Carter Clay (29 page)

When Jersey comes around the corner of building H, out of the shadow of building I, and into the summer's white light once more, she finds that her mother and Carter Clay and M.B.—still in her bathrobe—stand in the parking lot beside Carter Clay's van.

“Well, hello there!” croaks M.B., and even Katherine smiles, and Carter Clay says, “Hey, Jersey! I was just showing these guys how, last night, I improved that doohickey I made—for your chair? Want to give it a test drive?”

Only politeness, and the eager look in her mother's eyes, makes Jersey agree. M.B., however, cries, “Well, great!” and then,
in a burst of emotion that gives the girl a start, bends down to press a kiss onto the top of Jersey's head.

“Hey!” From the balcony, Patsy Glickman whoops, “Hey, what's going on down there? I heard you all tramping up and down the stairs—”

“No!” M.B. whirls around. She flaps her arms. She cries, “I'll be right up, Patsy! Don't—wake the neighbors!” She turns back to the others. “You all get going,” she says, and smiles—a little maniacally in Jersey's opinion—before she darts forward to kiss Katherine's cheek and even give a hug to Carter Clay.

“Have fun now,” M.B. calls from the stairwell. And then, from a few steps higher, “Drive carefully!” and then, from the landing, “Take care of my girls, Carter!”

The van is damp and smells of pine cleaner. In the seam at the top of the seat in front of Jersey—her mother's seat—is a skinny, still-moist line of foam cleanser. Cloudy streaks reveal where someone—presumably Carter Clay—worked over the dusty dashboard with a rag. Also, Jersey notices—while he fidgets with her wheelchair restraint—Carter Clay not only has stubble on his chin but a pale blond fuzz on his scalp. Apparently he is bald by choice.

“There you go!” He gives her shoulder a little pat before he jumps out to close the cargo door.

Jersey says, “Thanks, Mr. Clay,” but is relieved that once they are moving, he inserts a cassette of Bible stories and turns it up so loud that conversation is impossible.

They drive for half an hour, forty-five minutes, an hour. Farther north than Jersey has been since the accident. Because she has no window of her own from which to look out, she fixes her gaze on the windshield. Which proves difficult; she must hold her head tilted to the left, and even then one corner of the back of her mother's seat still blocks her view.

“So, hey.” Carter Clay clears his throat. “Jersey, tell me some more about this clinic in Phoenix you want to go to—for your legs.”

Always mortified when Carter Clay raises the issue of her inability to walk, Jersey automatically glances at Katherine for
help—and finds that Katherine holds in her lap the big black purse that Jersey has not seen her carry since the accident. Katherine is inspecting the contents of her wallet: pictures—Jersey, Joe—and credit cards, driver's license, membership card for the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum—

“It's supposed to be best for what you got?” Carter Clay says.

“Yeah.”

“What do you think, Katherine?” Carter Clay asks.

When Katherine waves a preoccupied hand in the air, Jersey feels annoyed, and says, “
I'd
like to go to Arizona, period.”

Carter Clay laughs, and looks in the rearview mirror to catch her eye. “Well, that's good, ‘cause that's where we're taking you!”

“What?” Jersey looks out at the flatlands in which they move; which come to her in frames, click and click. Though the interstate highway's green mileage signs have gone silvery in the elements, she can make out Tampa. Coming up. Tampa.

“Mom!” she cries. “Where are we going?”

Smiling, fanning her credit cards like a hand of gin rummy, Katherine says, “Ar-zona! I don'
t
have to go
Fair
Oak
an-y-more!
”

“We're—you have to stop!” Jersey cries.
“Stop! Mom!”
Jersey reaches forward, fingertips grazing Katherine's shoulder. “Tell him!”

Katherine laughs. “M.B. help us pack!” She turns in her seat to point to the heap of plastic bags in the rear of the van. “See?”

Jersey leans as far forward as the restraints allow, and makes an ineffectual grab at the shoulder of Carter Clay's shirt. “Are you going to stop?”

He pats the air in her general direction. “It's okay. Don't upset yourself.”

Yes. Because panic is useless. Jersey tries to think. Remember:
Christmas tree.
“Mom? Christmas tree?”

Katherine smiles over her shoulder, and offers in response a question of her own: “Jin-le bells?”

“Exit,” Carter Clay announces. “We can use the facilities and talk about what's on our minds.”

Katherine holds out a handful of credit cards. “Car-er! Look!”

He shakes his head. “I ain't got any use for them things, Katherine.”

Jersey is too smart not to sense some connection between today's trip to Arizona and yesterday's encounter with the man at McDonalds, but the idea of a connection—it is too disturbing for her to confront it directly. Instead, once they have parked beneath the station's service canopy, and Carter Clay has guided her chair down the ramp and onto the cement pad, she murmurs to him, “You tricked me!”

“But you want to go to Arizona!”

The crackle of injury in his voice is only part of what makes Jersey afraid to crane her neck and look up at Carter Clay directly as he begins to push her chair toward the rest rooms. Still, she forces herself to speak. “Stop pushing me! And I want to call M.B.!”

Carter Clay removes his hands from the back of the chair but he steps around in front of it to speak to her, his voice low. “What your mom said is true, though, Jersey. M.B. did help us pack. She said we should make the trip a surprise.”

While Jersey tries to absorb and understand the significance of what Carter Clay says—without crying over the betrayal—Katherine nods and smiles, and calls out, “Surprise! Surprise!”

“And you thought this was a good idea?” Jersey asks Carter Clay.

He rubs his palm over the fuzz on top of his head. “I wasn't so sure about the surprise part, myself. But I knew your mom wanted to go to Arizona and that you did, too.”

“Did M.B. hire you?”

“No! I want to help, Jersey. I'm your friend.”

“Take us to an airport, then,” she says. “If M.B. wants to go this route, just put us on a plane and we'll fly to Arizona.”

“You'll need help in Seca. I'm going to help you.”

“Mom,” Jersey cries, and reaches out a blind hand to grab at Katherine's shoulder.

“Go on, Katherine,” Carter Clay says. “Take her hand, there. She's feeling bad.”

Katherine obeys Carter Clay's command, but she sighs as she does so. She rolls her eyes a little, too—a gesture she picked up from her mother long ago, but one in which she has not indulged for almost a year.

The leisurely trip made by Jersey and her parents recoils on itself with the snap of a New Year's Eve noisemaker. This time, there will be no visit to the Florida Museum of Natural History where, with the museum's permission, Jersey could open and close charming wooden drawers filled with shell samples and bird specimens (American kestrel, purple gallinule, kingrail, each one with its eyeholes stuffed with a bright blind dot of cotton wadding). There will be no detour to the Devil's Millhopper; or to Gadsden County, where the family ate a picnic lunch at the Lake Seminole Overlook and, at the base of a small bluff, Jersey discovered—all on her own—several nice chunks of fossiliferous clay (steinkerns, endocasts, permineralized bits of shell) that had recently come unhinged from the bluff's overhang.

The only concession Carter Clay makes to Jersey is the fifteen-minute stop that she has read a paraplegic must make for every hundred miles of travel. “To prevent pressure sores,” she explains. “You have to get in a different position. Off your—ischial tuberosities? You know?”

He nods. He does
not
know, but he remembers seeing an old fellow at the hospital with holes in his heels that somebody said were pressure sores. Carter does not want Jersey ending up with something like that, and so they stop every hundred miles, and he
lays her down on the garbage bags of clothes, on one side for seven minutes, the other, eight.

It is midnight when they exit for Mobile. He pulls the van into a place called the Big 9 Motel. The office is constructed of a transparent material so flimsy that Carter feels as if he stands inside a plastic corsage box. In and out, the walls heave in the stern breeze that blows off Mobile Bay.

From the front seat of the van, Katherine announces, “I see Car-ter. You see, Jers?”

“Mom?” Jersey tries to sound—just interested in a friendly sort of way. “What do you think of Carter?”

Katherine nods without turning the girl's way. “He taking me to Ar-zona. No more
Fair
Oak-s.”

“Is he—your boyfriend?”

Katherine looks back over her shoulder at the girl, then sticks out her tongue, and says, “None your beeswax!”

“You can't love him, Mom! You can't!”

Fingers in her ears, Katherine sings, “Car-er thinks I fine!
You
don-
t
think I fine!”

“Oh, Mom!” Jersey presses her fingers against her closed eyes, bringing up a second star-spangled night. “He'll get himself his own room, won't he?”

Katherine does not answer, but points across the street to the familiar building and signs of a fast food outlet. “Taco Bell. Bea' bur-ri-to. Sixy-nine cens.”

In the van once more, Carter Clay says, “So I can be there to help, I got one room, but you two get the bed. That way, we save money, okay?”

Jersey waits for his eyes to turn up in the rearview mirror, but this time they do not, and so she plunges ahead, albeit nervously. “My mom and I can pay for our own room, Mr. Clay. Or we can sleep in the van, and you can have the room.”

Carter Clay does not respond to these alternatives until he has driven the van across the lot and parked in front of a unit marked 18. “Katherine”—he is trying to sound amused, Jersey guesses—“you want to sleep in the van?”

“No!”

Carter Clay nods. “If having me in the room's a problem, Jersey,
I'll
sleep in the van.”

His voice buzzes with weary irritation. Jersey hears this, but she steels herself against whatever fear and sympathy it arouses, and murmurs, “Okay. Thanks.”

I feel like pizza. You guys like pizza? Pepperoni pizza?

Carter slams on the brakes just in time to avoid smashing into the teenage couple who lurch out of the late night gloom to cross the motel's driveway. Their headlight-bleached faces snarl his way, and both offer Carter a familiar middle-finger salute.

I could bring a pizza back here. A pizza with everything?

Carter suspects that, somehow, his offer sounded all wrong, like a lie, a cover-up, an escape plan.

Well? Is this a surprise? The relief that swells in Carter's chest as the motel shrinks in his rearview mirror has everything to do with the way in which going out for pizza clears a path to the bottle of MD 20–20 nestled in the rear of the van. The thought of the wine blotting out his worries over Finis Pruitt and Jersey and Katherine—it fills his groin with an anticipation not unlike what he recalls of true love.

He wishes wine were love. That love could let in air and light as well as a drink can.

“Goddamn that R.E.!” he cries. “And Jersey, too!”

Then prays that God will forgive him for swearing. And that God will help him not to be afraid of R.E. Finis Pruitt.
Help me, God, to not drink and to be brave and calm! Please.

Carter finds Carol's Pizza Pie a familiar sort of place. The ceiling's fluorescent lights unapologetically reveal an indoor-outdoor carpet gone slick with grime, and Carter is well aware that the counter at which he takes a seat would be called a bar if it were set a tad higher from the floor—which helps him to shake his head when the server (a plain girl, heavy thighs testing the limits of her new blue jeans) asks if he wants a beer while he waits for his pizza.

At the other end of the counter sit two women. Both wear some sort of stiff white martial arts uniform and their hair braided
and coiled over their ears. Mother and daughter? Big sister and little? The pizza maker himself is visible in the pass-through to the kitchen. A scrawny, unappetizing fellow. The lump of Band-Aid on his forehead scarcely covers the great blue carbuncle beneath.

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

Someone has burned this message into a long plank of varnished wood that hangs above the pass-through, and the women in the martial art uniforms laugh over the message, and debate its meaning.

“Here you go.”

Carter looks up as the countergirl sets a beer in front of him.

“Hey,” the younger martial arts woman calls down the counter, “he
told
you he didn't want a beer, Louise!”

“That's okay.” Carter sets his hand around the wasp-waist middle of the beer glass. “It's okay,” he says to the server.

“You sure?” She cocks her head to one side, and puts out her hand to suggest that she will take the drink back if he wants.

He lifts the glass and takes a sip. “Sure.” He smiles at her but not at the martial arts woman, who shrugs and turns back to her companion.

While he drinks the beer—not really his beer, because he did not order it, and what is
one
lousy beer at a time like this when he would need a case to put himself under—while he drinks the beer, Carter fixes his gaze on the window where the pizza maker spins and tosses a ball of dough into a thin disk.

Now how does a fellow learn to do that?

That's really something, isn't it?

You got to admit, probably not everybody could do that.

Carter practices these lines of appreciation, and smiles, and keeps his eyes on that activity that has nothing whatever to do with the fact that he is drinking the glass of beer, it is almost gone, he wants the next one already.

That's really something, isn't it?

If the martial arts women look his way again, he can nod toward the pizza guy, and say,
That's really something, isn't it?
But
the women do not look his way, and, finally, when the countergirl comes by again, he lifts his chin for her and says, “That pizza guy's really something, isn't he?”

She shrugs. “He's my dad. You want another one of those? It'll still be about ten minutes.”

Carter knows, even before they do it, that the women at the end of the counter will turn his way and smile and wait to hear his answer, and so he says—though it breaks his heart—“No, thanks. But I guess I'll step out for a smoke while I wait.”

What he feels after that one beer: odd, unfamiliar,
better.
He is a dog who has just given a shake to his wet, cold coat.

Though the parking lot of Carol's Pizza Pie is dark—the only light a parallelogram of white coming from the kitchen window—it is easy enough to locate M.B.'s bottle of wine (last row of bags, familiar shape and heft). He does not remove the bottle from the bag, however; he only touches it through the plastic as he prays,
God, please help me not to drink. Please, help me to help Jersey and Katherine, and not be an asshole.

It is not nice to leave the pizza behind, unpaid for, but he cannot go inside that place again without getting drunk, and so he returns to the Big 9 Motel, and he parks in back, then hurries to the pay telephone at the front of the motel.

“Go dump the bottle, hon,” says the lady volunteer who takes his call. “I'll wait.”

Carter actually does go so far as to walk back to the van. He stands there for a time looking at the van's rear door. He whistles the first half of “Born on the Bayou,” then returns to the dangling telephone receiver.

“Okay. I'm back.”

“Good for you, darlin'!” The woman tells him the location of the Welcome the Dawn group, and that she has arranged for one of the local members to meet him for coffee at a nearby restaurant in half an hour. A nice lady. Carter agrees to everything, but, for now, the best he can do is leave the bottle in the back of the van, let himself through the chain-link fence surrounding the motel's tiny pool, lie down in the webbed recliner there, and stare at the stars and pray until he finally falls asleep.

The next day, the dark muck of Louisiana exudes a scent that reminds Jersey of the digestive smells of Fair Oaks and the fact that her mother is
not
in Fair Oaks, and this makes Jersey feel a twinge of gratitude to Carter Clay, and she tries to strike up a conversation with him. “So, Mr. Clay, did you ever visit Arizona before?”

Carter Clay is just then concerned about an unfamiliar noise—a sound in the engine? the transmission? the undercarriage? Because of his bum ear, he can never say from which direction a sound comes.

Arizona? He doesn't think so. He's pretty sure he's been to Arkansas, though. Has she ever been to Arkansas?

No.

Is that the end of the conversation? The best either of them can do? Jersey stares out at the tall trees that sit far back from the road, beyond the sloughs. Because of the moss and vines that grow on them, they look dead, rotting, but she knows they are alive.

When she and her parents passed through this region traveling east, Joe lectured Jersey on the marshes' deposits of oil and natural gas. “Pumping history” was the phrase that Joe applied to the slow, menacing dance of the region's oil derricks, and—just to see if it stirs a memory in Katherine—Jersey now says a falsely casual, “So—pumping history, Mom.”

Katherine says nothing, but Carter Clay reads aloud the tall black letters painted on the side of a diner up ahead—“‘God is love'”—then adds, “That looks like as good a place to eat as any.”

Perhaps it is Jersey's wheelchair that causes people at restaurants and gas stations to smile so much. Perhaps it is Carter Clay, who does not allow his basic shyness to keep him from striking up a conversation: “Look like the high school'll have a good group for football this year?” he asks the diner's owner.

The owner is a friendly fellow himself, with sideburns that are simultaneously so skinny, so furry, they appear fake. In Jersey's past, those sideburns, the restaurant's paintings of country singer
Willie Nelson (in Indian chief headdress, cowboy hat, bandanna), the gumball machine that contains not gum but a bouquet of blue plastic flowers—all of these would have been items to evoke a private smile between Jersey and her parents. (“But let's be nice,” Katherine would say if anyone threatened to laugh. “Be nice.”)

“Mom”—Jersey closes her eyes as Carter Clay settles her in the van once more—“remember last year how we stopped in Baton Rouge and visited your friend Dave?”