The Little Friend (44 page)

Hurry
, he said to himself,
hurry up and let’s get out of here
but his hands weren’t working right, they slipped and slid uselessly on the doorknob like they weren’t even his.…

From below, a strangled cry from Harriet, so astonished with fright and despair that it choked off partway through.

“Harriet?” he called, into the uncertain silence that followed. His voice sounded flat and oddly casual. Then, the next instant, he heard car tires on gravel. Headlights swept grandly into the back yard. Whenever Hely thought about this night in the years to come, the picture that came to him most vividly was for some reason always this: the stiff, yellowed grass flooded in the sudden glare of car lights; scattered weed-spires—Johnson grass, beggar’s-lice—trembling and illumined harshly.…

Before he had time to think, or even breathe, high beams cut to low:
pop. Pop
again: and the grass went dark. Then a car door opened and what sounded like half a dozen heavy pairs of boots were tramping up the staircase.

Hely panicked. Later, he would wonder that he hadn’t thrown himself off the landing in his fright, and broken a leg or possibly his neck, but in the terror of those heavy footfalls he could think of nothing except the preacher, that scarred
face coming toward him in the dark, and the only place to run was back into the apartment.

He darted inside; and in the dim, his heart sank. Card table, folding chairs, ice chest: where to hide? He ran into the back room, stubbing his toe against a dynamite crate (which responded with an angry whack and a
tch tch tch
of rattles), and instantly realized his terrible mistake but it was too late. The front door creaked.
Did I even shut it?
he thought, with a sickening crawl of fear.

Silence, the longest of Hely’s life. After what seemed like forever there was the slight click of a key turning in a lock, then twice again, rapidly.

“What’s the matter,” said a cracked male voice, “didn’t it catch?”

The light snapped on in the next room. In the flag of light from the doorway, Hely saw that he was trapped: no cover, no escape. Apart from the snakes, the room was virtually empty: newspapers, tool chest, a hand-painted signboard propped against one wall (
With the Good Lord’s Help: Upholding the Protestant Religion and All Civil Laws …
) and, in the far corner, a vinyl beanbag chair. In an agony of haste (they could see him just by glancing through the open door) he slipped through the dynamite crates towards the beanbag.

Another click: “Yep, there it goes,” said the cracked voice, indistinctly, as Hely dropped to his knees and squirmed under the beanbag, as best as he could, pulling the bulk of it on top of him.

More talking, which he could not now hear. The bean-bag was heavy; he was facing away from the door, his legs curled tight beneath him. The carpet smashed against his right cheek smelled like sweaty socks. Then—to his horror—the overhead light came on.

What were they saying? He tried to make himself as small as he could. As he couldn’t move, he had no choice—unless he closed his eyes—except to stare at five or six snakes moving inside a gaudy, side-screened box two feet from his nose. As Hely stared at them, half-hypnotized, his muscles locked with terror, one little snake trickled away from the
others and crawled halfway up the screen. The hollow of his throat was white, and his belly-scales ran in long, horizontal plates, the chalky tan of calamine lotion.

Too late—as sometimes happened when he caught himself gawking at the spaghetti-sauce guts of some animal squashed on the highway—Hely shut his eyes. Black circles on orange—the light’s afterburn, thrown into negative—drifted up from the bottom of his vision, one after another, like bubbles in a fish tank, growing fainter and fainter as they rose and vanished.…

Vibrations in the floor: footsteps. The steps paused; and then another set, heavier, and quicker, tramped in and stopped abruptly.

What if my shoe is poking out?
thought Hely, with a near-uncontrollable sizzle of horror.

Everything stopped. The steps reversed themselves a pace or two. More muffled talking. It seemed to him as if one set of feet went to the window, paced fitfully, then retreated. How many different voices there were, he could not tell, but one voice rose distinct from the rest: garbled, singsong, like the game that he and Harriet sometimes played at the swimming pool where they took turns saying sentences underwater and tried to figure out what the other person was saying. At the same time he was aware of a quiet
scritch scritch scritch
coming from the snake box, a noise so faint that he thought he must be imagining it. He opened his eyes. In the narrow strip between beanbag and smelly carpet, he found himself staring sideways at eight pale inches of snake-belly, resting weirdly against the screen of the box opposite. Like the livery tip of some sea-creature’s tentacle, blindly it oscillated back and forth, like a windshield wiper
 … scratching
itself, Hely realized, with horrified fascination,
scritch … scritch … scritch.…

Off snapped the overhead lights, unexpectedly. The footsteps and the voices retreated.

Scritch … scritch … scritch … scritch … scritch …

Hely—rigid, his palms pressed between his knees—stared out hopelessly into the dim. The snake’s belly was still visible, just barely, through the screen. What if he had to
spend the night here? Helplessly, his thoughts skittered and bumped around in such a wild confusion that he felt sick.
Remember your exits
, he told himself; that was what his Health workbook said to do in case of fire or emergency, but he had not been paying very good attention and the exits he did remember were of absolutely no use: back door, inaccessible … inside staircase, padlocked by the Mormons … bathroom window—yes, that was possible—though coming in had been hard enough, never mind trying to squeeze out again unheard, and in the dark.…

For the first time, he remembered Harriet. Where was she? He tried to think what he would do if their positions were reversed. Would she have the sense to run get someone? In any other circumstances Hely would sooner have her pour hot coals down his back than call his dad, but now—short of death—he saw no alternative. Balding, soft around the middle, Hely’s father was neither large nor imposing; if anything, he was slightly below the average height but his years as a high-school administrator had given him a gaze which was Authority itself, and a stony manner of stretching out his silences at which even grown men faltered.

Harriet?
Tensely, he pictured the white Princess phone in his parents’ bedroom. If Hely’s dad knew what had happened, he would march straight up here unafraid and yank him up by the shoulder and tow him out—to the car, for a whipping, and a lecture on the drive home which would leave Hely’s ears sizzling—while the preacher cowered in confusion among his serpents mumbling
yes sir thankee sir
not knowing what had hit him.

His neck hurt. He couldn’t hear anything, not even the snake. Suddenly it occurred to him that Harriet might be dead: strangled, shot, hit by the preacher’s truck, for all he knew, turning in right on top of her.

Nobody knows where I am
. His legs were cramping. Ever so slightly, he straightened them.
Nobody. Nobody. Nobody
.

A shower of pinpricks sparkled through his calves. He lay very still for some minutes—tensed, fully expecting the preacher to swoop down on him at any moment. At last, when nothing happened, he rolled over. Blood tingled through his
pinched limbs. He wriggled his toes; he turned his head from side to side. He waited. Then, at last, when he could stand it no longer, he poked his head from beneath the beanbag.

In the darkness, the boxes sparkled. A skewed rectangle of light spilled onto the snuff-colored carpet from the doorway. Beyond—Hely inched forward, on his elbows—was framed a grimy yellow room, brilliantly lit by a ceiling bulb. A high-pitched hillbilly voice was speaking, rapid but indistinct.

A growly voice interrupted. “Jesus never done a thing for me, and the law sure aint.” Then, quite suddenly, a gigantic shadow blocked the doorway.

Hely clutched the carpet; he lay petrified, trying not to breathe. Then another voice spoke: distant, peevish. “These reptiles aint got a thing to do with the Lord. All they are is nasty.”

The shadow in the doorway let out a weird, high-pitched chuckle—and Hely froze to iron.
Farish Ratliff
. From the doorway, his bad eye—pale like a boiled pickerel’s—raked across the darkness like the search beam of a lighthouse.

“Tell you what you ort to do …” To Hely’s immense relief, the heavy tread retreated. From the next room, there was a squeak like a kitchen cabinet opening. When, at last, he opened his eyes, the bright doorway stood empty.

“… what you ort to do, if you’re tired of hauling them around, is to take them all in the woods and turn em aloose and shoot em. Kill the shit out of ever last one of them. Light em on fire,” he said, loudly, over the preacher’s objection, “chunk them in the river, I don’t care. Then you aint got a problem.”

A belligerent silence. “Snakes can swim,” said a different voice—male, too, white, but younger.

“They aint going to swim far in a damn box, are they?” A crunch, as if Farish had bitten into something; in a jocular, crumbly voice, he continued. “Look, Eugene, if you don’t want to fool with em, I got me a .38 down there in the glove compartment. For ten cents, I’ll go in there right now and kill ever last one of them.”

Hely’s heart plummeted.
Harriet!
he thought wildly.
Where are you?
These were the men who had killed her brother; when they found him (and they would find him, of that he was sure) they would kill him too.…

What weapon did he have? How to defend himself? A second snake had nosed up the screen alongside the first one, his snout on the underside of the other’s jaw; they looked like the twined snakes on a medical staff. The nastiness of this commonplace symbol—printed in red on his mother’s collection envelopes for the Lung Association—had never before occurred to him. His mind spun. Hardly aware what he was doing, Hely reached out with trembling hand and lifted the latch on the box of snakes in front of him.

There, that’ll slow ’em down
, he thought, rolling on his back and staring at the foam-panelled ceiling. He might be able to escape in whatever confusion ensued. Even if he was bit, he might make it to the hospital.…

One of the snakes had snapped at him, fitfully, as he reached for the lock. Now he felt something sticky—poison?—on the palm of his hand. The thing had struck and sprayed him clear through the screen. Hurriedly, he scrubbed his hand on the back of his shorts, hoping he didn’t have any cuts or scratches he’d forgotten about.

It took the snakes a little while to figure out they were loose. The two leaning against the screen had tumbled free at once; for some moments they lay there, without moving, until other snakes nosed in over their backs to see what was going on. All at once—as if a signal had been given—they seemed to understand that they were free and slid out gladly, fanning in all directions.

Hely—sweating—squirmed out from under the beanbag and crawled as rapidly as he dared past the open doorway, through the light spilling in from the next room. Though he was sick with apprehension, he dared not glance in but kept his gaze rigidly down for fear that they would sense his eyes upon them.

When he was safely past the door—safe for the moment, anyway—he slumped in the shadow of the opposite wall, shaky and weak from the beating of his heart. He was all out
of ideas. If somebody decided to get up again and come in and turn on the lights, they would see him instantly, huddled defenseless against the particle-board.…

Had he
really
set those snakes loose? From where he stood, he saw two lying in the open floor; another wriggling, energetically, towards the light. A moment ago it had seemed like a good plan but now he was fervently sorry:
please, God, please don’t let it crawl over here.…
The snakes had patterns on their backs like copperheads, only sharper. On the audacious snake—which was making brazenly for the next room—he now made out the two-inch stack of rattle buttons on the tail.

But it was the ones he couldn’t see that made him nervous. There had been at least five or six snakes in that box—possibly more. Where were they?

From the front windows it was a sheer drop to the street. His only hope was the bathroom. Once he got out on the roof, he could dangle from the edge before dropping the rest of the way. He’d jumped from tree limbs nearly as high.

But to his dismay, the bathroom door wasn’t where he thought it was. Down the wall he inched—too far altogether for his taste, down into the dark area where he’d turned the snakes loose—but what he’d thought was the door wasn’t the door at all but only a piece of particle-board propped against the wall.

Hely was perplexed. The bathroom door was on the left, he was sure of it; he was debating whether to move farther down or go back when with an abrupt pitch of his heart he realized that it was on the left side of the
other
room.

He was too stunned to move. For an instant, the room plunged away (great depths, soundless wells, pupils dilating in response) and when it rushed back again, it took him a moment to figure out where he was. He leaned his head against the wall, rolling it back and forth. How could he be so dumb? He
always
had trouble with directions, confusing left with right; letters and numbers switched chairs when he was looking away from the page, and grinned back at him from different places; sometimes he even sat down at the wrong chair at school without realizing it.
Careless! Careless!
screamed the red writing on his book reports, on his math tests and scratched-up worksheets.

————

When the lights swung into the driveway, Harriet was caught wholly off-guard. She dropped to the ground and rolled under the house—bump, right into the cobra’s box, which lashed angrily in reply. The gravel crackled and almost before she could catch her breath, tires roared by a few feet from her face, in a blast of wind and bluish light that rippled through the ragged grass.