Carter Clay Read Online Free PDF

page not yet colored. Black-and-white illustrations of normal cells, sickle cells, a little map of Africa.
    Only when she hears the change in sound that the big man’s shoes make as he steps out from beneath the echoing portico and into the street—only then does M.B. raise her head once more.
    The guard gives her a wink. “Rough-looking character!” he says. He takes a seat beside M.B. on the planter and lights up a cigarette of his own. With a laugh, he leans close to say, “Guess now us smokers know how the niggers used to feel, huh?”
    M.B. glances at the street, the diminishing figure of the man in the bandanna. It has been many years since Kitty informed M.B. that, at the very least, the use of the word nigger branded the speaker as ignorant, and surely you don’t want to sound ignorant, Mother ? Still, when M.B. turns back, she smiles at the guard because, after all, Lorne continued to say nigger until the day he died; all of the men at the mills said nigger , and the guard only means to be friendly.
    Which is not to say that M.B. wishes to talk to him, no, and to prevent further conversation, she begins slowly flipping through the coloring book.
    Gardner Glazier is the security guard’s name. Until quite recently, he worked in the parking lot of Southeastern Savings: days spent greeting customers, telling the occasional joke, getting tough with the jerks who had no bank business but wanted free parking while they ran to the pharmacy or met a friend for lunch. Gardner often forgets that the people he meets at the hospitalare, for the most part, worried over disease and injury and death, and so he teases M.B., “You going to do some coloring, there?”
    Too weary and worried to register the man’s teasing, M.B. replies, “This is my granddaughter’s book. I guess this is the sort of coloring books they give the smart ones, nowadays. My granddaughter—” She hesitates at an illustration of a cutaway of the human brain that is distressingly similar to the illustration shown her by the neurosurgeon now attending her daughter—corpus callosum, Broca’s area, Wernicke’s area—and a second illustration that depicts what occurs in the brain’s various regions: Writing. A hand moving a paintbrush. A long-haired girl looking sad.
    While M.B. stares at the illustrations, Gardner Glazier tries to recall a joke that someone told him about kids nowadays, but he can remember only the one about the Martians who showed up at the Welfare office. Something about aliens. We hear you have great benefits for aliens ? Maybe he could tell the woman that one, he thinks, and sneaks a look to see if he still has her attention.
    Uh-oh. The white face, the tremor of her lips remind Gardner of where he is. “Miss,” he says, with genuine solicitude, and pats her arm, “you look awful pale, miss. Is there anybody I can call for you?”
    M.B. shakes her head. No. And there is no one she can die for, either. No one for whom her death would do a bit of good. She stares across the street at the notorious oncology building, so white it gleams in the morning sun, and, oh, it hits her then what that marshmallow stack of a building is—it is a joke that she does not get, a joke that she is not meant to get, and, thus, its white walls of exclusion form the backdrop against which the shadow of her next thoughts play out:
    Jesus, at least, could die for people. Jesus could exchange his life for the lives of all mankind. Jesus was lucky! People thought: How sad, poor Jesus, dying on the cross. But when you think about it, really, when you really think about it, Jesus was the luckiest of them all.

2
    Granted, the Carter Clay encountered by M.B. outside of Memorial Hospital appeared piratical (beard, bandanna); when clean and clean-shaven, Carter Clay is a man with the face of a choirboy; so much so, in fact, that his face appears somewhat mismatched to the rest of