The Little Friend (49 page)

“Mother wants to fire Ida.”

“Tough,” said Hely agreeably.

Harriet looked at the ground, trying to remember how her face worked and her voice sounded when everything was okay.

“Let’s get the bikes later,” she said; and she was heartened by how casual her voice came out sounding.

“No! My dad’s going to kill me!”

“Tell him you left it over here.”

“I can’t just leave it out there. Somebody’ll steal it.… Look, you told me you would,” said Hely despairingly. “Just walk over there with me.…”

“Okay. But first you have to promise—”

“Harriet,
please
. I put up all this junk for you and
everything.
”

“Promise you’ll go back with me tonight. For the box.”

“Where you going to take it?” said Hely, brought up short. “We can’t hide it at
my
house.”

Harriet held up both hands: no fingers crossed.

“Fine,” said Hely, and held his hands up, too—it was their
own private sign language, as binding as any spoken promise. Then he turned and broke into a fast walk, through the yard and down to the street, with Harriet right behind him.

————

Sticking close to the shrubbery and ducking behind trees, they were within forty feet or so of the frame house when Hely seized Harriet’s wrist, and pointed. On the median, a long spike of chrome glinted from beneath the unwieldy spread of the summersweet bush.

Cautiously, they advanced. The driveway was empty. Next door, at the house belonging to the dog Pancho and his mistress, was parked a white county car which Harriet recognized as Mrs. Dorrier’s. Every Tuesday, at three-forty-five, Mrs. Dorrier’s white sedan rolled slowly up to Libby’s house and out stepped Mrs. Dorrier, in her blue Health Service uniform, come to take Libby’s blood pressure: pumping the cuff tight around Libby’s little bird-boned arm, counting the seconds on her large, masculine wristwatch while Libby—who was unspeakably distressed by anything remotely to do with medicine, or illness or doctors—sat gazing at the ceiling, her eyes filling with tears behind her glasses, her hand pressed to her chest and her mouth trembling.

“Let’s do it,” Hely said, glancing over his shoulder.

Harriet nodded at the sedan. “The nurse is over there,” she whispered. “Wait till she leaves.”

They waited, behind a tree. After a couple of minutes, Hely said: “What’s taking so long?”

“Dunno,” said Harriet, who was wondering the same thing herself; Mrs. Dorrier had patients all over the county and was in and out of Libby’s in a flash, never loitering to chat or have a cup of coffee.

“I’m not waiting here all day,” Hely whispered, but then across the street the screen door opened and out stepped Mrs. Dorrier in her white cap and blue uniform. Following was the sun-baked Yankee woman, in dirty scuffs and a parrot-green housedress, with Pancho hooked over her arm. “Two dallors a pill!” she squawked. “I’m takin forteen dallors of medicine a day! I said to that boy down there at the pharmacist’s—”

“Medicine is expensive,” said Mrs. Dorrier politely, and turned to go; she was tall and thin, about fifty, with a gray streak in her black hair and very correct posture.

“I said, ‘Son, I gat emphysema! I gat gallstones! I gat arthritis! I—What’s your problem, Panch,” she said to Pancho, who had stiffened in her grasp, his gigantic ears cocked straight out from the side of his head. Even though Harriet was hidden behind the tree, he still seemed to see her; his lemur-like eyes were fixed directly on her. He bared his teeth at her and then—with rabid ferocity—began to bark and struggle to get away.

The woman whacked him with the flat of her palm across the top of his head. “Shut your trap!”

Mrs. Dorrier laughed—slightly uncomfortable—and picked up her bag and started down the steps. “Next Tuesday then.”

“He’s all worked up,” called the woman, still wrestling with Pancho. “We had a winder-peeper last night. And the police come next door.”

“Great day!” Mrs. Dorrier paused, at the door of her sedan. “You don’t mean it!”

Pancho was still barking up a storm. As Mrs. Dorrier got in her car and slowly rolled away, the woman—standing on the sidewalk now—whacked Pancho again, then carried him inside and slammed the door.

Hely and Harriet waited, for a moment or two, breathless; and when they were sure that no cars were coming, they dashed across the street to the grassy median and dropped to their knees by the bicycles.

Harriet jerked her head at the driveway of the frame house. “Nobody’s home over there.” The stone in her chest had lifted somewhat and she felt lighter now, level and swift.

With a grunt, Hely wrenched his bicycle free.

“I need to get that snake from under there.”

The brusqueness of her voice made him feel sorry for her without understanding why. He stood his bike up. Harriet was astride her own bicycle, glaring at him.

“We’ll come back,” he said, avoiding her gaze. He hopped on and, together, they kicked off and glided down the street.

Harriet overtook him, and passed, aggressively, cutting him off at the corner. She was acting like she’d just had the shit beaten out of her, he thought, looking after her hunched low on the bike and pedalling furiously down the street, like Dennis Peet, or Tommy Scoggs, mean kids who beat up on smaller kids and got beaten up themselves by larger ones. Maybe it was because she was a girl—but when Harriet got in these mean daredevil moods, it excited him. The thought of the cobra excited him too; and though he didn’t feel comfortable explaining to Harriet—not yet—that he’d set half a dozen rattlesnakes loose in the apartment, it had just occurred to him that the frame house was empty, and might be for some time.

————

“How often do you think he eats?” said Harriet, who was stooped over pushing the wagon from behind as Hely tugged it ahead in front—not very fast, because it was almost too dark to see. “Maybe we should give him a frog.”

Hely heaved the wagon down from the curb and into the street. A beach towel from his house was draped over the box. “I’m not feeding this thing any frog,” he said.

He had been correct in his hunch that the Mormon house was empty. It had been only a hunch, nothing more: based on a conviction that he, personally, would rather spend the night locked in a car trunk than a house where rattlesnakes had been found crawling loose. He still had not mentioned to Harriet what he had done, but all the same he had brooded upon his actions sufficiently to justify his innocence. Little did he realize that the Mormons, in a room at the Holiday Inn, were at that very moment discussing with a real-estate lawyer in Salt Lake whether the presence of poisonous vermin in a rental property constituted a breach of contract.

Hely hoped that nobody drove by and saw them. He and Harriet were supposed to be at the movies. His father had given them money to go. She’d spent the whole afternoon at Hely’s house, which wasn’t like her (usually she got tired of him and went home early, even when he begged her to stay) and for hours they’d sat cross-legged on the floor of Hely’s bedroom playing tiddlywinks as they talked quietly about the
stolen cobra and what to do with it. The box was too big to conceal on the premises of her house, or his. At length they’d settled on an abandoned overpass west of town, which spanned County Line Road at a particularly desolate stretch, outside the city limits.

Lugging the dynamite box out from under the house and loading it on Hely’s old red kiddie wagon had been easier than they’d imagined; they hadn’t seen a soul. The night was hazy and sweltering, with rumbles of thunder in the still distance. Cushions had been removed from porch furniture, sprinklers turned off and cats called indoors.

Down the sidewalk they rattled. It was only two blocks up High Street on open sidewalks to the train depot, and the farther east they got—closer to the freight yards, and the river—the fewer lights they saw. Tall weeds jingled in neglected yards, which were posted with signs which read
FOR SALE
and
NO TRESPASSING
.

Only two passenger trains a day stopped at the Alexandria station. At 7:14 in the morning, the City of New Orleans stopped in Alexandria on her way home from Chicago; at 8:47 in the evening, she stopped again on her way back, and the rest of the time, the station was more or less deserted. The rickety little ticket office, with its steeply pitched roof and its peeling paint, was dark, though the ticket master would arrive in an hour to open it up. Behind, a series of unused gravel roads connected the switching yards with the freight yards, and the freight yards with the gin, and the lumber mill, and the river.

Together, Hely and Harriet stopped to ease the wagon off the sidewalk and down onto the gravel. Dogs were barking—big dogs, but far away. To the south of the depot were the lights of the lumberyard and, further back, the friendly streetlamps of their own neighborhood. Turning their backs upon these last glimmers of civilization, they headed off resolutely in the opposite direction—into outer darkness, and the broad, flat, uninhabited wastes stretching off to the north, past the dead freight yards with their open boxcars and empty cotton wagons, and towards a narrow gravel path vanishing into black pine woods.

Hely and Harriet had played along this isolated road—which led to the abandoned cotton warehouse—but not often. The woods were still and frightening; even in broad daylight the gloomy footpath—choked to a thread—was always dark beneath the dense, vine-strangled canopy of ailanthus, stunted sweetgum, and pine. The air was damp and unwholesome, whining with mosquitos, and the silence broken only occasionally: by the startling crash of a rabbit through the thicket, or the harsh caws of unseen birds. Several years ago, it had sheltered a team of convicts escaped from a chain gang. Never before had they seen a living soul in that wasteland—except, once, a tiny black boy in red underpants who, bent at the knee, had chunked a rock underhand at them and then tottered back, shrieking, into the underbrush. It was a lonely spot, and neither Harriet nor Hely enjoyed playing there, though neither admitted it.

The wagon tires crackled loud on the gravel. Clouds of gnats—undeterred by the fumes of the insect repellent they’d sprayed themselves with, head to foot—floated around them in the dank, airless clearing. In the shadow and dusk, they could only just see what was in front of them. Hely had brought a flashlight, but now they were here, it didn’t seem like such a good idea to shine lights all over the place.

As they went along, the path grew narrower and more choked with brush, pressing in close on either side like a pair of walls, and they had to roll along very slowly, stopping every now and then to push branches and twigs out of their faces in the dense, blue twilight. “Phew!” said Hely, up front, and as they rolled forward the buzz of the flies grew louder and Harriet was struck in the face by a moist, rotten odor.

“Gross!” she heard Hely cry.

“What?” It was getting so dark that she couldn’t see much more than the wide white bands on the back of Hely’s rugby shirt. Then gravel crunched as Hely lifted the front of the wagon and pushed it sharply to the left.

“What
is
it?” The stench was incredible.

“A possum.”

A dark lump—whirring with flies—lay bunched and
shapeless on the footpath. Despite the twigs and branches scratching at her face, Harriet turned her head away as they edged past it.

They pushed ahead until the metallic drone of the flies had faded and the stink was well behind them, then stopped for a moment to rest. Harriet switched on the flashlight and lifted a corner of the beach towel between her thumb and forefinger. In the beam, the cobra’s small eyes glittered at her spitefully when he opened his mouth to hiss at her, and the open slit of his mouth was horribly like a smile.

“How’s he doing?” said Hely, gruffly, hands on his knees.

“Fine,” said Harriet—and jumped back (so that the circle of light swung up crazily in the treetops) as the snake struck against the screen.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing,” said Harriet. She switched off the flashlight. “He must not mind being in the box too much.” Her voice seemed very loud in the silence. “I guess he must have lived in it his whole life. They can’t exactly let him out to crawl around, can they?”

After a moment or two of silence, they started up once more, a bit reluctantly.

“I don’t guess the heat bothers him,” Harriet said. “He’s from India. That’s hotter than here.”

Hely was careful where he put his foot—as careful as he could be, in the dark. From the black pines on either side a chorus of tree frogs shrilled back and forth across the road, their song pulsing vertiginously between left ear and right in stereophonic sound.

The path opened into a clearing, where stood the cotton warehouse, washed bone-gray in the moonlight. The recesses of the loading dock—where they’d sat, many afternoons, dangling their legs and talking—were alien in the deep shadow, but on the moon-washed doors, the muddy round marks they’d made by throwing tennis balls were perfectly distinct.

Together they eased the wagon over a ditch. The worst was over now. County Line Road was forty-five minutes from Hely’s house by bicycle, but the road behind the warehouse
was a shortcut. Just beyond it were the railroad tracks and then—after a minute or so—the path emerged like magic at County Line Road, just past Highway 5.

From behind the warehouse, they could just see the tracks. Telegraph poles, sagging with honeysuckle, stood out black against a lurid purple sky. Hely looked back and saw in the moonlight that Harriet was glancing around, nervously, in the sawgrass which rose past her knees.

“What’s the matter?” said Hely. “Lose something?”

“Something stung me.”

Hely wiped his forearm across his sweaty brow. “The train doesn’t come through for another hour,” he said.

Together, they struggled to lift the wagon onto the train tracks. While it was true that the passenger train to Chicago wouldn’t be in for a while, they both knew that freight trains sometimes passed through unexpectedly. Local freights, ones that stopped at the depot, crept along so slowly you could practically out-run them on foot but the express freights to New Orleans screamed by so fast that—when waiting with his mother, behind the crossing gate of Highway 5—Hely could scarcely read the words on the boxcars.