Read Carter Clay for Free Online Page A

came through the back door of Full Gospel Baptist (“Stairway to Heaven,” “Badge,” “Light My Fire”). Carter wanted to be good. He spoke often of how he yearned for a Higher Power like the one that lit up the eyes of certain of the group’s star members. He earnestly related his past failures and was even able to laugh about a number of them. It did not hurt Carter’s case, of course, that he was big and pleasant to look at, if not precisely handsome; or that the story he told of how he came to AA was tinged with the glamour that can attach itself to even sordid disaster (the war, of course, and then the fact that—albeit while homeless and drunk—he had been most grievously stabbed for defending a fellow vet).
    After meetings, people often asked if Carter would like to go with them to the new Village Inn out on the interstate. Carter, however, still tended to feel glassy while socializing without a leg-up from chemicals more ambitious than those found in coffee and chocolate cream pie. He did not have much to say once he had told a person where he lived, what jobs he had held (cannery work, hanging sheetrock, roofing, and house-painting); hence, he generally went straight home to Mrs. Dickerson’s after meetings. Before sleep, sometimes he did open Moby-Dick or Alcoholics Anonymous. Usually, however, he lay on his bed with his Walkman and whistled along with the cassettes that one of the waitresses at the Accordion had kindly made up for him from her collection of albums from the 1960s: the Doors, Hendrix, the Who, Credence Clearwater, Steppenwolf. Carter loved to whistle. He sounded sweet as a bird, Mrs. Dickerson said. Sometimes he whistled her up the Hoagie Carmichael “Stardust” that his mother used to request.
    All was relatively well, then, until two mornings ago, at which time a customer entered the Accordion Cafe and ordered a bagel.
    In little Sabine, Florida—forty-five miles inland from Sarasota—people ate so few bagels that the owner of theAccordion insisted that the help keep the cafe’s bag of bagels frozen and thaw them in the microwave before toasting. The bagel customer of two mornings before, however, had insisted on “no nuking,” and so Carter had attempted to cut the frozen bagel with a cleaver.
    â€œI trained in Massachusetts,” said the clinic doctor who subsequently put seventeen stitches into Carter’s finger. “We get a lot of bagel accidents where I come from. I had a patient almost cut off two whole fingers!” The doctor gave the last stitch a tug that, despite local anaesthesia, Carter felt pass along his finger bones and right up into his elbow. Still, Carter liked the doctor, who wore a ponytail and sandals and a strip of rawhide knotted around his wrist. Carter laughed when the doctor said, “Man, you are my first southern victim of an encounter with a frozen bagel!”
    The surprise of so much blood coming from his finger; the embarrassment of walking over to the clinic with a towel-wrapped hand held over his head; his need for the doctor to like him as much as he liked the doctor—all of this left Carter feeling loose, giddy. He assured the doctor that he, Carter, was no southerner either; though he did not explain that he had wound up living in Florida because, in 1988, at a party in Seattle, he and a couple of other men had decided to go to D.C. and visit the Wall. At the Wall, the mother of a dead Marine had invited Carter and his friends to Thanksgiving dinner at her home in St. Petersburg, Florida. That Marine’s mother touched Carter’s heart as she stood there in the windy cold, her gray hair blowing this way and that. She could be my mother , Carter thought. If I’d died in the war and she were still alive, she could be my mother. While the others drove back to Washington state, Carter had hitchhiked to St. Petersburg—though he never actually did make it up the