Carter Clay (34 page)

MAN TAKES ON BRAIN-DAMAGED WIFE WITH DISABLED DAUGHTER

Is
that
Carter Clay's story? The sort of thing that occasionally appears in the newspapers when editors believe their readers need a shot of inspiration?

In an attempt at normal conversation, Jersey asks, “So, where is it we're going to camp, Mr. Clay?”

“Somewhere real pretty. Up north. Let it be a surprise.”

When he pulls over for gas in Phoenix, she wonders if she is nuts for wondering if she should leave a message on the inside of the handicapped stall of the Chevron station:
HELP
!

From the stall, Jersey calls to Katherine, “Mom, remember how Carter was supposed to take me to the clinic here?”

Katherine does not respond. She is tipped over the little sink, mouth open as she concentrates on straightening the part in her hair.

“Carter's not doing what he said he'd do, Mom.”

No response.

“Remember how you said you'd never go camping again, Mom? You hated camping?”

After Jersey and her chair have boxed their way out of the stall, Katherine lowers her head so that the girl can check the part in her hair. “Wha' else din't I like?” she asks.

The familiar whistling begins outside the rest room door before Jersey finishes her list: expensive cars, Speedo suits on men, Madonna, El Caminos, flavored coffee—

She pauses, listens to the whistling, then adds, “‘Stairway to Heaven'”—

A lie. Katherine did like “Stairway to Heaven.”

Carter Clay moves fast when he resettles the pair in the van. “But I need to reposition myself,” Jersey says. “I need my fifteen minutes now, Carter.”

He gives his head a quick shake. “Not now. Wait a while.” Then he returns to the food mart to fetch some sandwiches.

“S'too hot,” Katherine says.

“Yeah,” says Jersey. The car dealership sign that they passed on their way into Phoenix showed a temperature of one hundred and seven. Jersey watches Carter Clay move about inside the stations food mart. A stop at the coffeepot. A few words with a man filling the doughnut case. When he disappears from view, it occurs to Jersey that she would not be entirely surprised if Carter Clay ran off and left them sitting in this van; was never seen again. But, then, she supposes this is no novel idea. She has always felt the potential for abandonment in everyone except her mom. That is, her mom of the past.

“Mom, can't we listen to something besides the Christian channel while Carter's inside?”

Katherine shrugs, then rolls the radio dial to a storm of static through which it is just barely possible to make out a rock and roll beat that causes her to say, “Hey!” and sit back smiling in her seat.

“You recognize that?”

Katherine screws up her forehead painfully, then turns to look out the window and mutter, “I hope Car-er get me can-ny.”

“Oh, candy!” Jersey yowls, and when Katherine turns her way, eyes narrowed, lips pursed, Jersey adds, “Get a life, Mom!”

Of course this is shameful; thoroughly ashamed, Jersey stares in misery out the window at the area to the rear of the station: A flaking Adirondack chair. A hose tangled around the chair's legs. The dusty white and blue handle of a pacifier that sticks out from a dried-up mud puddle. A plug, Jersey thinks. Give it a tug and some secret drain will suck everything down, down, down—

She looks up as a teenage boy walks by the van, tossing a set of keys in his hands.

Oh.

She scratches her head, imagining for a moment that she needs to camouflage her thought:
Carter Clay's keys are in the van.

Carter Clay's keys are in the van and he is in the food mart.
There. His head and big shoulders now float along above a shelf of cookies and crackers and chips.

“Mom,” says Jersey, “remember, earlier, you were asking about things you didn't like? One thing you always
did
like was driving. You're a good driver. If you'd just slide over, you could drive us back to Seca, or even over to a motel here, and we could get out of this hot old van.”

Katherine shakes her head. “They tole me I cou-n't drive!”

“But that was a long time ago. There's no reason you can't drive now.”

Katherine turns in her seat to stare at the girl. “We'll
as-k
Car-er.”

Jersey pretends to be busy with her colored pencils and does not look up when she says, “It's so hot, though. And you don't need Carter to drive. And—he may be having lunch in there, or something.”

“You mea'
leave
Car-er?”

“Well. He might not want to come right now, you know?”

Katherine pushes open her door and scrambles out. “Car-er save' me, Jersey!” she declares, and her eyes fill with fear and she turns and she runs toward the food mart, calling, “Car-er! Help! Help!”

This is the route Carter has planned: Seca to Phoenix on 1–10; 1–17 to Flagstaff; Flagstaff into St. George, Utah on US 89; then interstate all the way—zoom—through Salt Lake, Twin Falls, Boise, Baker City. Take the ferry from Seattle to Bremerton, then drive on north to Fort Powden.

After the scene in Phoenix, Carter is determined to put as many miles between himself and Seca as possible before stopping. He is relieved, then, that the girl asks for the fifteen-minute repositioning stops only twice before Salt Lake. Of course, it is also true that the girl scarcely speaks; that it is Katherine who, as they rush past Salt Lake, complains about the long drive.

“Hey,” Carter asks, in an effort to distract Katherine, “you got a favorite movie, Katherine?”

She shrugs.

Well, his is
The Great Escape.
She ever see that?

Another shrug.

He debates whether or not he should ask Jersey if she has seen
The Great Escape.
In the dark, it is difficult to see her face in the rearview, but he feels her presence. She is a strangling vine. A bat, liable to fly out at any moment, flap wings in his eyes, blind him, poison him with her bite.

“We ought to rent it!” he declares. “Back when it come out, me and my buddies must have seen it six or seven times. It's about these Allied soldiers, and how they get put in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp made just for them 'cause they're all such masters of breaking out. They're from England and the U.S. and such. This one really cool one, Hills”—he turns his head slightly in an effort to make the girl feel included—“you know the actor Steve McQueen, Jersey?”

“No.” Jersey's voice sounds raw, as if, instead of keeping silent, she has spent the day pushing rough words from her throat.

“Your mom would know Steve McQueen!” Carter pats Katherine's arm.
“Baby, the Rain Must Fall. Cincinnati Kid
—he did that one, too, right, Katherine? In
Great Escape
, though, Steve McQueen is this Hills, an American pilot. He's always got a ball and glove in his hands, and he's always getting in trouble. All these prisoners is good at something; like, one's good at forging and one's good at stealing tools or digging tunnels, see? They got this trick—to get rid of dirt from the escape tunnels they're digging, they all wear little bags inside their pants, and then, whenever they go outside, they dump the dirt while they walk. They're all great guys, too. I mean, you like all of them. A few crack under the pressure, though. One little Scotsman, or maybe he's Irish—he'd been a jockey, and there's a time when they're all set to get out. They've worked and worked on their tunnel, and then one of the Nazis comes in this barracks place where the tunnel starts, and he, like, spills coffee on the floor, and—bam—it goes right through the floor, so he knows, man, and Ives”—Carter's voice cracks a little as speaks through his memory of little Ives' attempt to scale the prison fence—“well, I can't tell you, in case you see it,
but, hey, it's a great movie.” He pauses. “How about you, Jersey? What's your favorite movie?”

Jersey played this game with her parents many times. Best brownie you ever ate? For Jersey and her dad: the ones from Jersey's swim meet in Yuma; for Katherine, those made by a neighbor named Marion Casey. Best opera? All three of them agreed on
The Magic Flute.
Most beautiful animal of the Sonoran Desert? Puma for Jersey. Trogon for her mom. Gila monster for her dad.

She cannot ignore the fact that her father's favorite movie (A
Man Escaped
by Robert Bresson) is not so far off in title or theme from this movie Carter Clay describes. But her father's movie is a quiet thing, in which the viewer focuses upon a Resistance fighter captured by the Nazis, alone in his cell, and how, ever so patiently, he converts his spoon into the tool with which he slowly, slowly disassembles the cell's wooden door; how he unravels the wires that support his mattress and wraps them around his bedding in order to make himself a rope—

Altogether different, she tells herself. And she does not want to play “favorites” with Carter Clay anyway, and so she returns to a consideration of the Book of Job, which she finished reading just before dark fell. “One thing, Mr. Clay—and Mom? You guys know how at the end of Job, God's supposed to restore Job's possessions?”

Only Carter Clay responds: “Yeah?”

Jersey releases a tired breath. “Okay. God gives Job
more
sons and daughters, but He doesn't bring the dead ones back to life, and that's the most important thing to get back, the ones who died.”

Carter Clay is silent for a time. She imagines he is not going to respond at all, but then he releases a long yawn, and he says, “The thing is, Jersey, they'll all be together in heaven. It's in heaven where things'll be made perfect.”

“Why?” she asks, then feels a little embarrassed. Her
why
makes her sound like a four-year-old.

“Because—it's heaven, Jersey.”

“But why isn't life on earth perfect?”

“Life on earth is a
test
.”

“Why?”

“Why should we be tested to find out if we're worthy of paradise?”

“Just—never mind, okay? I'm going to try to sleep.”

She looks out at the slice of night sky available from the back of the van. It is dark as a blueprint. Its beauty, she understands, is never banal. It is and it is and it is. Better for God not to have given anything to Job at the end of the story. Better for God to have given his tough old speech to Job and left Job totally bereft than to give him back something and pretend it was everything.

“My wife and—daughter,” Carter tells the convenience store clerk, “they conked out on me!”

Perry, Utah. Beneath the store's unnaturally bright lights, Carter smiles and pours himself a cup of coffee at the beverage station. The clerk smiles, too. His name is Sandy Lohafer, though his shirt pocket reads
BRIAN
. Sandy tries to appear blasé while studying the scoop of store and customer contained in the security mirror; fair-skinned Sandy, however, is betrayed by his blotchy cheeks. A small man, and slight, just now Sandy wishes—as he has many times before—that there were laws that prohibited men of a certain size from entering convenience stores at certain hours.