Carter Clay (44 page)

(Yes. Tucked in her sleeping bag. Staring at the sheetrock ceiling overhead. Feeling scared, and grateful that the man—her husband—put the Walkman on her head; that she can listen to Old Testament stories and not Jersey's cries. Joshua and the battle of Jericho. Samson and Delilah. Joseph and his brothers.)

I must calm down. If I'm calm and call to her maybe she'll take me in.
So Jersey thinks for a time. But then the panic in her rises again, and she calls
“Help, please, somebody!”
And then,
“I'm sorry, Mr. Clay! Mom! Help me, Mom!”

As soon as Carter is out of sight of the cabin, he pulls off on a little fork of road that leads back to someone else's cabin, and he unscrews the cap on M.B.'s bottle of wine. Because Neff Morgan never quite understood the way that Carter drank. Also, though Carter feels sure that Neff would laugh at Carter's drinking such swill, Carter does not want to risk the chance that Neff might expect Carter to share.

When Jersey understands that no one means to rescue her—do the three cars that pass in the night simply choose not to stop, or do they truly not hear?—she stops crying and tries to remember her mother's story of the man on his way to the execution. Tries
very hard to experience each blue moment in the coop. The sharp, peppery smell left behind by the chickens. The way the worn surface of the floorboards feels almost like cloth. The squares of blue light in the window. By paying attention to such things, it is possible—sometimes it is possible—to avoid giving all of her attention to her fear, and her body's demands, its feverish tingle, the pain that radiates up her spine and into her skull and her shoulders.

Breathe in deep. Expel the breath. She hears her mother's voice tell her:
In through the nose, out through the mouth.
Maybe it is not right to pretend that she and her mother lie on the twin beds in Jersey's room. Maybe she should not allow herself to go there, but it is so reassuring. Her mother, an arm's length away, trying to help Jersey fall asleep, offering Jersey some technique or other that she has read about. Mostly, of course, what Jersey likes is the presence of her mother, her voice taking Jersey through things called Progressive Muscle Relaxation or Mindfulness Meditation or whatever.
Breathe into your belly. Hold it. Now let all of the air come out until you've totally expelled every bit of breath, and you feel your stomach touch the back of your spine.
She can hear her mother's voice say this, and it helps. Just as the voice helps, later in the night, when Jersey must move her bowels:

The ones who survived the concentration camps were the ones who exercised as much control over their own lives as possible
, her mother says, and so Jersey drags herself to one corner of the coop, hikes her skirt, and lowers her underpants—an action that does not keep her entirely clean, no, but makes her feel relatively sane.

It is important to feel sane in a night without sleep.

The first light of morning comes through the small high window on the eastern side of the chicken coop's door, but a good deal of time passes before the sunrise smokes the dusty glass and tints with gold the rotten wood of the frame.

Jersey has a plan for what she will do when Carter Clay comes to the coop. If he comes. She will not allow herself to think about the fact that he might not come, that both he and Katherine might be gone.

So: when he comes, she will hit him with a brick—heavy, whitened with old chicken shit—that someone perhaps used as the coop's doorstop, once upon a time.

Suppose she fails to kill him with the brick? Suppose she cannot bring herself to hit a person with a brick—

It is hard for her, even while planning a murder, and feeling feverish—it is hard to ignore the fact that she has begun to smell. Like a pack of hamburger forgotten at the back of the fridge.

She thinks about her father's favorite movie,
A Man Escaped.
The Resistance hero's patient destruction of the cell door with his spoon. Such a thing might be necessary if the brick fails. If Carter Clay does not return.

There are nails in the wooden nesting boxes, and though she could never pull a nail from its wooden bed, surely, with the brick, she could smash up one of the boards enough that, over time, she could shred the wood, work out a nail. Use that nail as some sort of tool of destruction.

In her father's movie, the enemy fed the prisoners of war. Maybe not much food, but even so, the food did keep up the prisoners' strength, and strength was needed for escape. Funny to think of feeding your enemy. Funny to think that human beings could make up rules for the way they killed each other. Actually held conventions to discuss such things.

She smashes the brick into the edge of one of the nesting boxes. Again. Again. But the effort of several blows leaves her weary. Which will not do. She must save her energy for dealing with Carter Clay. She must balance on a square of hip that has, perhaps, not born her weight too much.

Listen: some kind of woodpecker or flicker laughs in flight. A cardinal calls.
Pur-ty.
And there is something that sounds like the house finches that fly all over Seca. And blue jays.

Footsteps rustle through the brambles and grasses that grow behind the coop. Always an ominous sound, those rustles, unless transformed by visuals into the background noise of, say, a fall hike.

She takes a deep breath and raises herself onto an elbow and picks up the brick. Her heart beats hard. Ready, she thinks, but at
the sound of the nail being removed from the latch, she cries out, “Don't come in, if that's Mr. Clay!” And then: “I want my mom!”

There is a sound of shoes shifting on the piece of old board that serves as the coop's front step; then Carter Clay speaks through the door, his voice strained and exhausted, his breath coming hard as if he has been running:

“Jersey. I'm going to let you out. But you got to promise something—hey, I meant to come right back last night! I didn't mean to leave you out here! It's just—I started talking to Neff and I fell asleep. No. That's not the truth. The truth is: I passed out. Because I was drinking. And I promise you—I make a solemn vow—I will never have another drink so long as—”

“Where's my mom? I need my mom! I'm sick!”

“I ain't finished! I was saying you got to promise not to pull anything like what
you
did, too, Jersey.”

Carefully, Jersey lowers her hot cheek onto the pillow of her fingers. She stares at the nesting box before her. A piece of broom straw pokes out from between two of the box's boards, and part of the straw is broken and hanging at an angle.

“Jersey?”

The bit of straw swings back and forth in time with the girl's breath, in and out, and if there is any reason in the world for her speak to Carter Clay, she cannot think what it might be.

“Jersey?” Almost as if he does a dance, Carter Clay's boot heels rattle on the board outside the door. “You got to listen to this, okay? It's a prayer I found in the Bible, okay? ‘
Silver and gold, I have none; but what I have, that I give thee. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, arise and walk.
'”

Jersey sighs. Eyes fixed on her piece of straw, she makes an effort to bend a knee, wiggle her toes. “No good,” she calls. “Unless the spell needs time to cook or something.”

“Don't make jokes!”

“It's no joke. I'm sick. I need a doctor. Anyway, Mr. Clay, remember how, before he was crucified, Jesus prayed three times that God would make it so he wouldn't have to die? Even in the Bible—even if you're Jesus—you don't always get what you pray for.”

When she hears the nail scrape in the hasp, and then the creak of the door, her fear disperses the other words that she needs to say. She tries to call them in from various locations, and sweep them up into a little pile—

“You ready to go inside now?” Carter Clay says.

“Can't I have my chair, though? Please? I can't lift myself without my chair—”

He draws a little closer. “Neff's going to pay me to do some work for him at the campground till I find something else. But getting back your chair—see, you have to
believe
God'll make you walk, Jersey. Otherwise, you won't be able to.”

Jersey tries to consider this, but the thought slips away from her. It is a cartoon thought in a cartoon balloon. She closes her eyes. To herself, she mutters a begrudging, “I believe,” but the words remind her of the wrong thing:

How, in the play
Peter Pan
, to save the life of Tinkerbell, Peter Pan begs the members of the audience to declare that they believe in fairies. Jersey went to
Peter Pan
with her mother and one of her mother's friends, and everyone in the audience seemed willing to say “I believe.” Katherine and her friend—grown-up women with tears in their eyes—chanted right along.

But, of course, they did not believe in fairies. It simply felt good to them to say “I believe,” to pretend to be little children for the two hours until the curtains closed and they all got clobbered by the daylight of the parking lot.

“I told Neff about my fasting idea,” says Carter Clay. “He thought maybe you shouldn't do it, so I guess it'll just be me for now.”

Jersey stares at a large, oddly familiar bulge in the pocket of Carter Clay's jacket. “Is—that a gun?”

Carter Clay glances down at the pocket as if embarrassed. “It's—yeah, a gun. 'Cause—well, Neff says somebody's been asking about us in town.”

“Somebody's asking about us?” The girl starts to cry. “Oh, please, Mr. Clay. Suppose it's my uncle or my grandma! Can't we try to find out? Please? They could take me to a doctor—”

“It ain't—” He breaks off at the sound of voices. Yanks the gun from his pocket—ripping the jacket slightly in the process.

Out in the yard, the children he met at the campground the night before stand in a circle around Katherine. Katherine joins them when they begin to call up into the trees, “Mr. Clown! Mr. Clown, where are you?”

“HELP!”

Jersey. In that split second before he registers the madness in his movement, he has spun and pointed the Colt her way.

A nightmare moment. “I didn't mean it,” he whispers. He starts to lower the gun, then stops because the girl's eyes are filled with not just terror, but careful watchfulness. She is studying him. His every move.

“Jersey,” he says, and crouches low, “I only got this gun to protect us from
other
people. You got to be quiet, though. People might misunderstand. Or you might give us away, here.”

She turns her face away and stares at the ceiling. “I'm sick,” she says. “Maybe they would've helped me.”

“Hey,
I'm
going to help you, Jersey.” Carter reaches out the thumb of his free hand to wipe away the tear that runs from the girl's eye into the hair at her temple. It is true, her face is warm. Which worries him. And also relieves him a little; at least when she said she felt sick, she did not lie.