The Little Friend (18 page)

Harriet observed her aunt’s faraway expression; she cleared her throat. “I guess this is what I came over to ask you, Adelaide,” she said.

“I always wonder if his hair would have darkened when he got older,” said Adelaide, holding up the magazine at arm’s length to examine it over the tops of her reading glasses. “Edith’s hair was mighty red when we were little, but not as red as his. A
true
red. No orange about it.”
Tragic
, she thought. Here were these spoilt Yankee children prancing around the Plaza Hotel, while her lovely little nephew, superior in all respects, was in the ground. Robin had never even had the chance to touch a girl. With warmth, Adelaide thought of her three ardent marriages and the cloakroom kisses of her own full-handed youth.

“What I wanted to ask is if you had any idea who might have—”

“He would have grown up to break some hearts, darling. Every little Chi O and Tri Delt at Ole Miss would be fighting over who got to take him to the Debutante Assembly in Greenwood. Not that I put much stock in that debutante foolishness, all that blackballing and cliques and petty—”

Rap rap rap:
a shadow at the screen door. “Addie?”

“Who’s there?” called Adelaide, starting up. “Edith?”

“Darling,” said Tattycorum, bursting in wild-eyed without even looking at Harriet, tossing her patent-leather handbag into an armchair, “darling, can you believe that rascal Roy Dial from the Chevrolet place wants to charge everybody in the Ladies’ Circle sixty dollars apiece to ride to Charleston on the church trip? On that broken-down school bus?”

“Sixty dollars?”
shrieked Adelaide. “He said he was lending the bus. He said it was
free.
”

“He’s still saying it’s free. He says the sixty dollars is for
gasoline.
”

“That’s enough gasoline to drive to Red China!”

“Well, Eugenie Monmouth’s calling the minister to complain.”

Adelaide rolled her eyes. “I think
Edith
should call.”

“I expect she will, when she hears about it. I’ll tell you what Emma Caradine said. ‘He’s just trying to make himself a big profit.’ ”

“Certainly he is. You’d think he’d be ashamed of himself. Especially with Eugenie and Liza and Susie Lee and the rest of them living on Social Security—”

“Now if it was
ten
dollars. Ten dollars I could understand.”

“And Roy Dial supposedly such a big deacon and all.
Sixty dollars?
” said Adelaide. She got up and went over to the telephone table for pencil and notebook and began to figure. “Goodness, I’m going to have to get the atlas out for this,” she said. “How many ladies on the bus?”

“Twenty-five, I think, now that Mrs. Taylor’s dropped out and poor old Mrs. Newman McLemore fell and broke her hip—Hello, sweet Harriet!” said Tat, swooping to kiss her. “Did your grandmother tell you? Our church circle is going on a trip. ‘Historic Gardens of the Carolinas.’ I’m awfully excited.”

“I don’t know that I care to go now that we’ve got to be paying all this exorbitant fee to
Roy Dial.
”

“He ought to be ashamed. That’s all there is to it. With that big new house out in Oak Lawn and all those brand-new cars and Winnebagos and boats and things—”

“I want to ask a question,” said Harriet in despair. “It’s important. About when Robin died.”

Addie and Tat stopped talking at once. Adelaide turned from the road atlas. Their unexpected composure was so jarring that Harriet felt a surge of fright.

“You were in the house when it happened,” she said, in the uncomfortable silence, the words tumbling out a little too fast. “Didn’t you hear anything?”

The two old ladies glanced at each other, a small beat of thoughtfulness during which some unspoken communication seemed to pass between them. Then Tatty took a deep breath and said: “No. Nobody heard a thing. And do you know what I think?” she said, as Harriet tried to interrupt with another question. “I don’t think this is a very good subject for you to go around casually bringing up with people.”

“But I—”

“You haven’t bothered your mother or your grandmother with any of this, have you?”

Adelaide said, stiffly: “I don’t think this is a very good topic of conversation either. In fact,” she said, over Harriet’s rising objections, “I think it might be a good time for you to run along home, Harriet.”

————

Hely, half-blinded by sun, sat sweating on a brush-tangled creek bank, watching the red and white bobber of his cane pole flicker on the murky water. He had let his night crawlers go because he thought it might cheer him up to dump them onto the ground in a big creepy knot, to watch them squirming off or digging holes in the ground or whatever. But they did not realize that they were free of the pail, and, after disentangling themselves, wove around placidly at his feet. It was depressing. He plucked one off his sneaker, looked at its mummy-segmented underside and then flung it into the water.

There were plenty of girls at school prettier than Harriet, and nicer. But none of them were as smart, or as brave. Sadly, he thought of her many gifts. She could forge handwriting—teacher handwriting—and compose adult-sounding excuse
notes like a pro; she could make bombs from vinegar and baking soda, mimic voices over the telephone. She loved to shoot fireworks—unlike a lot of girls, who wouldn’t go near a string of firecrackers. She had got sent home in second grade for tricking a boy into eating a spoonful of cayenne pepper; and two years ago she had started a panic by saying that the spooky old lunchroom in the school basement was a portal to Hell. If you turned off the light, Satan’s face appeared on the wall. A gang of girls trooped downstairs, giggling, switched the lights out—and burst forth completely off their heads and screaming with terror. Kids started playing sick, asking to go home for lunch, anything to keep from going down in the basement. After several days of mounting unease, Mrs. Miley called the children together and—along with tough old Mrs. Kennedy, the sixth-grade teacher—marched them all down to the empty lunchroom (girls and boys, crowding in behind them) and switched off the light. “See?” she said scornfully. “Now don’t you all feel silly?”

At the back, in a thin, rather hopeless-sounding voice which was somehow more authoritative than the teacher’s bluster, Harriet said: “He’s there. I see him.”

“See!” cried a little boy’s voice. “See?”

Gasps: then a howling stampede. For sure enough, once your eyes got used to the dark, an eerie greenish glow (even Mrs. Kennedy blinked in confusion) shimmered in the upper-left corner of the room, and if you looked long enough, it was like an evil face with slanted eyes and a handkerchief tied over the mouth.

All that uproar about the Lunchroom Devil (parents phoning the school, demanding meetings with the principal, preachers jumping on the bandwagon, too, Church of Christ and Baptist, a flutter of bewildered and combative sermons entitled “Devil Out” and “Satan in Our Schools?”)—all this was Harriet’s doing, the fruit of her dry, ruthless, calculating little mind. Harriet! Though small, she was ferocious on the playground, and in a fight, she fought dirty. Once, when Fay Gardner tattled on her, Harriet had calmly reached under the desk and unfastened the oversized safety pin that held her kilt skirt together. All day she had waited for her opportunity;
and that afternoon, when Fay was passing some papers out, she struck out like lightning and stabbed Fay in the back of the hand. It was the only time Hely had ever seen the principal beat a girl. Three licks with the paddle. And she hadn’t cried.
So what
, she’d said coolly when he complimented her on the way home from school.

How could he make her love him? He wished he knew something new and interesting to tell her, some interesting fact or cool secret, something that would really impress her. Or that she would be trapped in a burning house, or have robbers after her, so he could rush in like a hero and rescue her.

He had ridden his bicycle out to this very remote creek, so small it didn’t even have a name. Down the creek bank was a group of black boys not much older than he was, and, further up, several solitary old black men in khaki trousers rolled up at the ankle. One of these—with a Styrofoam bucket and a big straw sombrero embroidered in green with
Souvenir of Mexico
—was now approaching him cautiously. “Good day,” he said.

“Hey,” said Hely warily.

“Why you dump all these good night crawlers on the ground?”

Hely couldn’t think of anything to say. “I spilled gasoline on them,” he said at last.

“That not going to hurt them. The fish going to eat them, anyway. Just wash them off.”

“That’s all right.”

“I help you. We can just muddle them around in the shallow water right here.”

“Go on and take them if you want them.”

Dryly, the old man chuckled, then stooped to the ground and began to fill his bucket. Hely was humiliated. He sat staring out at his unbaited hook in the water, munching morosely on boiled peanuts from a plastic bag in his pocket and pretending not to see.

How could he make her love him, make her notice when he wasn’t there? He could buy her something, maybe, except he didn’t know anything she wanted and he didn’t have any money. He wished he knew how to build a rocket or a robot, or
throw knives and hit stuff like at the circus, or that he had a motorcycle and could do tricks like Evel Knievel.

Dreamily, he blinked out across the creek, at an old black woman fishing on the opposite bank. Out in the country one afternoon, Pemberton had shown him how to work the gearshift on the Cadillac. He pictured himself and Harriet, speeding up Highway 51 with the top down. Yes: he was only eleven, but in Mississippi you could get a driver’s license when you were fifteen, and in Louisiana the age was thirteen. Certainly he could pass for thirteen if he had to.

They could pack a lunch. Pickles and jelly sandwiches. Maybe he could steal some whiskey from his mother’s liquor cabinet, or, failing that, a bottle of Dr. Tichenor’s—it was antiseptic, and tasted like shit, but it was a hundred and forty proof. They could drive to Memphis, up to the museum so she could see the dinosaur bones and shrunken heads. She liked that kind of thing, educational. Then they could drive downtown to the Peabody Hotel and watch the ducks march across the lobby. They could jump on the bed in a big room, and order shrimps and steaks from room service, and watch television all night long. No one to stop them from getting in the bathtub too, if they felt like it. Without their clothes on. His face burned. How old did you have to be to get married? If he could convince the highway patrol that he was fifteen, surely he could convince some preacher. He saw himself standing with her on some rickety porch in De Soto County: Harriet in that red checked shorts set she had and he in Pem’s old Harley-Davidson T-shirt, so faded that you could hardly read the part that said Ride Hard Die Free. Harriet’s hot little hand burning in his. “And now you may kiss the bride.” The preacher’s wife would have lemonade afterwards. Then they would be married forever and drive around in the car all the time and have fun and eat fish he caught for them. His mother and father and everybody at home would be worried sick. It would be fantastic.

He was jolted from his reverie by a loud bang—followed by a splash, and high, crazy laughter. On the opposite bank, confusion—the old black woman dropped her pole and covered
her face with her hands as a plume of spray burst from the brown water.

Then another. And another. The laughter—frightening to hear—rang from the little wooden bridge above the creek. Hely, bewildered, held his hand up against the sun and saw two white men, indistinct. The larger of the two (and he was much larger) was simply a massive shadow, slumped in hilarity, and Hely had only a confused impression of his hands dangling over the rail: big dirty hands, with big silver rings. The smaller silhouette (cowboy hat, long hair) was using both hands to aim a glinting silver pistol down at the water. He fired again and an old man upstream jumped back as the bullet kicked up a white spray of water near the end of his fishing line.

On the bridge, the big guy threw back his lion’s mane of hair, and crowed hoarsely; Hely saw the bushy outline of a beard.

The black kids had dropped their poles and were scrambling up the bank, and the old black woman on the opposite bank limped light and fast after them, holding her skirts up with one hand, an arm outstretched, crying.

“Get a move on, grammaw.”

The gun sang out again, echoes ricocheting off the bluffs, chunks of rock and dirt falling into the water. Now the guy was just shooting every which way. Hely stood petrified. A bullet whistled past and struck up a puff of dust next to a log where one of the black men lay hidden. Hely dropped his pole and turned to bolt—sliding, nearly falling—and ran as fast as he could for the underbrush.

He dived into a patch of blackberry bushes, and cried out as the brambles scratched his bare legs. As another shot rang out, he wondered if the rednecks could see from that distance that he was white, and if they could, whether they’d care.

————

Harriet, poring over her notebook, heard a loud wail through the open window and then Allison screaming, from the front yard: “Harriet! Harriet! Come quick!”

Harriet jumped up—kicking the notebook under her bed—and ran downstairs and out the front door. Allison stood
on the sidewalk crying with her hair in her face. Harriet was halfway down the front walk before she realized the concrete was too hot for her bare feet, and—leaning to one side, off-balance—she hopped on one foot back to the porch.

“Come on! Hurry!”

“I have to get some shoes.”

“What’s going on?” Ida Rhew yelled from the kitchen window. “Why yall carrying on out there?”

Harriet thumped up the stairs and slapped down them again in her sandals. Before she could ask what was wrong, Allison, sobbing, dashed forward and seized Harriet’s arm and dragged her down the street. “Come
on
. Hurry, hurry.”

Harriet, stumbling along (the sandals were hard to run in) scuffed behind Allison as fast as she could and then Allison stopped, still weeping, and flung her free arm out at something squawking and fluttering in the middle of the street.