Carter Clay (8 page)

After the accident, on the long drive back to Sabine, somehow or other Carter's grief had veered into another region, where he began to entertain what now seem to him the most absurd of thoughts: he would return to work at the Accordion Cafe, to his little room, to the friendly AA meetings at Full Gospel Baptist. There had been no witnesses to the accident. Luck was with him. After he cleaned up the front of the van in a slough, and reassembled the contents of the shopping cart—R.E.'s Colt .45 forming the hot coal at the center—he drove his comatose friend back to that alley in Sabine. There—in some other lifetime, it seemed—dogs had barked and R.E. had given Carter the Electric Prunes album. Now, the dogs stood quiet as accomplices when Carter lifted R.E., and then the unwieldy Winn-Dixie cart, from the back of the van. R.E. groaned but did not wake when Carter laid him on the pile of firewood behind the privet hedge, nor when he attached a twenty-dollar bill and a note to the buttons of R.E.'s shirt:

Sorry about your jaw, buddy. Had to take off.

It was only after Carter parked the van in back of Mrs. Dickerson's rooming house that he began to return to reality. Mrs. Dickerson was out in her yard, whisking bedsheets from the line. She looked the same as always—steel-gray bob, pastel knit pants
with the stretch waist—and seeing her, Carter understood that
he
was different because of what had occurred on Post Road.

“Hey, Rambo!” Mrs. Dickerson called with a laugh. “You look like something the cat dragged in!” She was far enough across the yard to miss the way the Carter's teeth rattled while he told her his story: bumped his head while helping a friend clean out a septic tank. Mrs. Dickerson held her nose and giggled and called to him, “You better get in the tub, boy! And use some hydrogen peroxide if you got a cut!”

Though Carter was still drunk, by then the Demerol had begun to wear off. He was ashamed that he could
even feel
pain after what he had done, but there it was. Big. Throbbing. He shut himself into the green bathroom in Mrs. Dickerson's hall. While he tried to think what roads he could take to get himself out of Florida the quickest, he unwrapped R.E.'s shirt from his head and removed the now filthy bandages that the doctor had so carefully wrapped around his hand earlier that day. The doctor's gauze had retained the water from the slough, and in the logy white skin of Carter's finger, the stitches looked like a parasite that had locked onto him but good. His forehead should have been stitched, too. Had he looked into the mirror of Mrs. Dickerson's medicine cabinet, he would have seen that when he hit the windshield of the van, the skin had burst open in a fat X. His cut, swollen forehead resembled a gruesome dough—pink, clotted, slashed across its top to help it in the rising.

But Carter did not look in the mirror. Could not. Could not stop shaking. Could not even call out that he was not hungry when Mrs. Dickerson knocked on the door and said, “Supper!” Could not read the highlighted parts of
Moby-Dick
, or page 58 (“How it works”) of
Alcoholics Anonymous.
Could not make room for the books' words above the battering in his head.

Boom, boom, boom.

“Carter”—it was dark when Mrs. Dickerson returned, and she kept her voice low on the other side of his door—“you need anything, dear?”

“I'm just a little under the weather, ma'am, but thanks.”

Trembling, he fed his fish. Said the Serenity Prayer and the Our Father, the way they did at the AA meetings.

God forgives us everything we do, but we still have to make amends to His people.
So said the AA old-timer with whom Carter had been paired by Recovery House. An ex-Marine with a trucker's cap that read Young Fart, the old-timer had volunteered to explain “working the Steps” to Carter.

“If you like, you can share your moral inventory with me,” the old-timer had murmured. The two sat in the Recovery House kitchen at the time—a high-ceilinged white room, its only color coming from the many boxes of cereal on a shelf over the stove. “Since I was over there, too, you wouldn't need to feel you had to leave anything out with me. If you raped a girl, whatever—I'm pretty much shockproof.” One of the younger residents, passing through the kitchen, grinned at the old-timer's cap, and the old-timer yanked the thing off and wedged it between his thigh and the seat of his chair.

Carter said he had never raped anybody, he would never rape anybody. The man nodded. “Fine.”

“I wasn't some Charlie Manson. And I had a chaplain tell me—over there—he said you didn't judge people by what they done in a war. People ain't themselves in a war.”

The man leaned forward. He put his hands on Carter's knees. A red band across his forehead showed where his cap had pressed into his skin. “You believe that?” he asked.

Carter had not known how to answer.

And now—in peacetime, with no excuses at all—he had probably killed two people. Maybe three—

Between the last pages of
Moby-Dick
, Carter kept the money that he had saved from work: nine one-hundred-dollar bills. He took the bills—crisp, ironed—out of the book, and inserted them in his wallet. Sat on the side of the bed. Clutched Mrs. Dickerson's chenille spread with his good hand.

The thought of Mrs. Dickerson finding out about the accident—it gave Carter a shoulder-jerking chill.

Say he called Fort Powden—his sister, or his old friend Neff Morgan. When Bonnie Drabnek and her kids had left Carter,
Neff Morgan helped Carter look for them. Neff Morgan nursed Carter through the worst drunks of those days. Both Neff and Cheryl Lynn had put up with a lot. Once, when Neff tried to stop Carter from going out on the road, Carter broke Neff's collarbone, and Neff not only forgave Carter afterward but loaned him money. Actually, Carter still owed both Cheryl Lynn
and
Neff money.

Say Carter killed himself. Or turned himself in to the police. He wouldn't need money then. He could split his nine hundred dollars between Cheryl Lynn and Neff and Mrs. Dickerson.

His father—he could not call his father. The last time he had run into Duncan—a little pit bull of a man—Duncan had walked into Rex's Bowladrome, swinging. There had been a number of occasions when, out of old fear and a sense of rank, Carter had allowed Duncan to beat him, but that last time, Carter had hit back, sent the old man sprawling into tables and chairs.

Well. Well. And, really, what would be the point of calling Duncan or Cheryl Lynn or Neff about the accident? Just to share his guilt? Bad enough that R.E. was mixed up in the mess. Why put the crap on one more person's shoulders?

Carter lay back on the bed. The former bed of Mrs. Dickerson's daughter. When he reached up to turn off the lamp, he could see on the wall the outlines of a trio of painted-over decals: Mary with her little lamb as it followed her to the school.

Even with the lamp off, the nighttime walls of the room rang with light. The crescent moon outside the window was a tear in the fabric of the sky, and Carter knew it delivered a message from a world beyond that he was not pure enough to read.

Well, sleep was impossible.

At three-thirty—clean red bandanna covering his forehead, clean gauze covering the stitches on his hand—he drove the van into the pale gravel lot across the street from the Sabine police station. Parked. Such a lot of noise that gravel made!

I'm the one
, he would say. But he did not get out of the van. Could not. The pain in his head had affected his hearing, his vision. The glass in the police station door—he took it for a sheet of white paper until one of the officers, can of pop in hand,
crossed behind it. Would that be the officer to whom Carter would have to tell his tale? A chubby guy. Laughing, now. Or maybe just yawning.

Is it ironic that when Carter had first arrived home from Vietnam, he considered becoming a police officer? Before he ever got around to applying to the academy, however, he went to do a roofing job and, high on THC, backed off the roof, hurt his back. Which led to an intimate relationship between himself and Percodan. Eventually, then, he concluded that the idea of being a police officer sounded like a little kid's dream; not all that far off from his childhood notion that when he grew up he would work at the pulp, like his dad.

What? Carter had once dreamed of going to a stinking slop of a job making paper bags for America's groceries so that he could come home each night, drunk, and get a little drunker and bat around a wife and kids? Of course not. In Carter's dream, the thermos and lunch box were the knight-in-armor's disguise. The knight might appear cruel at home, but every day, he saved the family from starvation; and every night, his cruelty kept from the door those dragons more vicious than himself.

After Carter returned from Vietnam, if you had asked him when he gave up the dream of working at the pulp, he would not have been able to tell you the answer. Which is not so unusual. How many people remember the abandonment of childhood dreams? However, a few years later, Carter also would not remember if the roof accident came before or after he worked up the coast at the cannery or painted houses with Jim Miner. He
would
know that he worked at the cannery when he lived with Bonnie Drabnek and her kids because, in the beginning, both he and Bonnie Drabnek worked at the cannery. In the beginning, Bonnie seemed like the answer. She reminded Carter of certain beautiful, smiling women he had seen at work on family farms in the hills of Vietnam. In the beginning, just like a regular couple, Bonnie and Carter and the kids went to picnics and softball games with other people from the cannery. Together, they rented one of the quonset huts owned by the cannery. The days seemed innocent and good—though Bonnie told him she would not marry
him until he stopped drinking so much. Sometimes, she said, he scared her, and the little ones, too. He knew he screamed in his sleep now and then, but Bonnie said—she was sorry, she had to tell him—sometimes, when he passed out, she saw dead people rise out of his head.
Like steam
, was how she put it.

Then, somewhere along the way, Bonnie took up drinking. Stopped getting up in the morning. Tears ran down her cheeks at all hours of the day. She locked herself in the bathroom.
Living with Carter was poison!
she cried from behind the door.
Carter was cursed!
During the war—so the Invit part of Bonnie believed—Carter's soul had gone to the land of the dead and tasted the food there, and so become forever lost.

Carter was worried that winter night when Bonnie's aunt and uncle and a cousin drove up to the quonset hut. Bonnie had stopped taking care of the children by then, and though Carter tried to keep them fed and clean, he supposed the relatives had heard things were bad. But the relatives climbed down from their old truck as if everything were fine, this was a social call. The uncle and the cousin each carried two bottles of Jim Beam. Like bracelets, a couple of rings of summer sausage hung from the aunt's thick wrists. The aunt was supposed to be the tough member of the group, but even she did not complain about the fact that you could see your breath in the hut (there had not been money to have the gas tank filled); and soon Carter was drunk enough to feel close to all three visitors. He drew a kitchen chair up to the easy chair where the aunt sat. “Things'd be better if Bonnie would marry me,” he said.

The aunt laughed and gave Carter a tap on the arm with the brush she was using to work out the snarls in Bonnie's hair. “Look at her,” the aunt said. “Look at you. Why should either of you want to be with either of you?” She shook her head, but she laughed. Carter thought they were having a party until he came to, and found himself alone—the only thing left behind, except for the empty bottles of Jim Beam, and the training papers for the stray he'd recently brought home for the kids.

In the war, other people were always trying to kill him while he was trying to stay alive. What was crazy: after he got out, he
often thought of killing
himself.
“I'll just have to kill myself,” he would say—sometimes right out loud—because his head was full of too much bad stuff. But he did not kill himself. He didn't even try, and sometimes he had to wonder if this showed he was at heart just the coward his father always said he was.

In the police station parking lot—brain racked with fear and guilt from yesterday's drugs—he watched the night sky fade to a phlegm-colored dawn that suddenly rustled its wings and turned into a parroty pink thing that gave the impression it had been dreamed up to move a human heart.

An officer came out of the station at five-fifteen. He headed straight toward the parking lot, and, for a moment, the left artery in Carter's neck did a little dance of fear. Should he bolt? Should he say,
I am the one, I am the one who—

Blood thundered in his ears. It seemed the officer headed straight for Carter and the van, but then the officer veered right, to a little hatchback a few feet off. A man close to Carter's own age. Slender. Hispanic, Italian. He came into the Accordion for coffee, and, on Sunday mornings, sometimes showed up for breakfast with a pretty wife and two little girls.