Amy told me that when Carter had met her mom, whose name was Ginette — Amy pronounced it Zhinette — Ginette was living out in Montauk in an RV and waitressing in a fishermen’s bar. Carter was cleaning boats at a Montauk yacht club.
“Is she French?” I asked.
Amy laughed, shaking her head so that red hair flew back and forth. “Not French.”
She told me that Jimmy had been born asleep and they had a hard time waking him. When he was a year old if you touched him he’d scream. When he was three if you brushed against him he’d wheel on you, his eyes would go wild and he’d hit at you. Ginette took him to a clinic and they gave her medication for him.
“But the pills are three dollars each,” Amy said. “Ginette yells, ‘This kid will send us to the poorhouse.’ Sometimes she doesn’t want to give Jimmy the pills. Carter’s like, ‘The kid needs the pills.’ He wouldn’t buy a new duffel coat last winter because if he did there might not be enough money for Jimmy’s pills.”
Two years ago, she said, working out at the Montauk gym, Carter dropped a 35-pound weight on his foot. “Crushed all the bones.”
Before he recuperated, the yacht club gave him severance pay and let him go. The best job he could find was garbage collector in Amagansett. He took the job but he couldn’t afford Amagansett rents, so every day at five in the morning he drove the twenty-five miles from Montauk in his Toyota pickup, and then drove back every afternoon at three.
“He calls his pickup ‘The Jap,’” Amy said. “He goes, ‘The Jap and my fuckin’ kidneys can’t take much more of this.’”
I’d never heard a girl my age use the word fuck before. The word sounded especially strange because, in case I didn’t mention it before, she had a high, sweet, girlish voice.
Ginette knew one of the workmen building an addition to A-1 Self-Storage. He told her that the owner needed a new caretaker. She got the job, and the family moved to the old jail in front of the units — the address was 1 Jail Road — and the kids transferred from Montauk Middle School to East Hampton Middle School.
Amy told me that her birthday was August thirteenth, which meant she was four months older than me.
I didn’t learn all this that first day at the hospital. Some of it, yes, but a lot of it I learned later. And more came out than I can tell you right now. If I told it all now, then some other things won’t make sense. I’ll tell you in the right time, and at the right place, when I learned it. I give you my word.
There’s one thing, though, that I learned right away.
Amy had to go to the bathroom, and while she was in there I wandered around the room. I’m a curious person. I didn’t open any of the drawers or anything, but I looked at whatever was out in the open, like the chart at the foot of the bed. It told when she was admitted to the hospital and who the doctor was and what pills they’d given her and what was wrong with her: laceration, 5 cm deep, 7 cm long, left anterior deltoid.
I saw that the patient’s name had been filled in by the computer as “Amy Bedford.” But then the first name had been crossed out. Another first name and a middle initial had been inked in, so that now her name read “Amnesia C. Bedford.”
Amnesia? Why would anyone give a kid a name like that? Being with Amy made me feel dizzy. It was the same feeling I’d had up on Crab Rock when I’d looked down and seen how far it was to fall.
Chapter 8
When Amy came back into the room I took out a cherry sourball and hid it in my mouth. Iphigenia stood on my head and did her trick of holding my nose with one hand and poking behind my teeth with the other to locate the treasure. Amy squealed with pleasure. She said the laughing hurt her shoulder, but she couldn’t stop.
I said, “When you’re in class, you talk to yourself. It sounds sometimes like singing. Who are you talking to?”
Amy didn’t answer.
“When you were lying by the side of the road,” I told her, “I heard you say ‘Princess.’”
Amy bobbed her head up and down. “That’s right. I was talking to the Princess,” she said. She took a deep breath, and explained in a breathy voice that the Princess was made of glass and was her friend and guide.
The Princess, who lived inside her, kept her from harm. She helped Amy not to be frightened. She advised Amy. So Amy wasn’t talking to herself; she was having a conversation. She described to the Princess most of the things she was doing. The Princess said, “Oh, watch out, that could be dangerous. Be careful of such-and-such person.” When Amy was saying something, she said it in a normal voice, and when the Princess spoke, Amy sang the words, because the Princess sang the words of comment and caution instead of speaking them. It was like an operative duet.
When Amy was stumbling down the road yesterday, after she’d been stabbed, the Princess was singing to her, telling Amy that she would be all right. “You won’t die… you have to be strong… you have to find help somewhere.”
Amy replied to the Princess: “I am strong. I’m walking along this road looking for help. See? I know I’ll be all right.”
I asked if Carter and Ginette knew about the Princess.
She shook her head and her hair flew. “They’d think I was weird.”
I had to go to the bathroom. I didn’t want to smell up Amy’s bathroom so I excused myself and hurried out in the corridor to the Men’s Room. I put Iphigenia back in her bag because otherwise she might follow me. In the Men’s Room, after I’d finished, I washed my hands and looked at myself in the big mirror over the sink. Except for my hair standing on end, I looked pretty snazzy. I was still wearing my brown suede windbreaker, which I’d got from Aunt Grace for my birthday. I winked at myself. I was having a great time.
When I got back to the room, Carter Bedford was sitting at the foot of the bed. He wore a sailcloth shirt with oil stains, the sleeves rolled up so that the muscles of his arm bulged. He wore the same blue silk scarf he’d worn when I met him on our front lawn.
He turned and showed me those bathroom-tile teeth.
“Billy Braverman!” He shook a fist above his head as if he were cheering for his favorite team.
“Hello, Mr. Bedford.”
He shook hands with me and put his left hand on top of my hand, which is supposed to show sincerity. The knuckles of Carter’s right hand were skinned and it looked like some blood had dried there. I remembered that his hands were always picking up gooey garbage, and as soon as he let go of me I moved my hand toward my nose and inhaled through my nose to see what yucky thing it smelled of.
“Yeah,” Carter said, “I been fishing. You smelled it, huh?”
I nodded, glad that he hadn’t realized I was sniffing for the smell of garbage.
“I washed up with lava soap but you don’t get rid of that fish stink for days. You like to fish?”
“Not really,” I said.
“You remember Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn? They fished all the time.” He sniffed up a load of phlegm again, just like he’d done in our driveway, made that funny hard noise in the back of his throat, and swallowed it. I wanted to tell him, “Spit, Carter. There’s a box of tissues right there on the table.” But I didn’t have the nerve.
He said, “I wish I could get Amy to read more. I tell her, ‘Broaden your mind, Amy. Accumulate knowledge. It’ll pay off.’” He leaned over and stroked Amy’s hair. Amy’s eyes had gone blank. She looked like a rag doll in a marionette show.
“I love my brave little girl,” he said. “And she got hurt.” His voice cracked on the last word.
Amy came out of her trance. “Carter, want to see something neat? Billy, show him the monkey.”
I took Iphigenia out of the gym bag and put her on my lap. Half the people who saw Iphigenia wanted to touch her. The other half thought she’d be smelly and maybe greasy. Maybe they’d seen monkeys at some zoo and remembered the jungle smell and the way the howlers and baboons shrieked at you.
“You want to play with her, Carter?” Amy asked. “She won’t hurt you.”
“F
orget it.”
I thought it would be a good idea to change the subject. “What did you do to your hand, Carter?”
“Caught it between the boat and the pier. Would you mind putting that animal back in the bag? She makes me nervous.”
After I did that, Carter said, “Don’t think I’m not aware you’re the one found my little girl on the road. The Bedford family owes you a major thank you.” He smiled so that his lips were skinned back against his teeth. “I’m out there in the Atlantic, with my amigos. Drink a little beer, land a bluefin. We come back to Montauk, think we’ll watch some of the ball game, and I find out my daughter got stabbed. You imagine how I felt?”
“You must have felt terrible.”
He looked out the window. It had begun to drizzle. “How’d you get down here, Billy?”
“Taxi.”
“I’ll give you a lift home. I gotta leave in about ten minutes. Get back to feed the boys.”
“Well, I thought I’d —”
“Never mind what you thought. It’ll save you a lot of money.”
“Yes, it will. I can —”
I was going to offer him some money, and my mind was already starting to form the words and send them to my tongue, when I realized how insulted he would feel. I choked off the rest of the sentence.
His icy eyes grabbed mine. It was like being physically grabbed. And I saw in the hardness of his face that he knew what I’d been going to propose.
“Don’t even think about it,” Carter Bedford said.
Next thing I knew he had shrugged into a yellow oilcloth jacket and was hugging Amy goodbye and telling me to shake a leg. “You want to kiss her goodbye, Billy, you can do it. On the cheek.”
I hadn’t been thinking about kissing her goodbye. I shook her hand, which was stubby, and white, and cool. “I’ll see you in school.”
Carter bent to hug her. “You hang in there now, sweetheart.” And then he took me by the arm and hauled me out of the hospital room like I was a caught fish.
But when we reached his truck and I saw what was inside it, I said, “This isn’t going to work. I’ll take a taxi.”
“No fucking way,” Carter said.
Chapter 9
Uncle Bernie had told me that on hot summer days Iphigenia slept on the tile floor of his Tuscan house in order to keep cool. One afternoon a farmer’s dog wandered in and picked Iphigenia up between her teeth. When Iphigenia shrieked, the dog, perhaps equally frightened, dropped her and bounded away. No physical damage was done, but Iphigenia had a long memory.
Outside Carter’s truck she began to cry. It sounded almost like a baby crying.
Because what Carter had neglected to mention, when he offered me the lift home from Southampton Hospital, was that his two dogs were in the front seat of his truck. When Carter appeared out of the rain with me at his side, both dogs whined with joy. They beat click-clack on the windows of the cab with the nails of their paws. The tail of one, a big long-haired mutt, went thump-thump-thump on the dashboard. The other was a bulldog, so she had no tail to thump with.
The Toyota pickup, a scarred wreck, no longer had a color. If you rolled the tires out flat you could have skated on them. Woolen army blankets covered the seats. When I put my head inside the cab, I almost gagged. Everything smelled of rotted fish and unwashed dog.
I bent to the mesh of the gym bag. “It’s all right, little girl. No one will hurt you.” I slid the zipper open and squeezed my hand in to stroke her. Iphigenia was trembling.
Carter yelled, “Daisy! Pablo! We got company. Behave, bitch. Pablo, you make trouble, I’ll whip your ass from here to next week. Just get the hell in,” he commanded me. “The beasts will calm down.”
Raising his hand into a karate chop pose, he growled at the dogs the way a wolf would growl. The jaws of Daisy, the bulldog, curled up, and two brown teeth stuck up toward nostrils that were like pink bullet holes. She crawled down under the steering wheel on top of the brake and accelerator. I think she leaked some piss on the floor-boards. The big mutt, Pablo, stretched out on the seat, his eyes bulging.
Carter had the door of the cab already open; he spread his hand on my back and shoved me up into the cab.
“Hey!” I kept one hand on Iphigenia. “My monkey —”
“For Christ’s sake, Billy, don’t let her outa that bag. Pablo’ll kill her. Him and Daisy will chew right through leather.”
There wasn’t room for all four of us, never mind petrified Iphigenia, in that front seat. The dogs couldn’t ride in the back of the truck because of the rain. I took shallow breaths — I didn’t want that wet warm doggy air to get into the lower part of my lungs.
“Carter, I have to get out of here.”
Carter snorted and swallowed it. “Pablo, shove over. Billy, get your little butt down on the seat next to the door.” He was still crowding me from behind with one hand, fingers hard as rods, and with his other hand he was muscling Pablo. I found myself squeezed into the seat with Iphigenia in her bag.
“See?” Carter said.
He ran around to the driver’s door, yanked it open, then grabbed Pablo’s haunches with both hands. The whole heavy quivering mass of hairy dog tumbled across my lap. Pablo wound up mostly on the floor, on my feet, except for his smelly hind end and tail, still on my lap. I could feel his lungs and belly collapsing and refilling with air. Under his chest, my left foot couldn’t budge.
“You okay?” Carter asked me. “Got room? Can you breathe?”
I didn’t want to breathe.
“Pablo, just stay, you fuckin’ monster.” Carter swung up, thumping his body into the seat behind the wheel. “Daisy, get your lard off the goddam clutch. Git to the back, you dumbass porker.”
She understood his kicks and pressed as best she could against the back of the seat. The heels of Carter’s boots were able to lean on her rib cage and the balls of his feet could work the pedals at the same time as he turned the ignition key and shifted the knob into gear. Daisy panted. The engine rumbled. The pickup shook. We shot away from the curb in the hospital parking lot, and Carter’s lips curved into a grin.
“We have lift-off!“
When we got out on the two-lane highway I realized the truck had only one headlight. The posted speed limit was forty and we cruised along the highway at fifty miles an hour in the rain. Carter saw me glance at the speedometer. “You can always go five or six miles over the limit,” he said, “and the cops don’t never pick you up for speeding. That’s the unwritten law.”
We were almost to the village of Water Mill when he flicked his eyes toward me. “So you got a crush on Amy?”
I felt my face burning.
“Hey, when I was your age I had a crush on this girl lived up the street. Jeannie Nolan. Her dad was a fireman. Her and I used to… no, I ain’t gonna tell you that story, ‘cept to say that she got my dick tender. Don’t want you to get any ideas.” And he laughed, but not with mirth or even cheer; it was a sound like stone grinding on concrete.
“How old are you, Billy?”
“Eleven.”
He swiveled his head to look at me, and I reddened even more.
“Almost twelve,” I said. “I skipped a grade.”
“Well, never mind what I said about crushes. You’re too young for that. Weenie’s hardly grown, right? You beat your meat yet?”
I felt bright red from my neck to my ears.
The fact is, I had done it twice. Once in bed, once in the bathroom. But each time, nothing came out. It took about a minute, and I felt this big rush — a whoosh — but I couldn’t shoot. Nothing there.
“That’s private,” I said to Carter.
He hammered me on the shoulder with a horny palm.
“I like that answer, Billy. You don’t let people push you around. That’s what people say about me, so I respect it in someone else. When I have something private in my life, I keep it to myself. Unless I feel like telling it, which I do, right now. You want to know something private about me,
something hardly anybody else knows?”
He didn’t wait for an answer.
“I’m a foundling. You know what that is?”
“A baby left on a doorstep.”
“Right. Like in David Copperfield. And Moses in the bulrushes. The thing is, some people look down on foundlings. They call them bastards. Here’s the big thing. These kids, the foundlings—I prefer that – sometimes they’re left by some rich person who can’t afford to admit that she gave birth to the kid. You follow?”
The truck swayed from side to side in the rain, while I clutched the door handle with one hand and Iphigenia’s gym bag with the other. We surged out of Bridgehampton, heading east. I looked at the speedometer — coming up on sixty.
Something bright red zipped by the window on my side.
“Carter, we just passed a police car.”
“Bullshit.”
“Off the road, on the Sagaponack turnoff.”
“Doing what?”
“Stopping another car.”
“Then he don’t care about us. Pay attention. Years later, the rich woman finds out where the foundling lives. Some lawyer knocks on the door, says, ‘Here’s this inheritance.’ That happens. No bull. I read about it in USA Today. They got a column, ‘Across the USA.’ That happened in Virginia and California. It could happen to me.”
“Carter, why is her real name Amnesia?”
I could see him flex the muscles in his back. “How’d you find that out?”
“It’s on her hospital admissions card.”
“Ginette did that without my knowing. And the reason’s none of your business.”
The pickup jolted and swerved off to the right. I heard a whack-whack-whack sound coming right up through the seat.
With a curse, Carter guided the pickup off to the right, onto the shoulder of a wet stretch of road east of Sagaponack. I think he would have kept driving on the flat tire if he could have, but we were already riding on the rim. Orange sparks shot out into the black rain.
Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 04 - BOY ON TRIAL - A Legal Thriller Page 6
