The Little Friend (68 page)

Harriet ducked to avoid the splash, and then—seized inexplicably by panic—somersaulted underwater and swam for the shallow end but he was too quick, and cut her off.

“Hey!” he said as she surfaced, with a grand shake of his head that sent the spray flying. “You got good while you were at camp! How long can you hold your breath?
Seriously,
” he said, when Harriet didn’t answer. “Let’s time you. I’ve got a stopwatch.”

Harriet felt her face growing red.

“Come on. Why don’t you want to?”

Harriet didn’t know. Down below on the blue bottom her feet—barred with pale blue breathing tiger stripes—looked very white and twice as fat as usual.

“Suit yourself.” Pem stood up for a minute, to push his hair back, and then settled back down in the water so their heads were on the same level. “Don’t you get bored, just laying there in the water? Chris gets a little pissed off.”

“Chris?” said Harriet, after a startled pause. The sound of
her own voice startled her even more: it was all dry and rusty, like she hadn’t spoken for days.

“When I came to relieve him he was all like: ‘Look at that kid, laying in the water like a log.’ Those toddler moms kept bugging him about it, like he would
just let
some dead kid float in the pool all afternoon.” He laughed, and then, when he couldn’t catch Harriet’s eye, he swam to the other side.

“Do you want a Coke?” he said; and there was a cheerful crack in his voice that reminded her of Hely. “Free? Chris left me the key to the cooler.”

“No thanks.”

“Say, why didn’t you tell me Allison was home when I called the other day?”

Harriet looked at him—blankly, a look that made Pemberton’s brow pucker—and then hopped along the bottom of the pool and began to swim away. It was true: she’d told him that Allison wasn’t there, and hung up, even though Allison was in the next room. Moreover: she didn’t know why she’d done it, couldn’t even invent a reason.

He hopped after her; she could hear him splashing.
Why won’t he leave me alone?
she thought despairingly.

“Hey,” she heard him call. “I heard Ida Rhew quit.” The next thing she knew, he had glided in front of her.

“Say,” he said—and then did a double take. “Are you crying?”

Harriet dove—kicking a healthy spray of water in his face—and darted off underwater:
whoosh
. The shallow end was hot, like bathtub water.

“Harriet?” she heard him call as she surfaced by the ladder. In a grim hurry, she clambered out and—head down—scurried for the dressing room with a string of black footprints winding behind her.

“Hey!” he called. “Don’t be like that. You can play dead all you want. Harriet?” he called again as she ran behind the concrete barrier and into the ladies’ locker room, her ears burning.

————

The only thing that gave Harriet a sense of purpose was the idea of Danny Ratliff. The thought of him itched at her.
Again and again—perversely, as if bearing down on a rotten tooth—she tested herself by thinking of him; and again and again outrage flared with sick predictability, fireworks sputtering from a raw nerve.

In her bedroom, in the fading light, she lay on the carpet, staring at the flimsy black-and-white photograph she’d scissored from the yearbook. Its casual, off-centered quality—which had shocked her at first—had long since burned away and now what she saw when she looked at the picture was not a boy or even a person, but the frank embodiment of evil. His face had grown so poisonous to her that now she wouldn’t even touch the photograph except to pick it up by the edges. The despair of her house was the work of his hand. He deserved to die.

Throwing the snake on his grandmother had given her no relief. It was him she wanted. She’d caught a glimpse of his face outside the funeral home, and of one thing she was now confident:
he recognized her
. Their eyes had met, and locked—and his bloodshot gaze had flashed up so fierce and strange at the sight of her that the memory made her heart pound. Some weird clarity had flared between them, a recognition of some sort, and though Harriet wasn’t sure what it meant, she had the curious impression that she troubled Danny Ratliff’s thoughts fully as much as he troubled hers.

With distaste, Harriet reflected upon how life had beaten down the adults she knew, every single grown-up. Something strangled them as they grew older, made them doubt their own powers—laziness? Habit? Their grip slackened; they stopped fighting and resigned themselves to what happened. “That’s Life.” That’s what they all said. “That’s Life, Harriet, that’s just how it is, you’ll see.”

Well: Harriet would
not
see. She was young still, and the chains had not yet grown tight around her ankles. For years, she’d lived in terror of turning nine—Robin was nine when he died—but her ninth birthday had come and gone and now she wasn’t afraid of anything. Whatever was to be done,
she
would do it. She would strike now—while she still could, before her nerve broke and her spirit failed her—with nothing to sustain her but her own gigantic solitude.

She turned her attention to the problem at hand. Why would Danny Ratliff go to the freight yards? There wasn’t much to steal. Most of the warehouses were boarded up and Harriet had climbed up and looked inside the windows of the ones that weren’t: empty, for the most part, except for raggedy cotton bales and age-blacked machinery and dusty pesticide tanks wallowing belly-up in the corners. Wild possibilities ran through her mind: prisoners sealed in a boxcar. Bodies buried; burlap sacks of stolen bills. Skeletons, murder weapons, secret meetings.

The only way to find out exactly what he was doing, she decided, was to go down to the freight yards and see for herself.

————

She hadn’t talked to Hely in ages. Because he was the only seventh grader at the Band Clinic, he now thought he was too good to associate with Harriet. Never mind that he’d only been invited because the brass section was short on trombones. The last time she and Hely had spoken—by telephone, and she had called
him
—he’d talked of nothing but band, volunteering gossip about the big kids as if he actually knew them, referring to the drum majorette and the hot-shot brass soloists by first name. In a chatty but remote tone—as if she were a teacher, or a friend of his parents—he informed her of the many, many technical details of the half-time number they were working on: a Beatles medley, which the band would conclude by playing “Yellow Submarine” while forming a gigantic submarine (its propeller represented by a twirled baton) on the football field. Harriet listened in silence. She was silent, too, at Hely’s vague but enthusiastic interjections about how “crazy” the kids in the high-school band were. “The football players don’t have
any
fun. They have to get up and run laps while it’s still dark, Coach Cogwell screams at them all the time, it’s like the National Guards or something. But Chuck, and Frank, and Rusty, and the sophomores in the trumpet section … they are
so
much wilder than any of the guys on the football team.”

“Hmmn.”

“
All
they do is talk back and crack crazy jokes and they wear their sunglasses all day long. Mr. Wooburn’s cool, he doesn’t care. Like yesterday—wait, wait,” he said to Harriet, and then to some peevish voice in the background: “What?”

Conversation. Harriet waited. After a moment or two Hely returned.

“Sorry. I have to go practice,” he said virtuously. “Dad says I need to practice every day because my new trombone is worth a lot of money.”

Harriet hung up and—in the still, dingy light of the hallway—leaned with her elbows on the telephone table and thought. Had he forgot about Danny Ratliff? Or did he just not care? Her lack of concern over Hely’s distant manner took her by surprise, but she could not help being pleased by how little pain his indifference caused her.

————

The night before, it had rained; and though the ground was wet, Harriet couldn’t tell if a car had recently passed through the broad gravel expanse (a loading area for cotton wagons, not really a road) that connected the switching yards with the freight yards, and the freight yards with the river. With her backpack and her orange notebook under her arm, in case there were clues she needed to write down, she stood on the edge of the vast, black, mechanical plain, and gazed out at the scissors and loops and starts and stops of track, the white warning crosses and the dead signal lanterns, the rust-locked freight cars in the distance and the water tower rising up tall behind them, atop spindly legs: an enormous round tank with its roof peaked like the Tin Woodman’s hat in
The Wizard of Oz
. In early childhood, she’d formed an obscure attachment to the water tower, perhaps because of this resemblance; it seemed a dumb, friendly guardian of some sort; and when she went to sleep, she often thought of it standing lonely and unappreciated out somewhere in the dark. Then, when Harriet was six, some bad boys had climbed up the tower on Halloween and painted a scary jack-o’-lantern face on the tank, with slit eyes and sawteeth—and for many nights after, Harriet lay awake and agitated, and could
not sleep for the thought of her steadfast companion (fanged now, and hostile) scowling out over the silent rooftops.

The scary face had faded long ago. Someone else had sprayed
Class of ’70
over it in gold paint, and now this too had faded, bleached by sun and washed dull by years and years of rain. Melancholy black drips of decay streaked the tank’s facade from top to bottom—but even though it wasn’t really there any more, the devil face, still it burned in Harriet’s memory, like a light’s afterburn in a recently darkened room.

The sky was white and empty.
With Hely
, she thought,
at least there’s somebody to talk to
. Had Robin wandered down here to play, had he stood astride his bicycle to look across the train tracks? She tried to imagine seeing it all through his eyes. Things wouldn’t have changed much: maybe the telegraph wires would sag a little more, maybe the creeper and the bindweed would hang a little thicker on the trees. How would it all look in a hundred years, after she was dead?

She cut through the freight yards—hopping over the tracks, humming to herself—towards the woods. Her voice was very loud in the silence; she had never ventured so far into this abandoned area by herself.
What if there was a disease in Alexandria
, she thought,
and everybody died but me?

I’d go live at the library
, she told herself. The notion was cheering. She saw herself reading by candlelight, shadows flickering on the ceiling above the labyrinth of shelves. She could take a suitcase from home—peanut butter and crackers, a blanket, a change of clothes—and pull together two of the big armchairs in the Reading Room to sleep on.…

When she stepped on the footpath and into the shady woods (lush vegetation, crackling through the ruins of her death-stilled city, buckling up the sidewalks, snaking through the houses) the passage from warmth to cool was like swimming into a cool plume of spring water in the lake. Airy clouds of gnats swirled away from her, spinning from the sudden movement like pond creatures in green water. In the daylight, the path was narrower and more choked than she had imagined it to be in the dark; barbs of fox-tail and witch grass prickled up in tufts, and the ruts in the clay were coated in scummy green algae.

Overhead, a raucous scream that made her jump: only a crow. Trees dripping in great chains and swags of kudzu loomed high on either side of the path like rotting sea monsters. Slowly she walked—gazing up at the dark canopy—and she did not notice the loud buzzing of flies, which grew louder and louder until she smelled a bad smell, and looked down. A glittering green snake—not poisonous, for its head was not pointed, but unlike any snake she had ever seen—lay dead on the path ahead of her. It was about three feet long, stomped flat in the middle, so that its guts were smashed out in rich dark globs, but the remarkable thing was its color: a sparkly chartreuse, with iridescent scales, like the color illustration of the King of the Snakes in an old book of fairy tales that Harriet had had since she was a baby.
“Very well,” had said the King of the Snakes to the honest shepherd, “I shall spit into your mouth three times, and then you shall know the language of the beasts. But take care not to let other men know your secret, or they shall grow angry and kill you.”

By the side of the path, Harriet saw the ridged print of a boot—a large boot—stamped distinctly in the mud; and at the same time she tasted the snake’s death-stink in the back of her throat and she began to run, heart pounding, as if the very devil was chasing her, ran without knowing why. The pages of the notebook flapped loudly in the silence. Drops of water, shaken loose from the vines, pittered all around her; a bewilderment of stunted ailanthus (varying heights, like stalagmites on a cave floor) rose pale and staggered from the strangle of brush on the ground, their lizard-skinned trunks luminous in the dim.

She broke through into sunlight—and, suddenly, sensed that she was not alone, and stopped. Grasshoppers whirred high and frantic in the sumac; she shaded her eyes with the notebook, scanned the bright, baked expanse—

High in the corner of her vision a silver flash jumped out at her—out of the sky, it seemed—and Harriet saw with a jolt a dark shape crawling hand over hand up the ladder of the water tower, about thirty feet high and sixty feet away. Again, the light flashed: a metal wristwatch, glinting like a signal mirror.

Heart racing, she stepped back into the woods and squinted through the dripping, interlaced leaves. It was him. Black hair. Very thin. Tight T-shirt, with writing she couldn’t read on the back. Part of her tingled with excitement but another, cooler part stood back and marveled at the smallness and flatness of the moment.
There he is
, she told herself (jabbing herself with the thought, trying to provoke the proper excitement),
it’s him, it’s him.…

A branch was in her face; she ducked so she could see him better. Now he was climbing up the last rungs of the ladder. Once he’d hoisted himself up onto the top he stood on the narrow walkway with his head down, hands on hips, motionless against the harsh, unclouded sky. Then—with a sharp backwards glance—he stooped and put a hand on the metal railing (it was very low; he had to lean to the side a bit) and limped along it quick and light to the left and out of Harriet’s sight.