The Little Friend (87 page)

Then, with a shock, she realized that she’d heard her father say Danny Ratliff’s name.

“Isn’t that too bad?” he was saying. “They were all talking about it, down in the cafeteria.”

“What?”

“Danny Ratliff. Robin’s little friend, don’t you remember? He used to come up in the yard and play sometimes.”

Friend?
thought Harriet.

Fully awake now, her heart pounding so wildly that it was an effort not to tremble, she lay with her eyes closed, and listened. She heard her father take a sip of coffee. Then he continued: “Came by the house. Afterwards. Raggedy little boy, don’t you remember him? Knocked on the door and said he was sorry he wasn’t at the funeral, he didn’t have a ride.”

But that’s not true
, thought Harriet, panicked now.
They hated each other. Ida told me so
.

“Oh, yes!” Her mother’s voice lively now, with a kind of pain. “Poor little thing. I do remember him. Oh, that’s too bad.”

“It’s strange.” Harriet’s father sighed, heavily. “Seems like yesterday he and Robin were playing around the yard.”

Harriet lay rigid with horror.

“I was so sorry,” said Harriet’s mother, “I was
so
sorry when I heard he’d started getting into trouble a while ago.”

“It was bound to happen, with a family like that.”

“Well, they’re not all bad. I saw Roy Dial in the hall and he told me that one of the other brothers had dropped in to see about Harriet.”

“Oh, really?” Her father took another long sip of his coffee. “Do you think he knew who she was?”

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised. That’s probably why he stopped in.”

Their talk turned to other things as Harriet—seized by
fear—lay with her face pressed in the pillow, very still. Never had it occurred to her that she might be wrong in her suspicions about Danny Ratliff—simply wrong. What if he hadn’t killed Robin at all?

She had not bargained for the black horror that fell over her at this thought, as if of a trap clicking shut behind her, and immediately she tried to push the thought from her mind. Danny Ratliff was guilty, she knew it, knew it for a fact; it was the only explanation that made any sense. She knew what he’d done, even if nobody else did.

But all the same, doubt had come down on her suddenly and with great force, and with it the fear that she’d stumbled blindly into something terrible. She tried to calm herself down. Danny Ratliff had killed Robin; she knew it was true, it had to be. And yet when she tried to remind herself exactly how she knew it was true, the reasons were no longer so clear in her mind as they had been and now, when she tried to recall them, she couldn’t.

She bit the inside of her cheek. Why had she been so sure it was him? At one time, she was very sure; the idea had
felt
right, and that was the important thing. But—like the foul taste in her mouth—a queasy fear now lingered close, and would not leave her. Why had she been so sure? Yes, Ida had told her a lot of things—but all of a sudden those accounts (the quarrels, the stolen bicycle) no longer seemed quite so convincing. Didn’t Ida hate Hely, for absolutely no reason? And when Hely came over to play, didn’t Ida often get outraged on Harriet’s behalf without bothering to find out whose fault the quarrel was?

Maybe she was right. Maybe he
had
done it. But now, how would she ever know for sure? With a sickening feeling, she remembered the hand clawing up from the green water.

Why didn’t I ask?
she thought.
He was right there
. But no, she was too frightened, all she’d wanted was to get away.

“Oh, look!” said Harriet’s mother suddenly, standing up. “She’s awake!”

Harriet froze. She’d been so caught up in her thoughts, she’d forgotten to keep her eyes shut.

“Look who’s here, Harriet!”

Her father rose, advanced to the bed. Even in the shadowy room, Harriet could tell that he had put on a bit of weight since she had last seen him.

“Haven’t seen old Daddy in a while, have you?” he said. When he was in a jocular mood, he liked to refer to himself as “old Daddy.” “How’s my girl?”

Harriet suffered herself to be kissed on the forehead and cuffed on the cheek—briskly, with a cupped hand. This was her father’s customary endearment, but Harriet disliked it intensely, especially from the hand that sometimes slapped her in anger.

“How you doing?” he was saying. He’d been smoking cigars; she could smell it on him. “You’ve fooled these doctors but good, girl!” He said it as if she’d pulled off some great academic or sports triumph.

Harriet’s mother was hovering anxiously. “She may not feel like talking, Dix.”

Her father said, without turning around: “Well, she doesn’t have to talk if she doesn’t feel like it.”

Looking up into her father’s stout red face, his quick, observant eyes, Harriet had an intense urge to ask him about Danny Ratliff. But she was afraid.

“What?” her father said.

“I didn’t say anything.” Harriet’s voice surprised her, it was so scratchy and feeble.

“No, but you were about to.” Her father regarded her cordially. “What is it?”

“Leave her alone, Dix,” said her mother in a low murmur.

Her father turned his head—quickly, without saying a word—in a manner that Harriet knew very well.

“But she’s tired!”

“I
know
she’s tired.
I’m
tired,” said Harriet’s father, in the cold and excessively polite voice. “I drove eight hours in the car to get here. Now I’m not supposed to speak to her?”

————

After they finally left—the visiting hours were over at nine—Harriet was much too afraid to go to sleep, and sat up
in bed with her eyes on the door for fear that the preacher would come back. An un-announced visit from her father was in itself occasion for anxiety—especially given the new threat of moving up to Nashville—but now he was the least of her worries; who knew what the preacher might do, with Danny Ratliff dead?

Then she thought of the gun cabinet, and her heart sank. Her father didn’t check it every time he came home—usually only in hunting season—but it would be just her luck if he
did
check it. Maybe throwing the gun in the river had been a mistake. If Hely had hidden it in the yard, she could have put it back where it belonged, but it was too late for that now.

Never had she dreamed he’d be home so soon. Of course, she hadn’t actually shot anyone with the gun—for some reason she kept forgetting that—and if Hely was telling the truth, it was at the bottom of the river now. If her father checked the cabinet, and noticed it was missing, he couldn’t connect it to her, could he?

And then there was Hely. She’d told him almost nothing of the real story—and that was good—but she hoped he wouldn’t think too much about the fingerprints. Would he realize eventually that nothing prevented him from telling on her? By the time he understood that it was her word against his—by then, maybe enough time would have passed.

People didn’t pay attention. They didn’t care; they would forget. Soon whatever trail she had left would be quite cold. That was what had happened with Robin, hadn’t it? The trail had got cold. And the ugly thought dawned on Harriet that Robin’s killer—whoever he was—must have at some point sat thinking some of these very same thoughts.

But I didn’t kill anybody
, she told herself, staring at the coverlet.
He drowned. I couldn’t help it
.

“What, hun?” said the nurse who had come in to check her IV bottle. “Need something?”

Harriet sat very still, with her knuckles in her mouth, staring at the white coverlet until the nurse had departed.

No: she hadn’t killed anybody. But it was her fault he was dead. And maybe he had never hurt Robin at all.

Thoughts like these made Harriet feel sick, and she tried—willfully—to think of something else. She had done what she had to; it was silly to start doubting herself and her methods at this stage. She thought of the pirate Israel Hands, floating in the blood-warm waters off the
Hispaniola
, and there was something nightmarish and gorgeous in those heroic shallows: horror, false skies, vast delirium. The ship was lost; she had tried to recapture it all on her own. She had almost been a hero. But now, she feared, she wasn’t a hero at all, but something else entirely.

At the end—at the very end, as the winds billowed and beat in the walls of the tent, as a single candle flame guttered in a lost continent—Captain Scott had written with numbed fingers in a small notebook of his failure. Yes, he’d struck out bravely for the impossible, reached the dead untraveled center of the world—but for nothing. All the daydreams had failed him. And she realized how sad he must have been out there on the ice fields, in the Antarctic night, with Evans and Titus Oates lost already, under immense snows, and Birdie and Dr. Wilson still and silent in the sleeping bags, drifting away, dreaming of green fields.

Bleakly, Harriet gazed out into the antiseptic gloom. A weight lay upon her, and a darkness. She’d learned things she never knew, things she had no idea of knowing, and yet in a strange way it was the hidden message of Captain Scott: that victory and collapse were sometimes the same thing.

————

Harriet woke late, after a troubled sleep, to a depressing breakfast tray: fruit gelatin, apple juice, and—mysteriously—a small dish of boiled white rice. All night long, she’d had bad dreams about her father standing oppressively around her bed, walking back and forth and scolding her about something she’d broken, something that belonged to him.

Then she realized where she was, and her stomach contracted with fear. Rubbing her eyes in confusion she sat up to take the tray—and saw Edie in the armchair by her bed. She was drinking coffee—not coffee from the hospital cafeteria,
but coffee she’d brought from home, in the plaid thermos—and reading the morning newspaper.

“Oh, good, you’re awake,” she said. “Your mother is coming out soon.”

Her manner was crisp and perfectly normal. Harriet tried to force her uneasiness out of her mind. Nothing had changed overnight, had it?

“You need to eat your breakfast,” said Edie. “Today is a big day for you, Harriet. After the neurologist checks you out, they may even discharge you this afternoon.”

Harriet made an effort to compose herself. She must try to pretend that everything was all right; she must try to convince the neurologist—even if it meant lying to him—that she was perfectly well. It was vital that she be allowed to go home; she must concentrate all her energies on escaping the hospital before the preacher came back to her room or somebody figured out what was going on. Dr. Breedlove had said something about unwashed lettuce. She must hold on to that, fix it in her mind, bring it up if she was questioned; she must keep them at all costs from making the connection between her illness and the water tower.

With a violent exertion of will, she turned her attention away from her thoughts and to her breakfast tray. She would eat the rice; it would be like eating breakfast in China. Here I am, she told herself, I’m Marco Polo, I’m having breakfast with the Kublai Khan. But I don’t know how to eat with chopsticks, so I’m eating with this fork instead.

Edie had gone back to her newspaper. Harriet glanced at the front of it—and stopped with the fork halfway to her mouth.
MURDER SUSPECT FOUND
, read the headline. In the picture, two men were lifting a limp, sagging body by the armpits. The face was ghastly white, with long hair plastered down at the sides, and so distorted that it looked less like an actual face than a sculpture of melted wax: a twisted black hole for a mouth and big black eyeholes like a skull. But—distorted as it was—there was no question that it was Danny Ratliff.

Harriet sat up straight in bed, and tilted her head sideways, trying to read the article from where she sat. Edie
turned the page and—noticing Harriet’s stare, and the odd angle of her head—put down the paper and said sharply: “Are you sick? Do you need me to fetch the basin?”

“May I see the paper?”

“Certainly.” Edie reached into the back section, pulled out the funnies, handed them to Harriet, and then, tranquilly, returned to her reading.

“They’re raising our city taxes again,” she said. “I don’t know what they do with all this money they ask for. They’ll build some more roads they never finish, that’s what they’ll do with it.”

Furiously, Harriet stared down at the Comics page without actually seeing it.
MURDER SUSPECT FOUND
. If Danny Ratliff was a suspect—if
suspect
was the word they’d used—that meant he was alive, didn’t it?

She stole another glance at the paper. Edie had now folded it in half, so the front page was invisible, and had started work on the crossword puzzle.

“I hear Dixon paid you a visit last night,” she said, with the coolness that crept into her voice whenever she mentioned Harriet’s father. “And how was that?”

“Fine.” Harriet—her breakfast forgotten—sat upright in bed and tried to conceal her agitation, but she felt that if she didn’t see the front page, and find out what had happened, she would die.

He doesn’t even know my name
, she told herself. At least she didn’t think he knew it. If her own name was mentioned in the paper, Edie would not be sitting so calmly in front of her at the moment, working the crossword puzzle.

He tried to drown me
, she thought. He would hardly want to go around telling people about that.

At length, she worked up the courage and said: “Edie, who is that man on the front page of the paper?”

Edie looked blank; she turned the newspaper over. “Oh, that,” she said. “He killed somebody. He was hiding from the police up in that old water tower and got trapped up there and nearly drowned. I expect he was pretty glad when somebody showed up to get him.” She looked at the paper for a moment. “There are a bunch of people named Ratliff who live out past
the river,” she said. “I seem to remember an old Ratliff man that worked out at Tribulation for a while. Tatty and I were scared to death of him because he didn’t have his front teeth.”

“What did they do with him?” said Harriet.