Carter Clay (9 page)

The officer broke off his singing. He turned. Yes, there was another person in the lot. “Excuse my—serenade,” he murmured to Carter, and climbed into the hatchback.

Carter tried to nod.
Thumpthumpthump
went his right foot against the floor of the car—as if he were a dog scratched in the wrong spot. He could remember that foot-thumping from other times: terrified, crouched in a foxhole, knee jerking up and down like a piston.

Surely it was wrong for one man to have the power to scare another man as much as the officer had scared him. Such fear made Carter angry, and his anger made him forget why he had felt afraid of the officer in the first place, and as soon as the little hatchback disappeared from sight, he started up the van.

I could kill myself.
So he thought.
Administer my own justice instead of messing with those fools.

He pulled onto Crown Street. Drove past the Accordion. Crossed over February Street, which led back to Mrs. Dickerson's, and then the street that led to the little Baptist church where he had attended so many AA meetings. But hey, he was obliged to make sure that R.E. was okay, wasn't he?

He found his way to the alley behind the tangerine garage. Parked. Stuck his head through the privet. Sweet relief. Neither friend nor cart remained in the spot.

The houses thinned as he reached the edge of Sabine. Now and again he felt like crying, but what he created was more steam than tears; heat radiated from his cheeks, forehead, and chest. For quite a while, he simply drove north on 17. Boom, boom, boom. His hand ached. His head ached. His feet prickled with the heat coming off the engine. The sun-shocked landscape left him nauseated, but it helped to focus on the landscape and his bodily pains. When he withdrew from them, he found himself shaking, staring at the woman who looked as if someone had shot her in the head—

Two children and a dog. Stepping up onto the shoulder of the highway from out of nowhere.

Carter made an exaggerated swerve to the left, then shrieked at himself, “Pay attention!”

At the next exit, he turned around. Drove south. Where to go?

When he finally turned east at Bartow, it was not a decision, just a movement of the arms; as was his subsequent turnoff in a town whose name he did not even bother to absorb.

A weedy little place. It cracked open before him like an old, dusty book. Would you suppose he had trouble finding the store that sold liquor?

An old silver trailer. Just inside the trailer's screen door, a German shepherd lay on a love seat. When Carter stopped to adjust his eyes to the trailer's dark, the animal stretched its neck long to look up at him. “Hey, there.” Carter crouched to pet the handsome creature. “Hey.” Had he been alone in the store, he would have sunk his face into the dog's ruff and stayed there a while.

“That's Cleopatra,” called a woman working on a ladder at the back of the trailer. With her chopped and oily hair, her shorts revealing legs knotted and bruised with veins, the woman reminded Carter of Ellie, who ran the bait shop of his childhood. He found himself thinking of the clerk as the age of his mother, before it occurred to him that she might be younger than himself.

“What do you need?”

Razor blades, please, and a fifth of Smirnoff.

Just across the street from the trailer there sat a sagging place called the Turquoise Motel. Not bothering to move the van from the bit of packed earth and weeds that served as the store's parking lot, Carter rented one of the Turquoise Motel's eight rooms.

A flute of grime decorated the baseboards. The batting showed gray through the threadbare coral and turquoise quilt. Carter opened his bottle while the ancient television set warmed.

Lassie
, from the 1950s. Carter's heart heaved painfully at the sight of the beautiful collie on the screen, and the sweet and melancholy whistling that played over the credits.
Lassie
was the show that had first made Carter want to learn how to whistle. His father forbade his whistling in the house, but Carter whistled up and down the alleys and streets, and he could remember how he had felt, whistling the
Lassie
song, that he and his family were actually wonderful people who had been cast under an evil spell.

After
Lassie
ended, on came the succession of old programs (
The Real McCoys, The Andy Griffith Show)
that the channel's Christian broadcaster believed to represent better family values than more contemporary productions.

While he drank his vodka, Carter half-listened to Sheriff Andy Taylor sing to his son a song about picking a bale of cotton and a bale of hay. Carter wished that he had kept R.E.'s gun. He could have put the .45 in his mouth, pulled the trigger, and taken care of everything. Though
not
at the Turquoise Motel. Cheryl Lynn had told him about cleaning up after their mother killed herself. It would be almost as bad to slit his wrists at the motel. Coming upon such a sight would surely hurt even a stranger.

“It's only by the grace of God that I'm here today, alive.” So Carter had often said at the AA meetings at Full Gospel. In Vietnam, he could have been killed fifty times over. Drinking and drugging, he could have OD'd, or choked on his vomit, or walked out in front of a car. He had a friend at Howell Park who did that. Got drunk and stepped right into traffic.

At AA, Carter liked to tell of the doctors' amazement at his recovery from those stab wounds received at Howell Park: “By the time the lady runners found me, I'd lost so much blood, the doctors weren't sure I'd even be good for donating organs! I guess God wasn't through with me yet!”

Now, however—while Sheriff Taylor and his incompetent deputy, Barney, bickered harmlessly—it seemed to Carter that his earlier escapes from death might have been a terrible mistake, missed opportunities for avoiding yesterday's disaster.

I guess God wasn't through with me yet! Yeah, folks, God was saving my sorry ass so I could go smash up some innocent people while they stood on the side of the road!

Boom, boom, boom.

Carter lay back on the motel's saggy bed. Closed his eyes.

Had there been a third person? A kid?

The credits for
Andy Griffith
played as he crashed into the motel room john and was sick.
The Power of Prayer
was just starting when he plunged back to the bed, and before he passed out, he spent a few minutes watching. The host had skin polished to a rosy granite. He and his pretty wife drank out of fancy teacups on a fancy couch and discussed Ephesians 2:8, 9.

The nylon stockings on the wife's legs caught black blades of light when she turned on the couch and said to the TV audience, “We hope you know Jesus loves you, friends. Whatever you've done, He loves you still, and He's just waiting for you to take Him up on His offer of eternal salvation!”

“We had a deal!”

“I don't make deals!”

Carter's neighbors at the Turquoise Motel were arguing. Two men. It was their shouting that had brought Carter around. The men were much louder than the aged preacher who now spoke on Carter's TV.

A sound of scuffling.

Something falling over with a crash.

Carter raised himself onto his elbows to call, “You okay over there?”

“Mind your own business!”

“Yeah! Fucking mind your own business, Jack!”

The two resumed their quarrel.

“What kind of lousy motherfucking shithead are you, anyway?”

“It is the blood of Christ,” said the elderly preacher on the television. Ram-faced. Vaguely familiar.

In an effort to drown out his neighbors, Carter stood and raised the volume on the television: “. . . and His divine and merciful love.” Quickly, he changed channels.

A nature show. Baby antelope drinking water. Delicate legs splayed outward. Big eyes. Tail flickering like flame.

“You fuck! You owe me!”

Just then the nature show's only sound came from birdsong in the distant background, and even with the volume set as high as it could go, the song could not compete with the neighbors. A fly landed on the little antelope's ear. Its buzzing gave the birdsong
scale. Then the antelope twitched its ear. The fly flew away. The camera panned from the antelope through greenery to a cheetah. Carter jerked as the voice of the authoritative narrator came on, booming:

“Will the cheetah get her chance, now that the antelope has come down to the water hole to drink?”

Another reminder of his childhood, with all of its Disney segments in which beautiful animals were sent through gripping but ultimately harmless adventures.

Shocking, then, when the next frames revealed the cheetah's successful leap, the pathetic struggle of the baby antelope to free itself from the cat's jaws. Flop, went the little neck, and the antelope became—though still in possession of its sweet face—food.

The motel television's reception was apparently limited to a few channels—the Christians, the nature shows, the news—the latter now flashing a set of photographs that stopped Carter's hand, and made him scramble to lower the volume.

Three faces in a row, looking out from the screen like travelers passing by on a train. Underneath them the names: Joseph Alitz. Katherine Milhause. Jersey Alitz.

Carter turned down the volume, but not so much that he could not hear: one dead, two in critical condition in Bradenton Memorial. Boom. Boom. Boom. Said a newscaster in a grave but mellifluous voice:

Shots of the accident scene.

A toll-free number for reporting information leading to the arrest of the driver.

Carter's eyes filled. Of course, he had known all along that people would want to arrest him. Still, it made him so agitated, he had to get up again and change the channel.

Carter McKay. That was the name of the ram-faced preacher. Carter McKay had been the preacher Carter's own mother had watched when Carter was a boy. “You come watch, too,” Betty Clay would call to Carter and Cheryl Lynn. Betty had named Carter after the preacher, but that was a secret, and maybe Duncan would not like it, so don't tell.

Every Sunday morning, skinny Betty, hands briny from hours spent scrubbing other people's floors, perched on the edge of a kitchen chair, ready to jump up fast and turn off Carter McKay should Duncan thunder into the room. Back in those days, McKay was a handsome man and his show took place in a huge tent, and he howled while he healed the crippled, deaf, and blind. “Jesus, Jesus, cast the devil out of this soul! Jesus, heal this woman's cancerous womb! Jesus, take the darkness from this poor sinner's eyes!” A wild and exciting spectacle back in those days, when Carter McKay spoke often of how he had been a fornicator, a drinker, a liar, a thief, one of Satan's own—until he was called to the Lord.

The motel television sat on a dresser and Carter pressed up against its warm screen while he lifted the bandanna from his forehead and, using the dresser's mirror, inspected the mess now cooking beneath the cloth. Carter McKay used to talk at length about the mark of the Beast. The Beast marked his own, Carter McKay had said, so that they would be known to each other.

Suppose Carter was now marked.

Boom, boom, boom.

But the voice of the old man that vibrated Carter's belly was calm and kind, and it said, “Friend, there's a story Jesus tells us in Luke about a man from Samaria. You all know about the Good Samaritan—about how a man on the road to Jericho was set upon by thieves who robbed and beat him and left him for dead. Two travelers—the man's own people—saw him on the road and did not come to his aid. Then, there came along a man from another country, a man from Samaria, a stranger, and he took pity on that poor bleeding man. He bandaged his wounds and took him to an inn and paid the innkeeper to look after him. This man of Samaria could not tarry in Jericho but he promised, ‘When I return, I'll
pay you any additional expenses you might incur in caring for this man.'

“You all remember that story, don't you, friends? What you may not remember is who asked the question that prompted Jesus to tell that little story. The answer is: a
lawyer.
This lawyer, you see, understood that to gain eternal life he was to love the Lord with all his heart and all his soul and all his strength and all his mind, and his neighbor as himself; but he had a question for Jesus, and that question was, ‘Who is my neighbor?'”