The Little Friend (54 page)

“What if somebody saw us? Harriet?”

“I’m here,” Harriet said.

“What about my wagon?”

“I don’t know,” said Harriet. She had been thinking about Hely’s wagon herself. It was still sitting up on the overpass, and the empty box, too.

“Should I go back and get it?”

“No. Somebody might see you. Your name’s not on it, is it?”

“Nope. I never use it. Say, Harriet, who
was
that person?”

“Dunno.”

“They looked real old. That person.”

A tense, grown-up silence followed—not like their usual silences, when they’d run out of things to say and sat waiting amiably for the other to speak up.

“I have to go,” said Hely at last. “My mom’s making tacos for supper.”

“Okay.”

They sat breathing, on each end of the line: Harriet in the high, musty hall, Hely in his room on the top bunk.

“What ever happened to those kids you were talking about?” said Harriet.

“What?”

“Those kids on the Memphis news. That threw rocks from the overpass.”

“Oh, them. They got caught.”

“What’d they do to them?”

“I don’t know. I guess they went to jail.”

There followed another long silence.

“I’ll write you a postcard. So you’ll have something to read at Mail Call,” said Hely. “If anything happens, I’ll tell you.”

“No, don’t. Don’t
write anything down
. Not about that.”

“I’m not going to tell!”

“I know you’re not going to
tell,
” said Harriet irritably. “Just don’t talk about any of this.”

“Well—not to just anybody.”

“Not anybody
at all
. Listen, you can’t go around telling people like … like
 … Greg DeLoach
. I mean it, Hely,” she said over his objection. “Promise me you won’t tell him.”

“Greg lives way out at Hickory Circle. I never see him except at school. Besides,
Greg
wouldn’t tell on us, I know he wouldn’t.”

“Well don’t tell him anyway. Because if you tell even one person—”

“I wish I was going with you. I wish I was going
somewhere,
” said Hely miserably. “I’m scared. I think that was maybe Curtis’s grandma we threw that snake on.”

“Listen to me. I want you to promise. Don’t tell
anybody
. Because—”

“If it’s Curtis’s grandmother, then it’s the others’, too. Danny and Farish and the preacher.” To Harriet’s surprise, he erupted into shrill, hysterical laughter.
“Those guys will murder me.”

“Yes,” said Harriet, seriously, “and that’s why you can’t tell anybody
ever
. If you don’t tell, and I don’t tell—”

Sensing something, she glanced up—and was badly startled to see Allison standing in the door of the living room, only a few feet away.

“It sucks that you’re leaving.” Hely’s voice sounded tinny on the other end. “Except I
cannot believe
you are going to that shitty damn Baptist camp.”

Harriet, turning pointedly from her sister, made an ambiguous noise, to indicate that she couldn’t talk with freedom, but Hely didn’t catch it.

“I wish
I
could go somewhere. We were supposed to go on a vacation to the Smoky Mountains this year but Dad said he didn’t want to put the miles on the car. Say, do you think you can leave me some quarters so I can call you if I have to?”

“I don’t have any money.” Typical of Hely: trying to weasel money out of her when he was the one who got an allowance. Allison had disappeared.

“Gosh I hope it’s not his grandmother. Please
please
let it not be his grandmother.”

“I have to go.” Why was the light so sad? Harriet’s heart felt as though it were breaking. In the mirror opposite, across the tarnished reflection of the wall above her head (cracked plaster, dark photographs, dead giltwood sconces) swirled a mildewy cloud of black specks.

She could still hear Hely’s ragged breath on the other end. Nothing in Hely’s house was sad—everything cheerful and new, television always going—but even his breath sounded altered, tragic, when it traveled through the telephone wires into her house.

“My mom’s requested Miss Erlichson for my home room teacher when I start seventh grade this fall,” said Hely. “So I don’t guess we’ll be seeing each other that much when school starts.”

Harriet made an indifferent noise, disguising the pain which bit her at this treachery. Edie’s old friend Mrs. Clarence Hackney (nickname: “Hatchet-head”) had taught Harriet in the seventh grade, and would teach her again in the eighth. But if Hely had chosen Miss Erlichson (who was young, and blonde, and new at the school) that meant Hely and Harriet would have different study halls, different lunchtimes, different classrooms, different everything.

“Miss Erlichson’s cool. Mom said that no way was she going to force another kid of hers through a year of Mrs. Hackney. She lets you do your book report on whatever you want and—Okay,” said Hely in response to an off-stage voice. To Harriet he said: “Suppertime. Talk to you later.”

Harriet sat holding the heavy black receiver until the dial tone came on at the other end. She replaced it on the cradle with a solid click. Hely—with his thin, cheery voice, his plans for Miss Erlichson’s room—even Hely felt like something that was lost now, or about to be lost, an impermanence like lightning bugs or summer. The light in the narrow hallway was almost completely gone. And without Hely’s voice—tinny and faint as it was—to break the gloom, her sorrow blackened and roared up like a cataract.

Hely! He lived in a busy, companionable, colorful world, where everything was modern and bright: corn chips and Ping-Pong, stereos and sodas, his mother in T-shirt and cut off jeans running around barefoot on the wall-to-wall carpet. Even the smell over there was new and lemon-fresh—not like her own dim home, heavy and malodorous with memory, its aroma a sorrowful backwash of old clothes and dust. What did Hely—eating his tacos for supper, sailing off blithely to Miss
Erlichson’s home room in the fall—what did Hely care about chill and loneliness? What did he know of her world?

Later, when Harriet remembered that day, it would seem the exact, crystalline, scientific point where her life had swerved into misery. Never had she been happy or content, exactly, but she was quite unprepared for the strange darks that lay ahead of her. For the rest of her life, Harriet would remember with a wince that she hadn’t been brave enough to stay for one last afternoon—the very last one!—to sit at the foot of Ida’s chair with her head on Ida’s knees. What might they have talked of? She would never know. It would pain her that she’d run off, cravenly, before Ida’s last work-week was over; it would pain her that somehow, strangely, the whole misunderstanding had been her fault; it would pain her, terribly, that she hadn’t told Ida goodbye. But, most of all, it would pain her that she’d been too proud to tell Ida that she loved her. In her anger, and her pride, she had failed to realize that she would never see Ida again. A whole new ugly kind of life was settling about Harriet, there in the dark hallway at the telephone-table; and though it felt new to her then, it would come to seem horribly familiar in the weeks ahead.

“Hospitality was the key-note of life in those days,” said Edie. Her voice—clear, declamatory—rose effortlessly over the hot wind roaring through the car windows; grandly, without bothering to signal, she swept into the left lane and cut in front of a log truck.

The Oldsmobile was a lush, curvaceous manatee of a car. Edie had purchased it from Colonel Chipper Dee’s car lot in Vicksburg, back in the 1950s. A vast tract of empty seat stretched between Edie, on the driver’s side, and Harriet slouched against the opposite door. Between them—next to Edie’s straw purse with the wooden handles—was a plaid thermos of coffee and a box of doughnuts.

“Out at Tribulation, Mother’s cousins would show up out of the clear blue to stay weeks at a time, and nobody thought a thing in the world about it,” Edie was saying. The speed limit was fifty-five but she was proceeding at her usual, leisurely motoring pace: forty miles an hour.

In the mirror, Harriet could see the driver of the log truck slapping his forehead and making impatient gestures with his open palm.

“Now, I’m not talking about the Memphis cousins,” said Edie. “I’m talking about the cousins from Baton Rouge. Miss Ollie, and Jules, and Mary Willard. And little Aunt Fluff!”

Harriet stared bleakly out the window: sawmills and pine barrens, preposterously rosy in the early morning light. Warm, dusty wind blew her hair in her face, whipped monotonously in a loose flap of upholstery on the ceiling, rattled in the cellophane panel of the doughnut box. She was thirsty—hungry, too—but there was nothing to drink but the coffee, and the doughnuts were crumbly and stale. Edie always bought day-old doughnuts, even though they were only a few cents cheaper than fresh.

“Mother’s uncle had a small plantation down there around Covington—Angevine it was called,” said Edie, plucking up a napkin with her free hand; in what could only be called a kingly manner, like a king accustomed to eating with his hands, she took a big bite of her doughnut. “Libby used to take the three of us down there on the old Number 4 train. Weeks at a time! Miss Ollie had a little dog-trot house out back, with a wood stove, and table and chairs, and we loved to play out in that little dog-trot house better than anything!”

The backs of Harriet’s legs were stuck to the car seat. Irritably, she shifted around and tried to get comfortable. They’d been in the car three hours, and the sun was high and hot. Every so often Edie considered trading in the Oldsmobile—for something with air conditioning, or a radio that worked—but she always changed her mind at the last minute, mainly for the secret pleasure of watching Roy Dial wring his hands and dance around in anguish. It drove Mr. Dial crazy that a well-placed old Baptist lady like Edie rode around town in a car twenty years old; sometimes, when the new cars came out, he spun by Edie’s house late in the afternoon and dropped off an unrequested “tester”—usually a top-of-the-line Cadillac. “Just drive it for a few days,” he’d say, palms in the air. “See what you think.” Edie strung him along cruelly, pretending to fall in love with the proffered vehicle, then—just as Mr. Dial was drawing up the papers—return it, suddenly opposed to the color, or the power windows, or complaining of some microscopic flaw, some rattle in the dashboard or sticky lock button.

“It still says Hospitality State on the Mississippi license plate but in my opinion true hospitality died out here in the first half of the present century.
My
great-grandfather was dead against the building of the old Alexandria Hotel, back before the war,” said Edie, raising her voice over the long, insistent horn blast of the truck behind them. “He said that he himself was more than happy to put up any respectable travelers who came to town.”

“Edie, that man back there’s honking at you.”

“Let him,” said Edie, who had settled in at her own comfortable speed.

“I think he wants to pass.”

“It won’t hurt him to slow down a little bit. Where does he think he’s taking those logs in such a great big hurry?”

The landscape—sandy clay hills, endless pines—was so raw and strange-looking that it made Harriet’s stomach hurt. Everything she saw reminded her that she was far from home. Even the people in neighboring cars looked different: sun-reddened, with broad, flat faces and farm clothes, not like the people from her own town.

They passed a dismal little cluster of businesses: Freelon Spraying Co., Tune’s AAA Transmission, New Dixie Stone and Gravel. A rickety old black man in coveralls and orange hunting cap was hobbling along the shoulder of the road carrying a brown grocery bag. What would Ida think when she came to work and found her gone? She would be arriving just about now; Harriet’s breath quickened a little at the thought.

Sagging telephone wires; patches of collards and corn; ramshackle houses with dooryards of packed dirt. Harriet pressed her forehead to the warm glass. Maybe Ida would realize how badly Harriet’s feelings were hurt; maybe she’d realize that she couldn’t threaten to pack up and quit every single time she got mad about something or other.… A middle-aged black man in glasses was tossing feed from a Crisco can to some red chickens; solemnly, he raised a hand at the car and Harriet waved back, so energetically that she felt a little embarrassed.

She was worried about Hely, too. Though he’d seemed pretty certain that his name wasn’t on the wagon, still she
didn’t like the thought that it was sitting up there, waiting for someone to find it. To think what would happen if they traced it back to Hely made her feel ill.
Don’t think about it, don’t think about it
, she told herself.

On they drove. Shacks gave way to more woods, with occasional flat fields that smelled of pesticide. In a grim little clearing, a fat white woman wearing a maroon shirt and shorts, one foot encased in a surgical boot, was slinging wet clothes on a line off to the side of her trailer home; she glanced at the car, but didn’t wave.

Suddenly Harriet was jolted from her thoughts by a squeal of brakes, and a turn that slung her into the door and upset the box of doughnuts. Edie had turned—across traffic—into the bumpy little country road that led to the camp.

“Sorry, dear,” said Edie breezily, leaning over to right her purse. “I don’t know why they make these signs so little that you can’t even read them until you get right up on them.…”

In silence, they jostled down the gravel road. A silver tube of lipstick rolled across the seat. Harriet caught it before it fell—
Cherries in the Snow
, said the label on the bottom—and dropped it back in Edie’s straw handbag.

“We’re certainly in Jones County now!” said Edie gaily. Her backlit profile—dark against the sun—was sharp and girlish. Only the line of her throat, and her hands on the steering wheel—knotty, freckled—betrayed her age; in her crisp white shirt, plaid skirt, and two-toned correspondent oxfords she looked like some enthusiastic 1940s newspaper reporter out to chase down The Big Story. “Do you remember old Newt Knight the deserter from your Mississippi History, Harriet? The Robin Hood of the Piney Woods, so he called himself! He and his men were poor and sorry, and they didn’t want to fight a rich man’s war so they holed up down here in the backwoods and wouldn’t have a thing to do with the Confederacy. The Republic of Jones, that’s what they called themselves! The cavalry sent bloodhounds after them, and the old cracker women choked those dogs to death with red pepper! That’s the kind of gentlemen you’ve got down here in Jones County.”