The Little Friend

  Amongst the slippery tinfoil lumps, Harriet caught sight of a grape Popsicle. With difficulty, she extricated it, thinking enviously of the deep-freeze at Hely’s house which was crammed with Fudgsicles and frozen pizzas, chicken pot pies and every kind of TV dinner imaginable.…

  With the Popsicle, she went out to the porch—without bothering to put the chair back where she’d got it—and lay on her back in the swing, reading The Jungle Book. Slowly, the color drained from the day. The rich greens of the garden faded to lavender, and as they dulled from lavender to purple-black, the crickets began to shriek and a couple of lightning bugs popped on and off, uncertainly, in the overgrown dark spot by Mrs. Fountain’s fence.

  Absentmindedly, Harriet let the Popsicle stick fall to the floor from between her fingers. She had not moved for half an hour or more. The base of her skull was propped on the swing’s wooden arm at a devilishly uncomfortable angle but still she remained motionless except to draw the book closer and closer to her nose.

  Soon it was too dark to see. Harriet’s scalp prickled and there was a throbbing pressure behind her eyeballs but she stayed where she was, stiff neck and all. Some parts of The Jungle Book she knew almost by heart: Mowgli’s lessons with Bagheera and Baloo; the attack, with Kaa, upon the Bandar-log. Later, less adventurous parts—in which Mowgli began to be dissatisfied with his life in the jungle—she often did not read at all. She did not care for children’s books in which the children grew up, as what “growing up” entailed (in life as in books) was a swift and inexplicable dwindling of character; out of a clear blue sky the heroes and heroines abandoned their adventures for some dull sweetheart, got married and had families, and generally started acting like a bunch of cows.

  Somebody was cooking steaks outside on a grill. They smelled good. Harriet’s neck hurt in earnest, but even though she had to strain to see the darkening page she was strangely reluctant to get up and switch on the light. Her attention slipped from the words to drift without purpose—mindlessly brushing along the top of the hedge opposite, as if along a length of scratchy black wool—until seized by the neck and marched back forcibly to the story.

  Deep in the jungle slumbered a ruined city: collapsed shrines, vine-choked tanks and terraces, decaying chambers full of gold and jewels about which no one, including Mowgli, gave a fig. Within the ruin dwelt the snakes that Kaa the python referred to, rather contemptuously, as The Poison People. And as she read on, Mowgli’s jungle began to bleed stealthily into the humid, half-tropical darkness of her own back yard, infecting it with a wild, shadowy, dangerous feel: frogs singing, birds screaming in the creeper-draped trees. Mowgli was a boy; but he was also a wolf. And she was herself—Harriet—but partly something else.

  Black wings glided over her. Empty space. Harriet’s thoughts sank and trailed into silence. Suddenly, she was not sure how long she had been lying in the swing. Why wasn’t she in her bed? Was it later than she thought? A darkness slid across her mind … black wind … cold.…

  She started, so hard that the swing lurched—something flapping in her face, something oily, struggling, she couldn’t get her breath.…

  Frantically, she slapped and batted at the air, floundering in space and the swing creaking and not knowing which way was up or down until, somewhere in the back of her mind, she realized the bang she’d just heard was her library book, fallen to the floor.

  Harriet stopped struggling and lay still. The swing’s violent rocking slowed again, and quieted, the boards of the porch ceiling sweeping slower and slower overhead and at last coming to a stop. In the glassy stillness she lay there, thinking. If she hadn’t come along, the bird would have died anyway, but that didn’t change the fact that it was she who had actually killed it.

  The library book lay open and face up upon the floorboards. She rolled on her stomach to reach for it. A car swung around the corner and down George Street; and as the headlights swept across the porch, an illustration of the White Cobra was illumined, like a road sign flashing up suddenly at night, with the caption beneath:

  They came to take the treasure away many years ago.

  I spoke to them in the dark, and they lay still.

  Harriet rolled back over and lay very still for a number of minutes; she stood, creakily, and stretched her arms over her head. Then she limped inside, through the too-bright dining room, where Allison sat alone at the dining-room table eating cold mashed potatoes from a white bowl.

  Be still, O little one, for I am Death. Another cobra had said that, in something else by Kipling. The cobras in his stories were heartless but they spoke beautifully, like wicked kings in the Old Testament.

  Harriet walked through to the kitchen, to the wall phone, and dialed Hely’s house. Four rings. Five. Then someone picked up. Gabble of noise in the background. “No, you look better without it,” said Hely’s mother to someone, and then, into the receiver: “Hello?”

  “It’s Harriet. May I speak to Hely, please?”

  “Harriet! Of course you can, Sweet Pea.…” The receiver dropped. Harriet, her eyes still unaccustomed to the light, blinked at the dining-room chair which still stood by the refrigerator. Hely’s mother’s little nicknames and endearments always caught her by surprise: sweet pea was not the kind of thing that people generally called Harriet.

  Commotion: a scraped chair, Pemberton’s insinuating laughter. Hely’s irritated whine rose above it, piercingly.

  A door slammed. “Hey!” His voice was gruff but excited. “Harriet?”

  She caught the receiver between her ear and shoulder and turned to face the wall. “Hely, if we tried, do you think we could catch a poisonous snake?”

  There was an awestruck silence, during which Harriet realized, with pleasure, he understood exactly what she was getting at.

  ————

  “Copperheads? Cottonmouths? Which is more poisonous?”

  It was several hours later and they were sitting on the back steps of Harriet’s house in the dark. Hely had gone nearly berserk waiting for the birthday excitement to die down so he could slip out and meet her. His mother—made suspicious by his vanished appetite—had leapt to the humiliating assumption that he was constipated and had hovered for ages querying him about his toilet intimacies, offering him laxatives. After she’d finally kissed him goodnight, reluctantly, and gone upstairs with his father, he’d lain open-eyed and stiff beneath the covers for half an hour or more, as zinged-up as if he’d drunk a gallon of Coca-Cola, as if he’d just seen the new James Bond movie, as if it was Christmas Eve.

  Sneaking out of the house—tiptoeing down the hall, easing the squeaky back door open, an inch at a time—had zinged him up even more. After the purring, air-conditioned chill of his bedroom, the night air pressed heavy and very hot; his hair was stuck to the back of his neck and he couldn’t quite catch his breath. Harriet, on the step below, sat with her knees under her chin eating a cold chicken leg that he’d brought her from his house.

  “What’s the difference between a cottonmouth and a copperhead?” she said. Her lips, in the moonlight, were slightly greasy from the chicken.

  “I thought it was all just one damn snake,” said Hely. He felt delirious.

  “Copperheads are different. It’s cottonmouths and water moccasins that are the same snake.”

  “A water moccasin will attack you if it feels like it,” said Hely gladly, repeating, word for word, something Pemberton had said to him a couple of hours earlier when Hely had questioned him. Hely was deathly afraid of snakes and did not even like to look at pictures of snakes in the encyclopedia. “They’re real aggressive.”

  “Do they stay in the water all the time?”

  “A copperhead is about two feet long, real thin, real red,” said Hely, repeating something else that Pemberton had said since he didn’t know the answer to her question. “They don’t like the water.”

  “Would he be easier to catch?”

  “Oh yeah,” said Hely, though he had no idea. Whenever Hely came acros
s a snake he knew—unerringly, regardless of size or color, from the point or roundness of its head—whether it was poisonous or not, but that was as far as his knowledge went. All his life, he had called all poisonous snakes moccasin, and any poisonous snake on land was, in his mind, simply a water moccasin that wasn’t in water at the moment.

  Harriet threw the chicken bone off the side of the steps and, after wiping her fingers on her bare shins, opened the paper towel and began to eat the slice of birthday cake Hely had brought. Neither child spoke for some moments. Even in the daytime, a dingy, shut-up vapor of neglect hung over Harriet’s back yard, which was tarnished-looking somehow, and colder than the other yards on George Street. And at night, when the sags and tangles and rat’s nests of vegetation blackened, and massed together, it practically twitched with hidden life. Mississippi was full of snakes. All their lives Hely and Harriet had heard stories of fishermen bitten by cottonmouths twining up paddles or tumbling into canoes from low, overhanging trees; of plumbers and exterminators and furnace repairmen, bitten beneath houses; of water skiers toppling into submerged nests of moccasins, floating up blotched and glassy-eyed, swollen so tight that they bobbed in the wash of the motorboat like blow-up pool toys. They both knew not to walk in the woods in the summer without boots and long pants, never to turn over big rocks or step over big logs without looking first on the other side, to stay away from tall grass and brush piles and swampy water and culverts and crawl-spaces and suspicious holes. Hely reflected, not without discomfort, on his mother’s repeated warnings to be careful of the overgrown hedges, the dank, long-abandoned goldfish pond and the rotted lumber piles in Harriet’s yard. It’s not her fault, she said, her mother doesn’t keep the place cleaned up like she should, just don’t you let me catch you running around barefoot over there.…

  “There’s a nest of snakes—little red ones like you say—under the hedge. Chester says they’re poison. Last winter when the ground froze, I found a ball of them like so—” she drew a softball-sized circle in mid-air. “With ice on them.”

  “Who’s scared of dead snakes?”

  “They weren’t dead. Chester said they’d come to life if they thawed out.”

  “Ugh!”

  “He set the whole ball of them on fire.” It was a memory that had stayed with Harriet a little too vividly. In her mind’s eye, she could still see Chester, in high boots, splashing the snakes with gasoline out in the flat, wintry yard, holding the gas can from his body at arm’s length. After he threw the match, the flame was a surreal, orange ball that cast no warmth or light upon the dull greeny-black of the hedge behind. Even at that distance, the snakes had seemed to writhe, glowing suddenly into a horrible life; one in particular had separated its head from the mass and weaved back and forth blindly, like a windshield wiper on a car. As they burned, they’d made a hideous crackling noise, one of the worst noises Harriet had ever heard. All the rest of that winter and most of the spring there’d been a small pile of greasy ash and blackened vertebrae in the spot.

  Absent-mindedly, she picked up the piece of birthday cake, then put it down again. “That kind of snake,” she said, “Chester told me, you can’t really get rid of them. They might go away for a little while if you really get after them, but once they get to living in a place and liking it, they’ll come back sooner or later.”

  Hely was thinking of all the times that he had taken the shortcut through that hedge. Without his shoes on. Aloud, he said: “Do you know that Reptile Playland out on the old highway? Near the Petrified Forest? It’s a gas station, too. Creepy old hare-lip guy runs it.”

  Harriet turned to stare at him. “You’ve been there?”

  “Yep.”

  “You mean your mother stopped there?”

  “Gosh no,” said Hely, slightly embarrassed. “Just Pem and me. On the way back from a ball game.” Even Pemberton, even Pem, had not really seemed all that keen on stopping at the Reptile Playland. They’d been low on gas.

  “I never knew anybody who actually went there.”

  “The man there is scary. He’s got tattoos of snakes all up and down his arms.” And scars, too, like he’d been bitten plenty of times, Hely had noticed while he was filling up the tank. And no teeth, and no dentures, either—which had given his grin a soft, horrible, snake-like quality. Worst of all, a boa constrictor had been twined around his neck: want to pet him, son? he’d said, leaning into the car, pinning Hely with his flat, sun-dazzled eyes.

  “What’s it like? The Reptile Playland?”

  “Stinks. Like fish. I touched a boa constrictor,” he added. He’d been afraid not to; he’d been afraid that the snake man might throw it on him if he didn’t. “It was cold. Like a car seat in winter.”

  “How many snakes does he have?”

  “Oh, man. Snakes in fish tanks, this whole wall of them. Then a ton more of snakes just laying out free. Out in this fenced part called the Rattlesnake Ranch? There was another building out in the back with words and pictures and junk painted all over the sides.”

  “What kept them from climbing out?”

  “I don’t know. They weren’t moving around too much. They looked sort of sick.”

  “I don’t want a sick snake.”

  A strange thought struck Hely. What if Harriet’s brother hadn’t died when she was little? If he was alive, he might be like Pemberton: teasing her, messing with her stuff. She probably wouldn’t even like him much.

  He pulled his yellow hair up in a ponytail with one hand, fanned the back of his neck with the other. “I’d rather have a slow snake than one of those fast ones that follow your ass,” he said cheerfully. “One time I saw on TV about Black Mambas? They’re about ten feet long? And what they do, is, they raise up on their first eight feet and chase after you about twenty miles an hour with their mouths wide open, and when they catch you,” he said, raising his voice over Harriet’s, “what they do is, they hit you right in the face.”

  “Does he have one of those?”

  “He has every snake in the world. Plus, I forgot to say, they’re so poisonous you die in ten seconds. Forget about the snakebite kit. You have had it.”

  Harriet’s silence was overpowering. With her dark hair, and her arms around her knees, she looked like a little Chinese pirate.

  “You know what we need?” she said presently. “A car.”

  “Yeah!” said Hely, brightly, after a sharp, stunned pause, cursing himself for bragging to her that he knew how to drive.

  He glanced at her, sideways, then leaned back stiff-armed on his palms and looked at the stars. Can’t or no was never what you wanted to have to say to Harriet. He had seen her jump off rooftops, attack kids twice her size, kick and bite the nurses during the five-in-one booster inoculations in kindergarten.

  Not knowing what to say, he rubbed his eyes. He was sleepy, but unpleasantly so—hot, and prickly, and like he was going to have nightmares. He thought of the skinned rattlesnake he’d seen hanging from a fence post at the Reptile Playland: red, muscular, twined with blue veins.

  “Harriet,” he said, aloud, “wouldn’t it be easier to call the cops?”

  “It would be a lot easier,” she said without missing a beat, and he felt a wave of affection for her. Good old Harriet: you could snap your fingers and change the subject just like that, and there she was, she stayed right with you.

  “I think that’s what we should do, then. We can call from that pay phone by City Hall and say we know who killed your brother. I know how to talk in a voice exactly like an old woman.”

  Harriet looked at him like he was insane.

  “Why should I let other people punish him?” she said.

  The expression on her face made him uncomfortable. Hely glanced away. His eyes lit on the greasy paper towel on the steps, with the half-eaten cake lying on top of it. For the truth of the situation was that he would do whatever she asked of him, whatever it was, and they both knew it.

  ————

  The copperhead was
small, only a little over a foot long, and by far the smallest of the five that Hely and Harriet had spotted that morning within the space of an hour. It was lying very quietly, in a slack S shape, in some sparse weeds coming up through a layer of builder’s sand just off the cul-de-sac in Oak Lawn Estates, a housing development out past the Country Club.

  All the houses in Oak Lawn were less than seven years old: mock Tudor, blocky ranch and contemporary, even a couple of fake antebellums of new, spanking-red brick, with ornamental columns tacked on to their facades. Though big, and fairly expensive, their newness gave them a raw, unfriendly feel. In the back of the subdivision, where Hely and Harriet had parked their bicycles, many of the houses were still under construction—barren, staked-off plots, stacked with tarpaper and lumber, sheetrock and insulation, bracketed with skeletons of new yellow pine through which the sky streamed a feverish blue.

  Unlike shady old George Street, built before the turn of the century, there were few trees of any size and no sidewalks at all. Virtually every scrap of vegetation had toppled to the chainsaw and the bulldozer: water oaks, post oaks, some of which—according to an arborist from the state university who led a doomed attempt to save them—were standing when La Salle came down the Mississippi River in 1682. Most of the topsoil their roots had held in place had washed into the creek and down the river. The hard-pan had been bulldozed down into low-lying areas to make the land level, and little would grow in the poor, sour-smelling earth that was left. Grass sprouted sparsely, if at all; the trucked-in magnolias and dogwoods withered swiftly and died down to sticks, protruding from hopeful circles of mulch and decorative edging. The baked expanses of clay—red as Mars, littered with sand and sawdust—butted starkly against the very margin of the asphalt, which was so black and so new that it still looked sticky. Behind, to the south, lay a teeming marsh, which rose and flooded the development each spring.