Free Carter Clay by Elizabeth Evans

Clay, a veteran of the Vietnam War, was known to suffer from depression and various addictions.
    So Finis had imagined the newspaper saying after the police found Clay dead with a hole in his head: clearly a suicide.
    Oh! Finis jumps as someone from the Accordion Cafe flings open the back screen door and tosses out some horrific thing, head-sized and dripping. Oh!
    Iceberg gone to rot.
    The screen door slams back into place. Finis holds his heart—even in private he tends toward the dramatic—and continues to excoriate himself:
    I was lazy at the penultimate moment! I was too eager to entertain myself with an amusing notion: Why not have Clay drive me to Solana before I do the deed? Yes, and there I’ll suggest we stop for a time at some remote little park, where Clay shall drink until he passes out—as Clay always does when he drinks—and there I shall put the .45 in Clay’s mouth, and do the deed.
    Not a pleasant prospect, the shooting, but it had to be done. He was prepared to do it, he felt certain.
    Could the people in Sabine be lying when they tell Finis that they have no idea where Clay has gone? Since the accident—between nights spent under a kudzu-covered bridge—Finis has done nothing but try to find Clay again, but both times he telephoned the Accordion Cafe, he was told, We don’t know where Carter went. If you see him, tell him we miss him, OK?
    And at the AA meetings—when Finis hinted, in a voice oozing concern, that folks ought to keep an eye out for a now-missing member of their flock as he might be a little loco en la cabeza , folks—the members listened politely, but not one of them pressed Finis for details or offered a theory about where Clay might be.
    On page 3 of the Gulf News , the article about the accident continues. There are two more photos: Jersey Alitz-Milhause and her mother, Katherine Milhause. In addition—clip, zip—here’s atidy illustration of the trauma that occurred to Katherine Milhause’s brain after her skull slammed into the asphalt road. In the illustration—perhaps to spare the newspaper’s readership—the head has been reduced to little more than an oval with a bump for a nose. Finis judges that this outline appears less that of a head than, say, a swimming pool. He may be correct, but this does not stop many readers who see the illustration from experiencing odd pluckings in their joints and guts as they pull back from the big sheets of newsprint in their hands.

    It is certainly true that three weeks later, when Jersey Alitz convinces her doctors and her grandmother that it is safe for her to take a gurney ride to the room of her brain-damaged mother—a bright space, all white walls and stainless steel—the poor girl can locate nothing of her pretty mom in that smashed and bloated jack-o’-lantern she finds in the hospital’s snarl of machinery: tracheostomy tube, feeding tube, heparin drip, heart monitor, oxygen meter, catheter, respirator. This creature’s hands are swollen large as catcher’s mitts. Even the feet at the end of the bed are strange blue roots, frozen, pointing one toward the other—
    Jersey wants the creature to be her mother—she wants her mother—but she has not expected this. The juddering in her chest makes her fear she may be ill, and she reaches out a hand to M.B., and says an urgent, “Here.”
    Like Jersey, M.B. has lost a great deal of weight since the accident, an occurrence that has made Jersey look younger, M.B. older. M.B. tries to give Jersey a smile of reassurance, but what comes out is crumpled as the balled-up kerchief she holds in her hand: a grimace.
    The grimace leaves Jersey feeling bereft; however, before M.B. arrived, Jersey determined a rule for herself: no tears during this visit to her mother. None. There was a period, Jersey knows, in which she screamed. Not in pain but—vigilance, an attempt to alert the heavens to