will swim up alongside the girl to suggest that it holds some explanation—then disappear into dark unreason, like a water snake disappearing into the flick of its tail.

Though her intelligence and powers of memory have often been remarked upon during her relatively short life, Jersey will not be able to recall why she and her parents traveled on Post Road. She will forget the morning's trip to Arles' Mineral Springs—though it was, in fact, she who discovered the spa's laughable brochure (a Pleistocene mammoth smiles as it takes a
drink at the Springs; a masseuse works on a client whose arms are larger at the wrist than at the elbow).

Bubulcus ibis
reads the bird book now held open in Jersey's hand. Cattle egret. An Old World species. U.S. presence established in 1952 when a Mr. Richard Borden unknowingly captured the birds in footage he shot at Florida's Eagle Bay Ranch.

Joe squints at his useless map. Though he understood even before opening the thing that its scale was entirely wrong for the present problem, he had hopes. Now he looks out at the cattle once more and says in a bitter voice, “Florida's dying, only everyone's so busy filling up oranges and swimming pools with the Everglades, they hardly notice.”

At this, Katherine laughs again and moves close to Joe to give him a little sideways hug. Because Joe's sentences do delight her. And because she wants him to know that, of course, of course, she sides with him against pink retirement condos built on the backs of alligators. Also, in siding with Joe on this, by extension, she sides with him against her mother, M.B., who has driven Joe to distraction since the start of this Florida visit—and, truth be told, never liked Joe anyway.

Another reason for Katherine's laughter: she hopes to diffuse whatever unpleasantness might arise from Joe's shame at their being lost.

“Look!” Noting her father's moroseness, knowing her mother's potential for being dragged into a depression by such moroseness, Jersey offers a distraction: drops down in the sand to point at the fat black bug that ever so delicately picks its way up a clump of sand. “Remember in the Everglades when we saw those orange grasshoppers? At first I thought they were something a little kid had dropped, like the prize from a Happy Meal!”

Joe and Katherine smile and nod. They adore this daughter of theirs—so much so that, on occasion, Jersey must seek shelter from the hot light of their devotion. If only, just now, Jersey were to turn away from her parents' approving smiles—if any
one
of the trio were to train that very fine pair of birding binoculars down the road—well, that might save the day. He or she would see the battered van that approaches, and how it weaves back and
forth there, raising a cloud of dust as its tires skip off the asphalt and bite into the gritty shoulder.

When Jersey stands once more, Katherine rests her cheek upon the girl's silky head. Katherine closes her eyes, and says in a dreamy voice, “When I first moved to the Southwest, I thought it was like the moon. All the rocks! Then I realized that it was just—like itself, a part of the planet. And I liked the way the rocks and mountains reminded me: I live on a planet in the solar system in the Milky Way in the universe.”

At this, Joe laughs. Because Katherine has reminded him of that earnest midwestern student who actually took notes when he first invited her out for cups of coffee. Happy times, those days, and because he would like Katherine to think of them, too, Joe says—using the name she long ago penned at the top of her class work—“But, Kitty, where on earth could you have imagined you lived before that?”

How Joe flushes when Katherine pivots her pained face his way! For he too has registered that his question sounded not like that of a fond and reminiscing husband but, instead, like a trick quiz got up by a parody of himself, some Professor Higgins, voice all plumed and wry.

This is not the first time that Joe Alitz has had such a moment. We all have our share of such moments. Crabbed by a failure of character, our fondness balks, and a remark that we hoped to adorn with wit, we infect instead with derision. Then comes the silence, the burning cheeks.

Joe Alitz would not want to be remembered for such a moment; of course not. Still, it is somehow sad that no one will remember the moment, or know that the last words that Joe ever spoke failed to convey anything at all of what it was he meant to say.