Carter Clay (13 page)

It was noon. Finis was consuming a swampy lentil and carrot soup in the mission dining hall. “Private Rear End!” A man who reeked of both circulating and processed booze plopped down at the table, and whooped, “Private Rear End! Who ran over you?”

Hayes. A baby bull veteran Finis had known in Austin during his early days as Rear End.
Yeah
, said Hayes,
he'd finally got tossed out of Texas altogether, and then, lately, he'd had some trouble in Sarasota, so he'd decided to come south.

Finis did not much like Hayes's gleeful eyeing of his battle scars, and he said, affecting that bit of a British accent with which he could best ladle out an air of noblesse oblige, “Sarasota, you say?” He slid his soup bowl and forearm over the section of the map of Washington that he had been inspecting before Hayes sat down.

Had Hayes ever met a guy named Carter Clay while he was in Sarasota?

Hayes laughed.
Not in Sarasota, but he'd been at Recovery House in Tampa with Clay! Shit, man, he'd lived right across the hall from Clay!

Finis folded the little paper napkin that came with the mission lunch of peanut butter sandwich, soup, two cookies, and coffee.
Hayes was jaundiced. Yellow cheeks, yellow eyes. Going, going, gone. Sit back. Let the fool talk.

And talk he did: “The minute I got out of that zoo, man, I bought myself a drink, you wouldn't have believed those AA bastards would whip Clay around the way they did! A big guy like that. Somebody said it was 'cause he almost died.” Hayes grinned. “Put the fear of the devil in him. You know about him getting stabbed?”

“Clay got
stabbed
?” said Private Rear End.

Hayes leaned forward. “He didn't remember the details—I guess he was all fucked up—but he got into it with some guy who pulled a knife on him. Supposedly another vet. Clay decked the guy, but later the guy came back and stuck him, like, I don't know, ten times.”

Difficult for Finis not to smile at Hayes's story. He had to take up the folded napkin and use it to scrub at his mouth before he allowed Private Rear End to say a relatively somber—if appropriately astonished—“Crazy!”

“Anyways, last I heard”—Hayes sneered—“Clay's a cook or something in Sabine.”

Rear End smoothed the crease in his map of Washington with the bowl of his soup spoon. Cleared his throat. “Is that up in the Northwest? Where he used to come from?”

“Hell, no!” Hayes laughed. “Sabine's half an hour—forty-five minutes—from here, man. Head east and you can't miss it.”

In the original
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(1956), with the help of the police and the National Guard, the hero foils the aliens' attempt to take over the world. The remake of 1978, however, ends with a bitter surprise: we see the fugitive hero, Matthew—charmingly portrayed by Donald Sutherland—all alone in the city's central plaza. We suppose brave Matthew to be the only human being whose body and soul have not yet been taken over by the space aliens, but then a voice calls out, “Psst! Matthew!” and who is it?
Nancy!
Matthew's good friend! About whom we have assumed the worst! Up starts Nancy to Matthew. Bedraggled, broken by all that she has witnessed, Nancy still manages to smile a brave smile at her old friend. We smile, too. But then the mouth of
Matthew
opens wide, and, oh, no,
Matthew
breaks forth in the aliens' hideous piglike squeal of denunciation. Matthew is now one of them.

The film's final shot: a movement into the void of that open, squealing mouth until the screen is black, black, black.

Joe Alitz preferred the original
Body Snatchers
, not knowing its optimistic ending to be a last-minute paste job. Jersey and Katherine preferred the apocalyptic remake of 1978, and watched it many times.

So it is that as Jersey sits playing chess in the dining section of M.B.'s living room (color scheme: bittersweet orange, powder
blue), Jersey recognizes the odd sounds that come from M.B.'s television—weird rumbles, whispers of solar winds—as the beginning of the remake.

“Wait!” she cries, for M.B. is in the process of changing the channel from
Home Shopping Network
to
Rescue 911
, complaining as she goes, “What's the deal with all these TV shows where everybody talks Spanish?
I
can't understand a word they're saying!”

“M.B., go back! You passed a great movie, and it's just starting!”

That odd grouping of heavenly objects that hangs above the rough rock horizon informs the viewers that the horizon belongs to an unknown planet—
not
earth, not anything in our solar system. Note the unfamiliar colors and webs and fogs that enshroud the planet's surface, the triumphal protozoa spinning off into space.

Jersey maneuvers herself closer to the switch that controls the dining area's overhead light. Her wheelchair is Model 504 from Theralife, a “super-lite,” with wheel covers decorated by Jersey's own hand (Arizona sunsets, saguaro cacti, a Gila monster nosing in from one edge of a tire rim).

“I want to watch
Rescue 911
,” M.B. protests.

“Please? I promise you'll love it?”

Jersey smiles back at frowning M.B. A pretty girl, M.B. supposes, though those dark eyebrows above the blue eyes are a too potent reminder of her father, and, with her long skirts and beads, she looks like a hippie girl from the sixties.

“Well, all right,” M.B. says. Her voice is calm, but the cords in her neck are tight, and in a most uncalm way M.B. is thinking,
Now it is the month of March.

In August, when Pastor Bitner said, “The Lord has his reasons for this accident,” and “This is your cross to bear,” M.B.—who has always believed that the goal of life is to get
rid
of crosses, not take them on—M.B. did try to make herself humble. After all, who on earth would not have wanted to do everything possible for her own daughter, and her one and only grandchild? And she did bring Jersey home after rehab, didn't she?

This morning, however, while her coffee perked, M.B. tore off the spent page of her kitchen calendar, and what did she discover? The month of
March
—with a grid so sharp and dizzying it seemed a thing upon which a person might fall and cut herself up into thirty-one squares. How could M.B. explain to Pastor Bitner, let alone anyone else, that a page from a calendar could make her grab for her kitchen counter, and hold on tight?

Of course, the calendar did not explain that at three this morning, M.B. woke to the sound of the girl crying in the bathroom—and, oh, what a stinking mess, followed by two hours of cleaning wheelchair, nightclothes, grout, and tile.

“It wouldn't have happened if you'd gotten the safety bars installed!” That was what the girl shouted at M.B. “Stop worrying about putting screws in your damned tiles and get the safety bars installed!”

M.B., however, has counted on Kitty's improvement; on mother and daughter's eventual return to their own home in Arizona. M.B. has believed that safety bars around the toilet would not only be an eyesore in her lovely guest bath, but also a possible jinx on Kitty's recovery.

At any rate, tonight the girl smiles as she asks, “See that mucilaginous stuff on the plants, M.B.? That's how the aliens spread themselves. A flower grows from it, and the flower turns into a pod, and a copy of a human being grows from the pod.”

Musa-what?

A collection of needlepoint pillows that declare M.B.'s preferences and loyalties sit about the living room. “A penny saved / Isn't worth much.” “My other pillow / Is a sofa.” M.B. leans away from her game of solitaire and rests the small of her back against “Life is short, / Eat dessert first.”

Musa-something.

The girl's mother and father used words like that. Indeed, the first time that Kitty brought Joe Alitz home, M.B. supposed many of the words the two of them used were a trick, some pig-Latin kind of way of excluding Lorne and herself. When Joe finally went out to buy cigarettes, M.B. fetched the dictionary from Kitty's old bedroom. She meant to force Kitty to admit that the words did
not exist. Well, that was not a pleasant memory: Kitty standing in the kitchen, looking sad and sorry. Pitying M.B.!

Exiguity.
M.B. remembers the word because, afterward, she wrote it in pencil on the bottom of her lingerie drawer. And did she ever in her life hear it used again? No.

“See how the camera looks smeared, M.B.? Like some of the slime fell on it? Isn't that great? Like, everything's being affected by the aliens, you know?”

Jersey turns in her wheelchair to smile at her grandmother. Who sits—as always—in the orange leather recliner that would have been the special chair of Jersey's grandfather had he lived. How many times has M.B. told Jersey this? Many times. Lorne this, Lorne that. Lorne didn't like rhubarb pie, but, oh, he loved strawberry. Lorne believed there ought to be committees in the public interest set up to vote on whether or not a woman had good enough legs to wear shorts, and if you couldn't get a tan car, Lorne said white was second best.

Does Jersey appear sweet and tractable as she speaks to her grandmother about the movie? (“You see, it's supposed to be happening in San Francisco, M.B. See the hills and all?”) After last night's overwrought bathroom scene, she certainly does mean to sound sweet. She knows well enough that M.B. does not want the job of Jersey's caretaker.

“What if she stayed on as a boarder? And I come by for daily visits?”

So Jersey overheard M.B. ask the director of St. Mary's Rehab on the day that M.B. was to take Jersey home. At the time, Jersey was hidden behind the reception area's fish tank, but she could see the face of the director. Blanched. Clearly ashamed for M.B.
“It isn't appropriate for a bright, healthy girl to stay on in an institution, Mrs. Milhause.”

The time that the physical therapist showed the patients and their caretakers the slide show
Decubitus Ulcers (Pressure Sores) Stages I-IV
—that time, M.B. knocked over her folding chair long before the slide that showed the teacup-sized hole in the blackened buttock of a young patient. In fact, M.B. fled the darkened room after a slide of a relatively minor sore—one on the back rib
of an invalid who had spent too many days with his torso twisted, just so, while he stared out his front window.

The Grandmother Queen of Frogs. Isn't that what M.B. resembles in her lacy bathrobe and the lacy cap that is a twin to the cover—strange in itself—that she keeps on a roll of toilet paper in the guest bath? In the dark pool of the living room—with her wreath of cigarette smoke wafting upward in the halogen light, her chair a bright lily pad upon which she sits cross-legged—couldn't M.B. be a creature in a fairy tale?

“You ever been to San Francisco, M.B.?”

“I never been anywhere much out of Indiana, but, say, don't those things drive you crazy?” M.B. draws a hand up to her own forehead to indicate the minute braids that Jersey has made in her long blond hair, and that now hang over her face like so many stalks of wheat. M.B. does not understand how the girl can bear to have such things in her face when M.B. herself can scarcely bear to see them—

Jersey chuckles, then gives the braids a shake.

To calm herself—distract herself—M.B. takes out the bottle of Jergen's Lotion she keeps in the drawer of her coffee table and begins to work lotion into her skin—hands, arms, elbows, then back to the hands, push up the cuticles.

At first the lotion's almond scent evokes its usual sweet association for M.B.—Lorne rubbing her back—but then something new and unpleasant arrives: yesterday's visit to Kitty at Fair Oaks Care. Kitty's roommate had a bottle of Jergen's Lotion on her own bedside table. Old Mrs. Radosovich—with her hearing aid and her Confidence panties that are really just diapers.

M.B. hustles the bottle out to the kitchen. Pitches it in the trash.

Fair Oaks.
Plantation life. Shade and genteel comforts. Lemonade. Polished wood floors and balconies and handsome visitors. These were the images that the name
Fair Oaks
initially suggested to M.B.; in fact, she carries those images with her still, though Kitty's Fair Oaks is actually brick ranch-style, linoleum, walkers and wheelchairs and hospital beds, a bleached-bone yard (no oaks at all, just two empty planters, and
a single palm stump whose tiny tonsure gives a pathetic flutter on days when a breeze stirs).

Couldn't M.B. have found a nicer place? So Joe Alitz's brother asked on his visit, but what help did he give, and suppose Kitty lives another fifty years? No matter what anyone says, money does have to be considered.

March.

Seven months have passed since the accident, and Kitty—also in Confidence panties—spends most of her day staring at the acoustical tile ceiling above her bed, or playing with bits of fuzz she picks off her blankets. Yesterday, when M.B. arrived at Fair Oaks, the aide directed her to the courtyard, and there she found Kitty, collapsed on a lounger, looking so pale and bony and lifeless she might have been the old canvas cot that Lorne always aired on the lawn before fishing trips with his pals.

I should have had another child.
So thinks M.B. as she returns from the kitchen to the living room. Surely if she had had the foresight to bear a
second
child, then child number two could at least take charge of Jersey.

If only the girl were more—lovable! A regular girl with regular interests.

It hurts M.B. to think she may not—well,
love
the girl. And who's to say she doesn't? M.B. refuses to think about something that is so uncertain, when she can think about something that is definite, something that she can say with confidence: “I am not equipped”—she likes the word
equipped
, its suggestion of outfitting rather than competence—“not
equipped
to provide care for an invalid.”

This morning, on the telephone to Pastor Bitner—the door to the master bedroom closed so the girl could not hear—M.B. tried to explain: “It would have been easier—I never told you, Pastor, but at the hospital I asked God to take me, please, just make them well and take me! I really did!”

And what was Pastor Bitner's response? A laugh! “Looks like God didn't give you the easy way out, doesn't it, Marybelle? But, you know, you oughtn't do a thing you can't do with a song in your heart!”

M.B. understood, of course, that Pastor Bitner did not mean she had his permission to stop visiting that stranger at the nursing home, or taking care of Jersey. On the contrary, Pastor Bitner meant that she must get a song in her heart. A song in her heart as she hefts her cross.

Oh, the cross. Pastor Bitner is more fond of the idea of the cross than any minister M.B. has ever encountered. The cross, the cross.
Folks, if you imagine you don't have a cross to bear, you haven't looked hard enough! If your life is so fine you haven't got a cross, look around for that person whose cross is too heavy for him to carry alone! That's your cross, folks! That's your cross!

“M.B.”—Jersey points at the TV screen—“see that woman in the trench coat? She's the heroine: Elizabeth. Brooke Adams. That's the actress's name. I really like her.”

“Mm.” M.B. rises to make her way to the ringing telephone, saying as she goes, “What do you bet it's the Breather?”

“The Breather” is Carter Clay, calling tonight from a pay telephone that roosts on one leg in front of an Exxon station.