The Little Friend (47 page)

Aloud, he said: “Tell you what I want to know.” He’d never trusted Dolphus, and he didn’t trust this Loyal, either. “How’d them snakes get out of the box in the first place?”

“Oh, shit,” said Farish, and darted to the window. After several moments Danny realized that the faint staticky
pop pop
sparking in his ears was not his imagination, but an actual car pulling up on the gravel outside.

A hot pin-head—like a tick lit on fire—sizzled and flared in his visual field. The next thing Danny knew, Loyal had vanished into the back room and Farish, by the door, was saying: “Get over here. Tell him the ruckus—Eugene?—Tell him you was snake-bit out in the yard—”

“Tell him,” said Eugene—who was glassy-eyed, and wobbling, in the glare of the overhead bulb—“tell him to pack his damn reptiles. Tell him he’d better not be here when I wake up in the morning.”

“Sorry, mister,” said Farish—stepping to block the passage of the enraged and gibbering figure who was attempting to gain entry.

“What’s going on here? What kind of a party is this—”

“This aint a party sir, no,
don’t
come in,” said Farish, blocking his way with his large body, “no time to stand around and visit. We need some help here, my brother’s snake-bit—out of his head, see? Help me get him out to the car.”

“You Babdist devil,” said Eugene, to the red-faced hallucination of Roy Dial—in plaid shorts and canary-yellow golf
shirt—which wavered at black tunnel’s end, in a narrowing radius of light.

————

That night—while a beringed and whorish lady wept amidst crowds and flowers, wept on the flickering black-and-white screen for the big gate, and the broad way, and the multitudes rushing down it to destruction—Eugene tossed upon his hospital cot, a smell like burned clothes in his nostrils. Back and forth he wavered, between the white curtains and the hosannas of the whorish lady and a storm on the shores of a dark and far-away river. Images whirled in and out like prophecy: soiled doves; an evil bird’s nest, fashioned from scaly bits of cast-off snakeskin; a long black snake crawling out of a hole with birds in its stomach: tiny lumps that stirred, still living, struggling to sing even in the blackness of the snake’s belly.…

Back at the Mission, Loyal—curled in his sleeping bag—slept soundly, black eye and all, untroubled by nightmares and reptiles alike. Before dawn he woke rested, said his prayers, washed his face and drank a glass of water, loaded his snakes in a hurry, came back upstairs and—sitting at the kitchen table—laboriously wrote out a thank-you note to Eugene on the back of a gas-station receipt, which he left on the table along with a fringed leatherette bookmark, a pamphlet entitled “Job’s Conversation,” and a stack of thirty-seven one-dollar bills. By sun-up, he was in the truck and on the highway, broken lights and all, heading back to his church homecoming in East Tennessee. He did not notice that the cobra (his prize snake, the only one he’d paid money for) was missing until Knoxville; when he called to tell Eugene, nobody answered the phone. And nobody was in the Mission to hear the scream of the Mormon boys—who, rising late (at eight o’clock, having returned late from Memphis the night before) were startled at their morning devotions by the sight of a timber rattlesnake, observing them from atop a basket of freshly laundered shirts.

The next morning, Harriet woke late: itchy, unbathed, in gritty sheets. The smell in the crawlspace, the colorful boxes all jewelly with nail-heads, the long shadows in the lighted doorway—all this, and more, had bled into her sleep and mixed oddly with the pen-and-ink illustrations from her dime-store edition of “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi”—big-eyed Teddy, the mongoose, even the snakes rendered perky and adorable. There had been some poor creature tied up and thumping at the bottom of the page, like an end plate to a storybook; it was in pain; it needed her assistance in ways she could not divine but though its very presence was a reproach, a reminder of her own laxity and injustice, she was too repulsed to help it or even look in its direction.

Ignore it Harriet!
sang Edie. She and the preacher were in the corner of her bedroom by the chest of drawers, setting up a torture contraption which was like a dentist’s chair with needles prickling from the padded arms and headrest. In some distressing way they seemed like sweethearts, eyebrows lifted, full of admiring glances for each other, Edie testing the needle points here and there with a delicate finger-tip as the
preacher stepped back, grinning fondly, his hands crossed over his chest and tucked beneath his armpits.…

As Harriet—fretfully—slid back into the stagnant waters of nightmare, Hely woke bolt upright in the top bunk, so fast that he knocked his head on the ceiling. Without thinking, he threw his legs over—and nearly fell, for he’d been so freaked out the night before about what might climb up after him, he’d unhitched the ladder and pushed it over on the carpet.

Self-consciously—as if he’d stumbled on the playground and people were watching—he righted himself and hopped to the floor, and was out of his dark, air-conditioned little room and halfway down the hall before it struck him how silent the house was. He crept downstairs to the kitchen (nobody around, driveway empty, his mom’s car keys gone) and poured himself a bowl of Giggle Pops and took it to the family room and switched on the television. A game show was on. He slurped up the cereal. Though the milk was cold enough, the crunchy pebbles scratched the roof of his mouth; they were strangely tasteless, not even sweet.

The silent house made Hely uncomfortable. He was reminded of the awful morning after he and his older cousin Todd had taken a bottle of rum from a paper bag in the front seat of someone’s unlocked Lincoln, at the Country Club, and drunk about half of it. While Hely and Todd’s parents stood chatting at the poolside luau, nibbling cocktail sausages on toothpicks, he and Todd borrowed a golf cart, rammed it into a pine tree, though Hely remembered very little of this: the main thing he remembered was lying on his side and rolling down a steep hill behind the golf course over and over again. Later, when his stomach started hurting, Todd told him to go to the buffet and eat as many cocktail weenies as fast as he could and that would make it stop. He’d vomited on his knees in the parking lot behind somebody’s Cadillac, while Todd laughed so hard that his mean, freckled face turned tomato-red. Though Hely didn’t remember it, somehow he’d walked home and got in his bed and gone to sleep. When he woke the next morning, the house was empty: they’d all gone to Memphis without him, to drive Todd and his parents back to the airport.

It had been the longest day of Hely’s life. He’d had to clatter around the house by himself for hours: lonesome, nothing to do, trying to piece together exactly what had happened the night before and worrying that he was in for a terrible punishment when his parents returned—which indeed he was. He’d had to hand over all his birthday money to help pay for the damage (his parents had to pay for most of it); he’d had to write a letter of apology to the owner of the golf cart. He’d lost his TV privileges for what seemed like forever. But worst was his mother wondering aloud where he had learned to be a thief. “It’s not so much the liquor”—she must have said it to his father a thousand times—“as him stealing it.” His father made no such distinctions; he acted as if Hely had robbed a bank. For ages, he had hardly spoken to Hely except to say things like Pass The Salt, wouldn’t even look at him, and life at home had never gone back to quite the same way it was before. Typically, Todd—Mr. Musical Genius, first-chair clarinet in his Illinois junior-high band—had blamed everything on Hely, which had been the way throughout their childhoods whenever they saw each other, thankfully not often.

A celebrity guest had just said a bad word on the game show (some rhyming game, the contestants had to come up with the rhyming word that completed a riddle).… The host blipped it out, the bad word, with an obnoxious noise like a dog’s squeaky toy and wagged a finger at the celebrity guest, who clapped a hand over her mouth and rolled her eyes.…

Where the hell were his parents? Why didn’t they just come on home and get it over with?
Naughty, naughty!
said the laughing host. The other celebrity on the panel had reared back in his chair and was clapping appreciatively.

He tried to stop thinking about the night before. The memory clouded and fouled the morning, like the after-taste of a bad dream; he tried to tell himself that he hadn’t done anything wrong, not really, hadn’t damaged property or hurt anyone or taken anything that didn’t belong to him. There was the snake—but they hadn’t really taken it; it was still under the house. And he’d set the other snakes loose but so what? It was Mississippi: snakes were crawling all over the place anyway; who was going to notice a few more? All he’d
done was open a latch,
one latch
. What was the big deal about that? It wasn’t like he’d stolen a golf cart from a City Councilman and wrecked it.…

Ding
went the bell:
time for today’s tiebreaker!
The contestants—eyes darting—stood gulping before the Big Board: what did
they
have to worry about? Hely thought bitterly. He hadn’t spoken to Harriet after his escape—wasn’t even sure she’d made it home, something else that was starting to worry him. As soon as he’d ducked out of the yard, he’d darted to the opposite side of the street and run home, over fences and through back yards, dogs barking at him from what seemed like all directions in the dark.

When he’d crept in the back door, red-faced and panting, he saw by the clock on the stove that it was still early, only nine. He could hear his parents watching television in the family room. Now, this morning, he wished he had stuck his head into the family room and said something to them, called out “Goodnight” from the stairs, anything; but he had not had the nerve to face them and had scurried cravenly to bed without a word to anyone.

He had no desire to see Harriet. Her very name made him think about things which he would rather not. The family room—tan rug, corduroy sofa, tennis trophies in a case behind the wet bar: all seemed alien, unsafe. Rigidly, as if some hostile observer were glowering at his back from the doorway, he stared at the carefree celebrities conferring over their riddle and tried to forget his troubles: no Harriet, no snakes, no punishment imminent from his dad. No big scary rednecks who had
recognized
him, he was certain of it.… What if they went to his father? Or, worse: came after him? Who could say what a nut like Farish Ratliff might do?

A car pulled up in the driveway. Hely nearly screamed. But when he looked out the window, he saw it wasn’t the Ratliffs; it was only his dad. Quickly, spasmodically, he attempted to slouch down and spread out and generally arrange himself in a more casual posture, but he could not make himself comfortable, cringing in expectation of the slammed door, his father’s footsteps clipping fast down the
hallway the way they always did when he was angry, and meant business.…

Hely—trembling with the effort—tried hard not to hold himself too stiffly; but he could not contain his curiosity and he sneaked a terrified glance to see that his father, with maddening leisure, was just climbing out of the car. He seemed unconcerned—even bored, though his expression was hard to read through the gray sunshades which were clipped over his glasses.

Unable to tear his eyes away, Hely watched him as he circled to the back of the car, opened the trunk. One by one he unloaded his purchases in the empty sunlight and set them down on the concrete: a gallon of paint. Plastic buckets. A coil of green garden hose.

Hely got up very quietly and took his cereal bowl to the kitchen and rinsed it out, then went up to his room and shut the door. He lay on the bottom bunk, staring at the slats above and trying not to hyperventilate or pay too much attention to his own heartbeat. Presently he heard footsteps. Outside the door, his father said: “Hely?”

“Sir?”
Why is my voice so squeaky?

“I thought I told you to turn off that television when you were finished watching it.”

“Yes sir.”

“I want you to come out and help me water your mother’s garden. I thought it was going to rain this morning but it looks like it’s blown over.”

Hely was afraid to argue. He detested his mother’s flower garden. Ruby, the maid before Essie Lee, would not go anywhere near the dense perennials his mother grew for cutting. “Snakes like flowers,” she always said.

Hely put on his tennis shoes and went outside. The sun was already high and hot. Glare in his eyes, woozy with heat, he stood seven or eight feet back on the crisped yellow grass as he swept the hose over the flower bed, holding it as far away from his body as he could.

“Where’s your bicycle?” said his father, returning from the garage.

“I—” Hely’s heart sank. His bike was right where he’d left it: on the median in front of the frame house.

“How many times do I have to tell you? Don’t come back in this house until it’s in the garage. I’m sick and tired of telling you not to leave it out in the yard.”

————

Something was wrong when Harriet went downstairs. Her mother was dressed in one of the cotton shirt-waist dresses she wore to church, and was whisking around the kitchen. “Here,” she said, presenting Harriet with some cold toast and a glass of milk. Ida—her back to Harriet—was sweeping the floor in front of the stove.

“Are we going somewhere?” said Harriet.

“No, darling …” Though her mother’s voice was cheerful, her mouth was slightly tense and the waxy coral lipstick she wore made her face look white. “I just thought I’d get up and make your breakfast for you this morning, is that all right?”

Harriet glanced over her shoulder, at Ida, who did not turn around. The set of her shoulders was peculiar.
Something’s happened to Edie
, thought Harriet, stunned,
Edie’s in the hospital.…
Before she had time for this to sink in, Ida—without looking at Harriet—stooped with the dust-pan and Harriet saw with a shock that she’d been crying.