Carter Clay (43 page)

It is hard for Carter to imagine telling Duncan about Katherine and Jersey, but he goes on, “In Florida—I got stabbed. They put me in the VA.”

Duncan turns from the television. “Fucking VA? Your sister tell you I was in a couple years ago? They said I was going to die! I showed them!” Duncan laughs, then slowly rises from his chair. He makes his way to the closet against the far wall, and, there, he takes out a bottle. Four Roses. Over by the closet is a little sink, and a medicine cabinet where he fiddles about while Carter continues:

“The guy who wasn't really a vet—a bunch of people think he's the one who stabbed me. And another time—for sure—he pulled a gun on me. But I didn't know then”—Carter waves his hands in the air, dismissing the story's complications—“anyway, it looks like he followed me up here. I think he wants to kill me, Dad.”

Duncan turns from the sink, and he holds out to Carter what, to judge by the residue in its bottom, would appear to be Duncan's toothbrush glass, or maybe the glass in which he soaks his dentures. The glass holds several inches of the Four Roses.

“Why'd he want to kill you?”

“I don't know. He wanted people to think he was a vet and some people found out he wasn't? But that was after the stabbing, so I don't know.”

Duncan shakes his head. “You understand you disgust me, right?”

Carter nods. “1 just want to borrow your gun. I ain't asking you to like me.”

Duncan sets the cloudy glass of scotch on the TV tray beside his chair, then pours from his bottle into a coffee cup on the tray.
“This is mine,” he says. “The glass's for you. What you waiting for? A goddamned toast?”

“You going to give me the gun?”

Duncan shrugs. “What do I care if you take the gun?”

“Fine, then,” Carter says, and he picks up the glass and drinks the contents down.

Imagine Carter—maybe six ounces of alcohol circulating in his veins. Imagine him reaching under the seat of Neff's station wagon to tap his fingers against the Colt stashed there. Imagine Carter imagining himself fleeing to Canada, alone, in Neff's station wagon. Imagine Carter imagining himself inserting the Colt into his own mouth in woods so far off that no one would find him before he was more than clean bones. You can make what Carter imagines almost as real as this next scene, which does not feature Carter at all.

Jersey, safety-belted into the van's front passenger seat.

Her sweaty reschooling of Katherine in the basics of driving.

On one of Katherine's first attempts at starting the engine, the van—which should be in reverse—leaps forward and actually
bumps
against a corner of the cabin just before the engine dies.

“I can't do this!” Katherine wails, but Jersey's desire for escape and her now percolating terror of Carter Clay become her inspiration, and she produces grand laughter, and reassures Katherine with pats on the knee, and makes merry sound effects (chug a chug a choo choo). Repeats on a crescendo I-think-I-can-I-Think-I-Can-I-THINK-I-CAN-
I-THINK-I-CAN
.

Dusk has fallen by the time that they finally have the van turned around and are able to start down the road without Katherine killing the engine. The green of the trees and brush is almost swallowed by the deepening day. The van dies on a shift, and Jersey giggles and says,
1 think I'm going to have the lemon meringue. Two pieces. Or maybe one piece of the lemon meringue and one piece of the rhubarb. I'm not sure I ever had rhubarb.

Her mouth is dry, her face wet. She imagines Carter Clay in every boulder and bush and tree that lines the road.

And if he should be there—a very real possibility—could Jersey persuade Katherine to drive by him without stopping? And if Katherine would not drive by him, could Jersey turn the wheel so they drove
over
him?

The pair inch along the gravel road until, finally, they come to the stop sign—
Stop!
Jersey commands—and they turn left onto the asphalt road and, oh, they are actually moving past the Boulders Campground, and no one is stopping them; soon they will reach a highway that will carry them to one town or another, and surely, somehow she will find help. She will go on TV! Plead for help! HELP!

Maybe, then, M.B. would be shamed into coming through—

“I li-
ke
to dri'?” Katherine asks. She grips the steering wheel as if it is a snake she cannot release or it will bite her. Her face is contorted with tension, but Jersey answers her with a cheer: “Sure! And, really, you can go quite a bit faster. Really, you don't have to go this slow.”

At this point, however, before Katherine can even begin to accelerate, the van begins to buck and lurch.

“No!” Jersey protests.

“Wha'?” Katherine removes her foot from the gas, her hands from the steering wheel—as if now she fears the way in which the engine rebels against her guidance.

On the side of the road, the van sputters to a stop.

“Okay, Mom,” Jersey says, “Okay, there's a car coming, but don't worry. Just get started again. You were doing fine.”

“No.” Katherine clutches her fists to her chest. “I
don't
like dri-ing!”

“Mom!”

“Look!” Katherine cries. “Tha' car stopping! They take us to tow'!”

A white station wagon. Out of the driver's door lumbers Frankenstein's monster. Jason. Mr. Body Snatcher. One of the Living Dead. Carter Clay. Who yanks open Katherine's door and shouts, “What's going on?”

Katherine tilts away from Carter and toward Jersey. “May-be we run ou' a gas?”

Carter Clay shoves his big head into the van to shout at Jersey, “Why you want to ruin everything?”

“You smell like al-col,” Katherine says. “An' you're shou'ing. I don't like shou'ing.”

Carter Clay shouts, “Get out of the van, Katherine!” After she does so, he tries without success to start the engine, then steps around to the passenger side and yanks off Jersey's seatbelt and lifts her from the van. “Get in the station wagon, Katherine. We're going home.”

“Bu' I ne'er go-t pie,” Katherine whimpers, and Jersey—squashed against Carter Clay's chest, in a cloud of boozy breaths—Jersey says, “Mr. Clay, I know you mean to help—”

“Shut up and shut up and shut up!”
he yells.

He climbs behind the wheel after he has set Jersey in the backseat of the wagon. She eases herself down on the vinyl upholstery, rests her cheek on her hand, stares into the pale back of the seat before her. In front, her mother is crying. Jersey herself does not begin to cry, however, until the wagon stops in the cabin's yard.

“Mr. Clay,” she says when he throws open the wagon's rear door, “can I stay here, please?”

He does not answer, but grimly pulls her toward him—“Careful! Please!”

“Sorry,” he mumbles, but after he has started toward the front door, he hesitates, then moves off around the cabin and toward the chicken coop.

“Car-er!” Katherine calls. She runs alongside the pair. “Where you going? Are you go-ing spang her? Don't spang her, Car-er! Please!”

He gives his head a rough shake. “You just stay put, Katherine. This is between her and me.”

Jersey struggles against the coop's door and Carter Clay's chest while he removes the nail from the hasp. ‘You're not going to hurt me, are you?” she yelps. “I'm sick! Please, don't hurt me!”

“I ain't hurting you. I'm teaching you a lesson, is all. I ain't no monster.”

So Carter replies, but even in his own ears his voice sounds strange, as if it has been shaken up like soda, and released in a fizzy spray.

“Car-er,” Katherine cries from the yard. “Don't hur' her!”

“I'm not hurting her! Go in the house!”

He sets the girl on the floor, then backs off a step. “You got to learn. You'll stay here till you learn.”

“Mom! If you let him do this, you aren't my mother anymore! Do you understand that? My mother would never let this happen to me!”

‘You be quiet,” Carter says. “What do you mean, talking like that to your mother?”

In the dark, he can feel the girl's stare. He can hear her jagged breath, and how she works to gain control over it before she says in a rattling, grief-stricken voice, “The accident changed her, and you're nuts if you think she's okay! Maybe it's because she's scared or something, but I can tell you, before she got hurt, my mom would have shot you for treating me like this!” Then she lays her head on her arms and begins to sob.

Carter feels grateful for the booze in his veins, and he makes a face for his own benefit—a kind of trial run of a monster's grimace. How's that? Mouth stretched wide and long? After he relaxes the face, he steps over to the nesting boxes, yanks M.B. Milhause's bottle of wine from its spot, and steps with it out into the yard.

Where, to his surprise, Katherine is waiting for him.

“Car-er,” she begins, but Jersey starts up again:

“Mom! Help! Please, don't leave me here! Mom! Help me!”

With his free hand, Carter sets the nail back in the hasp on the coop's door. “Come on,” he whispers to Katherine. “Let's get you set up with some tapes, and—I'll get her out when I come back from taking Neff his car. It's for her own good, right? You know what's good and bad, don't you?”

Katherine sighs. Her eyes look odd in the hollow light of the backyard—like olives or stones. Their suggestion of blindness frightens him a little, but she nods, yes.

“Well, all right! We got to help her to—
stay
here, so's she can learn to walk again! She's got to believe and be obedient before our prayers are going to work. Right?”

“Righ'.”

“Right!”

From her spot on the coop floor, Jersey can hear the opening and closing of the cabin's backdoor and, shortly thereafter, the sound of the station wagon starting up and driving away.

Could they have left her? The only noise is the wind, a rustle of leaves. But her mother would be inside surely.