The Little Friend (31 page)

“Go down to the Pool Hall and buy your own,” Benny had said, rolling up the comic book and slapping Hely across the side of the head.

That was two years ago. Now, horror comic books were all that got Hely through certain difficult stretches of life: chicken pox, boring car trips, Camp Lake de Selby. Because of his limited funds and the strict interdiction against the Pool Hall, his expeditions to purchase them were infrequent, once a month perhaps, and much anticipated. The fat man at the cash register didn’t seem to mind that Hely stood around the rack for so long; in fact, he hardly noticed Hely at all, which was just as well as Hely sometimes stood studying the comics for hours in order to make the wisest possible selection.

He had come up here to get his mind off Harriet, but he only had thirty-five cents after the potato chips, and the comic books were twenty cents each. Half-heartedly, he leafed through a story in
Dark Mansions
called “Demon at the Door”
(“AARRRGGGHH
—
!!!
—I—I—
HAVE UNLEASHED A—A—LOATHESOME
EVIL
 … 
TO HAUNT THIS LAND
UNTIL SUNRISE!!!!!
) but his eye kept straying to the Charles Atlas bodybuilding advertisement on the page opposite. “Take a good honest look at yourself. Do you have the dynamic tension that women admire? Or are you a skinny, scrawny, ninety-seven-pound half-alive weakling?”

Hely was not sure how much he weighed, but ninety-seven pounds sounded like a lot. Glumly, he studied the “Before” cartoon—a scarecrow, basically—and wondered if he should send for the information or if it was a rip-off, like the X-Ray Spex he’d ordered from an ad in
Weird Mystery
. The X-Ray Spex were advertised as enabling one to see through flesh and walls and women’s clothing. They had cost a dollar ninety-eight plus thirty-five cents for postage, and they had taken forever to arrive, and when they finally came they were nothing more than a pair of plastic frames with two sets of cardboard inserts: one with a cartoon drawing of a hand through which you could see the bones, the other with a cartoon of a
sexy secretary in a see-through dress with a black bikini underneath.

A shadow fell over Hely. He glanced up to see two figures with their backs half to him, who had drifted from the pool tables to the comic-book rack to converse privately. Hely recognized one of them: Catfish de Bienville, who was a slumlord, something of a local celebrity; he wore his rust-red hair in a giant Afro, and drove a custom Gran Torino with tinted windows. Hely often saw him at the pool hall, also standing around talking to people outside the car wash on summer evenings. Though his features were like a black man’s, he was not actually dark in color; his eyes were blue, and his skin was freckled, and as white as Hely’s. But he was mostly recognizable around town for his clothes: silk shirts, bell-bottom pants, belt buckles the size of salad plates. People said he bought them from Lansky Brothers, in Memphis, where Elvis was said to shop. Now—as hot as it was—he wore a red corduroy smoking jacket, white flares, and red patent-leather platform loafers.

It was not Catfish who had spoken, however, but the other: underfed, tough, with bitten fingernails. He was little more than a teenager, not too tall or too clean, with sharp cheekbones and lank hippie hair parted in the middle, but there was a scruffy, mean-edged coolness about him like a rock star; and he held himself erect, like he was somebody important, though he obviously wasn’t.

“Where’d he get playing money?” Catfish was whispering to him.

“Disability, I reckon,” said the hippie-haired kid, glancing up. His eyes were a startling silvery blue, and there was something staring and rather fixed about them.

They seemed to be talking about poor Carl Odum, who was racking balls across the room and offering to take on any comers for any sum they wished to lose. Carl—widowed, with what seemed like about nine or ten squalid little children—was only about thirty but looked twice as old: face and neck ruined with sunburn, his pale eyes pink around the rims. He’d lost a few fingers in an accident down at the egg-packing plant, not long after his wife’s death. Now he was drunk, and
bragging how he could whip anybody in the room, fingers or not. “Here’s my bridge,” he said, holding up his mutilated hand. “This here’s all I need.” Dirt etched the lines of his palm and the nails of the only two fingers remaining: the pointer and the thumb.

Odum was addressing these remarks to a guy beside him at the table: a gigantic, bearded guy, a bear of a guy, who wore a brown coverall with a ragged hole cut in the breast where the name tag should have been. He wasn’t paying any attention to Odum; his eyes were fixed upon the table. Long dark hair, streaked with gray, straggled down past his shoulders. He was very large, and awkward somehow about the shoulders, as if his arms did not fit comfortably into the sockets; they hung stiffly, with slightly crooked elbows and the palms falling slack, the way a bear’s arms might hang if a bear decided to rear up on its hind legs. Hely couldn’t stop staring at him. The bushy black beard and the brown jumpsuit made him look like some kind of crazy South American dictator.

“Anything pertaining to pool or the playing of pool,” Odum was saying. “It’s what I guess you’d have to call second nature.”

“Well, some of us has gifts that way,” said the big guy in the brown jumpsuit, in a deep but not unpleasant voice. As he said this he glanced up, and Hely saw with a jolt that one of his eyes was all creepy: a milky wall-eye rolled out to the side of his head.

Much closer—only a few feet from where Hely stood—the tough-looking kid tossed his hair out of his face and said tensely to Catfish: “Twenty bucks a pop. Ever time he loses.” Deftly, with the other hand, he shook a cigarette from the pack in a tricky flick like he was throwing dice—and Hely noted, with interest, that despite the practiced cool of the gesture his hands trembled like an old person’s. Then he leaned forward and whispered something in Catfish’s ear.

Catfish laughed aloud. “Lose, my yellow ass,” he said. In an easy, graceful movement, he spun and sauntered off to the pinball machines in the back.

The tough kid lit his cigarette and gazed out across the room. His eyes—burning pale and silvery out of his sunburnt
face—gave Hely a little shiver as they passed over him without seeing him: wild-looking eyes, with a lot of light in them, that reminded Hely of old pictures he’d seen of Confederate soldier boys.

Across the room, over by the pool table, the bearded man in the brown jumpsuit had only the one good eye—but it shone with something of the same silvery light. Hely—studying them over the top of his comic book—noted a squeak of family resemblance between the two of them. Though they were very different at first glance (the bearded man was older, and much heavier than the kid), still they had the same long dark hair and sunburnt complexion, the same fixity of eye and stiffness of neck, a similar tight-mouthed way of talking, as if to conceal bad teeth.

“How much you plan on taking him for?” said Catfish, presently, sliding back to his pal’s side.

The kid cackled; and at the crack in his laugh, Hely nearly dropped the comic book. He’d had plenty of time to get used to that high-pitched, derisive laughter; it had rung at his back from the creek bridge for a long, long time as he stumbled through the undergrowth, the echoes of the gunshots singing off the bluffs.

It was him. Without the cowboy hat—that was why Hely hadn’t recognized him. As the blood rushed to his face, he stared down furiously at his comic book, at the gasping girl who clutched Johnny Peril’s shoulder
(“Johnny! That figure of wax! It moved!
”)

“Odum aint a bad player, Danny,” Catfish was saying quietly. “Fingers or no fingers.”

“Well, he might could beat Farish when he’s sober. But not when he’s drunk.”

Twin light bulbs popped on in Hely’s head.
Danny? Farish?
Being shot at by rednecks was exciting enough, but being shot at by the Ratliffs was something else. He could not wait to get home and tell Harriet about all this. Could this bearded Sasquatch actually be the fabled Farish Ratliff? There was only one Farish that Hely had ever heard of—in Alexandria or anywhere else.

With difficulty, Hely forced himself to look down at his
comic. He had never seen Farish Ratliff up close—only at a distance, pointed out from a moving car, or pictured blurrily in the local paper—but he had heard stories about him all his life. At one time Farish Ratliff had been the most notorious crook in Alexandria, masterminding a family gang which incorporated every kind of burglary and petty theft imaginable. He had also written and distributed a number of educational pamphlets over the years featuring such titles as “Your Money or Your Life” (a protest against the Federal income tax), “Rebel Pride: Answering the Critics,” and “Not MY Daughter!” All this had stopped, however, with an incident with a bulldozer a few years back.

Hely didn’t know why Farish had decided to steal the bulldozer. The newspaper had said that the foreman discovered it missing from a construction site out behind the Party Ice Company and then the next thing anyone knew Farish was spotted tearing down the highway on it. He wouldn’t pull over when signaled, but turned and took defensive action with the bulldozer shovel. Then, when the cops opened fire, he bolted across a cow pasture, tearing down a barbed-wire fence, scattering panicked cattle in all directions, until he managed to tip the bulldozer into a ditch. As they ran across the pasture, shouting for Farish to exit the vehicle with his hands above his head, they stopped dead in their tracks to see the distant figure of Farish, in the bulldozer’s cab, stick a .22 to his temple and fire. There’d been a picture in the paper of a cop named Jackie Sparks, looking genuinely shaken, standing over the body out there in the cow pasture as he shouted instructions to the ambulance attendants.

Though it was a mystery why Farish had stolen the bulldozer in the first place, the real mystery was why Farish had shot himself. Some people claimed that it was because he was afraid of going back to prison but others said no, prison was nothing to a man like Farish, the offense wasn’t that serious and he would have gotten out again in a year or two. The bullet wound was grave, and Farish had very nearly died of it. He’d made news again when he awakened asking for mashed potatoes from what the doctors believed was a vegetative state. When he was released from the hospital—legally blind
in his right eye—he was sent down to the state mental farm at Whitfield on an insanity plea, a measure perhaps not unjustified.

Since his release from the mental hospital, Farish was in several aspects an altered man. It wasn’t just the eye. People said he had stopped drinking; as far as anyone knew, he no longer broke into gas stations or stole cars and chainsaws from people’s garages (though his younger brothers took up the slack as far as such activities were concerned). His racial concerns had also slipped from the forefront. No more did he stand on the sidewalk in front of the public school handing out his home-made pamphlets decrying school integration. He ran a taxidermy business, and along with his disability checks and his proceeds from stuffing deer heads and bass for local hunters he had become a fairly law-abiding citizen—or so it was said.

And now here he was, Farish Ratliff in the flesh—twice in the same week, if you counted the bridge. The only Ratliffs Hely had occasion to see in his own part of town were Curtis (who roamed freely over Greater Alexandria, shooting his squirt gun at passing cars) and Brother Eugene, a preacher of some sort. This Eugene was occasionally to be seen preaching on the town square or, more frequently, reeling in the vaporous heat off the highway as he shouted about the Pentecost and shook his fist at the traffic. Though Farish was said to be not quite right in the head since he’d shot himself, Eugene (Hely had heard his father say) was frankly demented. He ate red clay from people’s yards and fell out on the sidewalk in fits where he heard the voice of God in thunder.

Catfish was having a quiet word with a group of middle-aged men at the table beside Odum’s. One of them—a fat man in a yellow sports shirt, with piggy, suspicious eyes like raisins sunk in dough—glanced over at Farish and Odum and then, regally, strode to the other side of the table and sank a low ball. Without glancing at Catfish, he reached carefully for his back pocket and, after half a beat, one of the three spectators standing behind him did the same.

“Hey,” Danny Ratliff said across the room to Odum. “Hold your horses. If it’s for money now, Farish has the next game.”

Farish hawked, with a loud, retching noise, and shifted his weight to the other foot.

“Old Farish only got him the one eye now,” said Catfish, sidling over and slapping Farish on the back.

“Watch it,” Farish said, rather menacingly, with an angry jerk of his head that did not seem entirely show.

Catfish, suavely, leaned across the table and offered his hand to Odum. “Name of Catfish de Bienville,” he said.

Odum, irritably, waved him away. “I know who you are.”

Farish slid a couple of quarters into the metal slide and jerked it, hard. The balls chunked loose from the undercarriage.

“I’ve beat this blind man a time or two. I’ll shoot pool with any man in here that can
see,
” said Odum, staggering back, righting himself by jabbing his cue to the floor. “Why don’t you step on back and quit crowding me,” he snapped at Catfish, who had slipped behind him again; “yes,
you—
”

Catfish leaned to whisper something in his ear. Slowly, Odum’s white-blond eyebrows pulled together in a befuddled knot.

“Don’t like to play for money, Odum?” Farish said derisively, after a slight pause, as he reached beneath the table and began to rack the balls. “You a deacon over at the Baptist church?”

“Naw,” said Odum. The greedy thought planted in his ear by Catfish was beginning to work its way across his sunburnt face, as visible as a cloud moving across empty sky.

“Diddy,” said a small, acid voice from the doorway.

It was Lasharon Odum. Her scrawny hip was thrown to the side in what was, to Hely, a disgustingly adult-looking posture. Across it was straddled a baby just as dirty as she was, their mouths encircled with orange rings from Popsicles, or Fanta.