The Little Friend (32 page)

“Well look a here,” said Catfish stagily.

“Diddy, you said come get you when the big hand was on the three.”

“A hundred bucks,” said Farish, in the silence that followed. “Take it or leave it.”

Odum twisted the chalk on his cue and hitched up a pair
of imaginary shirtsleeves. Then he said, abruptly, without looking at his daughter: “Diddy’s not ready to go yet, sugar. Here’s yall a dime apiece. Run look at the funny books.”

“Diddy, you said remind you—”

“I said
run along
. Your break,” he said to Farish.

“I racked.”

“I know it,” said Odum, flicking his hand. “Go on, I’m giving it to you.”

Farish slumped forward, his weight on the table. He looked down the cue with his good eye—straight at Hely—and his gaze was as cold as if he was looking down the barrel of a gun.

Crack
. The balls spun apart. Odum walked to the opposite side and studied the table for several moments. Then he popped his neck quickly, by swinging it to the side, and leaned down to make his shot.

Catfish slipped in amongst the men who’d drifted from the pinball machines and the adjoining tables to watch. Inconspicuously, he whispered something to the man in the yellow shirt just as Odum made a showy leap-shot which sank not one, but two striped balls.

Whoops and cheers. Catfish drifted back to Danny’s side, in the confused conversation from the spectators. “Odum can hold the table all day,” he whispered, “as long as they stick to eight ball.”

“Farish can run it just as good when he gets going.”

Odum rolled in another combination—a delicate shot, where the cue ball hit a solid ball that tipped another one into a pocket. More cheers.

“Who’s in?” Danny said. “Them two by the pinball?”

“Not interested,” said Catfish, glancing casually over his shoulder and above Hely’s head as he reached in the watch pocket of his leather vest and palmed a small metal object about the size and shape of a golf tee. In the instant before his beringed fingers closed over it, Hely saw that it was a bronze figurine of a naked lady with high-heeled shoes and a big Afro hairdo.

“Why not? Who are they?”

“Just a couple good Christian boys,” said Catfish, as
Odum sank an easy ball into a side pocket. Stealthily, with his hand half in, half out of his jacket pocket, he unscrewed the lady’s head from her body and flicked it into the jacket pocket with his thumb. “Them other group”—he rolled his eyes at the man in the yellow sport shirt and his fat friends—“is passing through from Texas.” Catfish glanced around casually and then, turning as if to sneeze, he raised the vial and took a quick, covert sniff. “Work a shrimping boat,” he said, wiping his nose on the sleeve of his smoking jacket, his gaze passing blankly across the comic-book rack and over the top of Hely’s head as he palmed the vial to Danny.

Danny sniffed, loudly, and pinched his nostrils shut. Water welled in his eyes. “God almighty,” he said.

Odum smacked in another ball. Amidst the hoots of the men from the shrimping boat Farish glared down at the table, the pool cue balanced horizontally along the back of his neck and his elbows slung over either side, paws dangling.

Catfish stepped backward with a loose, comical little dance movement. He seemed exhilarated all of a sudden. “Mistah Farish,” he said gaily, across the room—his tone mimicking that of a popular black comedian on television—“has
apprised
himself of the situation.”

Hely was excited and so confused that his head felt as though it might pop. The significance of the vial had escaped him, but Catfish’s bad language and suspicious manner had not; and though Hely was not sure exactly what was going on he knew it was gambling, and that it was against the law. Just as it was against the law to shoot guns off a bridge, even if nobody got killed. His ears burned; they always got red when he was excited—he hoped nobody noticed. Casually, he replaced the comic he was looking at and took a new one from the rack—
Secrets of Sinister House
. A skeleton seated in a witness chair flung out a fleshless arm at the spectators as a ghostly attorney boomed: “And now, my witness—who was the
VICTIM
—will point out …

“THE MAN WHO KILLED HIM!!!”

“Come on, kick it!” shouted Odum unexpectedly, as the eight ball zinged across the baize, ricocheted, and clunked into the corner pocket opposite.

In the pandemonium that followed, Odum removed a small bottle of whiskey from his back pocket and had a long thirsty pull from it. “Let’s see that hundred dollars, Ratliff.”

“I’m good for it. And I’m good for anotherun, too,” snapped Farish, as the balls fell from the undercarriage and he began to rack them up again. “Winner’s break.”

Odum shrugged, and squinted down the cue—nose wrinkled, upper lip baring his rabbity front teeth—then smashed in a break that not only left the cue ball still spinning where it had hit the rack of balls, but shot the eight ball in a corner pocket.

The men who worked on the shrimping boat hooted and clapped. They looked like guys who felt they were on to a good thing. Catfish lolloped over to them jauntily—knees loose, chin high—to confer over the finances.

“That’s the fastest money
you
ever lost!” Danny called across the room.

Hely became aware that Lasharon Odum was standing right behind him—not because she said anything but because the baby had a bad cold and breathed with wet, repellent wheezes. “Get away from me,” he muttered, edging a little to the side.

Shyly, she moved after him, obtruding into the corner of his vision. “Let me borry a quarter.”

The wheedling hopelessness of her voice revolted him even more than the baby’s snotty breathing. Pointedly, he turned his back. Farish—to the rolled eyes of the men from the shrimping boat—was reaching again in the undercarriage.

Odum grabbed his jaw between both hands, and cracked his neck to the left and then right:
snick
. “Still aint had enough?”

“
Oh, all
right
now,
” Catfish crooned, along to the jukebox, popping his fingers:
“Baby what I say.”

“What’s all this
trash
on the music box?” snarled Farish, dropping the balls in an angry clatter.

Catfish, teasingly, undulated his meager hips. “Loosen up, Farish.”

“Go
on,
” said Hely to Lasharon, who had sidled up again, nearly touching him. “I don’t want your booger breath.”

He was so sickened by her nearness that he said this louder than he meant to; and he froze when Odum’s unfocused gaze swung vaguely in their direction. Farish looked up, too; and his good eye pinned Hely like a thrown knife.

Odum took a deep, drunken breath, and put down the pool cue. “Yall see that little old gal standing yonder?” he said melodramatically to Farish and company. “It’s against me to tell you this, but that little gal does the work of a grown woman.”

Catfish and Danny Ratliff exchanged a quick glance of alarm.

“I ask you. Where would you find a sweet little old girl like this that looks after the house, and looks after the little ones, and puts food on the table and totes and fetches and goes without so’s her poor old Diddy can have?”

I wouldn’t want any food
she
put on the table
, thought Hely.

“Younguns today all think they have to have,” Farish said flatly. “They would do just as well to be like yourn and go without.”

“When me and my brothers and sisters were coming up, we didn’t even have us an icebox,” said Odum in a quaver. He was getting good and wound-up. “All the summer long I had to chop cotton out in the fields—”

“I’ve chopped my share of cotton, too.”

“—and my mama, I’m telling you,
she worked those fields like a nigger man
. Me—I couldn’t go to school! Mama and Daddy, they needed me at home! Naw, we never had a thing but if I had the money it’s nothin in the world I wouldn’t buy those little ones over there. They know old Diddy’d rather give it to them than have it himself. Hmm? Don’t yall know that?”

His unfocused eyes wavered from Lasharon and the baby to Hely himself. “I said, Don’t Yall Know That,” he repeated, in an amplified and less pleasant tone.

He was staring straight at Hely. Hely was shocked:
Geez
, he thought,
is the old coot so drunk he don’t know I’m not his kid?
He stared back with his mouth open.

“Yes, Diddy,” Lasharon whispered, just audible.

Odum’s red-rimmed eyes softened, and moved unsteadily to his daughter; and the moist, self-pitying tremor of his lip made Hely more uneasy than anything else he had seen that afternoon.

“Hear that? Hear that little old gal? Come here and hug old Diddy around the neck,” he said, dashing away a tear with his knuckle.

Lasharon hoisted the baby on her bony hip and went slowly to him. Something about the possessiveness of Odum’s embrace, and the vacant way she accepted it—like a miserable old dog, accepting the touch of its owner—disgusted Hely but scared him a bit, too.

“This little gal
loves
her old Diddy, don’t she?” He pressed her to his shirt front with tears in his eyes.

Hely was gratified to see, by the way they rolled their eyes at each other, that Catfish and Danny Ratliff were just as disgusted by Odum’s slop as he was.

“
She
knows her Diddy’s a pore man!
She
don’t have to have a bunch of old toys and candy and fancy clothes!”

“And why should she?” said Farish abruptly.

Odum—intoxicated by the sound of his own voice—turned foggily and puckered his brow.

“Yeah. You heard right. Why should
she
have all that mess? Why should
any
of em have it? We didn’t have anything when we was coming up, did we?”

A slow wave of astonishment illumined Odum’s face.

“Naw, brother!” he cried gaily.

“Was we ashamed of being poor? Was we too good to work? What’s good enough for us is good enough for
her
, aint it?”

“Dern right!”

“Who
says
that kids should grow up to think they’re better than their own parents? The Federal Government, that’s who! Why do you reckon Government sticks its nose into a man’s home, and doles out all these food stamps, and vaccinations, and liberal educations on a silver platter? I’ll sure tell you why. It’s so they can brainwash kids to think they got to have
more
than their folks did, and look down on what they come from, and raise themselves above their own flesh and
blood. I don’t know about you, sir, but my daddy never give me a thing for free.”

Low murmurs of approval, from all over the poolroom.

“Nope,” said Odum, wagging his head mournfully. “Mama and Diddy never give me nothing. I worked for it all. Everything I have.”

Farish nodded curtly at Lasharon and the baby. “So tell me this. Why should
she
have what
we
didn’t?”

“It’s the God’s own truth! Leave Diddy alone, sugar,” Odum said to his daughter, who was tugging listlessly at his pants leg.

“Diddy, please, let’s go.”

“Diddy aint ready to leave yet, sugar.”

“But Diddy, you said remind you that the Chevrolet place closes at six.”

Catfish, with an expression of rather strained goodwill, slid over to speak quietly with the men from the shrimp boat, one of whom had just glanced at his wristwatch. But then, Odum reached into the front pocket of his filthy jeans, and dug around for a moment or two, and pulled out the biggest wad of cash that Hely had ever seen.

This got everyone’s attention right away. Odum tossed the roll of bills on the pool table.

“What’s left of my insurance settlement,” he said, nodding at the money with drunken piety. “From this hand here. Going to go to the Chevrolet place and pay that minty-breath bastard Roy Dial. He come and taken my damn car from out in front my—”

“That’s how they operate,” said Farish, soberly. “These bastards from the Tax Commission and the Finance Company and the Sheriff’s Department. They come right up on a man’s property, and take what they feel like whenever they feel like it—”

“And,”
said Odum, raising his voice, “I’m going to go down there directly and get it back. With this.”

“Um, none of my business, but you ort not drop all that cash money on a
car.
”

“What?” said Odum belligerently, staggering back. The money, on the green baize, lay in a yellow circle of light.

Farish raised a grubby paw. “I’m saying that if you purchase your vehicle above the
table
, so called, from a slick weasel like Dial, not only is Dial robbing you outright with the financing but the State and Federal government are right in line for their cut, too. I done spoke out many and many a time against the Sales Tax. The Sales Tax is
unconstitutional
. I can point my finger right where in the Constitution of this nation it says so.”

“Come on, Diddy,” said Lasharon faintly, plucking away gamely at Odum’s pants leg. “Diddy, please let’s go.”

Odum was gathering up his money. He did not seem to have absorbed really the gist of Farish’s little talk. “No, sir.” He was breathing hard. “That man can’t take what belongs to me! I’m going to go right down to Dial Chevrolet, and sling this right in his face—” he slapped the bills against the pool table—” and I’m going to say to him, I’m gonna say: ‘Give me back my vehicle, you minty-breath bastard.’ ” Laboriously, he stuffed the bills into the right pocket of his jeans as he fished for a quarter in the left. “But first I got this four hundred and two more of yours say I can kick your ass one more time at eight ball.”

Danny Ratliff, who had been pacing in a tight circle by the Coke machine, exhaled audibly.

“Them’s high stakes,” said Farish impassively. “My break?”

“Yours,” said Odum, with a drunken, magnanimous wave.

Farish, with absolutely no expression on his face, reached into his hip pocket and retrieved a large black wallet attached by a chain to a belt loop of his coveralls. With a bank teller’s swift professionalism, he counted off six hundred dollars in twenties and laid them down upon the table.