The Little Friend (81 page)

He looked at the shape sloshing in the water. Why had she destroyed his drugs?
Why?
He was superstitious about the kid; she was a shadow and a jinx but now that she was dead he feared that maybe she’d been his good-luck charm, too. For all he knew he’d made a huge mistake—the mistake of his life—by killing her, but
so help me
, he said, to her form in the water, and couldn’t finish the sentence. From that first moment outside the pool hall he’d been caught up with her somehow, in something that he didn’t understand; and the mystery of it still pressed in on him. If he’d had her on dry ground he would have knocked it out of her, but it was too late for that now.

He fished one of the packets of speed out of the nasty water. It was stuck together and melted, but maybe—if cooked down—shootable. Fishing around, he came up with half a dozen more or less waterlogged bags. He’d never shot drugs, but why not start.

One last look, and he started up the ladder. The rungs—rusted nearly through—shrieked and buckled under his weight; he could feel movement in the thing, it was wobbling under him a whole lot more than he liked, and he was grateful to emerge at last from the close dankness into the brightness and heat. On shaky legs, he climbed to his feet. He was sore all over, a muscular soreness, as if he’d been beaten—which, come to think of it, he had been. A storm was rolling in over the river. To the east, the sky was sunny and blue; to the west, gunmetal black with thunderclouds rolling and surging in over the river. Shady spots sailed over the low roofs of the town.

Danny stretched, rubbed the small of his back. He was sodden,
dripping; long strands of green slime clung to his arms but in spite of everything, his spirits had lifted absurdly, just to be out of the dark and damp. The air was humid, but there was a little breeze and he could breathe again. He stepped across the roof to the edge of the tank—and his knees went watery with relief when off in the distance he saw the car, undisturbed, a single set of tracks winding through the tall weeds behind it.

Gladly, without thinking, he started to the ladder—but he was a little off balance and before he knew what was happening,
crack
, his foot was through a rotten plank. Suddenly the world pitched sideways: diagonal slash of gray boards, blue sky. For a wild moment—arms windmilling—he flailed to recover his balance, but there was an answering
crack
and he fell through the boards to the waist.

————

Harriet—floating face downward—was seized with a spasm of shuddering. She’d been trying, stealthily, to ease her head to the side so she could draw another little breath through her nose, but with no luck. Her lungs could stand no more; they bucked uncontrollably, heaving for air, and if not air then water, and just as her mouth opened of its own accord, she broke the surface with a shudder and inhaled, deep deep deep.

The relief was so great it nearly sank her. Clumsily, with one hand, she braced herself against the slimy wall and gasped, and gasped, and gasped: air delicious, air pure and profound, air pouring through her body like song. She didn’t know where Danny Ratliff was; she didn’t know if he was watching and she didn’t care; breathing was all that mattered any more, and if this was the last breath of her life, so be it.

From overhead: a loud crack. Though Harriet’s first thought was the pistol, she made no move to get away.
Let him shoot me
, she thought, gasping, eyes damp with gratitude; anything was better than drowning.

Then a slash of sunlight struck bright green and velvety on the dark water, and Harriet looked up just in time to see a pair of legs waggling through a hole in the roof.

Snap went the plank.

————

As the water rushed toward him, Danny was gripped with a sickness of fear. In a confused flash his father’s warning from long ago came back, to hold his breath and keep his mouth shut. Then the water slammed into his ears and he was screaming a closed-off scream, staring out horrified into the green darkness.

Down he plunged. Then—miraculously—his feet struck bottom. Danny jumped—clawing, spluttering, climbing up through the water—and broke through the surface of the water like a torpedo. At the height of the jump, he had just enough time to gulp a breath of air before slipping under again.

Murk and silence. The water, it seemed, was only about a foot over his head. Above him, the surface shone bright green, and again he jumped from the bottom—layers of green that grew paler and paler as he rose—and broke back through into light with a crash. It seemed to work better if he kept his arms to his sides and didn’t beat them around like swimmers were supposed to.

Between jumps, and breaths, he oriented himself. The tank was awash in sun. Light streamed in through the collapsed section of the roof; the slimy green walls were lurid, ghastly. After two or three jumps he caught sight of the ladder, off to his left.

Could he make it? he wondered, as the water closed over his head. If he jumped toward it, gradually, why not? He would have to try for it; it was the best he could do.

He broke the surface. Then—with a painful shock, so sharp that he breathed in at the wrong time—he saw the kid. She was clinging with both hands to the bottom rung of the ladder.

Was he seeing things? he wondered on the way down, coughing, bubbles streaming past his eyes. For the face had struck him oddly; for a weird moment it hadn’t been the kid at all he was looking at, but the old lady:
E. Cleve
.

Choking, gasping, he burst through the water again. No, no doubt about it, it was the kid, and she was still alive: half-drowned
and pinched-looking, eyes dark in a sickly-white face. The afterimage glowed round behind Danny’s eyelids as he sank into the dark water.

Up he jumped, explosively. The girl was struggling now, grappling, swinging a knee up, pulling herself up on the ladder. In a burst of white spray he swiped for her ankle, and missed, and the water closed over his head.

On his next jump, he caught the bottom rung, which was rusted and slippery, and it slid right through his fingers. Up he jumped again, grabbing for it with both hands, and this time got a grip on it. She was above him on the ladder, scrambling up ahead of him like a monkey. Water streamed off her and into his upturned face. With an energy born of rage, Danny hoisted himself up, the rusted metal shrieking beneath his weight like a living creature. Directly above, a rung buckled under the kid’s sneaker; he saw her falter, grab the side rail as her foot struck empty air.
It won’t hold her
, he thought in astonishment, watching her catch herself, right herself, swinging a leg to the top of the tank now,
if it won’t hold her it won’t hold—

The bar snapped in Danny’s fists. In a single, swift, slicing movement—like brittle stems stripped from a branch—down through the ladder he fell, down through the rust-corroded rungs and back into the tank.

————

With rust-reddened hands, Harriet pulled herself up, and fell forward gasping onto the hot boards. Thunder rumbled in the deep blue distance. The sun had gone under a cloud, and the restless breeze tossing in the treetops set her shivering. Between herself and the ladder, the roof was partially caved in, sprung boards slanting downward to an enormous hole; her breath rasped noisy and uncontrollable, a panicky sound that made her feel sick just to hear it, and as she rose to her hands and knees, a sharp pain stabbed her in the side.

Then, from inside the tank, burst a flurry of agitated splashing. She dropped to her stomach; breathing raggedly, she began to scramble around the collapsed portion of the
roof—and her heart clenched as the boards sank sharply under her weight and groaned precariously toward the water.

Back and away she scrambled, panting—just in time, as part of a board snapped off into the water. Then—up through the hole, high in the air—spattered a startling fan of water, flung drops striking her face and arms.

A strangled howl—wet and burbling—spouted violently from below. Stiff now, practically waxen with terror, Harriet inched forward on her hands and knees; though looking down into the hole made her dizzy, she couldn’t help herself. Daylight flooded in through the broken roof; the inside of the tank glowed a lush, emerald green: the green of swamps and jungles, of Mowgli’s abandoned cities. The grass-green blanket of algae had broken up like pack ice, black veins cracking the opaque surface of the water.

Then
splash:
up burst Danny Ratliff, white-faced and gasping, hair plastered dark on his forehead. His hand grappled and groped, grasping for the ladder—but there wasn’t any more ladder, Harriet saw, blinking down at the green water. It had broken off about five feet above the surface, too high for him to reach.

As she watched in horror, the hand sank into the water, the last part of him to vanish: broken fingernails, clutching at the air. Then up bobbed his head—not quite high enough, eyelids fluttering, an ugly wet gurgle in his breath.

He could see her, up top; he was trying to say something. Like a wingless bird, he guttered and struggled in the water, and his struggles gave her a feeling that she could not name. The words broke from his mouth in an indistinct burble as he slipped under, flailing, and was gone, nothing of him visible but a weedy tuft of hair, bubbles foaming white at the slimy surface.

All quiet, bubbles boiling. Up he burst again: his face melted-looking somehow, his mouth a black hole. He was clutching at some floating boards but they wouldn’t hold his weight and as he crashed back into the water his wide eyes met hers—accusatory, helpless, the eyes of a guillotined head held up before a mob. His mouth worked; he tried to speak,
some glubbing gasping incomprehensible word that was swallowed as he sank.

A strong wind blew, raising goose bumps on Harriet’s arms, shivering the leaves on all the trees; and all at once, in a single breath, the sky darkened to slate-gray. Then, in a long sweeping gust, raindrops rattled across the roof like a shower of pebbles.

It was a warm, drenching, tropical-feeling rain: a squall like the ones that blew in on the Gulf Coast during hurricane season. It clattered loudly on the broken roof—but not so loudly that the gurgles and splashing from below were dinned out. Raindrops leaped like little silver fish on the surface of the water.

Harriet was seized by a fit of coughing. The water had gone in her mouth and up her nose, and the rotten taste soaked her to her marrow; now, with the rain driving in her face, she spat on the boards, turned on her back and rolled her head to and fro, driven nearly mad with the wretched noise that was echoing up the tank—a noise, it occurred to her, that probably was not much different from the noises that Robin had made as he was strangling to death. She’d imagined it happening clean and quick, no floundering or ugly wet strangles, only clapped hands and a puff of smoke. And the sweetness of the thought struck her: how lovely to vanish off the face of the earth, what a sweet dream to vanish now, out of her body:
poof
, like a spirit. Chains clattering empty to the floor.

Steam rose from the hot, verdant ground. Far below, in the weeds, the Trans Am was hunched in a disturbing, confidential stillness, raindrops shimmering on the hood in a fine white mist; a couple might have been inside it, kissing. Often, in the years to come, she would see it just so—blind, intimate, unreflecting—off in the thin speechless margins of her dreams.

————

It was two o’clock when Harriet—after pausing to listen (all clear)—let herself in through the back door. Apart from Mr. Godfrey (who didn’t seem to have recognized her), and Mrs. Fountain, who had given her an exceedingly strange
look from the porch (dirty as she was, striped with dark filaments of slime that had stuck to her skin and baked on in the heat), she had encountered no one. Cautiously, after looking both ways, she scurried down the hall to the downstairs bathroom and bolted the door behind her. The taste of decay fumed and smoldered in her mouth, unendurable. She stripped off her clothes (the smell was horrific; the Girl Scout shirt coming over her head made her gag) and threw them into the bathtub and turned the faucets on them.

Edie often told the story about the time she almost died from an oyster at a New Orleans wedding. “Sickest I’ve
ever
been.” She’d known the oyster was bad, she said, the moment she bit into it; she’d spit it right out in her napkin, but within hours collapsed and had to be taken to Baptist Hospital. In much the same way, from the instant she tasted the water in the tank, Harriet had known it was going to make her sick. The rottenness had seeped into her flesh. Nothing would wash it away. She rinsed her hands and mouth; she gargled with Listerine and spat it out, cupped her hands under the cold tap and drank and drank and drank, but the smell permeated everything, even the clean water. It rose from the dirty clothes in the bathtub; it rose ripe and warm from the pores of her skin. Harriet dumped half a box of Mr. Bubble into the tub and ran the hot water until the foam churned up outrageously. But even under the numbing mouthwash, the taste lingered ugly like a stain on Harriet’s tongue, and it called up vividly and quite particularly the bloated creature half-sunk and bobbing against the dark wall of the tank.

A knock at the door. “Harriet,” called her mother, “is that you?” Harriet never took baths in the downstairs bathroom.

“Yes maam,” called Harriet, after an instant, over the pounding water.

“Are you making a mess in there?”

“No, maam,” called Harriet, looking bleakly at the mess.

“You know I don’t like you to bathe in that bathroom.”

Harriet couldn’t answer. A wave of cramps had gripped her. Sitting on the side of the tub, staring at the bolted door, she clamped both hands over her mouth and rocked back and forth.

“There’d better not be a mess in there,” her mother called.

The water Harriet had drunk from the tap was coming right back up. With one eye on the door, she got out of the bathtub and—doubled over by the pain in her abdomen—she tiptoed to the commode as quietly as she could. As soon as she removed her hands from her mouth, out it poured,
whoosh
, a clear, startling gush of putrid water that smelled exactly like the stagnant water Danny Ratliff had drowned in.