The Little Friend (62 page)

“Harriet,” said Adelaide, stagily, and squeezed her hand, “I bet you don’t know who this is! This is Mr. J. Rhodes Sumner that had a place just down the road from where I grew up!”

“Chippokes,”
said Mr. Sumner, inflating himself grandly.

“Certainly,
Chippokes
. Right down the road from Tribulation. I know you’ve heard us all talk about Mr. Sumner, Harriet, that went to Egypt with the Foreign Service?”

“I knew your aunt Addie when she was just a little baby girl.”

Adelaide laughed, flirtatiously. “Not
that
little. Harriet, I thought you’d like to talk to Mr. Sumner because you’re so interested in King Tut and all.”

“I wasn’t in Cairo long,” said Mr. Sumner. “Only during the war. Everybody and his brother was in Cairo then.” He shuffled up to the open passenger window of a long black Cadillac limousine—the funeral-home limo—and stooped a little to speak to the driver. “Will you look after this young lady here? She’s going to lie down in the back seat for a few minutes.”

The driver—whose face was as white as Harriet’s, though he had a gigantic rust-red Afro—started, and switched off the radio. “Wha?” he said, glancing from side to side and not knowing where to look first—at the tottery old white man leaning in his window or at Harriet, climbing into the back. “She aint feeling well?”

“Tell you what!” said Mr. Sumner, stooping down to peer into the dark interior after Harriet. “It looks like this thing might have a bar in it!”

The driver seemed to shake himself and perk up. “No sir, boss, that’s my
other
car!” he said, in a jokey, indulgent, artificially friendly tone.

Mr. Sumner, appreciatively, slapped the car’s roof as he laughed along with the driver. “All right!” he said. His hands were trembling; though he seemed sharp enough he was one of the oldest and frailest people Harriet had ever seen up and walking around. “All right! You’re doing all right for yourself, aint you?”

“Can’t complain.”

“Glad to hear it. Now girl,” he said to Harriet, “what do you require? Would you like a Coca-Cola?”

“Oh, John,” she heard Adelaide murmur. “She doesn’t need it.”

John! Harriet stared straight ahead.

“I just want you to know that I loved your aunt Libby better than anything in the world,” she heard Mr. Sumner say. His voice was old and quavery and very Southern. “I would have asked that girl to marry me if I’d thought she’d have me!”

Tears welled infuriatingly in Harriet’s eyes. She pressed her lips tight and tried not to cry. The inside of the car was suffocating.

Mr. Sumner said: “After yo’ great-granddaddy died I
did
ask Libby to come on and marry me. Old as we both were then.” He chuckled. “Know what she said?” When he couldn’t catch Harriet’s eye, he tapped lightly on the car door. “Hmn? Know what she said, honey? She reckoned she might be able to do it if she didn’t have to get on an
airplane
. Ha ha ha! Just to give you an idea, young lady, I was working down in Venezuela at the time.”

Behind, Adelaide said something. The old man said under his breath: “Darn if she aint Edith all over again!”

Adelaide laughed coquettishly—and at this, Harriet’s shoulders began to heave, of their own accord, and the sobs burst forth unwilling.

“Ah!” cried Mr. Sumner, with genuine distress; his shadow—in the car window—fell across her again. “Bless your little heart!”

“No, no.
No,
” said Adelaide firmly, leading him away. “Leave her alone. She’ll be fine, John.”

The car door still stood open. Harriet’s sobs were loud and repugnant in the silence. Up front, the limousine driver observed her silently in the rear-view mirror, over the top of a drugstore paperback (astrology wheel on the cover) entitled
Your Love Signs
. Presently he inquired: “Yo mama die?”

Harriet shook her head. In the mirror, the driver raised an eyebrow. “I say, yo mama die?”

“No.”

“Well, then.” He punched in the cigarette lighter. “You aint got nothing to cry about.”

The cigarette lighter clicked out, and the driver lit his cigarette and blew a long breath of smoke out the open window. “You don’t know what sadness is,” he said. “Till that day.” Then he opened the glove compartment and handed her a few tissues across the seat.

“Who died, then?” he asked. “Yo daddy?”

“My aunt,” Harriet managed to say.

“Yo wha?”

“My aunt.”

“Oh! Yo auntee!” Silence. “You live with her?”

After waiting patiently for some moments the driver shrugged and turned back to the front, where he sat quietly with his elbow out the open window, smoking his cigarette. Every so often he looked down at his book, which he held open beside his right thigh with one hand.

“When you born?” he asked Harriet after a while. “What month?”

“December,”
said Harriet, just as he’d started to ask her a second time.

“December?” He glanced over the seat at her; his face was doubtful. “You a Sagitaria?”

“Capricorn.”

“Capricorn!” His laugh was rather unpleasant and insinuating. “You a little
goat
, then. Ha ha ha!”

Across the street, at the Baptist church the bells chimed noon; their icy, mechanical peal brought back one of Harriet’s earliest memories: Libby (fall afternoon, vivid sky, red and yellow leaves in the gutter) stooping beside Harriet in her red parka, her hands around Harriet’s waist. “Listen!” And, together, they had listened in the cold, bright air: a minor note—which rang out unchanged a decade later, chilly and sad as a note struck on a child’s toy piano—a note that even in summertime sounded like bare tree branches, and skies in winter, and lost things.

“You mind if I put on the radio?” said the driver. When Harriet did not reply, for crying, he switched it on, anyway.

“You got a boyfrien?” he inquired.

Out on the street, a car honked. “Yo,” called the limo driver, flashing a palm at it—and Harriet, electrified, sat up rigid as Danny Ratliff’s eyes struck her own and flared with recognition; she saw her shock mirrored on his face. The next instant he was gone and she was staring after the indecently cocked rear of the Trans Am.

“Say. I say,” repeated the driver—and, with a start, Harriet realized that he was leaning over the seat looking at her. “You got a boyfrien?”

Harriet tried to look after the Trans Am, without appearing to—and saw it turn left, a few blocks ahead, toward the train station and the old freight yards. Across the street the church bell—on the last dying note of its carol—struck the hour with sudden violence:
dong dong dong dong dong.…

“You stuck up,” said the driver. His voice was teasing and coquettish. “Aint you?”

All of a sudden it occurred to Harriet that he might turn around and come back. She glanced up at the front steps of the funeral home. There were several people milling about—a group of old men, smoking cigarettes; Adelaide and Mr. Sumner, standing off to the side, Mr. Sumner bent over her
—solicitously was he lighting a cigarette for her? Addie hadn’t smoked in years. But there she was, arms crossed, throwing her head back like a stranger, blowing out a plume of smoke.

“Boys don’t like no stuck-up acting girl,” the driver was saying.

Harriet got out of the car—the door was still open—and walked up the steps of the funeral home, fast.

————

A despairing glassine shiver ran down Danny’s neck as he sped past the funeral home. Airy methamphetamine clarity gliddered over him in nine hundred directions simultaneously. Hours he’d looked for the girl, looking everywhere, combing the town, cruising the residential streets, loop after endless crawling loop. And now, just as he’d made up his mind to forget about Farish’s order and stop looking: here she was.

With Catfish, no less: that was the hell of it. Of course, you never could tell exactly where Catfish might pop up, since his uncle was one of the richest men in town, white or black, presiding over a sizable business empire which included grave-digging, tree-pruning, house-painting, stump-grinding, roof contracting, numbers running, car and small-appliance repair, and half a dozen other businesses. You never knew where Catfish might pop up: in Niggertown, collecting his uncle’s rents; on a ladder at the courthouse, washing windows; behind the wheel of a taxicab or a hearse.

But explain this: this twenty-car pile-up of freaked-out reality. Because it was a little too much of a coincidence to see the girl (of all people) sitting there with Catfish in the back of a de Bienville funeral limousine. Catfish knew there was a very large shipment of product waiting to go out, and he was just a little too casually curious about where Danny and Farish were keeping it. Yes, he’d been a little too inquisitive, in his easy-going talkative way, had twice made a point of “dropping by” the trailer, nosing up unannounced in his Gran Torino, shadowy behind the tinted windows. He’d spent an unusually long time in the bathroom, knocking around, running the taps full-blast; he’d stood up a little too quick when Danny came outside and caught him looking underneath the
Trans Am. Flat tire, he’d said. Thought you had a flat tire, man. But the tire was fine and they both knew it.

No, Catfish and the girl were the least of his problems—he thought, with a hopeless feeling of inevitability, as he bumped down the gravel road to the water tower; seemed like he was bumping down it all the time, in his bed, in his dreams, twenty-five times a day hitting this exact same pothole. No, it wasn’t just the drugs, all this feeling of being
watched
. The break-in at Eugene’s, and the attack upon Gum, had them all glancing over their shoulders constantly, and jumping at the slightest sound, but the biggest worry now was Farish, who was overheated to the boiling point.

With Gum in the hospital, there had been no reason for Farish even to pretend to go to bed any more. Instead he sat up all night, every night, and he made Danny sit up with him: pacing, plotting, with the curtains drawn against the sunrise, chopping drugs on the mirror and talking himself hoarse. And now that Gum was home again (stoic, incurious, shuffling sleepy-eyed past the doorway on her way to the toilet) her presence in the house didn’t break the pattern, but increased Farish’s anxiety to a very nearly unbearable pitch. A loaded .38 appeared on the coffee table, beside the mirror and the razor blades. Parties—dangerous parties—were out to get him. Their grandmother’s safety was at risk. And yes, Danny might shake his head at certain of Farish’s theories, but who knew? Dolphus Reese (persona non grata since the cobra incident) often bragged of his connections with organized crime. And organized crime, who handled the distribution end of the drug business, had been in bed with the CIA ever since the Kennedy assassination.

“It aint me,” said Farish, pinching his nose and sitting back, “
whew
, it aint me I’m worried about, it’s poor little Gum in there. What kind of motherfuckers are we dealing with? I don’t give a shit about my
own
life. Hell, I’ve been chased barefoot through the jungle, I hid in a mud-ass rice paddy for a solid week breathing through a bamboo pole. There isn’t shit they can do to me. Do you hear?” said Farish, pointing the blade of his clasp knife at the test pattern on the television. “There isn’t shit you can do to me.”

Danny crossed his legs to keep his knee from jittering and said nothing. Farish’s ever-more frequent discussion of his war record disturbed him, since Farish had spent most of the Vietnam years in the state asylum at Whitfield. Usually, Farish saved his Nam stories for the pool hall. Danny had thought it was bullshit. Only recently had Farish revealed to him that the government shook certain prisoners and mental patients out of their beds at night—rapists, nuts, expendable folk—and sent them on top-secret military operations they weren’t expected to come back from. Black helicopters in the prison’s cotton fields at night, the guard towers empty, a mighty wind gusting through dry stalks. Men in balaclavas, toting AK-47s. “And tell you what,” said Farish, glancing over his shoulder before he spat into the can he carried around with him. “They wasn’t all speaking English.”

What had worried Danny was that the meth was still on the property (though Farish hid and re-hid it compulsively, several times a day). According to Farish, he had to “sit on it a while” before he could move it, but moving it (Danny knew) was the real problem, now that Dolphus was out of the picture. Catfish had offered to hook them up with someone, some cousin in South Louisiana, but that was before Farish had witnessed the snooping-under-the-car episode and charged outside with the knife and threatened to cut Catfish’s head off.

And Catfish—wisely—hadn’t come around since then, hadn’t even called on the telephone, but unfortunately Farish’s suspicions did not end here. He was watching Danny too, and he wanted Danny to know it. Sometimes he made sly insinuations, or got all crafty and confidential, pretending to let Danny in on nonexistent secrets; other times he sat back in his chair like he’d figured something out and—with a great big smile on his face—said, “You son of a bitch. You
son of a bitch.
” And sometimes he just jumped up with no warning and started screaming, charging Danny with all kinds of imaginary lies and betrayals. The only way for Danny to keep Farish from going really nuts and beating the shit out of him was to remain calm at all times, no matter what Farish said or did; patiently, he endured Farish’s accusations (which
came unpredictably and explosively, at bewildering intervals): answering slowly and with care, all politeness, nothing fancy, no sudden movements, the psychological equivalent of exiting his vehicle with his hands above his head.

Then, one morning before sunrise, just as the birds were starting to sing, Farish had leapt to his feet. Raving, muttering, blowing his nose repeatedly into a bloody handkerchief, he’d produced a knapsack and demanded to be driven into town. Once there, he ordered Danny to drop him off in the middle of town and then drive back home and wait for his phone call.

But Danny (pissed off, finally, after all the abuse, the groundless accusations) had not done this. Instead, he’d driven around the corner, parked the car in the empty parking lot at the Presbyterian church and—on foot, at a cautious distance—followed Farish, stumping angrily down the sidewalk with his army knapsack.