Carter Clay by Elizabeth Evans Page B

off a disk of shiny white: the very top of the white cap on R.E.’s bottle of rub-a-dub. A little white cap with tiny grooves all around to make the cap easier for fingers to grip, turn, and remove. That cap—Carter had a notion about that cap that made him smile; that cap covered an entrance to a hidden place as large and wonderful as the cave made famous in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.
    Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves was dear to the heart of Carter, who remembered, as a boy, watching on his family’s new television Sal Mineo in the role of the poor woodcutter who gainsentrance to the treasure cave of the Forty Thieves by learning the magical phrase “Open, Sesame.” The thrill of the cave opening upon shining urns! Trunks overflowing with gold coins! King-size heaps of precious lamps! Casks of gemstones fracturing the light! (Mistaking the realities of stage sets for a failure of story, Duncan Clay had scoffed from his big vinyl chair, “What do you bet that jewelry ain’t real, and they got lumber or hay bales propping all that other stuff up too?”)
    â€œOpen, Sesame.” Carter—now dappled gold and mauve by the sun coming through the oleanders—laughed at the funny phrase, and, really, since he had already received the Demerol from the doctor, who could hold it against him if, today, he took a sip of the rub-a-dub? And wouldn’t taking a real sip of rub-a-dub correct what had been, in fact, a kind of lie told to his old buddy R.E.? If anything, Carter’s affection for R.E. had grown since he had last seen the man. Okay, maybe they could not spend a lot of time together. Okay, maybe that would be unwise. But what kind of shit was he to lie to a fellow vet about something as stupid as a swig of rub-a-dub?
    Carter set the fingers of his good hand around the neck of the bottle and pulled it from the folds of blankets. A noise followed the bottie’s removal—a rustle, a skitter. Carter started at the sound, but then a mockingbird flew out from the nearby oleanders and Carter assumed that his lousy hearing had tricked him about the noise and its location.

    It was not until after Carter and R.E. roared down Post Road—drunk, drunk, drunk, the Who singing “Magic Bus”—and one wheel of Carter’s van went off the berm, and then two, and R.E.’s shopping cart slammed into the wall of the van and tipped over; it was not until then that there was proof that the sound Carter had heard in the alley had indeed come from the cart: it was the sound of a pet ferret belonging to R.E.
    After the cart tipped—enraged, one paw crushed—the ferret, Nietzsche, managed to scamper across the van floor and up the big body of Carter, who was, by then, too blotto and numband busy trying to steer the van back onto the road to notice the animal until it took his earlobe between its sharp, sharp teeth.
    It was the ferret that Carter was battling when the family turned up in front of his van. A nightmare of boom, and boom, boom.

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    That accident—it was blood spilled and damage done to tissue and bone and lives changed forever. Worlds of hurt , hurting.
    But it is necessary to ask: Is there a difference in your experience of this horrible event if you proceed from here , rather than some later there , with the knowledge—still unavailable to Carter Clay—that his old friend R.E. had come to Sabine that August morning with the express intention of killing Clay? That, in fact, it was R.E. ( né Finis Pruitt) who had done his best—one year ago—to stab Clay to death in Howell Park?
    Also, consider: how much will you make of the fact that the unwillingness of Joe Alitz to ask directions placed his family in the path of a man, Carter Clay, who was unwilling to refuse the chemicals that would contribute to his driving his van into Joe Alitz’s family?
    Unlike R.E., neither Carter nor Joe meant to do evil, or even ill. Of course, neither