Carter Clay by Elizabeth Evans

reports regarding his subsequent hearing loss were purposefully vague). There was worse from the war. Coming upon a trio of men he knew —men he had to live with afterward—and what was left of the girl those men had raped, then finished off with a flare up the vagina—
    A door slammed. “I think they went in the house,” Carter whispered to R.E.
    â€œSh!” R.E. extracted what appeared to be a piece of bread from one of his windbreaker’s enormous pockets. He poked it through the shopping cart’s gridwork sides—was he saving scraps of food?—then he pointed, frowning, at the bottle of rub-a-dub, still unopened in Carter’s hand. “What’s with you, man?” he hissed. “You gotten too good for rub-a-dub?”
    Little coins of sunshine danced through the privet and onto Carter’s shoulders. He could not recall the last time that the dappling of light and shadow on his skin had felt so fine, so—full of the precise meaning that life was good. Still, R.E.’s words hurt Carter. Carter was no snob, and he never had been, and so he said, “Hey, man, when was I ever too good for anything?”
    R.E. turned his head to one side, listening, then hunkered down beside the cart. “You tell me, Clay,” he muttered, “you tell me.” From the cart’s bottom shelf, he began to yank all manner of plastic bags, shoe boxes filled with pens and pencils, packets of restaurant ketchup and wooden clothespins, egg cartons, a bundle of Post-It notes, gloves, several Wonder Bread bags filled with bundles of newspaper clippings, audiocassettes. A Tootsie’s Bread bag contained three books: The Birth of Tragedy, A Christmas Carol , and The Analects of Confucius. Here were two packets of queen-size panty hose crushed against several small Styrofoam buckets of instant oriental noodles and something that appearedto Carter to be the pressure mechanism designed to keep a screen door from slamming.
    Without looking up, R.E. handed Carter a record album that Carter recognized immediately: the Electric Prunes. “Your favorite, right?” R.E. whispered.
    Carter was touched. “I told you that?”
    â€œHa!” R.E. made a face that looked to Carter almost like a face of disgust, but then R.E. continued in a soft rush, “‘I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night’! The anthem of your salad days, man! Oriental whirligigs, crashing drums, lyrics delivered with hazardous glottal stops, drunken longing, and fury!” A fleck of spit bounced on R.E.’s tattered lip. “And you were in love with—let’s see, some sweet thing with the limply lovely long blond hair of those distant days?”
    â€œAmazing!” The name of the girl R.E. referred to eluded Carter for a moment—a lawyer’s daughter. Becky Pattschull. He could remember entering her house for the first time. An enormous dove-gray house cantilevered over the bluffs of Fort Powden. Before he had entered that house, Carter had assumed all houses smelled like pulp from the paper mill where his own and all of his friends’ fathers worked. A miracle that Becky Pattschull had gone out with Carter at all. Of course, it didn’t last. Nevertheless, Carter had felt irreparably damaged by the fact that it didn’t last; in an effort to give the girl a small taste of such damage, he had poured a five-pound bag of C and H sugar into the gas tank of the baby-blue Mustang coupe she received for her sixteenth birthday.
    â€œSo you want it or not, Clay?”
    Carter turned the album over in his hands. Its cardboard cover gaped in a way that suggested the record within was impossibly warped. Who knew? Perhaps it was Carter’s own long-lost copy of the album? While Carter had been in the service, his mother had finally managed to remove herself from the planet. As a response—in one of those drunken rages that had surely fanned Betty Carter’s desire