The Little Friend (72 page)

Farish’s brow darkened. “Say what? If somebody,” he growled, scouring his wet nostrils with the back of his hand, “if somebody put that little dab out to spy on
me
, I’ll rip her wide open.”

“She knows something,” said Danny. Why?
Because she’d looked at him from the window of a hearse. Because she’d invaded his dreams. Because she was haunting him, hunting him, messing with his head
.

“Well, I’d sure like to know what she was doing up at Eugene’s. If that little bitch busted out my tail-lights …”

His melodramatic manner made Danny suspicious. “If she busted the tail-lights,” he said, carefully avoiding Farish’s eye, “why you reckon she knocked on the door and told us about it?”

Farish shrugged. He was picking at a crusty patch on his pants leg, had all at once got very preoccupied with it, and Danny—suddenly—was convinced that he knew more about the girl (and about all of it) than he was saying.

No, it didn’t make sense, but all the same there was something to it. Dogs barked in the distance.

“Somebody,” said Farish, suddenly—shifting his weight—“
some
body clumb up there and turned them snakes aloose at Eugene’s. The windows is painted shut except for that one in the bathroom. Nobody could have got through
that
but a kid.”

“I’m on talk to her,” said Danny.
Ask her lots of things. Like why I never saw you in my life before, and now I see you everywhere? Like why do you brush and flitter against my windows at night like a death’s-head moth?

He’d been so long without sleep that when he closed his eyes, he was in a place with weeds and dark lakes, wrecked skiffs awash in scummy water. There she was, with her moth-white face and her crow-black hair, whispering something in the moist cicada-shrieking gloom, something he almost understood but couldn’t quite.…

I can’t hear you, he said.

“Can’t hear what?”

Bing:
black dashboard, blue Presbyterian spruces, Farish staring from the passenger’s seat. “Can’t hear what?” he repeated.

Danny blinked, wiped his forehead. “Forget it,” he said. He was sweating.

“In Nam, them little sapper girls was tough sons of bitches,” said Farish cheerfully. “Running with live grenades,
it was all a game to them. You can get a kid to do shit wouldn’t nobody but a crazy man try.”

“Right,” Danny said. This was one of Farish’s pet theories. During Danny’s childhood, he had used it to justify getting Danny and Eugene and Mike and Ricky Lee to do all his dirty work for him, climbing in windows while he, Farish, sat eating Honey Buns and getting high in the car.

“Kid gets caught? So what? Juvenile Hall? Hell—” Farish laughed—“when yall was boys, I had yall
trained
to it. Ricky was crawling in windows soon as he could stand up on my shoulders. And if a cop come by—”

“God amighty,” said Danny, soberly, and sat up; for in the rear view mirror he’d just seen the girl—alone—walk around the corner.

————

Harriet—head down, brow clouded with thought—was walking down the sidewalk towards the Presbyterian church (and, three streets over, her desolate home) when the door of a car parked about twenty feet ahead of her suddenly clicked open.

It was the Trans Am. Almost before she had time to think she doubled back, darted into the dank, mossy yard of the Presbyterian church and kept running.

The side yard of the church led through to Mrs. Claiborne’s garden (hydrangea bushes, tiny greenhouse) directly to Edie’s back yard—which was cut off by a board fence, six feet high. Harriet ran through the dark passageway (Edie’s fence on one side; a prickly, inpenetrable row of arborvitae bordering the yard adjacent) and ran smack into another fence: Mrs. Davenport’s, chain-link. In a panic, Harriet scrambled over it; a wire on top caught her shorts and with a twist of her whole body she wrenched free and hopped down, panting.

Behind, in the leafy passage, the burst and crash of footsteps. There was not much cover in Mrs. Davenport’s yard, and she looked about helplessly before she ran across it and unlatched the gate and ran down the driveway. She’d intended to double back to Edie’s house, but when she got out
to the sidewalk something stopped her (where were those footsteps coming from?) and, after a split-second pause of deliberation, she ran straight ahead, towards the O’Bryants’ house. To her shock, while she was in the middle of the street, the Trans Am swung around the corner.

So they’d split up. That was smart. Harriet ran—under the tall pines, through the pine needles that carpeted the O’Bryants’ deeply shaded front yard—directly to the little house out back where Mr. O’Bryant kept his pool table. She seized the handle, shook it: locked. Harriet, breathless, stared in at the yellowy pine-panelled walls—at bookshelves, empty except for a few old yearbooks from Alexandria Academy; at the glass lamp that said Coca-Cola dangling from a chain over the dark table—and then darted off to the right.

No good: another fence. The dog in the next yard was barking. If she stayed off the street, the guy in the Trans Am obviously couldn’t catch her, but she had to take care that the one on foot didn’t corner her, or flush her out into the open.

Heart galloping, lungs aching, she swerved to the left. Behind, she heard heavy breaths, the crash of heavy feet. On she zig-zagged, through labyrinths of shrubbery, crossing and re-crossing and veering off at right angles when her path closed off in front of her: through strange gardens, over fences and into a perplexity of lawns checkered with patios and flagstones, past swing-sets and clothes-posts and barbecue grills, past a round-eyed baby who gazed at her fearfully and sat down hard in his playpen. Further down—an ugly old man with a bulldog face hoisted himself halfway from his porch chair and bawled “Get away!” when Harriet, in relief (for he was the first grown-up she’d seen), slowed to catch her breath.

His words were like a slap; as frightened as she was, the shock of them stopped her for a heartbeat and she blinked in astonishment at the inflamed eyes, blazing away at her, at the freckled, puffy old fist, raised as if to strike. “That’s right,
you!
” he cried. “Get away from here!”

Harriet ran. Though she’d heard the names of some of the people on this street (the Wrights, the Motleys, Mr. and Mrs. Price) she didn’t know them except by sight, not well enough
to run up breathless and pound on their doors: why had she let herself be chased here, into unfamiliar territory?
Think, think
, she told herself. A few houses back—just before the old man shook his fist at her—she’d passed an El Camino with paint cans and plastic drop cloths in the bed; it would have been the perfect place to hide.…

She ducked behind a propane tank and—bent double, hands on knees—gulped for breath. Had she lost them? No: a renewed fracas of barking from the penned Airedale, down at the end of the block, who’d thrown himself against his fence when she ran past.

Blindly she turned and plunged on. She crashed through a gap in a privet hedge—and nearly fell flat across an astonished Chester, who was on his knees fooling with a soaker hose in a thickly mulched flower bed.

He threw up his arms as if at an explosion. “Watch out!” Chester did odd jobs for all sorts of people, but she didn’t know he worked over here. “What in thunder—”

“—Where can I hide?”

“
Hide?
This aint no place for you to play.” He swallowed, flung a muddy hand at her. “Go on. Scat.”

Harriet, panic-stricken, glanced around: glass hummingbird feeder, glassed-in porch, pristine picnic table. The opposite side of the yard was walled-in with a thicket of holly; in the back, a bank of rosebushes cut off her retreat.

“
Scat
I said. Look at this hole you done knocked in the hedge.”

A flagstone path lined with marigolds led to a persnickety dollhouse of a toolshed, painted to match the house: gingerbread trim, green door standing ajar. In desperation, Harriet dashed down the walk and ran inside (“Hey!” called Chester) and threw herself down between a stack of firewood and a fat roll of fiberglass insulation.

The air was thick and dusty. Harriet pinched her nose shut. In the dimness—chest heaving, scalp aprickle—she stared at an old frayed badminton birdie lying on the floor by the stacked logs, at a group of colorful metal cans that said Gasoline and Gear Oil and Prestone.

Voices: male. Harriet stiffened. Along time passed, during
which it seemed that the cans that said Gasoline and Gear Oil and Prestone were the last three artifacts in the universe.
What can they do to me?
she thought wildly.
In front of Chester?
Though she strained to listen, the rasp of her breath deafened her.
Just scream
, she told herself,
if they grab you scream and break free, scream and run.…
For some reason, the car was what she feared most. Though she could not say why, she had a sense that if they got her in the car, it was all over.

She didn’t think Chester would let them take her. But there were two of them, and only one of Chester. And Chester’s word probably wouldn’t go very far against two white men.

Moments ticked by. What were they saying, what was taking so long? Intently, Harriet stared at a dried-up honeycomb underneath the work-bench. Then, suddenly, she sensed a form approaching.

The door creaked open. A triangle of washed-out light fell across the dirt floor. All the blood rushed from Harriet’s head, and for a moment she thought she was going to black out, but it was only Chester, only Chester saying: “Come on out, now.”

It was as if a glass barrier had shattered. Noises came washing back: birds twittering, a cricket chirping stridently on the floor behind an oil can.

“You in there?”

Harriet swallowed; her voice, when she spoke, was faint and scratchy. “Are they gone?”

“What’d you do to them men?” The light was behind him; she couldn’t see his face but it was Chester, all right: Chester’s sandpapery voice, his loose-jointed silhouette. “They act like you picked they pocket.”

“Are they gone?”

“
Yes
they gone,” said Chester impatiently. “Get on from out of there.”

Harriet stood up behind the roll of insulation and smeared her forehead with the back of her arm. She was peppered all over with grit and cobwebs were stuck to the side of her face.

“You aint knock anything over in there, did you?” said Chester, peering back into the recesses of the shed and then,
down at her: “Aint you a sight.” He opened the door for her. “Why they get after you?”

Harriet—still breathless—shook her head.

“Men like that got no business running after some child,” said Chester, glancing over his shoulder as he reached in his breast pocket for a cigarette. “What’d you do? You threw a rock at they car?”

Harriet craned her neck to see around him. Through the dense shrubbery (privet, holly) she had no view at all of the street.

“Tell you what.” Chester exhaled sharply through his nostrils. “You’re lucky I’s working over here today. Mrs. Mulver-hill, she not at her choir practice, she call the police on you for busting through here. Last week, she make me turn the hose on some poor old dog wunder up in the yard.”

He smoked his cigarette. Harriet’s heart still pounded in her ears.

“What you doing, anyway,” said Chester, “tearing around in people’s bushes? I ought to tell yo’ grandmother.”

“What’d they say to you?”

“
Say?
They aint say nothing. One of him got his car parked out on the street there. The other one stick his head through the hedge there and peep in, like he the electrician looking for a meter.” Chester parted invisible branches and imitated the gesture, complete with weird eyeroll. “Got on a coverall like Mississippi Power and Light.”

Overhead, a branch popped; it was only a squirrel, but Harriet started violently.

“You aint gone tell me why you run from those men?”

“I—I was …”

“What?”

“I was playing,” said Harriet weakly.

“You ought not to get yourself so worked up.” Through a haze of smoke, Chester observed her shrewdly. “What you lookin at so fearful, over thataway? You want me to walk you over to your house?”

“No,” said Harriet, but as she said it Chester laughed and she realized that her head was nodding
yes
.

Chester put a hand on her shoulder. “You
all
mixed up,”
he said; but despite his cheerful tone he had a worried look. “Tell you what. I’s going home by your house. Give me a minute to wash off under the hydrant and I’ll walk you on down.”

————

“Black trucks,” said Farish abruptly, when they turned onto the highway towards home. He was all hopped-up, breathing with loud asthmatic rasps. “I never seen so many black trucks in my life.”

Danny made an ambiguous noise and passed a hand over his face. His muscles trembled and he was still shaky. What would they have done to the girl if they’d caught her?

“Dammit,” he said, “somebody could’ve called the cops on us back there.” He had—as he had so often nowadays—the sense of coming to his senses in the midst of some preposterous high-wire stunt in a dream. Were they out of their minds? Chasing a kid like that, in a residential neighborhood in broad daylight? Kidnapping carried a death penalty in Mississippi.

“This is nuts,” he said aloud.

But Farish was pointing excitedly out the window, his big heavy rings (pinky ring shaped like a dice) flashing outlandishly in the afternoon sun. “There,” he said, “and there.”

“What,” said Danny, “what?” Cars everywhere; light pouring off cottonfields so intense, it was like light on water.

“Black trucks.”

“Where?” The speed of the moving automobile made him feel like he was forgetting something or had left something important behind.

“There, there, there.”

“That truck’s
green.
”

“No it’s not—
there!
” Farish cried triumphantly. “See, there goes another one!”

Danny—heart hammering, pressure rising in his head—felt like saying
so fucking what
but—for fear of setting Farish off—refrained. Crashing over fences, through tidy town yards with barbecue grills: ridiculous. The craziness of it made him feel faint. This was the part of the story where you were
supposed to snap to your senses and straighten up: stop cold, turn the car around, change your life forever, the part that Danny never quite believed.