Carter Clay (32 page)

The Earth Sciences building has led many lives. Its old floors are a gray, glossy granite whose pattern resembles that on the back of the small lizards that dart in and out of the cat's-claw vines clinging to the building's base. The hallway that leads to the professors'
offices is dim even at noon, its only source of illumination the whey-colored light that passes through the fish-scale glass of the office doors; and this sense of constant overcast, plus an abundance of dark wood trim, gives the place that air of befuddled innocence so often produced by old age.

Without explaining herself, Katherine takes a seat on a worn swivel chair that someone has left in the hall outside the glass door to her old office, and, there, she begins to work at her bit of fuzz.

As there is no one to whom she can put the question but Carter Clay, it is Carter Clay whom Jersey asks, “So, what now?”

He chews on a nail. “We'll see,” he says.

“Hu-uh!” Every now and then, Katherine makes some odd little noise, and casts an angry, sideways glance toward the door of E 186. Looks at Jersey—one eyebrow lifted combatively. At Carter. Then back toward the door. This time, however, an anonymous gray shape behind the milky glass suddenly looms upward, like a breaching whale, and all three in the hall simultaneously draw sharp breaths: hhh!

“Mom,” Jersey says, when she has regained her composure, “why don't you show Mr. Clay and me the fossil collection?”

Eyes still on that ghostly shape behind the door, Katherine stands, nods, then asks, “Where we go?”

Jersey leads the way down the hall. Takes the key ring from Katherine's briefcase. “The last two digits on the key are seventy,” she says, holding the ring out to Katherine. “That's the year you graduated from high school.”

Katherine nods, then turns away with a sniff, as if she has smelled something rank but is too polite to say so.

Cabinet after cabinet of varnished blond drawers, and on top of the cabinets, rusty-looking mastodon bones and teeth, scale models of
Ankylosaurus
and
Ichthyosaurus
, and, then, life-size models of the
Archaeopteryx
and
Protoavis
central to Joe and Katherine's debate.

When Katherine wanders over to look at these last, Jersey and Carter Clay follow. “Those are the fossils she studied most,” Jersey whispers. “In her book—”

“Excuse me!” booms a voice from the end of the row of cabinets, and Jersey and Katherine and Carter Clay turn.

This fat fellow bedecked in Navajo turquoise is Max Wheeler, Katherine's former boss, a man with skin so sun-damaged that he resembles a ship's hull covered in barnacles and brine. His white hair has an iodine cast.

“Katherine.” Wheeler's voice clogs with tears, but the fact that his former colleague now dandles the model of
Protoavis
as if it were a teddy bear makes alarm join the grief that propels him forward to plant a kiss on Katherine's cheek. “How are you, my dear?”

Katherine leans away from the kiss.

“So you're admiring our model!” Adroitly, Wheeler removes the thing from her hands and holds it up as if he too wants to look. “Yes, yes.”

The glance he gives Jersey offers commiseration, but she sees he cannot remember her name, and she offers a quiet, “I'm Jersey.”

“Of course you are! And how're you doing, Jersey?”

As if she does not hear—she cannot seem to formulate any sort of answer—Jersey busies herself with adjusting her legs.

“Well! We've missed you terribly, Katherine! And Joe—”

“This is Mr. Clay, Dr. Wheeler,” Jersey says.

Carter Clay smiles and sticks out his hand to Wheeler. “Me and Katherine met over in Florida. We was members of the same church. Vineyard Christian. I don't know if you have that here. She wanted to come by today. Just for a bit.” He takes a deep breath, then announces, “We got married this morning.”

“Ah.” Max Wheeler moistens his lips. Without quite meaning to—well, he cannot help it—he glances at Katherine's briefcase, and the enormous pockets of the barn coat she wears. “So, what—have you got some work there, Katherine? Were you thinking about going to your office? Because, actually, I think someone's in there. This summer. Since we hadn't heard you were coming—”

Carter Clay interrupts Wheeler's hemming and hawing with a contemptuous nicker. “We didn't cop any of your fossils, if that's
what you think. We just stopped by to look around before we go out for ice cream, right, girls?”

Jersey and Katherine nod as one.

Wheeler protests, “Well, for goodness sakes!” and then Carter Clay adds a gentler though still gruff, “If you want, you can come, too.”

“Oh.” Carefully, the now florid Wheeler returns the model of
Protoavis
to the top of the case. “Well, thank you—Carter? is that right?—but I'm going to stay here a bit. I'll—lock up after you all. There
are
valuable things here. We have to be careful.”

Once the threesome is in the hall again and out of Wheeler's earshot, Carter Clay laughs. “Him and his old bones! Valuable things! That man wouldn't know a valuable thing if it stood up and bit him!”

When Katherine laughs at this, both hands covering her teeth, Jersey feels a terrible ache that she, too, cannot join in their fun.

Distressing
was the mild word her father used for moments that left him reeling in pained confusion:
distressing.
The loss of a grant meant to support three years' work. The death of his mother. A friend's suicide.
Distressing.

In the year that Katherine has been away from the university, the grounds crews have torn out the patch of lawn that formerly led to Earth Sciences' back entrance and, in its stead, inserted water-conserving desert plants: tiny-leaved paloverdes, which manufacture the bulk of their chlorophyll in their green trunks; ocotillos, which leaf out only after a rain; acacias; mesquites.

“Mom,” says Jersey, and points hopefully to the silver-haired man preaching in a circle of hecklers at the edge of the new desert plantings. “St. Tom.”

Katherine looks, but she now appears gloomy and gives no indication of remembering the campus preacher at all.

“Who's St. Tom?” Carter Clay asks.

“He's—like, mentally ill,” Jersey whispers.

The sun sits high in the blond sky, and its hot palm irons the tops of the heads of Carter, Katherine, and Jersey as they stand on the back steps of Earth Sciences and listen to St. Tom.

“There was only one in the land who could baptize Jesus, and that was John the Baptist. There is only one to baptize you now. You must be born again. You must be baptized in water to be clean.”

St. Tom shakes his head, then takes a sip from a giant plastic cup that reads 64 OZ.
BIG GULP
. He wears a robe that appears faintly liturgical but is, in fact, the commencement gown for Arizona University's school of architecture. “Where are the United Methodists?” he asks the crowd gathered around him. “There are ten million United Methodists! Why do you find not even one Methodist who will come out to bear testimony of Jesus? Because the Methodists are cowards!”

Carter Clay starts down the stairs, but Katherine does not follow. Jersey stays beside her, watching for a sign that Katherine may remember something of St. Tom.

“Hey, Tom!” A boy in fashionably baggy shorts and backward baseball cap darts into the circle. He zooms close, bringing his face within inches of the face of St. Tom. Zoom. Moves back. Zoom. Moves in.

“Creep,” says Jersey—loud enough that a laughing boy at the base of the steps turns to give her a fiery look—quickly extinguished by the fact of her wheelchair.

“Look at you.” Slowly, ruefully, St. Tom wags his head from side to side. “Your body—your body is a whorehouse. You could not stop sinning for twenty-four hours if your lives depended upon it!”

From his bicycle, a passing boy calls, “Super good, Tom!” while, to the delight of the ring of hecklers, the boy in the baseball cap darts forward and sets his cap upon the preacher's head.

“Who is Jesus?” With a stroke of his hand, St. Tom brushes the boy's cap onto the ground. “Who is Jesus? He is Allah! He is the God of Abraham. He is the God of Reuben. He is the God of Moses. He is the God of Queen Esther. He is the God who allows man to fall. He is your God. He is your God”—his voice goes low, then catches in just such a way that, for a moment, Jersey feels some divinity in the man assert itself, clutch her heart—“and unless you become a fool for him, you cannot know your God.”

Jersey turns to Katherine. “You remember him, Mom?”

In response, Katherine points back to the circle that surrounds the man. “Look,” she says. “There's Car-er.”

What makes Carter Clay so intimidating as he joins the circle is not his size but his appearance of having nothing to lose—and of not belonging to that world at all. He looks utterly exhausted, his shoulders hunched, yet even Jersey feels frightened when he walks up behind the taunting college boy. Taps the boy's shoulder as if about to ask him for the next dance.

“Di' I know them?” Katherine asks as they make their way to the ice cream parlor.

Jersey shakes her head. She still feels shaky from the scene with St. Tom, though mercifully, nothing happened really. The college boy bowed and backed his way out of the ring, laughing while he said, “Hey, he's all yours, mister! You two look like you're made for each other, anyway!”

A bright splash of silver light makes her turn, and who is it but herself, wheeling past the glass doors of the university planetarium? Herself in her wheelchair, accompanied by Carter Clay and Katherine.

Jersey and her parents used to visit the planetarium. Climb the stairs on the side of the building so that they might look at the sky through the big telescopes there. Afterward they would walk to the same ice cream parlor that she and Katherine and Carter Clay enter now.

“What'll it be, Jersey?” Carter Clay asks.

“Nothing for me, thanks.” She looks over at her poor mom, stunned by variety. “You've always liked Pralines and Cream, Mom.”

In a voice surprisingly sharp, Carter says, “Let her pick for herself!”

“Just trying to be helpful,” Jersey murmurs, then looks away, embarrassed before the counterboy. Does he remember her? Probably not. If you remember other people much more often than you seem to be remembered, does this mean you have a better
memory than most or that you are simply unmemorable? Now, if she resumes coming to the ice cream parlor, will she be memorable? A girl with long blond hair in a wheelchair?

Peppermint is the flavor that Katherine selects with a point of the finger. “Pink.”

“She won't like it,” Jersey says, but her voice comes out small. She does not suppose anyone has heard what she said, or cared that she said it, and all that she can think to do is roll back to the store's entry to stare out.

A pay telephone sits on a post just in front of the ice cream shop. She could wheel herself out there. Telephone Erin Acuff.
Erin, it's Jersey! I'm home!
Erin—and other people, too—they would have to let her come to see them.

At her back, quite near, Carter Clay murmurs, “She seems to like the peppermint okay.”

She turns, and he jerks a thumb toward the rear of the parlor, indicating Katherine, who is now seated at a little table.

“Mr. Clay.” Jersey shakes her head, dull with misery. “I know you're trying to help us, but—what if we met you, and
you'd
been totally changed because of something that happened to you—”

He breaks in, grabbing for her hand. “That's the way it was for me, Jersey! Just before you got to know me, I become a Christian. I was real different before that.”

“But what I mean is, you don't know anything about our past, and—well, wouldn't you like us to have some respect for your past?”

“Oh, no!” Solemnly, he goes down on one knee. “The past is gone!” He bows his head. “That's the good news. I have a new life. You can have that, too, Jersey.”

Jersey sits absolutely still in her wheelchair. “Yes, well, I do have a new life, but I have an old life, too. That's what you don't understand. I love my old life. Now”—she nods toward the pay telephone—“excuse me, I'm going to call somebody.”

“Wait.” Carter Clay stands. He seems embarrassed when he realizes that he has used the arms of Jersey's chair for a support while bringing himself to his feet, and the girl wants to reassure him, no harm done, but then he asks, “So, who you going to call,
Jersey?” and the idea that he feels free to ask such a question sets off all kinds of alarms in her head. Worse, her good manners tell her to answer him, and it is only with great effort—the energy required to stop herself seems to leave behind an odor of smoke—it is only with great effort that she is able to say, “Well, that's personal, Mr. Clay.”