The Little Friend (27 page)

“The mark upon your face, my brother?”

“What about it?” Eugene was well aware of the gruesome red burn scar running down his face, and felt no need for strangers to call it to his attention.

“Is it not from being took in the Signs?”

“Accident,” Eugene said curtly. The injury had resulted from a concoction of lye and Crisco shortening known, in prison parlance, as Angola cold cream. A vicious little trick-bag named Weems—from Cascilla, Mississippi, in for aggravated assault—had thrown it in Eugene’s face in a dispute over a pack of cigarettes. It was while Eugene was recovering from this burn that the Lord had appeared to Eugene in the dark of the night and informed him of his mission in the world; and Eugene had come out of the infirmary with his sight restored and all set to forgive his persecutor; but Weems was dead. Another disgruntled prisoner had cut Weems’s throat
with a razor blade melted into the end of a toothbrush—an act which only strengthened Eugene’s new faith in the mighty turbines of Providence.

“We all of us who love Him,” said Loyal, “bear His mark.” And he held out his hands, pocked and hatched with scar tissue. One finger—spotted with black—was horribly bulbed at the tip and another cut short to a nub.

“Here’s the thing,” Loyal said. “We got to be willing to die for Him like He was willing to die for us. And when we take up the deadly serpent and handle it in His name, we show our love for Him just as He shown it for you and me.”

Eugene was touched. Obviously the boy was sincere—no sideshow performer, but a man who lived his beliefs, who offered up his life to Christ like the martyrs of old. But just then they were disturbed very suddenly by a knock at the door, a series of quick, jaunty little raps:
tap tap tap tap
.

Eugene tossed his chin at the visitor; their gazes parted. For several moments, all was stillness except their breath and the dry, whispery rattle from the dynamite crates—a hideous noise, so delicate that Eugene had not been aware of it before.

Tap tap tap tap tap
. Again came the knock, prissy and self-important—Roy Dial, had to be. Eugene was paid up on the rent but Dial—a born landlord, drawn irresistibly to meddle—often came snooping around on one pretext or another.

Young Reese laid a hand on Eugene’s arm. “They’s a sheriff in Franklin County got a warrant on me,” he said in Eugene’s ear. His breath smelled like hay. “My daddy and five others was arrested down there night before last for Breach of the Peace.”

Eugene held up a palm to reassure him but then Mr. Dial gave the doorknob a ferocious rattle. “Hello? Anybody home?”
Tap tap tap tap tap
. A moment of silence and then, to his horror, Eugene heard a stealthy key turning in the lock.

He bolted to the back room, just in time to see the chain-lock catch the door in the act of easing open.

“Eugene?” The doorknob rattled. “Is somebody in there?”

“Um, I’m sorry Mr. Dial but now aint a very good time,” Eugene called, in the chatty, polite voice he used with bill collectors and law-enforcement officials.

“Eugene! Hello there, bud! Listen, I understand what you’re saying but I’d appreciate it if we could have a word.” The nose of a black wing-tip shoe slid into the door crack. “Okey-doke? Half a second.”

Eugene crept up, stood with one ear inclined to the door. “Uh, what can I do for you?”

“Eugene.”
The doorknob rattled again. “Half a second and I’ll be out of your hair!”

He ort to been a preacher himself
, thought Eugene sourly. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hands and said aloud, in the most glib and sociable voice he could muster: “Um, I sure do hate to do you this away but you done caught me at a bad time, Mr. Dial! I’m directly in the middle of my Bible Study!”

A brief silence before Mr. Dial’s voice came back: “All right. But Eugene—you ought not to be setting all this garbage out in front of the curb before five o’clock p.m. If I receive a summons you’re going to be responsible.”

“Mr. Dial,” said Eugene, staring fixedly at the Little Igloo cooler on his kitchen floor, “I sure do hate to tell you this but I kindly think that trash out there belongs to the Mormon boys.”

“It’s not my problem whose it is. The Sanitation Department doesn’t want it out here before five.”

Eugene glanced at his wristwatch.
Five minutes to five, you Baptist devil
. “All right. Er, I surely will keep my eye on it.”

“Thanks! I’d really appreciate it if we could help each other out on this thing, Eugene. By the way—is Jimmy Dale Ratliff your cousin?”

After a wary pause, Eugene replied: “Second cousin.”

“I’m having trouble running down a phone number on him. Could you give it to me?”

“Jimmy Dale and them out there don’t have a phone.”

“If you see him, Eugene, will you please tell him to stop by the office? We need to have a little talk about the financing on his vehicle.”

In the silence that followed, Eugene reflected upon how Jesus had overthrown the tables of the moneychangers, and
cast out them that sold and bought in the temple. Cattle and oxen had been their wares—the cars and trucks of Bible times.

“All right now?”

“I sure will do it, Mr. Dial!”

Eugene listened for Mr. Dial’s footsteps going down the stairs—slowly at first, pausing halfway before they resumed at a brisker pace. Then he crept to the window. Mr. Dial did not proceed directly to his own vehicle (a Chevy Impala with dealer’s plates) but lingered in the front yard for several minutes, out of Eugene’s line of vision—probably inspecting Loyal’s pick-up, also a Chevrolet; possibly only checking up on the poor Mormons, whom he was fond of but devilled mercilessly, baiting them with provocative passages from Scripture and interrogating them on their views of the Afterlife and so forth.

Only when the Chevy started up (with a rather lazy, reluctant sound, for so new a car) did Eugene return to his visitor, whom he found knelt down on one knee and praying intently, all atremble, thumb and forefinger pressed into his eye sockets in the manner of a Christian athlete before a football game.

Eugene was uncomfortable, reluctant either to disturb his guest or join him. Quietly, he went back to the front room and retrieved from his Little Igloo cooler a warm, sweaty wedge of hoop cheese—purchased only that morning, never far from his thoughts since he’d bought it—and cut himself a greedy chunk with his pocket knife. Without crackers, he gobbled it down, his shoulders hunched and his back to the open door of the room where his guest still knelt amongst the dynamite boxes, and wondered why it had never occurred to him to put curtains up in the Mission. Never before had it seemed necessary, since he was on the second story, and though his own yard was bare, trees in other yards occluded the view from neighboring windows. Still, a little extra privacy would be wise while the snakes were in his custody.

————

Ida Rhew poked her head through the door of Harriet’s room, her arms full of fresh towels. “You aint cutting pictures
from that book, are you?” she said, eyeing a pair of scissors on the rug.

“No, maam,” said Harriet. Faintly, through the open window, drifted the whir of chainsaws: trees toppling, one by one. Expansion was all the Deacons thought about at the Baptist church: new rec rooms, new parking lot, a new youth center. Soon there would not be a tree left on the block.

“I better not catch you doing any such.”

“Yes, maam.”

“What them scissors out for, then?” Belligerently, she nodded at them. “You put them up,” she said. “This minute.”

Harriet, obediently, went to her bureau and put the scissors in the drawer and closed it. Ida sniffed, and trundled off. Harriet sat down on the foot of her bed, and waited; and as soon as Ida was out of earshot, she opened the drawer and got the scissors out again.

Harriet had seven yearbooks for Alexandria Academy, starting with first grade. Pemberton had graduated two years before. Page by page she turned through his senior yearbook, studying every photograph. There was Pemberton, all over the place: in group pictures of the tennis and golf teams; in plaid pants, slumped at a table in the study hall; in black tie, standing in front of a glittery backdrop swagged with white bunting, along with the rest of the Homecoming Court. His forehead was shiny and his face glowed a fierce, happy red; he looked drunk. Diane Leavitt—Lisa Leavitt’s big sister—had a gloved hand through his elbow, and though she was smiling she looked a little stunned that Angie Stanhope and not her had just been announced Homecoming Queen.

And then the senior portraits. Tuxedoes, pimples, pearls. Big-jawed country girls looking awkward in the photographer’s drape. Twinkly Angie Stanhope, who’d won everything that year, who’d married right out of high school, who now looked so pasty and faded and thick about the waist when Harriet saw her in the grocery store. But there was no sign of Danny Ratliff. Had he failed? Dropped out? She turned the page, to baby pictures of the graduating seniors (Diane Leavitt talking on a play plastic telephone; scowling Pem in a soggy diaper, swaggering about a toy pool), and
with a shock found herself looking down at a photo of her dead brother.

Yes, Robin: there he was opposite, on a page to himself, frail and freckled and glad, wearing a huge straw hat that looked as if it might belong to Chester. He was laughing—not as if he was laughing at something funny but in a sweet way, as if he loved the person who was holding the camera. R
OBIN
WE MISS YOU!!! read the caption. And, underneath, his graduating classmates had all signed their names.

For a long time, she studied the picture. She would never know what Robin’s voice had sounded like, but she had loved his face all her life, and had followed its modulations tenderly throughout a fading trail of snapshots: random moments, miracles of ordinary light. What would he have looked like, grown up? There was no way of knowing. To judge from his photograph, Pemberton had been a very ugly baby—broad-shouldered and bow-legged, with no neck, and no indication at all that he would grow up to be handsome.

There was no Danny Ratliff in Pem’s class for the previous year (though there was Pem again, as Jolly Junior) but running her finger down the alphabetized list of the class behind Pemberton’s, suddenly she landed on his name:
Danny Ratliff
.

Her eye jumped to the column opposite. Instead of a photograph there was only a spiky cartoon of a teenager with his elbows on a table, poring over a piece of paper that said “Exam Cheat Sheet.” Below the drawing, jangly beatnik capitals read:
TOO BUSY—PHOTO NOT AVAILABLE
.

So he’d failed at least one year. Had he dropped out of school after the tenth grade?

When she went back another year, she finally found him: a boy with thick bangs brushed low on his forehead, covering his eyebrows—handsome, but in a threatening way, like a hoodlum pop star. He looked older than a ninth-grader. His eyes were half-hidden beneath the low fringe of hair, which gave him a mean, hooded look; his lips were insolently pursed as if he was about to spit out a piece of gum or blow a raspberry.

She studied the picture for a long time. Then, carefully, she scissored it out, and tucked it in her orange notebook.

“Harriet, get down here.” Ida’s voice, at the foot of the stairs.

“Maam?” called Harriet, hastening to finish.

“Who been poking holes in this lunch bucket?”

————

Hely did not call that afternoon, or that night. The next morning—which was rainy—he didn’t come by either so Harriet decided to walk over to Edie’s house to see if she had made breakfast.

“A deacon!” said Edie. “Trying to turn a profit from a church outing of widows and retired ladies!” She was dressed—handsomely—in khaki shirt and dungarees, for she was to spend the day working at the Confederate cemetery with the Garden Club. “ ‘Well,’ he said to me,” (lips pursed, mimicking Mr. Dial’s voice) “ ‘but Greyhound would charge you eighty dollars.’ Greyhound! ‘Well!’ I said. ‘I find that not at all surprising! The last I heard, Greyhound was still running a money-making concern!’ ”

She was looking at the newspaper over the tops of her half-moon spectacles as she said this: her voice was queenly, withering. She had taken no notice of her granddaughter’s silence, which had driven Harriet (crunching quietly at her toast) into a deeper and more determined sulk. She had felt quite hard towards Edie ever since her conversation with Ida—more so, because Edie was always writing letters to congressmen and senators, getting up petitions, fighting to save this old landmark or that endangered species. Was not Ida’s welfare as important as whatever Mississippi waterfowl occupied Edie’s energies so profoundly?

“Of course, I didn’t bring it up,” said Edie, and sniffed an imperious sniff as if to say:
and he’d better be glad I didn’t
as she picked up her paper and gave it a rattle, “but I never will forgive Roy Dial for the way he did Daddy on that last car he bought. Daddy got mixed up about things there at the last. He might as well have knocked Daddy on the pavement and stolen the money out of his pocket.”

Harriet realized that she was staring at the back door too pointedly, and turned back to her breakfast. If Hely went to
her house and she wasn’t home, he came looking for her over here, and this was sometimes uncomfortable since Edie loved nothing better than to tease Harriet about Hely, with murmured asides about sweethearts and romance, humming infuriating little love songs under her breath. Harriet bore teasing of any sort very badly, but she could not endure being teased about boys. Edie pretended not to know this, and drew back from the results of her handiwork (tears, denial) in theatrical astonishment. “Methinks the lady doth protest too much!” she said, gaily, in a merry, mocking tone that Harriet loathed; or, more smugly, “You must really like that little boy if it upsets you so much to talk about him.”

“I think,” said Edie—startling Harriet from these recollections—“I think they ought to give them a hot lunch at school but they ought not to give the parents a dime.” She was talking about a story in the newspaper. A little earlier she’d been talking about the Panama Canal, how crazy it was to just give the thing away.