The Little Friend (56 page)

Danny shrugged.

“You didn’t ask her?”

“Look, man,” Danny said, trying to keep his voice even, “there was an awful lot going on that night.”

“And you let her get away? You said you saw a kid,” said Farish to Gum. “Black or white? Boy or girl?”

“Yeah, Gum,” said Danny. “What’d you see?”

“Well, I tell you the truth,” said their grandmother, faintly, “I didn’t get a good look. You know how my eyes are.”

“Was it one? Or more than one?”

“I didn’t see a whole lot. When I run off the road, I heard a kid screaming and laughing from up on that overpass.”

“That girl,” Eugene said to Farish, “was down on the square watching Loyal and me preach earlier in the night. I remember her. She was riding a bicycle.”

“She wasn’t on any bicycle when she come to the Mission,” said Danny. “She ran away on foot.”

“I’m just telling you what I saw.”

“I believe I seen a bicycle, come to think of it,” said Gum. “I can’t be sure.”

“I want to talk to this girl,” Farish said. “Yall say you don’t know who she is?”

“She told us her name but she couldn’t make up her mind. First it was Mary Jones. Then it was Mary Johnson.”

“Would you know her if you saw her again?”

“
I’d
know her,” said Eugene. “I was standing there with her for ten minutes. I got a good look at her face, up close.”

“So did I,” Danny said.

Farish compressed his lips. “Are the cops involved in this?” he said abruptly to his grandmother. “Have they asked you any questions?”

“I didn’t tell em a thing.”

“Good.” Awkwardly, Farish patted his grandmother on the shoulder. “I’m on find out who done this to you,” he said. “And when I find em, you bet they’ll be sorry.”

————

Ida’s last few days at work were like the last few days before Weenie died: those endless hours of lying on the kitchen floor beside his box, and part of him still there but most of him—the best part—gone already. Le Sueur’s Peas, his box had said. The black lettering was stamped in Allison’s memory with all the sickness of despair. She had lain with her nose only inches away from those letters, trying to breathe in time
with his fast, agonized little gasps as if with her own lungs she could buoy him up. How vast the kitchen was, so low down, so late at night: all those shadows. Even now, Weenie’s death had the waxy sheen of the linoleum in Edie’s kitchen; it had the crowded feel of her glass-front cabinets (an audience of plates ranked in galleries, goggling helplessly); the useless cheer of red dishcloths and cherry-patterned curtains. Those dumb, well-meaning objects—cardboard box; cherry curtains and jumbled Fiestaware—had pressed close in Allison’s grief, sat up and watched with her all the long awful night. Now, with Ida leaving, nothing in the house shared Allison’s sorrow or reflected it but objects: the gloomy carpets, the cloudy mirrors; the armchairs hunched and grieving and even the tragic old tall-case clock holding itself very rigid and proper, as if it were about to collapse into sobs. Within the china cabinet, the Vienna bagpipers and crinolined Doulton ladies gestured imploringly, this way and that: cheeks hectic, their dark little gazes hollow and stunned.

Ida had Things to Do. She cleaned out the refrigerator; she took everything out of the cabinets, and wiped them down; she made banana bread, and a casserole or two, and wrapped them in tinfoil and put them in the freezer. She talked, and even hummed; and she seemed cheerful enough except that in all her rushing around, she refused to meet Allison’s eye. Once Allison thought she caught her crying. Gingerly, she stood in the doorway. “Are you crying?” she asked.

Ida Rhew jumped—then pressed a hand to her chest, and laughed. “Bless your heart!” she cried.

“Ida, are you sad?”

But Ida just shook her head, and went back to work; and Allison went to her room and cried. Later on, she would regret that she’d wasted one of her few remaining hours with Ida by going up to her bedroom to cry alone. But at the moment, standing there in the kitchen watching Ida clean out the cabinets with her back turned had been too sad to bear, so sad that it gave Allison a panicky, breathless, choking feeling to remember it. Somehow Ida was already gone; as warm and
solid as she was, she had already turned into a memory, a ghost, even as she stood in her white nurse’s shoes in the sunny kitchen.

Allison walked to the grocery and got a cardboard box for Ida to carry her cuttings in, so they wouldn’t get broken during the trip. With what money she had—thirty-two dollars, old Christmas money—she bought Ida everything she could think of that Ida might want or need: cans of salmon, which Ida loved to eat for lunch, with crackers; maple syrup; knee-high stockings and a fancy bar of English lavender soap; Fig Newtons; a box of Russell Stover chocolates; a booklet of stamps; a pretty red toothbrush and a tube of striped toothpaste and even a large jar of One-A-Day vitamins.

Allison carried it all home, and then spent a long time that evening out on the back porch, wrapping up Ida’s collection of rooted cuttings, each snuff tin and plastic cup in its own carefully fashioned sleeve of wet newspaper. In the attic was a pretty red box, full of Christmas lights. Allison had dumped them all out on the floor and carried the box down to her bedroom to re-pack the presents, when her mother pattered down the hallway (her pace light, unconcerned) and put her head in at the door.

“It’s lonesome here without Harriet, isn’t it?” she asked brightly. Her face was shiny with cold cream. “Do you want to come in my room and watch television?”

Allison shook her head. She was disturbed: this was very unlike her mother, to go around after ten at night taking an interest, issuing invitations.

“What are you doing? I think you ought to come in with me and watch TV,” said her mother, when Allison did not answer.

“Okay,” said Allison. She stood up.

Her mother was looking at her strangely. Allison, in an agony of embarrassment, glanced away. Sometimes, especially when the two of them were alone together, she sensed keenly her mother’s disappointment that she was herself and not Robin. Her mother couldn’t help this—in fact, she tried touchingly hard to conceal it—but Allison knew that her very existence was a reminder of what was missing, and in deference to her mother’s feelings she did her best to stay out of the
way and make herself small and inconspicious around the house. The next few weeks would be difficult, with Ida gone and Harriet away.

“You don’t
have
to come watch TV,” her mother finally said. “I just thought you might want to.”

Allison felt her face growing red. She avoided her mother’s eye. All the colors in the bedroom—including the box—seemed far too acid and bright.

After her mother left again, Allison finished packing the box and then put the money left over into an envelope, in with the book of stamps, a school picture of herself and her address, carefully printed on a sheet of good stationery. Then she tied the box up with a string of green tinsel.

Much later, in the middle of the night, Allison woke with a start from a bad dream—a dream she’d had before, of standing before a white wall only inches from her face. In the dream she was unable to move, and it was as if she would have to go on looking at the blank wall for the rest of her life.

She lay quietly in the dark, staring at the box on the floor by her bed, until the street lamps went off and the room was blue with the dawn. At last, she got out of bed in her bare feet; with a straight pin from the bureau, she sat down cross-legged by the box, and spent a laborious hour or so pricking out tiny secret messages in the cardboard, until the sun was up and the room was light again: Ida’s last day. IDAJ WE LOVE
YOU
, the messages on the box said. I
DA R. BROWNLEE
. C
OME BACK IDA
. D
ON’T FORGET ME, IDA
. L
OVE
.

————

Though he felt guilty for it, Danny was enjoying his grandmother’s stay in the hospital. Things were easier without her at home, stirring up Farish all the time. And though Farish was doing a lot of drugs (with Gum away, there was nothing to stop him from sitting in front of the television with the razor and the mirror all night long) he wasn’t so likely to blow up at his brothers without the additional strain of gathering three times a day for Gum’s large fried meals in the kitchen.

Danny was doing a lot of drugs himself, but that was all
right; he was going to stop soon but he just hadn’t got to that point. And the drugs gave him enough energy to clean the whole trailer. Barefoot, sweating, stripped to his jeans, he washed windows and walls and floors; he threw out all the rancid grease and bacon fat that Gum secreted around the kitchen in smelly old coffee cans; he scrubbed down the bathroom, and polished the linoleum until it shone, and bleached all their old underwear and T-shirts until they were white again. (Their grandmother had never got used to the washing machine Farish had bought her; she was bad about washing the white clothes with colors, so they got gray-looking.)

Cleaning made Danny feel good: in control. The trailer was trim and ship-shape, like the galley of a boat. Even Farish commented on how neat things were looking. Though Danny knew better than to touch any of Farish’s “projects” (the partially assembled machinery, the broken lawn mowers and carburetors and table lamps) it was possible to clean up around them, and getting rid of all the needless mess helped a lot. Twice a day he drove the trash to the garbage dump. After heating alphabet soup or frying bacon and eggs for Curtis, he washed the dishes and dried them immediately, instead of letting them sit. He’d even figured out how to stack everything in the cabinet so it didn’t take up as much room.

At night, he sat up with Farish. This was another good thing about speed: it doubled your day. There was time to work, time to talk, time to think.

And there was a lot to think about. The recent attacks—on the Mission, on Gum—had marshaled Farish’s attention to a single point. In the old days—before his head injury—Farish had a knack for reasoning out certain kinds of practical and logistical problems, and some of this quiet old calculating shrewdness was in the cock of his head as he and Danny stood together on the abandoned overpass, checking out the crime scene: the cobra’s decorated dynamite box, empty; a child’s red wagon; and a bunch of little footprints running back and forth in the cement dust.

“If it was her that done this,” said Farish, “I’m on kill the little bitch.” He was silent, hands on hips, staring down at the cement dust.

“What are you thinking?” Danny said.

“I’m thinking how did a kid move this heavy box.”

“With the wagon.”

“Not down the stairs at the Mission, she didn’t.” Farish chewed on his lower lip. “Also, if she stole the snake, why knock on the door and show her face?”

Danny shrugged. “Kids,” he said. He lit a cigarette, taking the smoke up through his nose, and snapped the big Zippo lighter shut. “They’re dumb.”

“Whoever done this wasn’t dumb. To pull this off took some kind of balls and timing.”

“Or luck.”

“Whatever,” said Farish. His arms were crossed across his chest—military-looking in the brown coverall—and all of a sudden he was staring at the side of Danny’s face in a way that Danny didn’t like.

“You wouldn’t do anything to hurt Gum, would you?” he said.

Danny blinked. “No!” He was almost too shocked to speak. “Jesus!”

“She’s old.”

“I know it!” said Danny, tossing his long hair rather aggressively out of his face.

“I’m just trying to think who else knew that it was her, not you, driving the Trans Am that day.”

“Why?” said Danny after a short, stunned pause. The glare off the highway was shining up in his eyes and it increased his confusion. “What difference does it make? All she said was she didn’t like to climb up in the truck. I told you that. Ask her yourself.”

“Or me.”

“What?”

“Or me,” said Farish. He was breathing audibly, in moist little huffs. “You wouldn’t do anything to hurt me, would you?”

“No,” said Danny, after a long, tense pause, his voice as flat as he could make it. What he felt like saying but was afraid to was
fuck you
. He spent fully as much time on the drug business as Farish, running errands, working in the
lab—hell, he had to drive him everywhere he went—and Farish paid him nothing like an equal share, in fact didn’t pay him shit, just tossed him a ten or a twenty from time to time. True: for a while, it had beat the hell out of having a regular job. Days squandered shooting pool or driving Farish around in the car, listening to music, staying up all night: fun and games, and all the drugs he could do. But watching the sun come up every morning was getting a little eerie and repetitive, and lately it had got downright scary. He was tired of the life, tired of getting high, and was Farish about to pay Danny what he actually owed him so that he could leave town and go someplace where people didn’t know him (you didn’t stand much of a chance in this town if your last name was Ratliff) and get a decent job for a change? No. Why should Farish pay Danny? He had a good deal going, with his unpaid slave.

Abruptly, Farish said: “Find that girl. That’s your number-one priority. I want you to find that girl and I want you to find out what all she knows about this. I don’t care if you have to wring her fucking neck.”

————

“
She’s
already seen Colonial Williamsburg, she doesn’t care if I see it or not,” said Adelaide, and turned pettishly to look out the back window.

Edie took a deep breath, through her nostrils. Because of taking Harriet to camp, she was already good and tired of driving; because of Libby (who’d had to go back twice to make sure she’d turned off everything) and Adelaide (who’d made them wait in the car while she finished ironing a dress she’d decided to bring at the last minute) and Tat (who’d allowed them to get halfway out of town before she realized she’d left her wristwatch on the sink): because of disorganization sufficient to drive the devil out of a saint they were already two hours late in getting on the road and now—before they were even out of town—Adelaide was demanding detours to another state.