The Little Friend (77 page)

Danny—wondering how he was supposed to drive from the wrong side of the car—reached up to feel his bloody nose.
Thank God, I’m not wired
, he thought, wiping the back of his hand over his mouth, split lip and all,
thank God I’m not wired or I’d lose my mind.…

“Go?” said Curtis brightly, toddling up to the open window; with his smeary orange lips, he made a
vroom vroom
noise. Then, stricken, he noticed the blood on Danny’s face.

“No, sugar,” said Danny, “you’re not going anywhere,” but all at once, Curtis’s face slackened, and—gasping for breath—he turned and scurried off just as Farish opened the door on the driver’s side:
click
. A whistle. “In,” he said; and before Danny realized what was happening Farish’s two German shepherds leapt into the back seat. The one named Van Zant
panted noisily into his ear; its breath was hot, and smelled like rotten meat.

Danny’s stomach contracted. This was a bad sign. The dogs were trained to attack. On one occasion, the bitch had dug out of her pen and bit Curtis on the leg through his blue jeans so bad he had to get stitched-up at the hospital.

“Farish,
please,
” he said, as Farish popped the seat back in place and sat down behind the wheel.

“Shut your mouth.” Farish stared straight ahead, his eyes queerly dead. “The dogs are coming.”

Danny made a big show of feeling around in his pocket. “If I’m on drive, I need to get my wallet.” Actually, what he needed was a weapon of some sort, if only a knife.

The interior of the car was blazing hot. Danny swallowed. “Farish?” he said. “If I’m on drive, I need my license. I’ll just go inside now and get it.”

Farish leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes and stayed like that for a moment—very still, eyelids fluttering, as if trying to fight off an impending heart attack. Then, very suddenly, he started up and roared, in full throat:
“Eugene!”

“Hey,” said Danny, over the piercing barks from the back seat, “no need in calling him out here, let me get it myself, okay?”

He reached for the door handle. “Ho, I seen that!” shouted Farish.

“Farish—”

“I seen that, too!” Farish’s hand had shot to the top of his boot.
Has he got a knife in there?
thought Danny.
Great
.

Half breathless from the heat, throbbing all over with pain, he sat still for a moment, thinking. How best to proceed, so Farish wouldn’t jump on him again?

“I can’t drive from this side,” he said at last. “I’ll go in and get my wallet, and then we can trade places.”

Attentively, Danny watched his brother. But Farish’s thoughts had strayed elsewhere for the moment. He had turned around to face the back seat, and was allowing the German shepherds to lick him all over the face.

“These dogs,” he said, threateningly, lifting his chin over their frantic attentions, “these dogs mean more to me than
any human being ever
born
. I care more about these two dogs here than any human life that was
ever lived.
”

Danny waited. Farish kissed and fondled the dogs, murmuring to them in indistinct baby-talk. After a moment or two (the UPS coveralls were ugly enough, but one thing Danny could say for them: they made it hard if not impossible for Farish to conceal a gun on his person) he eased the door open and got out of the Trans Am and started across the yard.

The door of Gum’s trailer squeaked open with a rubbery, refrigerator sound. Eugene poked his head out. “Tell him I don’t care to be spoke to in that tone.”

From the car, the horn blared, throwing the shepherd dogs into a fresh fit of barking. Eugene pulled his glasses low on his nose and peered over Danny’s shoulder. “I wouldn’t let those animals ride in the car if I was you,” he said.

Farish threw back his head and bellowed: “Get back out here!
Now!
”

Eugene took a deep breath, rubbed the back of his neck with his hand. Scarcely moving his lips, he said: “If he don’t end up in Whitfield again he’s gone kill somebody. He come in there this morning and like to set me on fire.”

“What?”

“You was asleep,” said Eugene, looking apprehensively over Danny’s shoulder at the Trans Am; whatever was going on with Farish and the car, it was making him plenty nervous. “He taken his lighter out and said he’d burn the rest of my face off. Don’t get in the car with him. Not with them dogs. Aint no telling what he’ll do.”

From the car, Farish shouted: “Don’t make me come after you!”

“Listen,” said Danny, casting a nervous glance back at the Trans Am, “will you look after Curtis? Promise me?”

“What for? Where you going?” said Eugene, and looked up at him sharply. Then he turned his head.

“No,” he said, blinking, “no, don’t tell me, don’t say another word—”

“I’m going to count three,” screamed Farish.

“Promise?”

“Promise and swear to God.”

“One.”

“Don’t listen to Gum,” said Danny, over another blare from the car horn. “She aint going to do a thing but discourage you.”

“Two!”

Danny put a hand on Eugene’s shoulder. Looking quickly over at the Trans Am (the only motion he could see was the dogs, tails thumping against the window glass), he said: “Do me a favor. Stand here a minute and don’t let him in.” Quickly he slipped inside the trailer and, from its place on the shelf behind the television, grabbed Gum’s little .22 pistol, pulled up his pants leg and stuck it muzzle-first in the top of his boot. Gum liked to keep it loaded, and he prayed that it still was; no time to fool with bullets.

Outside, heavy fast footsteps. He heard Eugene say, in a high frightened voice: “Don’t you raise your hand to me.”

Danny straightened his pants leg, opened the door. He was about to blurt his excuse (“my wallet”) when Farish snatched him up by the collar. “Don’t try to run from
me
, son.”

He hauled Danny down the steps. Halfway to the car Curtis scuttled over and tried to throw his arms around Danny’s waist. He was crying—or, rather, he was coughing and choking for breath, the way he did when he was upset. Danny, stumbling along behind Farish, managed to reach back and pat him on the head.

“Get back, baby,” he called after Curtis. “Be good.…” Eugene was watching anxiously from the door of the trailer; poor Curtis was crying now, crying to beat the band. Danny noticed that his wrist was smeared with orange lipstick, where Curtis had pressed his mouth.

The color was garish, shocking; for a fraction of a second, it stopped Danny cold.
I’m too tired to do this
, he thought,
too tired
. Then, the next thing he knew, Farish had opened the driver’s side door of the Trans Am and slung him inside. “Drive,” he said.

————

The top of the water tank was more rickety than Harriet remembered: furred gray boards, with nails popped loose in
some places and, in others, dark gaps where the wood had shrunk and split. Peppering it all were plump white fishhooks and squiggles of bird dropping.

Harriet, from the ladder, examined it at eye level. Then she stepped up, cautiously, and began to climb toward the middle—and something tore loose in her chest as a plank screeched and sank sharply under her foot, like a pressed piano key.

Carefully, carefully, she took a giant step backward. The plank sprang up with a shriek. Stiff, heart pounding, she crept to the margin of the tank, by the railing, where the boards were more stable—why was the air so strange and thin, up high?
Altitude sickness
, pilots and mountain climbers suffered from it, and whatever those words actually meant, they described how she felt, a queasiness in her stomach and sparkles at the corners of her eyes. Tin roofs glittered in the hazy distance. On the other side lay the dense green woods where she and Hely had played so often, fighting their all-day wars, bombing each other with clods of red mud: a jungle, lush and singing, a palmy little Vietnam to parachute into.

She circled the tank twice. The door was nowhere to be seen. She was just starting to think that there wasn’t a door at all when at last she noticed it: weather-worn, almost perfectly camouflaged in the monotone surface except for a chip or two of chrome paint that hadn’t quite peeled off the handle.

She dropped to her knees. With a wide, windshield-wiper swing of her arm, she pulled it open (squeaky hinges, like a horror movie) and dropped it with a bang which vibrated in the boards beneath her.

Inside: dark, a bad smell. A low, intimate whine of mosquitos hung in the stagnant air. From the roof, a prickle of tiny sun shafts—narrow as pencils—bristled from the holes up top, and crisscrossed in dusty beams which were powdery and pollen-heavy like goldenrod in the darkness. Below, the water was thick and inky, the color of motor oil. At the far end, she made out the dim form of a bloated animal, floating on its side.

A corroded metal ladder—rickety, rusted half-through—went down for about six feet, stopping just short of the water.
As Harriet’s eyes adjusted to the dim, she saw, with a thrill, that something shiny was taped to the top rung: a package of some sort, rolled up in a black plastic garbage bag.

Harriet prodded it with her toe of her shoe. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she got on her stomach and reached inside and patted it. Something soft but solid was inside—not money, nothing stacked or sharp or definite, but something that gave under pressure like sand.

The package was bound around and around with heavy duct tape. Harriet picked and pulled at it, tugged with both hands, tried to work her fingernails under the edges of the tape. Finally she gave up and tore through several layers of plastic right into the heart of the package.

Inside: something slick and cool, dead to the touch. Harriet withdrew her hand quickly. Dust sifted from the package, spread upon the water in a pearly film. Harriet peered down at the dry iridescence (poison? explosives?) swirling in a powdery glaze upon the surface. She knew all about narcotics (from TV, from the colored pictures in her Health workbook) but those were flamboyant, unmistakable: hand-rolled cigarettes, hypodermics, colorful pills. Maybe this was a decoy package, like on
Dragnet;
maybe the real package was hidden elsewhere, and this was just a well-wrapped bag of … what?

Inside the torn bag something gleamed shiny and pale. Carefully, Harriet pushed aside the plastic, and saw a mysterious nest of shiny white sacs, like a cluster of giant insect eggs. One of them toppled into the water with a plunk—Harriet drew her hand back, fast—and floated there, half-submerged, like a jellyfish.

For an awful instant, she’d thought the sacs were alive. In the watery reflections, dancing in the tank’s interior, they had seemed to pulsate slightly. Now she saw that they were nothing more than a number of clear plastic bags, each packed with white powder.

Harriet, cautiously, reached down and touched one of the tiny bags (the little blue line of the zip lock was plainly visible at the top) and then lifted it out and hefted it in her hand. The powder looked white—like sugar or salt—but the texture was different, crunchier and more crystalline, and the weight
curiously light. She opened it and brought it to her nose. No smell, except for a faint clean aroma that reminded her of the Comet powder that Ida used to clean the bathroom.

Well, whatever it was: it was his. With an underhand toss, she threw the little bag into the water. There it floated. Harriet looked at it, and then, without much considering what she was doing, or why, she reached inside the cache of black plastic (more white sacs, clustered like seeds in a pod) and pulled them out and dropped them by idle handfuls, threes and fours, into the black water.

————

Now that they were in the car, Farish had forgotten what was eating him, or so it seemed. As Danny drove through cottonfields hazy with morning heat and pesticides he kept glancing nervously at Farish, who was settled back in his seat and humming along with the radio. Hardly had they turned off the gravel onto the blacktop than Farish’s tense violent mood had shifted, inexplicably, to a happier key. He’d closed his eyes and breathed a deep contented sigh at the cool air blasting out of the air conditioner, and now they were flying along the highway into town, listening to
The Morning Show
with Betty Brownell and Casey McMasters on WNAT (“Worst Noise Around Town,” as Farish claimed the call letters stood for). WNAT was Top 40, which Farish hated. But now he was liking it, nodding his head, drumming on his knee, the armrest, the dashboard.

Except he was drumming a little too hard. It made Danny nervous. The older Farish got, the more he behaved like their father: the particular way he smiled before he said something mean, the unnatural liveliness—talkative, overly friendly—that came before a bad outburst.

Rebellient! Rebellient!
Once Danny had said that word in school,
rebellient
, his father’s favorite word, and the teacher told him it wasn’t even a word. But Danny could still hear that high crazy crack in his father’s voice,
re
bel
lient!
the belt coming down hard on the
bel
as Danny stared at his hands: freckled, porous, hatched with scars, white-knuckled from clutching the kitchen table. Danny knew his own hands very
well, very well indeed; every hard bad moment in his life, he’d studied them like a book. They were a ticket back in time: to beatings, deathbeds, funerals, failure; to humiliation on the playground and sentencing in the courtroom; to memories more real than this steering wheel, this street.

Now they were on the outskirts of town. They drove by the shady grounds of the Old Hospital, where some high-school cheerleaders—in a V formation—jumped all at once into the air:
hey!
They weren’t in uniform, or even in matching shirts, and despite their crisp unified movements they looked ragged. Arms chopped in semaphore, fists struck the air.

Another day—any other—Danny might have parked behind the old pharmacy and watched them in privacy. Now, as he drove slowly through the dappled leaf-shade, ponytails and tan limbs flashing in the background, he was chilled by the sudden appearance, in the foreground, of a smaller, hunchbacked sort of creature, all in black, which—mega-phone in hand—stopped in its soggy, squelchy walk to observe him from the sidewalk. It was something like a small black goblin—scarcely three feet tall, with orange beak and big orange feet, and a strangely drenched look. As the car went by, it turned in a smooth tracking motion and opened its black wings like a bat … and Danny had the uncanny sensation that he’d met it before, this creature, part blackbird, part dwarf, part devilish child; that somehow (despite the improbability of such a thing) he remembered it from somewhere. Even stranger: that
it
remembered
him
. And as he glanced in the rear view mirror he saw it again, a small black form with black wings, looking after his car like an unwelcome little messenger from the other world.