Carter Clay (17 page)

“What's your name?”

“When's your birthday?”

“Where are you?”

Standard questions, but only the first two receive correct answers; the third makes Katherine Milhause's eyes grow large in alarm and what Subhas Mukhergee suspects is shame. Subhas pats Katherine Milhause's arm. A sad case. He has read her very interesting book of 1991,
Rethinking the Evolution of Birds
, alongside an essay she has more recently produced for her occupational therapist:

A sad case.

In a wheelchair, in a corner of this shadowy room, the patient's paraplegic daughter sits with fingers pressed hard to her own lips, as if she must
physically
prevent herself from answering the questions posed to her mother. The daughter is the one, Subhas understands, who made the big sign posted above the easy chair in which the patient sits:

PLEASE, SPEAK TO ME, and REMEMBER I CAN HEAR YOUR WORDS.

Surely the girl and her grandmother do not need to witness this depressing examination again and again. Even the aide—a big fellow who must have observed plenty of similar scenes—the aide gives a heavyhearted sigh as he fiddles with the blinds.

In an attempt to bring a smile to the face of the patient's daughter—a bright, pretty child; no doubt ill-served by her cranky grandmother—Subhas points to the big book in the girl's lap. “Pretty heavy going, that!” he says.

As if she has been called from somewhere, the girl looks up at Subhas for a blank moment before she smiles and nods and says, “It is!”

Subhas smiles, then turns back to the patient to ask, “How about the month, Katherine? Do you know what month it is?”

She gives him a withering look.

Which her mother protests. “Stop that, Kitty!”

“Kitty” sticks out her tongue.

The mother—an odd little creature—steps close to the patient's bed; she slips her watch off her wrist and presses it into the patient's hand. “Now watch that little skinny thing, Kitty. That there's the second hand and when it moves, that means seconds are passing, see? There's sixty seconds in a minute. That's what this other hand's for. The seconds add up to minutes, and minutes add up to hours, and then days and months. Doctor wants to know what month it is. The
month.
If last month was March, then this month is—”

The old lady holds her mouth open, ready to help the patient to say
April
, but the patient looks away.

And wonders about the girl, who rolls about in the ugly chair and never, ever stands up. Is something tucked beneath the girl? Hidden?

“Stand up! Stand up!” she shouts, but the girl will not do it. The girl says, “I can't, Mom. No way.”

“Kitty,” says the patient's mother, “look at the watch!”

Subhas is aware that the patient's mother has some crazy notion that the patient and her paraplegic daughter will soon be back at home in Arizona, with the patient teaching at the university again, and the granddaughter riding bikes and going to dances—

“Kitty?” The patient's mother wraps her hand around the patient's hand. She closes her eyes and says in the mournful croon of a fortune-teller, “Every morning, Kitty, the sun rises up in the east.”

“But not
really,”
says the patient's daughter, then apparently decides to be less finicky, and so adds, “In Arizona, Mom, at home, east is outside your bedroom window.”

“Your dad—Lorne—remember how he sang that song about ‘East is east,'” the patient's mother asks. “You loved that when you were a little girl, Kitty. ‘Buttons and Bows.'”

The patient blinks at all of them, then, before the aide can leave the room, she calls to him, “Were you the'?”

The man flushes and looks to Subhas as if for help.

“In the
askident
?” the patient says. “Were you the' too?”

The patient's mother turns to the aide and pats his big shoulder and whispers, “She asks everybody that, hon.”

“It's okay,” says the aide, but the patient shouts, “HEY!” and points out the window toward a large anonymous building in the distance. “Meet the-re!” she says to the aide. “Bring me can-ny bar!”

“Kitty,” Subhas says, “what is it that's so interesting over there?”

From her spot in the corner, the patient's daughter murmurs, “She likes to be called
Katherine.”

Subhas nods. “Katherine. What would you like to do over there?”

The patient looks at her daughter as if she is a terrible annoyance, then, ignoring Subhas, she signals for the aide to draw near, and she hisses, “We run 'way.”

The aide gives Subhas a nervous smile, then says to the patient, “You need to stay here. Till you're all better. Ain't that
right, doctor? If there's anything I can do to help get you better, I'd be glad—if the doctor's got a suggestion.”

Subhas nods, then tells the patient, “I'll be back next month. You see that these fellows get you walking every day!”

The way that Katherine Milhause does not respond to the doctor—just turns her head and looks at the wall—makes Carter Clay think of his own mother. When she died, his mother was about the age of Katherine Milhause; had she lived, it occurs to him, she would now be about the age of Katherine Milhause's mother. This realization leaves Carter feeling stretched between fact and possibility, for him always a painful location—the most likely spot from which to reach for a drink, a drug.

As the three visitors move out into the hall, Carter follows them, trying to hear their conversation. He lingers at the water fountain. One short drink. Straighten. Swallow. Bend for another.

“So, is Kitty any better?” Marybelle Milhause asks the doctor.

The doctor looks embarrassed. He rests his hand on the shoulder of the girl—a nice girl, Carter feels sure—and he gives the girl's shoulder a squeeze. Carter can feel that squeeze, its friendly assurance, and wishes he were the one dispensing it, inspiring confidence in the girl.

“Kitty—Katherine needs to get involved in life,” the doctor says. “And to get around more. I have to tell you again, Mrs. Milhause, I don't believe this is the right place for her.”

The girl makes some response, but Carter misses what she says because, just then, she turns his way.

Does she stare at Carter or merely at the felt banner above his head?—
Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
Carter would prefer that he felt more keenly his remorse at the fact that he is the driver than his fear that, as in a movie, the girl or her mother will look at him—if not now, maybe later—and say, “You!” To his regret, the two feelings continue to hang in balance, and as he hurries down the corridor, he tries hard to generate a more acute remorse: Because of him, the wheelchair, the scars on the
mother's neck, and let's face it, both of their lives loused up forever. Because of him. Because of him.

As a kid on a swing or a teeter-totter uses the ground to boost himself into the air, so Carter uses his rock-hard fear of disclosure to boost himself into the loftier realms of remorse, but he understands that he, on his own, cannot keep himself suspended indefinitely.

After his discharge from the service in 1970, when Carter returned to the upper left-hand corner of the country, he knew exactly how to find the sea-foam green rooming house into which his father had moved after the suicide of Carter's mother. Everyone in Fort Powden knew the place because of the large, cartoonish sign nailed to the front porch:
BRENT'S ROOMS FOR MEN
, announced a dialogue balloon above a monkey who held a banana in what many took to be a suggestive position.

Imagine Carter imagining a nervous but poignant reunion scene in which he puts out of his mind his father's blows, the terrible things Duncan had said about Carter's mother and Carter and Cheryl Lynn (
slut faggot bastard asshole shithead twat bitch jerkoff fucker
) so that he and Duncan Clay can embrace, man to man, soldier to soldier. After a few embarrassed tears—tears? no tears?—Duncan and Carter go out for a drink. They talk about the suicide of Carter's mother. Duncan explains that her death has opened his eyes, he misses her something awful—

No. Drinks with Duncan would be a bad idea. Duncan, drunk, tended to grow sullen, not sentimental. So, no drinks. They would sit in the rooming house and talk—Carter, perhaps, perched on some lumpy bed while Duncan sat in a chair. A straight-backed chair? An easy chair? Soft light coming into the room?

Carter smoked a joint before he left his motel room for his visit with Duncan. In high school, he and a girl named Sharon Scott had come to this motel—the Adelphi—a few times. He suspected that he might even be staying in one of the rooms he and Sharon Scott had used. Was that strange? Was it anything? In a town with only three motels, wasn't it likely you might end up in the same motel room someday?

Autumn. Everything deep green and bushy behind the bits of fall color. Without his weapons, walking the damp gravel road that ran beside the Adelphi and toward the bluffs overlooking downtown, Carter felt naked, as if an ambush awaited him behind each tree. He could smell the paper bag plant. If the day had been clearer, he knew—at least in theory—he would have seen the Cascades. If he kept going toward the water, he would eventually pass through the concrete and iron remains of the old fort, where he and his childhood friends had played war, and he and his high school friends had gone to drink.

Actually, there was a faster route to Brent's Rooms than the one Carter took, but he wanted to see the town, the old Victorian houses, the stores. Neff Morgan and a few other people had taken him past the high school and down London Street and up on the bluffs the night before, but he needed to walk on London Street in the daylight.

Innocents.
That was what Carter thought of Neff (exempted for asthma) and Cheryl Lynn and everyone else who had not been in the war. He was glad of their innocence, really, because when he was with them it was not necessary to know what he knew. That was one of the worst parts of the war, what all of you knew together and could not pretend
not
to know.

The small white hexagonal tiles that still led the way into Fuller Drugs soothed Carter. The yellow and white cardboard display of Jean Naté After Bath Splash still sat in Fuller's window, though it seemed dustier now. Becky Pattschull had worn Jean Naté. The house of Becky Pattschull still pushed its great gray breast out over the bluff, and though it broke his heart a little, it was good to see that great dove of a house. While he had been away, it sometimes seemed to Carter as if Becky and anything
else clean and normal might be things he had dreamed up altogether.

He had written to Becky Pattschull from over there but she never answered. A number of people from the high school did write to him. And his sister wrote, and his mother, too, before she died.

At Brent's Rooms, a man with a cotton swab dangling from each ear helped Carter find his father, who was not only drunk but vomiting into a Folger's coffee can.

“You jackass!” Duncan Clay declared when Carter tried to help. After he began to feel a little better, Duncan threw a gooseneck lamp at Carter—a feeble toss, but, nevertheless, eight stitches were required to close the gash left on Carter's jaw.

The next day, Carter and Cheryl Lynn went together to visit their mother's grave. The weather was rainy and cold. The grave marker was a square of metal that looked like the lid from a canned ham.

Was that the best they could do? Carter wondered, but he said nothing, as Cheryl Lynn was already on the verge of tears.

Cheryl Lynn was a nice enough girl, but it was not easy being her younger brother. Cheryl Lynn was loud and crude and had a reputation for being a fool in love. Let Cheryl Lynn fall in love—and she was always falling in love—and she would be a happy idiot, writing the boy's name on anything at hand, playing songs she connected with the boy over and over and over, and, in general, planning her entire life around the newest jerk's likes and dislikes. Every breakup was a major catastrophe, with Cheryl Lynn blubbering in her room and at dances and the Bowladrome, her cheeks streaked with black makeup. Carter could have borne that, but he sometimes did feel angry at Cheryl Lynn for not knowing more about the world. She should have known, for example—and let Carter know—that a girl like Becky Pattschull would laugh her tinkling laugh when Carter said his sister was going to cosmetology college. (“Cosmetology
college
, Carter? Do they major in things like permanent wave techniques or what?”) That you did not order pie à la mode with ice cream. That a Fort Powden girl considered a pearl ring a
ridiculous gift unless she was ready to be “engaged to be engaged.”

In her drafty old Fairlane, on the way home from the cemetery, teary Cheryl Lynn wanted Carter to talk about the war. Clearly she wanted to think that Carter was a hero, or some kind of wild man; that Vietnam was a World War II movie, or that it was an orgy.

“Did you carry a bullet with your name on it, like I told you?”

Carter nodded, although he certainly had not been that dumb.

“Maybe that's why you're alive, you know?” A little sob escaped Cheryl Lynn, but then she laughed, and said, “Sorry,” and talked about how skinny Carter was, on and on. She wanted to talk about the protesters, too—
little college shits, what do they know?
—but to Carter, Cheryl Lynn looked as if she could have been one of them. She wore bell-bottom trousers, and her hair was long and straight. While he was away, Cheryl had gone to Seattle, to the cosmetology college, but now she was back in Fort Powden, working at the bowling alley.

“So what happened in Seattle?” he asked.

“Oh, they was all stuck on themselves, and you know how good Rex and Maggie always been to me. When I come home—after Dad called about Mom—”

Cheryl Lynn shook her head, then reached up to the Fairlane's battered visor and pulled out a joint tucked there. Carter was relieved. He thought maybe Cheryl Lynn meant to change the topic. He should have known better. Even though he and Cheryl Lynn had never smoked dope together, he should have known that Cheryl Lynn, stoned, would not turn all light and lively.

“That fucking bastard.” Cheryl Lynn rubbed the back of her hand across her nose, and growled, “He drove her to it.” Carter could feel her sneak a quick look his way. “You don't know, Carter,” she said, then began to cry in earnest, her voice tiny, a tiny thing. “Their bedroom. That's where she did it.” Cheryl Lynn's shoulders worked up and down convulsively, and Carter said, “Hey, you want to pull over, maybe you should pull over,”
but she shook her head and kept driving, as if they were headed somewhere important.

“Maggie helped me—clean.” Though she kept her eyes on the road, Cheryl Lynn leaned a shoulder toward Carter to hiss a furious, tear-filled, “And all the while we was working, Dad's out in the hall, ragging on about how that bitch Betty fucked up his precious gun, that bitch got his gun all bloody! I was crying my head off, and Maggie says don't listen, and that I could just think of her and Rex as my parents, you know?”

Carter did not nod to show understanding, but he began to wipe at his steamy window as if he needed to see something out there in the rain—maybe a certain gas station, or the swing set at Fort Powden State Park.

Cheryl Lynn taking on other people for her parents? What the fuck was she talking about? He wanted out of her car, now. He felt as if he were hacking his way through jungle, and he wondered—not idly—how much skin would a person lose in a roll along the road's gravel shoulder?

Before he could jump, however, Cheryl Lynn pulled up in front of the Adelphi Motel.
“Anyways”
—she gave him a wobbly smile—“I'm having a welcome home party for you! A tea.”

A tea?

When Cheryl Lynn insisted he wear his uniform, he began to get the general idea.

Cheryl Lynn had rented the social hall of the Moose Lodge. The refreshments were dishes of colored mints and mixed nuts and a ginger-ale punch with an ice ring of strawberries and pineapple chunks floating on top. She and her best friend, Donna Hale, were decked out in matronly party dresses and hairdos stiff and lacquered as cinnamon rolls.

Carter cheered, along with the majority of the guests, when his friend Neff Morgan turned down the lights and began—one bottle per hand—pouring vodka into Cheryl Lynn's fruit punch.

“Neff!” Cheryl Lynn protested from across the room. “This ain't that kind of party!”

Neff had topped off each punch bowl by the time she reached him. “The rest's for you, man,” he told Carter, and handed over the bottles, each still a good third full.

“Thanks, buddy.” Carter took a swig. He tried to act as if he were having a good time, but everything irritated him. The dark social hall felt like a garage. Several of the girls who had written to him while he was gone tried to get him to dance.
“I don't dance no more. Not me, girls,”
he said. Still, he did not understand—because he did not see the new way his eyes darted around the room, even when he talked about things he had always talked about—he did not understand why he kept finding himself standing alone.

Eventually, he took what remained of his vodka out into the alley behind the lodge. It felt like a wonderful escape, a brilliant move. In the dark, there, he leaned against a concrete wall and closed his eyes and smoked one of the several joints people had pressed upon him. A light rain fell, and the rain in the streetlights was a beautiful thing to see, and the chill in the air distilled the smell of the pulp and his damp uniform to a kind of syrup coating the back of his throat.

On foot, he started toward the Adelphi Motel. Then he changed his mind and backtracked, making his way across town toward the little white rental where he and Cheryl Lynn had grown up. Where his mother had tried and tried to kill herself, and finally succeeded.

Carter had no idea who lived in the little white house now. The dark windows suggested that no one was home. A lawn chair, folded-up, sat propped against the front steps.

He walked around the corner, then up the dark back alley, overgrown with raspberry brambles, bits of fence pitching this way and that. The house surprised him when he saw it from across the open backyard. Because it was the same? Because it did not seem to know that his mother had died there?

A window on either side of the back door, a window in the door. A black wire swung down from a power pole and entered the house just above the left-hand corner of the door. He did not remember whether or not the door used to be black, and this bothered him. He had
lived
there, for Christsake. His mother
died
there. He wanted the house to mean something. He wanted to be able to seize that something, and to store it in his heart for all time.

But, man, as he stood there in the alley, staring at the house, his heart was already full of something, and it was the wrong something. The weight of it rolled upward and tipped him forward, hands on his knees. It contorted his face, and he found himself straining to make the contortion bigger, uglier, more distinct so that he could expel it, oh, please—

The moan that rose from his mouth took him by surprise. It made a red and turquoise and purple pressure behind his eyes and grew to a roar that filled the little yard. He was hot. He was wet, his uniform—

“Who's out there?” someone called from the back door of the house. “Who is it?'

Carter backed into the alley, turning his ankle in a rut. There had been a rabbit warren in the alley when he was a boy. One morning, right where he now limped, he had seen a baby rabbit. When he drew close to the creature, it hopped away, but not before Carter saw that the top of its skull was missing. A beautiful little gray rabbit, big enough to have fur, and there was its brain, exposed, and a fly was feeding there. Carter wanted to catch the rabbit, to help it, but the rabbit was scared of him, and hopped away into the alley's mess of brambles and bushes. On hands and knees, Carter tried to get to the rabbit but it did not matter that the strip of brambles and bushes and rolls of old fencing and piles of rusted tin cans never was wider than six feet, the rabbit could always move back and forth in the strip faster than Carter could move to catch up with it. The poor thing, it was terrified of Carter. He began to feel as if he might make the creature's heart explode, and finally he had backed out of the bushes—on his way, cutting his knee badly on a piece of broken jar.

Now, it was night. The alley was dark. He walked toward the floodlight that shone over a backyard garage. He had never seen the woman who lived in the house to which the garage belonged. He had heard she had flippers for hands. He stopped by the garage, and he yanked his shirtfront into the light. An oddly disappointing moment. He had known that his entire uniform was soaked, but had formed a notion that it was blood that he sweated, and that blood would have done him some good.