The Little Friend (33 page)

“That’s a lot of cash, my friend,” said Odum.

“Friend?” Farish laughed harshly. “I only got two friends. My two
best
friends.” He held up the wallet—still thick with bills—for inspection. “See this? This here’s my first friend, and he’s always right here in my hip pocket. I got me a second best friend that stays with me too. And that friend is a .22 pistol.”

“Diddy,” said Lasharon hopelessly, giving her father’s pants leg one more tug. “Please.”

“What are
you
staring at, you little shit?”

Hely jumped. Danny Ratliff, only a foot away, was towering over him, eyes horribly alight.

“Hmmn? Answer me when I talk to you, you little shit.”

Everyone was looking at him—Catfish, Odum, Farish, the men from the shrimp boat and the fat guy at the cash register.

As if from a great distance, he heard Lasharon Odum say, in her clear acidic voice: “He’s just looking at the funny books wi’ me Diddy.”

“Is that true?
Is
it?”

Hely—too petrified to speak—nodded.

“What’s your name?” This, gruffly from across the room. Hely glanced over and saw Farish Ratliff’s good eye trained on him like a power drill.

“Hely Hull,” said Hely without thinking, and then, aghast, clapped a hand over his mouth.

Farish chuckled dryly. “That’s the spirit, boy,” he said, screwing a square of blue chalk on the end of his cue, his good eye still fixed on Hely. “Never tell nothing that you aint
made
to tell.”

“Aw, I know who this little shit-weasel is,” Danny Ratliff said to his big brother, and then tossed his chin at Hely. “Say you called Hull?”

“Yes, sir,” said Hely miserably.

Danny let out a high, harsh laugh. “Yes
sir
. Listen at that. Don’t you
sir
me, you little—”

“Nothing wrong with the boy having manners,” said Farish rather sharply. “Hull, your name is?”

“Yes, sir.”

“He’s kin to that Hull boy, drives an old Cadillac convertible,” said Danny to Farish.

“Diddy,” said Lasharon Odum loudly, in the tense silence. “Diddy, kin me and Rusty go look at the funny books?”

Odum gave her a pat on the bottom. “Run along, sugar. Lookahere,” he said drunkenly to Farish, stabbing the butt of his cue on the floor for emphasis, “we’re going to play this game let’s go on and play it. I got to get going.”

But Farish—much to Hely’s relief—had already begun to rack the balls, after one last, long, stare in his direction.

Hely concentrated every ounce of his attention on the comic book. The letters jumped slightly with his heartbeat.
Don’t look up
, he told himself,
even for a second
. His hands were trembling, and his face burned so red that he felt it was drawing the attention of everyone in the room, as a fire would.

Farish made the break, and it was a resounding one, so loud that Hely flinched. A ball clunked into a pocket, followed four or five long, rolling seconds later by another.

The men from the shrimping boat went silent. Somebody was smoking a cigar, and the stink made Hely’s head ache, as did the garish ink jittering across the newsprint in front of him.

A long silence.
Clunk
. Another long silence. Very very quietly, Hely began to slink towards the door.

Clunk, clunk
. The stillness practically vibrated with tension.

“Jesus!” someone cried. “You said the bastard couldn’t see!”

Confusion. Hely was past the cash register and nearly out the door when a hand shot out and grabbed him by the back of his shirt, and he found himself blinking into the face of the bald, bull-faced cashier. With horror, he realized that he was still clutching
Secrets of Sinister House
, which he had not yet paid for. Frantically, he dug in the front pocket of his shorts. But the cashier was not interested in him—was not even looking at him, though he had him by the shirt firmly enough. He was interested in what was going on at the pool table.

Hely dropped a quarter and a dime on the counter and—as soon as the guy let go his shirt—shot out the door. The afternoon sun hurt his eyes after the darkness of the pool hall; he broke into a run down the sidewalk, his vision so light-dazzled that he was hardly able to see where he was going.

There were no pedestrians on the square—too late in the afternoon—and only a few parked cars. Bicycle—where was it? He ran past the post office, past the Masonic Temple, and
was halfway down Main Street before he remembered that he’d left it all the way back in the alley, behind the City Hall.

He turned and ran back, panting. The alley was slippery with moss and very dim. Once, when Hely was younger, he had ducked into it without paying attention where he was going and stumbled headlong over the shadowy, supine form of a tramp (an odorous heap of rags) stretched out nearly half the alley’s length. When Hely fell, smack over him, he sprang up, cursing, and grabbed Hely by the ankle. Hely had screamed as if boiling gasoline was being poured over him; in his agony to escape, he’d lost a shoe.

But now Hely was so frightened that he didn’t care who he stepped on. He darted in the alley—skidding on the moss-slick concrete—and retrieved his bicycle. There wasn’t enough room to ride it out, and hardly enough room to turn it around. He grabbed it by the handlebars, sawed and twisted it until he’d maneuvered the front wheel forward, and then he ran it out—where, to his horror, Lasharon Odum and the baby were standing on the sidewalk, waiting for him.

Hely froze. Languidly, she hiked the baby higher on her hip and looked at him. What she wanted from him he had absolutely no idea, but yet he was afraid to say anything and so he just stood there and looked back at her, heart galloping.

After what seemed like forever she re-shifted the baby, and said: “Lemme have that funny book.”

Without a word, Hely reached in his back pocket and handed the comic over. Placidly, without a flicker of gratitude, she shifted the baby’s weight to one arm and reached to take it but before she could, the baby stretched out its arms and caught the comic book between his filthy little palms. With solemn eyes, he drew it close to his face, and then, tentatively, closed his sticky, orange-stained mouth on it.

Hely was revolted; it was one thing if she wanted to read the comic book; it was quite another if she wanted it for the baby to chew. Lasharon made no move to take the comic book away. Instead, she made goo-goo eyes at the baby, and jogged it affectionately up and down—quite as if it was clean and attractive, and not the rheumy little wheezer it was.

“Why Diddy crying?” she said to it brightly, in baby talk,
peering directly into its tiny face. “Why Diddy crying back there? Hmn?”

————

“Put some clothes on,” said Ida Rhew to Harriet. “You dripping water all over the floor.”

“No, I’m not. I dried off on the way home.”

“You put some clothes on anyway.”

In her bedroom, Harriet peeled off her bathing suit and put on some khaki shorts and the only clean T-shirt she had: white, with a yellow smiley face on the front. She detested the smiley-face shirt, a birthday present from her father. Undignified as it was, somehow or other her father must have believed it suited her and this thought was more galling to Harriet than the shirt itself.

Though Harriet didn’t know it, the smiley-face shirt (and the peace-sign barrettes, and the other brightly colored and inappropriate presents her father sent for her birthday) had not been chosen by her father at all but by her father’s mistress, in Nashville; and if not for the mistress (whose name was Kay) Harriet and Allison would have received no birthday presents at all. Kay was a minor soft-drink heiress, slightly overweight, with a sugary voice and a soft, slack smile and a few mental problems. She also drank a bit too much; and she and Harriet’s father often got weepy together in bars over his poor little daughters trapped down in Mississippi with their crazy mother.

Everybody in town knew about Dix’s Nashville mistress except his own family and his wife’s. No one had the nerve to tell Edie, or the heart to tell any of the others. Dix’s colleagues at the bank knew, and disapproved—for occasionally he brought the woman to bank functions; Roy Dial’s sister-in-law, who lived in Nashville, had furthermore told Mr. and Mrs. Dial that the lovebirds actually shared an apartment, and while Mr. Dial (to his credit) had kept this to himself, Mrs. Dial had spread it all over Alexandria. Even Hely knew. He’d overheard his mother talking about it when he was nine or ten years old. When he confronted her, she’d made him swear never to mention it to Harriet; and he never had.

It never occurred to Hely to disobey his mother. But though he kept the secret—the only real secret that he did keep from her—it did not seem to him that Harriet would be particularly upset if ever she happened to learn the truth. And about this he was right. No one would have cared except Edie—from outraged pride; for if Edie grumbled about her granddaughters growing up without a father, neither had she or anyone else suggested that Dix’s return would in any way remedy this lack.

Harriet was in a very grim mood, so grim that she relished, perversely, the irony of the smiley-face shirt. Its self-satisfied air called Harriet’s dad to mind—though there was little reason for Harriet’s dad to be so cheerful or to expect cheer from Harriet. No wonder Edie despised him. You could hear it just in the way Edie said his name:
Dixon
, never Dix.

Nose dripping, eyes burning from the pool chemicals, she sat in the window seat and looked out across the front yard, at the rich greens of the trees in full summer leaf. Her limbs felt heavy and strange from all the swimming, and a dark lacquer of sadness had settled about the room, as it usually did whenever Harriet sat still long enough. When she was little, sometimes she had chanted to herself her address as it would appear to a visitor from outer space. Harriet Cleve Dufresnes, 363 George Street, Alexandria, Mississippi, America, Planet Earth, the Milky Way … and the sense of ringing vastness, of being swallowed by the black maw of the universe—only the tiniest white grain in a sprinkling of white sugar that went on forever—sometimes made her feel as if she were suffocating.

Violently, she sneezed. Spray flew everywhere. She pinched her nose and, eyes streaming, hopped up and ran downstairs for a Kleenex. The telephone was ringing; she could hardly see where she was going; Ida was standing at the telephone table at the foot of the stairs and before Harriet knew what was happening Ida said “Here she is,” and put the receiver in her hand.

“Harriet, listen. Danny Ratliff is at the pool hall now, him and his brother. They’re the ones that shot at me from the bridge.”

“Wait,” said Harriet, who was very disoriented. With effort, she managed to suppress another sneeze.

“But I
saw
him, Harriet. He’s scary as hell. Him and his brother, too.”

On he babbled, about robbery and shotguns and theft and gambling; and gradually the significance of what he was saying crept in on Harriet. In wonder, she listened, her itch to sneeze now vanished; her nose was still running and, awkwardly, she twisted around and tried to scour her nose upon the skimpy cap-sleeve of her T-shirt, with a rolling motion of the head like Weenie the cat had used to do against the carpet when he had something in his eye.

“Harriet?” said Hely, breaking off in the middle of his narrative. He’d been so eager to tell her what happened that he’d forgot they weren’t supposed to be speaking.

“Here I am.”

A brief silence followed, during which Harriet became aware of the television gabbling cordially in the background on Hely’s end.

“When did you leave the pool hall?” she said.

“About fifteen minutes ago.”

“Reckon they’re still there?”

“Maybe. It looked like there was going to be a fight. The guys from the boat were mad.”

Harriet sneezed. “I want to see him. I’m going to ride my bike down there right now.”

“Whoa. No way,” said Hely in alarm, but she’d already hung up.

————

There had been no fight—nothing that Danny would call a fight, anyway. When, for a moment, it had looked like Odum was reluctant to pay up, Farish had picked up a chair and knocked him to the floor and begun to kick him methodically (while his kids cowered in the doorway) so that soon enough Odum was howling and begging Farish to take the money. The real worry was the men from the shrimp boat, who could have caused a lot of trouble if they’d wanted to. But though the fat man in the yellow sports shirt had some colorful things
to say, the rest only muttered among themselves and even chuckled, though a bit angrily. They were on leave, and had money to burn.

To Odum’s pitiful appeals, Farish reacted most impassively.
Eat or be eaten
was his philosophy, and anything he was able to take from somebody else he regarded as his own rightful property. As Odum limped frantically back and forth, begging Farish to think of the kids, Farish’s attentive, cheerful expression reminded Danny of the way that Farish’s twin German shepherds looked after they had just killed, or were about to kill, a cat: alert, businesslike, playful.
No hard feelings, kitty. Better luck next time
.

Danny admired Farish’s no-nonsense attitude, though he had little stomach for such things. He lit a cigarette even though he had a bad taste in his mouth from smoking too much.

“Relax,” said Catfish, sliding up behind Odum and laying a hand upon his shoulder. Catfish’s high spirits were inexhaustible; he was cheerful no matter what happened, and he was unable to understand that not everyone was so resilient.

With a feeble, half-crazed bluster—more pitiable than threatening—Odum swaggered back weakly and cried: “Get your hand off me, nigger.”

Catfish was unperturbed. “Anybody can play like you, brother, not going to have trouble winning that money back. Later on, if you feel like it, come find me over at the Esquire Lounge and maybe we can work out a little something.”

Odum stumbled back against the cinder-block wall. “My car,” he said. His eye was swollen and his mouth was bloody.