Carter Clay (45 page)

She pulls back from his touch and raises herself up on an elbow. She listens, then says a mournful, “They're leaving. They didn't hear me.”

“God damn it, Jersey.” Carter springs to his feet. He jams the gun back into his pocket. The weight of the thing continually surprises him, wearies him. “I guess—till you change your attitude,” he declares, “you can just stay out here.”

But—hey, he does not
want
to be a tyrant, and he makes himself stop before he goes out the door. He grabs hold of the parallel bars, tries to soften his voice. “I'll send Katherine out. To give you some breakfast. Maybe you and her could try and work on the bars. Or you and me can do it when I get home.”

“Wait.” Her voice is flat. She lowers herself to the floor, then says, not looking at him, but still sounding a little scary, “I heard
what you said to my mom the other day, Mr. Clay. About Abraham and Isaac. Just remember, though: you don't have a right to sacrifice me. The point with Abraham was—he
loved
Isaac. You may want to love me, but you don't.” She pauses to cough. “My parents loved me. I know the difference.”

Maybe if she were not so sick and tired, she could pretend to go along with him. But she
is
sick and tired, and so she is glad to see him go. She has begun to suspect correctly that the hospital filmstrip that her grandmother found so grisly did not explain everything about the decubitus ulcer to its audience. The film-strip did not detail how, if unchecked, the destruction of tissue begins to affect the patient's entire system. The body begins to fall to sepsis, to circulate toxins. The condition has stages beyond what is visible at the site of the sore. If the toxins are not stopped, they begin to damage the blood vessels, organs, and cells. If the damage continues, the cells become unable to extract sufficient oxygen from the hemoglobin in the blood. In time, all of the vital organs begin to fail. Such failure leads to the buildup of even more poisons in the body. The lining of the stomach and intestines are destroyed. Gastrointestinal bleeding follows and, eventually, death.

Better to know? Not to know?

After Carter Clay has been gone for a time, Jersey hears Katherine step out the backdoor of the cabin and into the yard, where she begins to call to the birds.
Tsk. Tsk.

“Mom”—Jersey raises her voice, does her best to sound full of authority—“you've got to get me to a doctor, Mom.”

Nothing, then a bleating, “I can-'
t
!”

“Come on, Mom!” She hesitates, then adds a stern, “You would have done it before, Mom.”

“Don-'t talk!” Katherine's frightened face appears in the window by the coop door. “'Less you nee-d a go toi-let!”

“Mom! Please! At least sit with me!”

Katherine wags her head from side to side, but she remains at the window, staring in.

“Hey, Mom? Remember how you used to wonder what it would be like to be in prison or a concentration camp? You wondered how you would stand it, and you told me a story about a man who was going to be executed. You remember that? How it made you feel better?”

When Katherine neither nods nor shakes her head nor makes any sign that she has heard, Jersey goes on: “That's what I did last night. I mean, I told myself that story, and I tried to do what the man did, to pay attention to things. I used to do it at the hospital, too.”

The face disappears from the window, but Jersey continues. She closes her eyes, and she says, “Sometimes, I do different stuff. I go through the Desert Museum, or the house in Seca. Like, I pretend I'm in the kitchen and I run my hands along the tile on the counter. Remember where the grout's missing by the sink? I see that. I take a banana out of the fruit bowl. A really nice banana. With the little freckles on it. This one has freckles. Because it's perfectly ripe, the top doesn't snap when I bend it back, but opens a little mouth—you know what I mean? It sort of dents the top of the fruit inside, but it's not serious or anything, and that's where I start peeling it.” She shivers, and makes a little noise of revulsion. “There's a string thing on the fruit, and I have to pull that off, but then it's okay. I always hesitate a little before I bite into fruit. The first bite. It always feels like a little test, you know? Then my teeth slide into the banana. There aren't very many foods that feel quite like this—cheesecake? The banana feels a little like cheesecake, but of course it's—”

Katherine's return to the window is announced by her forehead's knock against the glass. “You don-'
t
have banana!” she says with some indignation. “You mak-
ing
it up!”

Jersey takes a breath. “That's okay, though, Mom.” Again, she closes her eyes. She says, “Sometimes I go through the linen closet, too. I press my face into the towels. The old ones Grandma Ann gave us—the green ones we use for the pool, and the blue ones. They smell like wood. Sort of pulpy? The sheets—are different. More like dry grass.”

“We're not
home
,” Katherine says.

But Jersey shuts the door to the linen closet and steps out of the hall and into the living room. Her feet are bare, and the concrete floor is cool on their soles. She runs her fingers along the books in the bookcase on her left and this makes a small drumming sound. There is a book by the singer Bob Dylan and it has a cracked spine of some pink and glossy material, and long, long ago someone taped that crack. With cellophane tape. Three rows. Yellowed. The edges grown sharp with age. To the right of the books, a small brass frog in a short red jacket holds a tiny barbell over his head. Jersey used to play with that frog, and now she lifts it in her hand and feels its cool weight, and the spot on the back of the jacket where the enamel is chipped—

And what else? What else?

Agitated—how hot she feels!—she says, “We could sing, Mom.” The hollow sound of her voice insists to her that she is in the chicken coop, but she forces herself back into the Seca living room, where the second bookshelf holds alphabetized record albums and CDs. Some of her father's record albums come from the fifties—how can her father be dead?—but it is her mother's albums from the sixties that have spines worn to an unreadable fuzz.

“Smokey Robinson?” Jersey whispers. It helps to whisper, to not jar the world too much. “‘Ooo, Baby, Baby'?” She pulls the record from the bookcase while her mother sits behind her on the love seat and whispers a response that Jersey cannot hear—though it must certainly be yes.

You know what the trouble with you is? You're too much fun.
So her mother used to say, laughing, when Jersey distracted her from her work.

Remove the album from its jacket. Set it on the turntable. Place the needle. After the first thrilling notes, there is a not unattractive skip that Jersey—who has heard only this scratched recording—thinks of as part of the song.

Jersey has always loved to sing—even now, feeling sick and in pain and a little crazy, she is glad to sing, glad, glad, and, after the first few lines, Katherine joins in:

“What a price to pa-ay-ay-ay-ay! I'm crying!”

Is it better to feel that she sings at home—even if that is only imagination—or to know that she sings in the chicken coop while her mother, the guard, sings outside?

Irrelevant, because the next words she says aloud—“How about ‘Tracks of My Tears,' Mom?”—they let in too much light, and Katherine shouts, “Qui-
et
! Now!” and then she is gone, the backdoor to the cabin slamming.

Rain.

A sweet sound on the little coop's roof. If Jersey were well, and she and Katherine and Joe were all together, and the coop were clean and had a little braided rug on the floor and curtains—it would be a nice place to sit and read, wouldn't it?

Even if it were only her mother and herself—

Though Jersey supposes she would need someone to help her with her mother. And then she thinks,
really, it would be easier on my own.

A guilty thought, that. The sort of thought, she supposes, that must have driven her grandmother to let Carter Clay take them away.

M.B.
, she hums.
Come in, M.B.

At some point, she must have fallen asleep, for now the rain has stopped and Katherine is hoisting Jersey in her arms, carrying her to the cabin. “Here,” Katherine says, and sets the girl down in the cubicle that houses the cabin's toilet.

“But, Mom,” Jersey calls through the plywood door, “listen to me, Mom. I'm cold out there. I'm sick.”

“Hur-ry! Hur-ry!”

“Mom”—as Katherine steps back into the cubicle, Jersey grabs Katherine's hand and presses it to her forehead.

“See?” she demands.

Katherine's eyes open wide. “You sick!” she says. “You—you' eyes loo' yellow, Jers'!”

Jersey was not aware of this fact but she nods since it has seemed to her that the skin on her hands has begun to look slightly orange.

“I tell Car-er,” Katherine says, and she hoists Jersey and starts for the door.

“Mom. Just—put me on the couch now, and go out to the road and get somebody to take me to a doctor.”

Katherine's eyes fill with tears. “No way! Car-er says there's a ba-d guy ou' there! And las' nigh-t, Car-er was
mad.
At us! He ne'er came home! I was s'care!”

“Mom. At least you can keep me in here, can't you? You can explain to Carter that I'm sick.”

Katherine hesitates, then carries Jersey to the little couch and sets her down. “Oh! I forgo'. I wa' bring-ing you foo'!” In demonstration, she pats the lumpy pockets of Joe Alitz's barn coat. “Here.” From one of the coat's great pockets, she removes two woebegone slices of bread and an apple. From another, she extracts a peanut butter jar full of milk. From a third, comes the gun that Carter Clay pulled on Jersey that morning. Quite casually, Katherine sets the gun on the couch, its snout resting on one of the slices of bread.

Jersey glances away, uncertain that she wants her mother to know that she has seen the thing. Katherine, however, makes a point of picking the gun up and pointing it toward the ceiling. “Car-er gay me thi-s, but don't wor-ry. Tha'”—she points to the safety mechanism—“you have to move tha' to shoo'.”

She returns the gun to the coat pocket, then unscrews the lid of the peanut butter jar of milk. “Car-er says it's to protec' us. It was his da's gun, in a war.” She widens her eyes for Jersey's benefit. “He say it'a chop dow-n a tree!”

While Jersey drinks from the jar of milk, she wonders:
What would happen if she were to try to take that gun away from Katherine? Would Katherine hurt her?

To Jersey, guns are so foreign and full of menace that she thinks of them as almost make-believe, something like witches or ghosts, monsters; this despite the fact that the former Katherine told Jersey more than once that a person—“a person” being Katherine's nonthreatening way of saying Jersey—“a person” should always do her best to run away if a stranger tried to get her into his car,
especially if he threatened her with a gun
, because
statistics showed that “a person” almost always ended up dead if forced into the car of a stranger with a gun.

Run away.

All that intimidating, well-thought-out advice that the old Katherine gave: no help at all for
this
Jersey in dealing with
this
stranger.

More rain falls in the late afternoon. The rain and general humidity have swollen the wood of the cabin, eliminated the gaps that gave the floors and walls the creaks and squeaks of drier weather; the acoustics of the place have changed now. The rooms feel almost padded, and this sensation adds to Katherine's panic.

Back and forth she circles, from feverish Jersey on the couch to the front window, again and again. Carter has told Katherine that there are bad men out there; people upon whom she might need to use the gun that knocks against her leg at every move—but Katherine can hardly think about the bad people since that moment when Jersey insisted Katherine look at the sore that Jersey says is making her sick.

A volcano. That is what Katherine thought of. A red hole surrounded by black, with black wisps coming off it, and something else Katherine knew she should not see: the glisten of bone.

Katherine begins to cry as soon as she hears the campground station wagon pull up in front of the cabin: Neff Morgan, driving Carter home. She pushes on the swollen front door several times before she finally forces it open.

“Car!” She rushes out into the rain and grabs at the front of his jacket as he turns from the wagon. “Jers' needs a do-tor! She
hot
! She has some-pin! You never! Like she
sai'd.”

From his window, Neff Morgan calls, “Anything wrong?”

“Is Jers'! She's sick!” Katherine cries, but Carter waves Neff Morgan off,
Go on, I'll take care of it
, as he starts to the cabin.

On Carter's heels, Katherine protests, “I tol' her we get a docer! I promise! And—I her moth-er, Car-er!”

He squeezes Katherine's hand as they step inside the cabin. “You're her mother, and I'm her father, now, too, ain't I? Ain't I the one fasting to try to make her walk? I gone forty-eight hours so far—”

“There.” Katherine points to the little couch, where Jersey lies curled on her side, eyes closed. “I brough' her in.”

Carter nods, though this independent act on the part of Katherine makes him a little nervous. Suppose she has undone whatever good came from last night's discipline? But, then, he could not be certain much good came of last night, anyway.

“So, hey, Jersey.” He seats himself on one arm of the couch. “Your mom says you don't feel so good. The thing is”—he makes a production of rubbing his boots on the floor, letting the wood soak up a little of the wet—“what neither you understand—”

“Fee' her forehea'!” Katherine commands. “An' look a' her so-re! There' bone!”

“You awake, Jersey?” A queer smell comes off the girl and he does his best to ignore it. Perhaps she has soiled her pants? He gives a little whistle, a kind of
yoo-hoo
, then says, “I'm going to feel your forehead, Jersey. Your mom thinks you got a fever.”

Though his fingers are cold from his lack of food and the cool drive from the campground, Carter knows, instantly, that the girl's forehead is much hotter than it was this morning. Hot like a glass of tea that you took without understanding that you could not hold it, and so it slid through your fingers, and crashed to the floor.

He starts when he realizes that the girl now considers him with open eyes.

“Wait,” she says. Wanly, she begins to tug at the fabric of her skirt, drawing up the hem. “Look.”

A wad of damp and dirty cloth sticks out from the elastic of her underpants, and he must fight down a shiver of nausea to ask, “So, you want us to clean you up? We can do that. No problem.”

“No.” She makes a movement with her head that is so small, it seems large. “I want you to see.”

He takes a gulp of air, then glances up at Katherine, who gives him a decisive nod, yes.

“All right, then.” Gingerly, he lowers the elastic waist of the briefs over the soiled cloths. Lifts the cloths.

In the war, Carter learned how to conceal from another soldier the fact the soldier's limb was now little more than rags, or that the larger part of the man's face lay on the ground by his head. That, however, was over twenty years ago. Today, Carter is not prepared for anything but some level of embarrassment; and so Jersey spies the horror that passes over his face, and she cries out in alarm one split second after he does.

The world convulses as Carter leaps to his feet. Berry-bright explosions fill his head, and he reels backward against the picnic table. Which shrieks as it advances across the bare floor.

“Jersey.” He does not understand. The skin surrounding the gaping wound appears dark with gunpowder, as if she has been shot. “What happened?”

“What I told you.” She has covered her face with her hands in order to hide from the look in his eyes. “A pressure sore.”

“God.” Carter kneels beside the couch. “God,” he murmurs, “is there something more you want from me? You want me to offer her up without complaint? Well, I won't! I won't!”

With her right eye—her topside eye—Jersey can see the weeping Carter Clay. Opals form where her left eye presses into the fingers she now cups beneath her cheek. She gasps for the execution story. She reaches for it with a breath so jagged that Carter himself feels torn, but the execution story is not there today, and Jersey pleads, “Don't let me die, Mr. Clay.”

“No.” He adjusts her briefs and skirt over the sore. “I'm going to get Neff's wagon and take you to the hospital.”