Carter Clay Read Online Free PDF Page B

his forty-two-year-old self.
    As a boy, however, while Carter was growing up in the green, green sectors of Washington state—despite that innocent face—his height and width of bone made him appear older than his peers. More than once, while at play with classmates, Carter found himself grabbed by a passing grown-up who mistook the boy for some older roughneck pestering the little ones.
    Other facts about Carter Clay: he tends to believe that the world is made up of the haves and have-nots.
    Also: His hair, though thinning, remains the baby-fine blond of his youth. One large, maroon telltale capillary runs across his left nostril like a piece of fraying thread, but otherwise his skin is good. Women are attracted to his big, bearded woodsman looks, a fact of which Carter seems unaware, though it might be more accurate to say that he is impervious to such attentions. His responses to the world tend to be wary—a little congealed, or moony , even. He has been deaf in one ear since serving in Vietnam, which is where he also acquired the minor scars to be found on his neck and right arm, but not the five doozies thatmark his back; those he acquired a little over a year ago, in a stabbing near a picnic shelter designated #6 in the city of Sarasota’s own Edmund Howell Park.
    More details: Only three nights ago, Carter Clay went off to a Tuesday night meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, and, there, claimed a “chip” for his first year of sobriety. That was in tiny Sabine, Florida, in the Sunday school classroom borrowed from the Full Gospel Baptist Church. The other AA members clapped as Carter went to the front of the room. Carter smiled and flushed as he received the metallic coin from a grandmotherly former junkie named Earla R.
    That Tuesday night, Carter was on the right road. He was continuing to practice the lessons learned at a halfway place called Recovery House. His basic honesty remained intact while a tendency toward gullibility had been pruned to a more reasonable size. He did not pretend to have entirely lost all interest in the delights and demons that lay, so cozily coiled, inside a helping of methamphetamine, grass, booze, Percodan, cocaine, and/or whatever else might be offered or sold in a bar or a car, at a baseball game, park, public john, even an espresso cart at an indoor mall whose shops featured windows only as a means of displaying more merchandise—
    Still, three nights ago, at the AA meeting, Carter’s cravings appeared to have shrunk to something relatively small.
    Suffice it to say that Carter did not understand this appearance of diminution to be largely a feature of distance, as with a great warship that might be covered by the tip of your little finger when the vessel sits on the far horizon. However, things had improved for Carter. On the occasion of that Tuesday-night meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, for the first time in four years, Carter had a means of transportation: a used van that he had been able to purchase, cheap, from his Recovery House counselor. He had a regular job: cook at a storefront place on Sabine’s main street. The owners of the Accordion Cafe had lost a big, blond-haired nephew in Vietnam; when Recovery House called about a job for Carter, not only were they tearfully happy to give a veteran a job, they also helped Carter find a room to rent.
    A nice room in a nice house belonging to a nice lady named Mrs. Dickerson. Two double-hung windows, one on the north and facing the neighbors, one on the east and looking out into Mrs. Dickerson’s crust of yard and the two orange trees whose fruit was concealed by their own summertime green. Across the hall, there lived another boarder, a friendly younger man with an interest in drawing cartoons about a rat who was friends with a cat.
    On top of his room’s three-drawer dresser, on a bit of crochet provided by the kindly Mrs. Dickerson, Carter kept a clear bowl, round as a globe, containing a