The Little Friend (22 page)

“My dad does.”

“Those big old shotguns? You couldn’t even pick one of them things up.”

“I can too.”

“Maybe so, but—Look, don’t get
mad,
” he said, as her brow darkened. “I can’t even shoot a gun that big and I weigh ninety pounds. That shotgun would knock me down, maybe even put my eye out. If you put your eye right up to the sight, the kick will knock your eyeball right out of the socket.”

“Where did you learn all this?” said Harriet, after an attentive pause.

“In Boy Scouts.” He hadn’t really learned it in the Boy Scouts; he didn’t know exactly how he knew it, though he was pretty sure it was true.

“I wouldn’t have quit going to Brownies if they’d taught us stuff like that.”

“Well, they teach you a lot of crap in the Boy Scouts too. Traffic safety and stuff.”

“What if we used a pistol?”

“A pistol would be better,” said Hely, glancing coolly away to conceal his pleasure.

“Do you know how to shoot one?”

“Oh yeah.” Hely had never had his hands on a gun in his
life—his father didn’t hunt, and didn’t allow his boys to hunt—but he did have a BB gun. He was about to volunteer that his mother kept a little black pistol in her bedside table when Harriet said: “Is it hard?”

“To shoot? Not for me, it isn’t,” said Hely. “Don’t worry, I’ll shoot him for you.”

“No, I want to do it myself.”

“Okay, so, I’ll teach you,” said Hely. “I’ll
coach
you. We start
today.
”

“Where?”

“What do you mean?”

“We can’t be shooting off guns in the back yard.”

“That’s right, sweet pea, you certainly can’t,” said a merry-voiced shadow which loomed suddenly in the door of the toolshed.

Hely and Harriet—badly startled—glanced up into the white pop of a Polaroid flashbulb.

“
Mother!
” screamed Hely, throwing his arms over his face and stumbling backwards over a can of gasoline.

The camera spat out the picture with a click and a whir.

“Don’t be mad, yall, I couldn’t help it,” said Hely’s mother, in a bemused voice which made it plain she didn’t give a hoot if they were mad or not. “Ida Rhew told me she thought you two were out here. Peanut—” (“Peanut” was what Hely’s mother always called him; it was a nickname he despised) “did you forget that today is Daddy’s birthday? I want both you boys to be at home when he gets back from playing golf so we can surprise him.”

“Don’t sneak up on me like that!”

“Oh, come on. I just went out and bought a bunch of film, and yall just looked so cute. I hope it comes out.…” She examined the photograph, and blew on it through pursed, pink-frosted lips. Though Hely’s mother was the same age as Harriet’s, she dressed and acted much younger. She wore blue eye shadow and had a dark, freckly tan, from parading around Hely’s back yard in a bikini (“like a teenybopper!” said Edie), and her hair was cut the same way that a lot of high-school girls wore it.

“Stop it,”
whined Hely. He was embarrassed by his
mother. Kids at school teased him about her skirts being too short.

Hely’s mother laughed. “I know you don’t like white cake, Hely, but it
is
your father’s birthday. Guess what, though?” Hely’s mother always spoke to Hely in this bright, insulting, babyish tone, like he was in kindergarten. “They had some chocolate
cupcakes
at the bakery, how about that? Come on, now. You need to take a bath and put on some clean clothes.… Harriet, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, sweet pea, but Ida Rhew asked me to tell you to come in for supper.”

“Can’t Harriet eat with us?”

“Not today, Peanut,” she said breezily, with a wink at Harriet. “Harriet understands, don’t you, sweetie?”

Harriet—offended by her forward manner—gazed back at her stolidly. She didn’t see any reason to be more polite to Hely’s mother than Hely was himself.

“I’m
sure
she understands, don’t you, Harriet? We’ll have her over next time we cook hamburgers in the yard. Besides, if Harriet came, I’m afraid we wouldn’t have a cupcake for her.”

“One cupcake?” shrieked Hely. “You only bought me one cupcake?”

“Peanut, don’t be greedy like that.”

“One isn’t enough!”

“One cupcake is plenty for a bad boy like you.… Oh, look here. This is hilarious.”

She leaned down to show them the Polaroid—still pale, but clear enough now to make out. “Wonder if it’s going to come out any better?” she said. “You two look like a couple of little Martians.”

And it was true: they did. Both Hely and Harriet’s eyes glowed round and red, like the eyes of little nocturnal creatures caught unexpectedly in car headlights; and their faces, dazed with shock, were tinted a sickly green from the flash.

Sometimes, before Ida went home for the evening, she set out something nice for supper: casserole, fried chicken, sometimes even a pudding or cobbler. But tonight on the counter were only some leftovers that she wanted to get rid of: ancient ham slices, pale and slimy from sitting around wrapped in plastic; also some cold mashed potatoes.

Harriet was furious. She opened the pantry and stared in at the too-tidy shelves, lined with dim jars of flour and sugar, dried peas and cornmeal, macaroni and rice. Harriet’s mother rarely ate more than a few spoonfuls of food in the evenings and many nights she was happy with a dish of ice cream or a handful of soda crackers. Sometimes Allison scrambled eggs, but Harriet was a little sick of eggs all the time.

Cobwebs of lassitude drifted over her. She snapped off a stick of spaghetti and sucked on it. The floury taste was familiar—like paste—and triggered an unexpected splutter of pictures from nursery school … green tile floors, wooden blocks painted to look like bricks, windows too high to see out of.…

Lost in thought, still chewing on the splinter of dried spaghetti—her brow knotted cumbrously in a way that
brought out her resemblance to Edie and Judge Cleve—Harriet dragged a chair to the refrigerator, maneuvering carefully to avoid setting off a landslide of newspapers. Gloomily, she climbed up and stood in it as she shifted through the crunching packages in the freezer compartment. But there was nothing good in the freezer, either: only a carton of the disgusting peppermint-stick ice cream that her mother loved (many days, especially in the summertime, she ate nothing else) buried in an avalanche of foil-wrapped lumps. The concept of Convenience Foods was foreign and preposterous to Ida Rhew, who did the grocery shopping. TV dinners she thought unwholesome (though sometimes she bought them if they went on sale); between-meal snacks she dismissed as a fad derived from television. (“
Snock?
What you want with a
snock
if you eat your dinner?”)

“Tell on her,” Hely whispered when Harriet—glumly—joined him again on the back porch. “She has to do what your mother says.”

“Yeah, I know.” Hely’s mother had fired Roberta when Hely told on her for whipping him with a hairbrush; she had fired Ruby because she wouldn’t let Hely watch
Bewitched
.

“Do it. Do it.” Hely bumped her foot with the toe of his sneaker.

“Later.” But she said it only to save face. Harriet and Allison never complained about Ida and more than once—even when Harriet was angry at Ida, over some injustice—she’d lied and taken the blame herself rather than get Ida in trouble. The simple fact was that things worked differently at Harriet’s house than at Hely’s. Hely—as had Pemberton before him—prided himself on being so difficult that their mother was unable to hold on to any housekeeper over a year or two; he and Pem had gone through nearly a dozen. What did Hely care if it was Roberta, or Ramona, or Shirley or Ruby or Essie Lee who was watching TV when he got home from school? But Ida stood at the firm center of Harriet’s universe: beloved, grumbling, irreplaceable, with her large kind hands and her great moist prominent eyes, her smile which was like the first smile that Harriet had ever seen in the world. It tormented Harriet to see how lightly her mother treated Ida
sometimes, as if Ida was only passing through their lives and not fundamentally connected with them. Harriet’s mother sometimes got hysterical, and paced around the kitchen crying, and said things she didn’t mean (though she was always sorry later), and the possibility of Ida being fired (or, more likely, getting mad and quitting, for Ida groused continually about how little Harriet’s mother paid her) was so frightening that Harriet could not allow herself to think of it.

Amongst the slippery tinfoil lumps, Harriet caught sight of a grape Popsicle. With difficulty, she extricated it, thinking enviously of the deep-freeze at Hely’s house which was crammed with Fudgsicles and frozen pizzas, chicken pot pies and every kind of TV dinner imaginable.…

With the Popsicle, she went out to the porch—without bothering to put the chair back where she’d got it—and lay on her back in the swing, reading
The Jungle Book
. Slowly, the color drained from the day. The rich greens of the garden faded to lavender, and as they dulled from lavender to purple-black, the crickets began to shriek and a couple of lightning bugs popped on and off, uncertainly, in the overgrown dark spot by Mrs. Fountain’s fence.

Absentmindedly, Harriet let the Popsicle stick fall to the floor from between her fingers. She had not moved for half an hour or more. The base of her skull was propped on the swing’s wooden arm at a devilishly uncomfortable angle but still she remained motionless except to draw the book closer and closer to her nose.

Soon it was too dark to see. Harriet’s scalp prickled and there was a throbbing pressure behind her eyeballs but she stayed where she was, stiff neck and all. Some parts of
The Jungle Book
she knew almost by heart: Mowgli’s lessons with Bagheera and Baloo; the attack, with Kaa, upon the Bandar-log. Later, less adventurous parts—in which Mowgli began to be dissatisfied with his life in the jungle—she often did not read at all. She did not care for children’s books in which the children grew up, as what “growing up” entailed (in life as in books) was a swift and inexplicable dwindling of character; out of a clear blue sky the heroes and heroines abandoned their adventures for some dull sweetheart, got married and
had families, and generally started acting like a bunch of cows.

Somebody was cooking steaks outside on a grill. They smelled good. Harriet’s neck hurt in earnest, but even though she had to strain to see the darkening page she was strangely reluctant to get up and switch on the light. Her attention slipped from the words to drift without purpose—mindlessly brushing along the top of the hedge opposite, as if along a length of scratchy black wool—until seized by the neck and marched back forcibly to the story.

Deep in the jungle slumbered a ruined city: collapsed shrines, vine-choked tanks and terraces, decaying chambers full of gold and jewels about which no one, including Mowgli, gave a fig. Within the ruin dwelt the snakes that Kaa the python referred to, rather contemptuously, as The Poison People. And as she read on, Mowgli’s jungle began to bleed stealthily into the humid, half-tropical darkness of her own back yard, infecting it with a wild, shadowy, dangerous feel: frogs singing, birds screaming in the creeper-draped trees. Mowgli was a boy; but he was also a wolf. And she was herself—Harriet—but partly something else.

Black wings glided over her. Empty space. Harriet’s thoughts sank and trailed into silence. Suddenly, she was not sure how long she had been lying in the swing. Why wasn’t she in her bed? Was it later than she thought? A darkness slid across her mind … black wind
 … cold.…

She started, so hard that the swing lurched—something flapping in her face, something oily, struggling, she couldn’t get her breath.…

Frantically, she slapped and batted at the air, floundering in space and the swing creaking and not knowing which way was up or down until, somewhere in the back of her mind, she realized the
bang
she’d just heard was her library book, fallen to the floor.

Harriet stopped struggling and lay still. The swing’s violent rocking slowed again, and quieted, the boards of the porch ceiling sweeping slower and slower overhead and at last coming to a stop. In the glassy stillness she lay there, thinking. If she hadn’t come along, the bird would have died
anyway, but that didn’t change the fact that it was she who had actually killed it.

The library book lay open and face up upon the floorboards. She rolled on her stomach to reach for it. A car swung around the corner and down George Street; and as the headlights swept across the porch, an illustration of the White Cobra was illumined, like a road sign flashing up suddenly at night, with the caption beneath:

They came to take the treasure away many years ago.
I spoke to them in the dark, and they lay still.

Harriet rolled back over and lay very still for a number of minutes; she stood, creakily, and stretched her arms over her head. Then she limped inside, through the too-bright dining room, where Allison sat alone at the dining-room table eating cold mashed potatoes from a white bowl.

Be still, O little one, for I am Death
. Another cobra had said that, in something else by Kipling. The cobras in his stories were heartless but they spoke beautifully, like wicked kings in the Old Testament.

Harriet walked through to the kitchen, to the wall phone, and dialed Hely’s house. Four rings. Five. Then someone picked up. Gabble of noise in the background. “No, you look better without it,” said Hely’s mother to someone, and then, into the receiver: “Hello?”

“It’s Harriet. May I speak to Hely, please?”

“
Harriet!
Of course you can, Sweet Pea.…” The receiver dropped. Harriet, her eyes still unaccustomed to the light, blinked at the dining-room chair which still stood by the refrigerator. Hely’s mother’s little nicknames and endearments always caught her by surprise:
sweet pea
was not the kind of thing that people generally called Harriet.

Commotion: a scraped chair, Pemberton’s insinuating laughter. Hely’s irritated whine rose above it, piercingly.