Carter Clay (7 page)

The universe that Jersey Alitz inhabits at the hospital is much denser than the sunlit acre that the Sabine doctor gave Carter Clay in exchange for the stitches in his hand. Jersey's dope has put her to work measuring those interesting interstices between here and there. Still, she has found a hole through which she understands that the woman who sometimes speaks is M.B., her mother's mother, her own grandmother, yes.

To whom does M.B. speak? To Jersey herself? To the silver-haired man in black who stands at the end of the bed? No matter. Jersey is shiveringly delicious. Jersey is a dish of cream being lapped up by her very own tongue, a sensation so lovely that it makes her laugh aloud.

Ah! M.B. and the man in black turn Jersey's way. Such sad faces! Yet
funny
is the word Jersey means to say to them. Because she feels exquisite, and the light is liquid pearl, and could the man in black be the silver-haired lunatic who preaches at her parents' university? St. Tom the Baptist, the student hecklers call that one. Tanned and handsome Tom, who looks as if he might officiate at a country club. Preacher Tom. Tommy Boy. And because of his silver hair, Foxy.

When Jersey says, “Structure,” M.B. and the man in black bend close. It is Jersey's plan to tell them that the hair color of the man in black, like that of St. Tom, is the result of structure, not
pigment. Under a microscope—Jersey has seen this—a strand of such silvery hair is crystalline as a handful of snow.

“What is it, kid?”

Jersey tries again: “Struc-ture.” But the act of speech has changed. Speech, she discovers, must now be built with the solid mass of tongue, carefully detonated into echoing skull and mouth; and there is a distraction, a smell, something that reminds Jersey of one of the solvents her parents use in the field—

Up pops M.B.'s tiny wrinkled face! Like a toy that has been held under in a tub of water! Then the smell and M.B.'s face recede, and M.B. says to the man in black, “Just chatter. They got her so full of dope, she don't—
doesn't
know which end's up.”

“Poodle in the noodle?” Jersey laughs as she says the silly phrase—which is, in fact, M.B.'s own phrase for someone mixed up. M.B. and the man, however, seem not to hear. They are farther away now, farther. Leaning together, they make up a slender volcanic cone along Jersey's very private, very white horizon, and she wishes she could show them how strange they look, make them come over where she is, and look back, and see themselves.

Over
here.
Please. Because Jersey is suddenly very alone over here, and the heaven in her head begins to shudder and grow and prove itself no heaven at all, no, it is a
box
that heaves with its own vile contents.

“What is it? What's happened?” she pleads, but all that she receives is M.B. and the strange man, squeezing her hands and saying, “There, there,” words without meaning,
there, there
, pretenders to content—like blanks in a gun. Jersey, however, is a smart girl, and when she considers the object at which the pair points those words,
there, there
, what does she find but herself, and so she opens her mouth, and then opens it wider still and begins to scream.

Though the
Gulf News
does not detail the death of Joseph Alitz (full impact, hit and run), a week later the paper does run a complete article on the accident. The accompanying photograph of Joseph Alitz is drawn from the jacket of his most recent book, and Finis Pruitt—aka R.E. and/or Private Rear End—Finis Pruitt, reading the newspaper behind the Accordion Cafe, tries to imagine Joseph Alitz in front of a class. Quite erroneously, Finis Pruitt decides Alitz was a prig, the type to oh-so-dramatically remove his watch at the beginning of each lecture and set it on the corner of the desk for periodic, purse-lipped referral.

With a little clipper he carries for the purpose, Finis Pruitt cuts the article from the newspaper. Wonders, not so idly: has Carter Clay seen it?

Amazing to Finis: that he has such a piece of clearly bad shit on Clay. And frustrating: the
Gulf News
of two days before included a bit with M.B. Milhause, mother of Katherine, begging people to come forward and collect the twenty-five hundred dollars being offered for information leading to arrest and conviction of the driver.

Finis's money, for the asking! But Finis does not want Clay in prison. Finis wants Clay
dead. Kaput.
Finis wants Clay
FINIS.

The truth: This second failure to kill Clay has left Finis ashamed of himself. And so he will be until Clay is no more.

Where he went wrong: He hesitated before shooting Clay. He did not behave like a warrior.

Perhaps it is true that it is hard to kill one's own monster. You fall in love with it a little.

Mr. Clay, a veteran of the Vietnam War, was known to suffer from depression and various addictions.

So Finis had imagined the newspaper saying after the police found Clay dead with a hole in his head: clearly a suicide.

Oh! Finis jumps as someone from the Accordion Cafe flings open the back screen door and tosses out some horrific thing, head-sized and dripping. Oh!

Iceberg gone to rot.

The screen door slams back into place. Finis holds his heart—even in private he tends toward the dramatic—and continues to excoriate himself:

I was lazy at the penultimate moment! I was too eager to entertain myself with an amusing notion:
Why not have Clay drive me to Solana before I do the deed? Yes, and there I'll suggest we stop for a time at some remote little park, where Clay shall drink until he passes out—as Clay always does when he drinks—and there I shall put the .45 in Clay's mouth, and do the deed.

Not a pleasant prospect, the shooting, but it had to be done. He was prepared to do it, he felt certain.

Could the people in Sabine be lying when they tell Finis that they have no idea where Clay has gone? Since the accident—between nights spent under a kudzu-covered bridge—Finis has done nothing but try to find Clay again, but both times he telephoned the Accordion Cafe, he was told,
We don't know where Carter went. If you see him, tell him we miss him, OK?

And at the AA meetings—when Finis hinted, in a voice oozing concern, that folks ought to keep an eye out for a now-missing member of their flock as he might be a little
loco en la cabeza
, folks—the members listened politely, but not one of them pressed Finis for details or offered a theory about where Clay might be.

On page 3 of the
Gulf News
, the article about the accident continues. There are two more photos: Jersey Alitz-Milhause and her mother, Katherine Milhause. In addition—clip, zip—here's a
tidy illustration of the trauma that occurred to Katherine Milhause's brain after her skull slammed into the asphalt road. In the illustration—perhaps to spare the newspaper's readership—the head has been reduced to little more than an oval with a bump for a nose. Finis judges that this outline appears less that of a head than, say, a swimming pool. He may be correct, but this does not stop many readers who see the illustration from experiencing odd pluckings in their joints and guts as they pull back from the big sheets of newsprint in their hands.

It is certainly true that three weeks later, when Jersey Alitz convinces her doctors and her grandmother that it is safe for her to take a gurney ride to the room of her brain-damaged mother—a bright space, all white walls and stainless steel—the poor girl can locate nothing of her pretty mom in that smashed and bloated jack-o'-lantern she finds in the hospital's snarl of machinery: tracheostomy tube, feeding tube, heparin drip, heart monitor, oxygen meter, catheter, respirator. This creature's hands are swollen large as catcher's mitts. Even the feet at the end of the bed are strange blue roots, frozen, pointing one toward the other—

Jersey
wants
the creature to be her mother—she wants her mother—but she has not expected this. The juddering in her chest makes her fear she may be ill, and she reaches out a hand to M.B., and says an urgent, “Here.”

Like Jersey, M.B. has lost a great deal of weight since the accident, an occurrence that has made Jersey look younger, M.B. older. M.B. tries to give Jersey a smile of reassurance, but what comes out is crumpled as the balled-up kerchief she holds in her hand: a grimace.

The grimace leaves Jersey feeling bereft; however, before M.B. arrived, Jersey determined a rule for herself: no tears during this visit to her mother. None. There was a period, Jersey knows, in which she screamed. Not in pain but—vigilance, an attempt to alert the heavens to what had happened and convince them that they must reverse it. Those screams—she drove them out of herself like horses from a burning barn. Still, when she was done, she
found that nothing had been saved. All that remained were ashes, and herself to contemplate them.

So: no tears. And perhaps she will succeed. While the neurosurgeon, Dr. Subhas Mukhergee, explains in his mellifluous voice, “Even five years ago, chances are she would not have made it,” Jersey distracts herself by imagining that she is the needle that draws the thread that forms the little blue seashells stitched into the leather of the handbag that sits in M.B.'s lap. Threads of powder blue and cerulean and royal, lighter grading into darker and back again, under and up and over, up and over.

Diffuse
is the word Dr. Mukhergee uses to describe Katherine's injuries: contusions, lacerations, bleeding, cerebral cicatrix. When he moves his hands about in soft circles of expression, M.B. nods.

“We just got to remember,” she says, “the Lord don't put a thing in our path we can't handle, right, doctor?”

Up and over and down goes the needle. The first shell is a conch, and the second a murex, but Jersey cannot help hearing her grandmother's words, and she protests, “Don't say that!”—a mistake, for as soon as she opens her mouth, her eyes well with tears.

Though M.B. might ignore the words of the girl, she feels wounded by the solemn nod of agreement from Dr. Mukhergee. Overexposure to death and disaster have given the doctor a patina that, in combination with his heavy-lidded eyes, his dark skin, makes M.B. regard him as a gilded and slightly dangerous god.

Jersey, on the other hand, does not know what to make of the man. Suppose he is fourth-rate, and how is she to know? Can she trust the judgment of M.B.? Back when Jersey was six or seven, Katherine—always trying to prepare for disasters—decided that the family should have a code word. With a code word, in an emergency a person unknown to Jersey could prove himself parent-approved.
Christmas tree
was the code word that Jersey selected, but no one ever had to use it. Joe or Katherine or a duly appointed friend or sitter always managed to retrieve Jersey at the swimming pool or Girl Scouts. There were no disasters until
now
, when neither Joe nor Katherine can give the code to anyone.

Dr. Mukhergee crouches beside the girl's gurney, bringing his face level with Jersey's own. “Your mother's a real fighter,” he says. “You're both fighters. You're lucky.”

Lucky. Dr. Mukhergee is, of course, correct in a world in which survival is considered a good, but that does not stop Jersey from turning her face from his hot breath. She does not yet understand that the others whose stories appeared in the newspapers—the victims about whom
she
used to read—they no more planned to partake in disaster than Jersey herself. Later, she will see how the way in which she once interpreted the details of other victims' stories as harbingers of their now-published disasters was a kind of mental knock on wood. (Surely the heart-shaped locket that the rape-murder victim wore in her senior class photo indicated a nature too trusting for this world?)

“Dr. Mukhergee—” She wants to ask him if she might touch her mother. Her mother's toes, perhaps. That would be some sort of consolation, she thinks. Skin to skin. Her cheek pressed hard to the sole of her mother's foot. But just as she wonders how to ask permission for this small thing—suppose her touch is explosive, all of the sustaining equipment blasts apart—a terrible darkness flickers through the white room, and Jersey cries, “Oh! Is she okay? Did the electricity go out?”

Dr. Mukhergee gives a kindly laugh. “It was just a gull flying past the window. You just saw the gull's shadow.”

A herring gull.

Which has nabbed a Cheeto tossed up to it by Carter Clay, who eats his lunch on a bench in the little sculpture garden below. Carter Clay has recently begun work at the hospital, as an orderly. He lives in Bradenton now, occupying the echoey unused second floor of a storefront beauty salon (lavender paint from last month's resident masseuse, the sweet stink of permanent wave solution and shampoo wafting up from below).

With clean-shaven head and face, white work clothes, and apologetic air, Carter Clay now looks very little like that bearded pirate M.B. spied beneath the hospital portico three weeks before.

The day that he shaved his head and face with those razors originally purchased for use on his veins, penance was Carter's acknowledged aim—penance and some sort of removal of self—but as soon as people on the street began to call him Mr. Clean, Kojak, and Yul, he had to admit that he had also fashioned a disguise.