Carter Clay (33 page)

Periodically, a man and a little girl on a tricycle pass by the Alitz/Milhause house. The man is smoking cigarettes and reading a magazine as he accompanies the girl up the street and down. Jersey, in the dining room, looking out, does not recognize the man and his daughter. She guesses from its size and the ratio of print to photos that his magazine is something like
Time
or
Newsweek.
On some of his passes, the man stops to answer a question from Mr. Sheets, who lives across the street from the Alitz/Milhause house, and just now drags his garden hose from one watering basin to another.

Carter Clay is in the kitchen. Jersey can hear him putting the dinner things back in the cupboards.

In the living room, Katherine watches a TV infomercial for an electric sandwich maker. The woman in the ad turns a lazy Susan that bears cartons of various fillings (tuna, sweetened pie cherries, deviled ham) and demonstrates the different snack items she can produce by spreading the filling between two slices of bread and toasting the results in her machine. Katherine nods and smiles and moves her hands in the air as if she too brushes the surfaces of the sandwich machine with melted margarine.

Just a short while ago, however, Katherine was crying.

When they arrived home from the trip to the university—while Carter Clay set up the ramp so that Jersey could leave the
van—who should come across the street to say hello but Mr. Sheets?

“Katherine!” Mr. Sheets called. “How are you?”

Well, Katherine wanted nothing to do with Mr. Sheets, and made a point of telling him to go away, even knelt down to pick up a handful of decorative rock with which to ward him off.

Jersey, who knew Jimmy Sheets only as a person with whom her mother shared praise of beautiful sunsets, beautiful days, called out, “She's not up to visitors yet, Mr. Sheets. Sorry.”

Carter, on the other hand, wanted to talk to the neighbor. To tell him about the wedding. So the neighbors would know that it made sense for Carter to be at the house. Also, it seemed to Carter that if he told the neighbor about the wedding, then he could explain how he meant to take Jersey to the clinic in Phoenix. He wanted to hear himself talk about that to the neighbor, to make it more real. But Jersey and Katherine were escaping up the sidewalk and into the house without him, and Carter worried that he might appear unneeded, and so he called to the neighbor, “We'll talk later, man!” then hurried to catch up to the others.

After dinner—steaks, grilled by Carter on the brick barbecue in the backyard—Carter stayed outside, alone, to poke at the coals for a while. He allowed himself a peek into the part of his brain that screened a jumble of nightmarish possible and past attractions: Katherine lying on Post Road. R.E./Finis Pruitt at the Alitz/Milhause front door, the street behind him blocked with patrol cars. Louie Konigsberg giving Carter the lowdown at the AA meeting. Jersey knowing all, and wishing Carter dead. M.B. giving their whereabouts to Finis Pruitt. Now, while he cleans up the kitchen, Carter works on building up the steam to call M.B. He figures he ought to let her know about him and Katherine, but, more important, he wants to learn if she has heard from Finis Pruitt. If she has not, he means to tell her, “Don't tell folks where Katherine and Jersey have gone”—though he has yet to figure out how he can tell her such a thing without setting off alarms.

Because we're newlyweds and want to enjoy our time together
?

“Hey, Jersey.” With the kitchen telephone in hand, Carter leans into the dining room. There, the girl sits looking out the front window at the quiet, supper-hour street. “I'm calling your grandma. To tell her about me and Katherine. I'll let you talk, too, okay?”

Jersey makes a face. “Thanks, but I haven't got anything to say to her.”

Carter cups his hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone—now ringing through to Florida—and he calls in the direction of the living room, “How about you, Katherine? Want to say hi to your mom?”

When Katherine does not answer, Jersey says, “I think she's watching TV again. And hey, you know it's nine-thirty in Florida, right? Three hours' time difference?”

“I'll hang up if she's—M.B., it's Carter. Carter Clay.”

Yes, M.B. has been drinking when Carter Clay calls.

And, yes, she was temporarily confused the day that she discovered that her backup bottle of wine was missing; however, she did not give the matter too much thought, as it seemed possible that too much thought might lead to the discovery that she drank even more than she imagined.

Wait: Carter is saying that he and Katherine have gotten married!

Married. Which, of course, was her secret wish. But the news is a blow, all the same. The weight that lifted from her chest when Carter took Katherine and Jersey away in the van—here it comes again.

Still, she says her congratulations. She rambles on about her happiness with Lorne, and her prayers at the hospital for Jersey and Katherine, and, finally, somehow, finds herself talking about the leak in her dishwasher.

While Carter pays a kind of weary attention to all of this, waiting for a chance to say his bit about giving out information to
callers, Jersey wheels into the kitchen to whisper a bossy, “What'd she say when you told her?”

“Congratulations,” he whispers back.

The girl pivots and leaves the room.

While M.B. babbles on, Carter fingers the objects on the window seat in front of him: not just books, but fossils, a jar of minuscule pine cones, an odd collection of blue glass bottles, a tiny, much-mended plaster of paris handprint bearing the name
JOEY ALITZ—

At a click on the telephone line, Carter snaps to attention. “Jersey? Is that you?”

“Yeah.” Her voice saturated with tears.

“Hi, kid!” M.B. begins, but Jersey cuts her off.

“Mr. Clay, you know how I thought I didn't have anything to say to her? Well, I thought of something: Traitor. Traitor, traitor, traitor.”

After the girl hangs up, Carter apologizes to M.B. Then he mumbles that maybe till they're settled and see how Jersey adjusts to things, maybe M.B. shouldn't tell folks where Jersey and Katherine have gone to, you know?

M.B.—who would like to keep the knowledge of where Jersey and Katherine are a secret from even herself—M.B. considers this a wonderful idea, but, “Oh, Carter! I guess I did tell
one
caller already.”

The telephone that Jersey used to break in on M.B. and Carter's call was one that sat in her parents' study, and after she has hung up, she finds herself surrounded by her parents' absence, presence. It hurts her to see those things that her father will never come back to: chewed pencils, notes written (a miracle, it seems) in his own hand, cartoons tucked in the border of his blotter. A surprise—a paperback anthology of poetry—lies in the middle drawer of her mother's desk, and Jersey flips through it, and finds, here and there, a discreet pencil mark alongside a line or two. From Wordsworth's “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern
Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798”:

Jersey understands that the black and yellow
USED
sticker on the book's cover means the margin checks might not be Katherine's, but just then—with the familiar huff of the swamp cooler in the background—the girl feels comforted. At the very least, she is in company with the poets and whoever that reader was who read with a pencil in hand.

As he suspected he would, Carter finds Jersey in the cluttered room where he earlier noted the location of another telephone.

“Hey.” He drops himself down in a chair so dilapidated that strands of stuffing poke out of its seams. Does he look friendly, casual? He hopes so. Because he has something he wants Jersey to help him clear up.

“Your grandma said a friend of your mom called. She gave him the number here, so whoever it was—maybe he'll call, huh?”

When Jersey looks up, her eyes are red, and Carter feels a surge of woe and worry. “I thought,” he says in the gentlest voice he can summon, “you might know who it was. Something, like, Toby Arnott?”

“Toby Arnott?” Jersey thinks for a moment, then gives a weak laugh. “But—it's a joke. You've heard that joke, right?”

Carter pushes a bit of the chair's ancient horsehair back into a rip in the arm. “I don't think so.”

“Toby Arnott—Toby?” The girl holds her hands up in the air, as if she waits to catch a ball. “As in
Hamlet
?”

For a moment, Carter is relieved that the ringing of the telephone keeps him from having to pretend to understand the joke, or to ask the girl to explain it; but by the second ring he realizes the much more awkward aspect of his situation: to answer the
telephone might be to give away his location to R.E. If R.E.—Finis Pruitt—is also Toby Arnott.

“I bet that's M.B. again,” Jersey says. “I'm not answering.”

“Well, fine.” Carter cannot believe his luck! “Fine, 'cause we can always call her back—”

Abruptly, the phone stops ringing.

“Probably just somebody who realized they'd dialed a wrong number,” he says.

“Probably,” says Jersey, though she sounds slightly disappointed.

“Car-er!” Katherine calls down the hall. “Car-er!” From the doorway to the study, she smiles the smile of a kid successfully completing a grown-up's job, before she adds, “Fo' you, Car-er.”

He hesitates, then—mother and daughter watching—takes up the telephone from the jumbled desk.

“Hello?” he says, but there is only a click, and then the dial tone sounds.

Once upon a time, during a hike from the floor of the Sonoran Desert into these very same lavender and tan mountains that Carter, Katherine, and Jersey now drive past in such a gassy rush—once upon such a time, right here, Joe Alitz tried to explain fractals to Jersey. A Father's Day hike in the desert. Not long before the fateful trip to Florida. A piece of gneiss lay on the ground, and Joe picked it up and pointed to the mountains of gneiss that rose beyond the desert floor's prickly complications of creosote bush, ocotillo and cholla, opuntia, mesquite, paloverde. Joe held out the rock and exclaimed, “The pattern in the peaks is the same as the pattern in the rock, see? That's called self-similarity, and it's everywhere in nature.”

An odd moment for Jersey: when she looked at the rock and the mountains and did
not
see what her father saw. The heavy chunk of gneiss that Joe placed in her hand was striated—dark bands running through a lightly flecked matrix (pale rose, tan, gray)—while the mountains, at least at that moment, appeared a mottled mauve. Still, Jersey believed Joe. That is, she supposed that she
should
see the pattern. She loved Joe. She wanted to please him, and she truly had seen, on other occasions, the phenomenon that he described, and so she nodded. Uh-huh.

Jersey does not think of any of this now, of course; not while Carter Clay whisks her and her mother northward. (“We're going
on a camping trip!” Carter Clay announced after last night's phone call, and then he began to add, to the black plastic bags still in the van, every piece of equipment that he could find in the house: tent, Coleman lantern, cookstove, inflatable boat, sleeping bags, even a few bright orange life jackets.)

I will go crazy
, Jersey thinks as they drive past fields of irrigated cotton that spark bright green against the desert's glare.
Or die. It must be possible—why not?—to die of misery. It should be possible.

The pressure of tears behind her eyes causes a wobble in the mesquite trees that border this stretch of interstate. She missed the mesquites while she was in Florida, but they are parched this summer, their feathery leaves—bipinnate, compound—hang limp and gray from dust and lack of rain. The tan clusters of dried seedpods appear so many hands—lopped off, hung out to dry. Pass close enough, and you will hear the bony fingers rattle one against the other.

“Don't be drinking all the time,” Carter Clay says with a glance in the rearview mirror. “We don't want to be stopping every few minutes, you know.”

Jersey does not bother to point out that she is not drinking at all. She merely stares at Carter Clay's head, shaved to a shine once more.

“Hey”—he ducks to scramble for something under the seat, then comes up, and holds over his shoulder the big road atlas he purchased on their way out of Seca. “Here, Jersey. You be navigator.”

She leans forward to take the floppy thing, but whispers, “You can't make me your conspirator, Mr. Clay.”

He emits a puff of laughter. “Conspirator!”

“I'm not laughing, Mr. Clay.” The girl's voice is so cool that Carter must work hard to keep the smile on his face.
Slap you silly.
That was one of his father's phrases,
I'm going to slap you silly.
To remove the phrase from his own head, Carter prays,
Lord, help me know the right thing to do.

His first mistake—well, he has made so many mistakes he cannot order them, but, sometimes, he does wonder if he should have just confessed to the accident and gone to prison. Finis Pruitt would have had no power then.
Tell! Go ahead!
That's what he could have said to Finis Pruitt. Really, these days Carter has no fear of prison whatsoever. He has thought it through. A bed, food, a place to pray.

If only someone could make him a deal—“Carter, you go to prison, and Jersey and Katherine will never have to know you were the driver”—hell, he would go. Prison would be the easy choice. Prison would mean the end of having to help bear their cross.

But leaving them would not be right. Leaving them would be selfish. So here he is, whistling a little Steve Miller—“Living in the USA”—giving a pat to Katherine's knee. When Katherine smiles, he dips his chin low over the steering wheel and tries to think of himself as a man on vacation with the family; a man appraising fresh scenery. “What do you bet Indians used to live here?” he says. “This looks a lot like places in movies—ha!” Alongside the highway stands a grand saguaro cactus whose upraised arms give it the look of a victim of highway robbery, and Carter points a finger at the thing and calls, “Stick 'em up, pardner!”

Neither of his passengers laughs, which makes Carter feel a little stung, but not long after, Katherine begins to sing a song about a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and he supposes this may be the result of
his
putting everyone in a vacation mood.

Peanut, peanut butter, jelly!
Katherine sings. Jersey joins in—albeit halfheartedly—and, once he understands how the song works, Carter sings along, too. Isn't that good? Isn't that the sort of thing Pastor Bitner would say that a father ought to do? Maybe he could start another song when this one ends? “Bingo”? The one where, as you spelled out the name of the farmer's black dog, with each verse you continued to substitute more and more claps for the letters in the name. But maybe that wasn't a safe song for a driver to lead—

WIDE LOAD
reads the yellow banner lashed to the front of a truck now passing in the opposite direction. Its cargo: one half of
a gray-shingled prefab house. Though the interior is a blur behind heaving sheets of protective plastic, for Carter it conjures up a poster from the hall of his grade school: a cross section view of an enviably happy home whose inhabitants were shown enjoying the benefits of electricity (kids watching TV in the den, Mom removing a turkey from the oven, Dad using power tools in the basement).

Jersey closes her eyes against the half-a-house and her sense that the shuddering sheets of plastic conceal a brood of big-headed hatchlings, dinosaur babies, aliens.

There is no one of whom she can ask: Is this what it feels like to go crazy? The landscape along the interstate does not appear different than she remembers it. She knows that the straight rows of pecan trees on her right always appear to open like a fan as you pass them by. Still, today they are freshly dizzying, and she thinks,
I will be devoured. Drowned. Undergo some dread metamorphosis, change from human to—

What comes to mind is something mangy, moss-damp with its own dread secretions. Irrational, she knows, but her life
is
making sly changes, like the shell that looks like itself while, in fact, it becomes permineralized, a fossil—over time, every bit of its original material replaced.

She reaches forward and sets her hand on her mother's shoulder, just to make her turn and smile.

“Hi, Jers,” Katherine says. Which makes Carter Clay turn and smile at Katherine, and pat her knee once more. Jersey cannot help liking him for that: for being kind to her mother.

“Hey! We just passed a historical marker,” Carter Clay says. “Casa Alma. Read your mother and me about Casa Alma, Jersey.”

The girl inspects the paperback guide that Carter Clay passes back to her.
JOE ALITZ
written on the inside cover,
PLEASE RETURN IF FOUND
. A knife into her heart.

“‘Four-story mud structure built by the Hohokam in the mid-1300s,'” Jersey reads. ‘“Abandoned about 1350. Later used as a church by Spanish missionaries. Potsherds and tools found in the area suggest that the spot was a gathering place of native peoples as early as the 1100s.”'

“Le's stop!” Katherine interrupts. “I bore-d!”

Carter Clay pats her arm. “We got to cover some ground yet.”

“‘The name “Hohokam,”'” Jersey reads, “‘was not used by the tribe itself, but came later from the Pima Indians. Hohokam, in the Pima language, means “all used up.”'” The girl leans forward, against her safety straps, and taps Katherine's shoulder. “See that gas station, Mom? Maybe the Hohokam lived on that spot once, too. Maybe later it was a trading post. Remember telling me how, lots of times, cities get built on top of other cities? Remember Jericho?”

Katherine gives the station a bored glance out her window, but Carter Clay laughs, and he looks for Jersey in the rearview mirror. “Jericho's in the Bible, Jersey! ‘Joshua took the battle of Jericho and the walls come a-tumbling down.' Like I told you, it's all there! All the science and history you ever need. Here—” He ducks—the van swerves, someone honks—and this time when he rises he passes a Bible with a gold cover over the seat. “Here.”

Jersey sighs but takes the book. “Religions get built a lot like cities, too, right, Mom?”

Katherine glances at Carter Clay. “May-be?”

“Not maybe!” Jersey says. “
You
told me about it, Mom. You said how, when people were writing the end of the Old Testament, a lot of them were interested in some Persian god who was a lot like Jesus, and that was how they got people ready for the New Testament. Like, the Persian god was supposed to have been born of a virgin, and shepherds witnessed his birth.” She pauses, then snaps her fingers. “And remember? His followers celebrated December twenty-fifth, and he was put in a rock tomb when he died, and he came back to life three days later.”

“Hold on!” Carter Clay has just succeeded in the trembling retrieval of his wallet from his back pants pocket. “Here”—eyes flicking back and forth from the road to an index card, he reads, “‘A man that is a heretic, after the first and second admonition, avoid.' That's Titus 3:10.”

“So avoid me!” Jersey says. “Drop me off at the clinic in Phoenix and I'll take care of myself. That's where we're supposed to be going on this trip, remember?”

“Jersey, just 'cause we're going camping now don't mean I'll never take you to the clinic. And maybe you won't even need the clinic! If you get faith, maybe God'll cure you.”

“Ha,” says Katherine. “Ha, ha!” Not because she finds Jersey or Carter Clay funny, no, but because she imagines—incorrectly—that if she were to look inside the wallet in her purse she would find the cards that buy things. She imagines that she could buy motel rooms and magazines and good food at restaurants—because she is not aware that, back in Seca, Carter Clay removed all of the credit cards from her wallet into a kitchen drawer.

The girl's being cured by prayer—that was not impossible, surely. Didn't Pastor Bitner say to pray for it? And once, when Carter was in Katherine's room at Fair Oaks, and Jersey came in, Katherine shouted at Jersey, “Stand up!” and Carter could have sworn that
everyone
—the doctor who was there, and everyone—they looked at the girl like she could do it if she just would.

A little silvery ringing often starts up in Carter's bad ear when he is feeling tense, or has not had enough sleep. Like now. Now, off and on, the muscles in his thighs twitch. That's something else that happens when he is exhausted. Familiar things, but Carter has never seen a giant dust devil come spinning across the flats off to the west of 1–10, and now, when he does, he takes that golden, fast-moving funnel for a sign from God, a pillar of fire. He stops the van—so quickly that the camp stove in back topples over with a
clank.
In indignation and fright, cars and trucks to the rear honk while Carter pulls onto the shoulder and rests his head on the steering wheel.

“Did you see?” he cries, and points a blind finger to the west. “It's a sign!” he says.

“Jus' a dus' de-vil,” Katherine says, and Jersey, “Right.”

Carter lifts his head from the steering wheel and peeks at the swirling, brilliant thing. “I never seen anything like it,” he says, and then, before he pulls back on the road, “Just 'cause you seen them before don't mean this one ain't special. Maybe it's meant to
be a sign for you, Jersey. Maybe God's making you an offer, and you need to pay attention.”