Carter Clay (30 page)

“Dave?”

“He took me to that dinosaur exhibit?”

Katherine does not remember, but she jabs her head between the seats and nods agreeably. Carter Clay nods, too—which is maddening, in Jersey's book—and then, as he finishes locking Jersey's chair in place, he adds, “Pastor Bitner told us how dinosaurs are really just what you hear called Leviathan in the Bible. Just alligators or crocodiles.”

“Mom, maybe you'd like to call Dave.”

“No,” say Katherine and Carter Clay in one alarmed breath. Then they reach out between the seats and squeeze each other's hand. Smile.

“We want to get to Arizona, right?” says Carter Clay, and Katherine nods, “Righ'.”

That day and the next, Jersey spends in limply reading from the Turquoise Motel's gold-covered Bible, every now and then stirring herself to ask the pair in the front seat, what do you think of this or that?

“If you're a leper, you have to make a
sin
offering. You're supposed to buy the idea that it's your fault you've got this terrible disease. Anything goes wrong with you, it's your fault, because God is just and if you'd done everything right, you wouldn't be sick—”

“Whoa!” says Carter. “What you're reading, it's a book
God
wrote, Jersey.”

“Just let me have one of my own books,” she says with a sigh. “Then I'll be quiet, okay?”

“Jersey.” After a quick glance at Katherine—now absorbed in a copy of
Josannah!
—Carter says, his voice low, “Without God, Jersey, what'll you do when your dark days come?”

She meets his eyes in the mirror. Each word bitten off, she says, “You think I haven't seen dark days? You think, since my parents—”

“Sorry,” he murmurs. “Okay? I'm sorry.”

She nods. “Okay.” She does not want to fight. Things are bad enough. “Hey, Mr. Clay. That—should the motor sound like that?”

Carter listens, shakes his head. “I don't know. It's old. It sounds that way every now and then.”

After staring out the windshield for a few minutes, Jersey says, “I guess you've seen dark days, too.”

He nods, yes. “In the war, you see your buddies get killed and all. And my mom—she killed herself while I was over there.”

“Oh! That's—I'm sorry. Your
mom.
”

Will there ever be a better moment for Carter Clay to say,
I'm the one who hit you
? Probably not, but just then the van begins to lurch and lunge and buck, and Katherine starts to cry, and the engine dies, and there is nothing for Carter to do but pull off on the shoulder.

“What hap-pen?” Katherine asks.

Carter glances in the side mirror at the cars and trucks that buffet the van in their passing. Maybe God did not want him to confess just then? Is that the message? Or is he
supposed
to confess now, when the car cannot move and he cannot be distracted by driving?

“Mom, you should have one of those AAA cards,” Jersey says. “Let me see your wallet.”

“I look!” Katherine says.

And Carter: “We'll just sit tight and see if it don't start up again.”

During last year's trip to Florida, Katherine explained to Jersey that the pronghorn antelope that feed on the hills along the interstate have keen vision; and big windpipes and big lungs so they can take in great quantities of oxygen. That their blood is rich with hemoglobin and their body mass contains proportionately
more muscle cells than that of the average mammal; and that these muscle cells are particularly rich in the mitochondria that help them to use all that oxygen more efficiently. “In effect,” Katherine said, “pronghorns are running machines, built to escape predators in a land with minimal cover.”

Now, however, Katherine knows only what she sees, and so she looks at the dark-eyed creatures that browse on the hills and says, “Pretty.”

“Mom? Remember this?” Jersey takes her journal from the side pocket of her chair and, leaning forward so Katherine can see, holds the journal open to a cartoon she drew on the trip to Florida: Nighttime. A groggy man in hunter's garb climbs from his car while a bemused woman in a bathrobe—presumably the man's wife—stands in the front door of her house and peers out at the sign strapped to her husband's crumpled bumper:
DEER CROSSING
.

“I drew it last August. When we were driving to M.B.'s, remember? We kept seeing Deer Crossing signs?”

The August before, Katherine laughed and laughed over the cartoon. Now, the way she merely stares out the window of the broken-down van makes Jersey want to cry.

Carter Clay, however, leans sideways to stare at the cartoon in Katherine's lap. Carter wonders: Should he say something about the girl's little drawing? Or does she want him to pretend he is not there at all? Sometimes he gets tired of trying to figure out how to respond. “I guess the guy knocked over the sign, right?” he says. “I did that once. Not a deer sign, but one like that, a big yellow sign. I think it was for a crosswalk or something.”

“It's supposed to be—funny,” Jersey says. “Like, instead of bringing home a real deer, the hunter's come home with a sign showing a
picture
of a deer. The sign's message is, like, ‘Watch out 'cause there's so many deer!' but, see, the hunter didn't get any deer when he was hunting. What he got was the
sign
—and now he's got the sign strapped on the front of the car. Like it's a real deer. See?”

“Yeah, sure.” Carter turns to smile over his shoulder at the girl. Okay. Relax. Say a prayer. So they're broken down on the
interstate. They've put quite a few miles between themselves and Florida, haven't they? The girl's been talking to him. Katherine seems all right.

Still, being stuck on the side of the interstate—it makes Carter feel like a criminal, and when an eastbound highway patrol car slows, and turns around in the grassy median—bump, bump—he has to grip the steering wheel to keep himself from leaping out of the van on the run.

Jersey, on the other hand, views the patrol and all police officers as public servants. Jersey says, “Thank goodness! He can call AAA for us right from his car.”

She is correct. The officer—a nice young man—assures them that they will not have to wait more than fifteen minutes for a tow; then he climbs back into his car, bumps across the median again, and resumes his eastern path.

Carter looks at Katherine's AAA card. “It expires day after tomorrow. Just as well, too. I don't like cards. A person can follow you with them. A person can find out where you been and what you bought, all kinds of private stuff.”

Katherine turns toward him, her eyes open wide, staring. “I know! A man ha' a gun!” she cries. “Remem-er? A man with a gun!”

Carter stiffens but Jersey begins to smile and nod. “You mean the man who got mad at Dad at the rock shop, Mom? You're right, it was around here. The owner guy took out a gun, and he told Dad, ‘I shot people for better offers than that!' That's what you're talking about, right?”

Katherine stares at Carter. “You were there,” she says, then frowns and looks confused before she turns to stare out the window again.

But Jersey laughs with delight. She has often thought that if she could see, strung together and sped up, the days since her mother came out of the coma,
then
surely she would notice improvements that are hard to spot because they are gradual—and doesn't this new memory of her mother's testify to her improvement?

“Mom, remember how that guy had his rock shop set up in a kind of machine shed thing? And he had that weird little toy running around on the floor? It looked like a squirrel chasing its own tail?”

When Katherine does not respond, Carter Clay murmurs, “You don't want to pressure her. Maybe she don't remember all that.”

“I don't know.” Jersey leans forward to rub a corner of Katherine's shoulder. “I don't know, but she remembers I was there, and the guy with the gun. That's pretty good. That's a start.”

“I guess we don't need to call in an expert for me to know you've got heap big guano between your ears!”

So Patsy Glickman told M.B. on the morning of Jersey and Katherine and Carter's departure for Arizona. Patsy had the advantage; M.B. was still in her bathrobe while Patsy was dressed for the day (turquoise knit under the influence of a vaguely Native American bosom fringe that bounced and swayed as Patsy stomped into her kitchen to fetch coffee).

M.B. immediately regretted that she had settled herself in Patsy's
mamasan
chair, a pillowy affair out of which she always had to fight her way. “Is this why I'm here?” she called after Patsy. “To listen to insults?”

“What do you even know about this guy, Marybelle?”

When Patsy had first learned M.B.'s true name, she had used it, now and then, in a teasing way, pretending to be a kind of mother figure. Lately, however, Patsy had begun to employ Marybelle exclusively, and this grated on M.B.'s nerves.

“Here.” Patsy handed M.B. a cup of coffee. M.B. offered Patsy the terse smile she had refined many years ago on customers hoping to return used cosmetics. “Patsy.” M.B. held up her fingers to enumerate: “Carter goes to my same church. I know that his mom's dead. His dad and sister live around Port”—M.B. waved in what she thought of as a northwesterly direction
but actually indicated the Caribbean—“something. I can't think just now, but it's up there in Washington. His dad worked in the paper mill there and they like Carter at Fair Oaks and he served in Vietnam.”

Patsy bugged her eyes at M.B., then kicked off her shoes and plopped down in the
papasan
chair.

Animal
, M.B. thought as she stared at the yellowed calluses on Patsy's feet. She blamed Jersey for the thought. It was Jersey who was always lumping humans in with the rest. Just the way Kitty used to.
Bird nostrils.
Just the week before, Jersey and M.B. had gone to a mall not far from Palm Gate Village, and when they stopped in a pet store, Jersey insisted that the nostrils of certain birds were red because they had
colds.
Bird nostrils. And once you saw them, you could never unsee them. Birds had ears, too. Jersey had shown M.B. Pitiful little holes, right under the feathers.

“M.B.,” said Patsy, “what if Kitty gets better eventually and here you've married her off to a janitor?”

“There's nothing wrong with being a janitor.” M.B. pulled her Salems from her robe pocket and lit up. “Anyway, Carter isn't a janitor. He's an aide. And he's done other things too. In case you've forgotten, my husband was a factory worker! Unless that's not good enough for you.”

Patsy reached into the drawer of the end table where, until recently, she had kept her own Kool Lites. She took out a stick of gum and unwrapped it and folded it into her mouth and began to chew very hard, very seriously. M.B. waited. She almost had a sense that Patsy's next words depended on something Patsy was extracting from the gum, but when Patsy finally spoke, all she said was, “Don't be dumb, M.B.”

At which M.B. gathered up her bathrobe as if it featured a train and, feeling both queenly and grossly underdressed, headed for the door.

Back in #335, she immediately set to work. There were certain things to do to restore the condo to its pre-accident condition. She removed all bedding and towels and curtains from the guest bathroom and bedroom and began running bleach-heavy
loads in the washing machine. Emptied the cupboards, drawers, and closets of both rooms for thorough cleaning. Sprayed down the walls with Lysol, which left streaks on the paint in the bedroom but M.B hardly cared. She doused the bathroom floor with bleach and set to work on the grout with toothbrush and Q-tips—missing the fact, until it was too late, that a bit of bleach had seeped into the blue hall carpet, making a little pile of white clouds along the tile's horizon. No matter. No matter. Though she had done her best to see that every possible item belonging to Katherine and Jersey went into the bags loaded into the van, as she cleaned M.B. kept an eye out for strays: two ponytail holders, a sock that read Southern Arizona Swim Club around its cuff, and a few colored pencils—all of which she dropped immediately into the trash.

The records of Jackie Gleason and his orchestra had been Lorne and M.B.'s favorites—“For Lovers Only”—and she listened to them as she worked. “Dancing in the Dark,” “I Only Have Eyes for You,” “I'm in the Mood for Love.”

Lorne, she knew, would have approved of the way she put the clean laundry right into the linen closet. For now, however, she had to store the freshly washed bedspreads and curtains and shower curtain on her bed. Until she felt the guest room and bath were solely hers once more.
Uncontaminated
was the word that occurred to her, but only in the most private folds of her brain. In that private part of her brain, she wished she could zap the entire unit in a microwave oven; she had read in the newspaper that this was an excellent way to kill germs and bugs in precious documents and books.

It was three in the morning by the time she decided she was done. She went to put on her nightgown; then remembered she had yet to remove the safety rails in the guest bathroom.

Not an easy job. The bolts were in there good, and the holes left behind by her impatient removal were worse than the holes made for the installation, but at least it was done.

She moved the table in the hall back where it had been before there was the maneuvering of a wheelchair to consider.

When, finally, M.B. did set her head down on the pillow, she smiled. But after all that cleaning, shouldn't she remove the old air-conditioning filter and install a new one? Yes. She got out of bed. Then had to rise a second time because it seemed #335 might become recontaminated immediately if she did not carry the old filter down to the dumpster.

Was that enough?

No. Let's face it, it was not, and so she rose—now with less enthusiasm—and emptied the kitchen drawer that held her dish towels, and she set the towels in the washing machine. The next drawer held her spice tins and she removed and wiped down each tin with a solution of Spic and Span and water.

At 8
A.M
.—she checked the time when she heard a neighbor go out to change his Today's Date calendar—M.B. thought that she really might need to drink a glass of wine in order to fall asleep. She was opening the dishwasher for a glass when the telephone rang.

A man. Asking for Katherine.

“Oh.” M.B. pulled the telephone cord behind her as she opened the cupboard under the sink, stuck out a toe to search for the bottle of MD 20–20. “She—Katherine's gone back to Seca. Moved—home.”

“Ah! Would you happen to have her number there?”

M.B. knew it was acceptable to ask for a caller's name; still, she was grateful that the man did not seem to take offense at the question, and while she unscrewed the lid on the wine bottle, she said in her most bright and friendly voice, “Let me just grab my address book, Mr.—was it Arnott?”

“Toby Arnott—
Toby
!”

M.B. hurriedly poured herself a glass of wine while flipping through the address book pages, and when she returned, she said, “Was it the address you wanted, or the phone—”

The caller laughed lightly, then said, “I suppose both would be helpful, wouldn't they?”