The Little Friend

  Without turning around, Allison said: “He comes every day.”

  Harriet shaded her eyes with her hand. On the top of Mrs. Fountain’s chimney, pocketed neatly between a pair of bricks, stood a red-winged blackbird: spruce, soldierly in its bearing, with steady sharp eyes and a fierce slash of scarlet cutting like a military epaulet across each wing.

  “He’s a funny one,” said Ida. “Here’s how he sound.” She pursed her lips and, expertly, imitated the red-winged blackbird’s call: not the liquid piping of the wood thrush, which dipped down into the dry tcch tchh tchh of the cricket’s birr and up again in delirious, sobbing trills; not the clear, three-note whistle of the chickadee or even the blue jay’s rough cry, which was like a rusty gate creaking. This was an abrupt, whirring, unfamiliar cry, a scream of warning—congeree!—which choked itself off on a subdued, fluting note.

  Allison laughed aloud. “Look!” she said, rising up on her knees—for the bird had suddenly perked up, cocking its glossy fine head intelligently to the side. “He hears you!”

  “Do it again!” said Harriet. Ida wouldn’t do bird-calls for them just any old time; you had to catch her in the right mood.

  “Yes, Ida, please!”

  But Ida only laughed and shook her head. “Yall remember, don’t you,” she said, “the old story how he got his red wing?”

  “No,” said Harriet and Allison, at once, though they did. Now that they were older, Ida told stories less and less, and that was too bad because Ida’s stories were wild and strange and often very frightening: stories about drowned children, and ghosts in the woods, and the buzzard’s hunting party; about gold-toothed raccoons that bit babies in their cradles, and bewitched saucers of milk that turned to blood in the night.…

  “Well, once upon a time, in the long-ago,” said Ida, “there was a ugly little hunchback man so mad at everything he decide to burn up the whole world. So he taken a torch in his hand, just as mad as he could be, and walked down to the big river where all the animals lived. Because back in the old days, there wasn’t a whole lot of little second-class rivers and creeks like you have now. There was only the one.”

  Over on Mrs. Fountain’s chimney, the bird battered his wings—quick, businesslike—and flew away.

  “Oh, look. There he goes. Aint want to hear my story.” With a heavy sigh, Ida glanced at the clock, and—to Harriet’s dismay—stretched and stood up. “And it’s time for me to be getting home.”

  “Tell us anyway!”

  “Tomorrow I’ll tell you.”

  “Ida, don’t go!” cried Harriet as Ida Rhew broke the small, contented silence that followed by heaving a sigh and moving towards the door, slowly, as if her legs hurt her: poor Ida. “Please?”

  “Oh, I’ll be back tomorrow,” said Ida, wryly, without turning around, hoisting her brown paper grocery bag underneath her arm, trudging heavily away. “Never you worry.”

  ————

  “Listen, Danny,” said Farish, “Reese is leaving, so we’re going to have to go on down to the square and listen to Eugene’s—” abstractedly, he waved his hand in the air. “You know. That church bullshit.”

  “Why?” said Danny, pushing back his chair, “why we got to do that?”

  “The boy is leaving tomorrow. Early tomorrow, knowing him.”

  “Well, come on, we’ll just run down to the Mission and put the stuff in his truck right now.”

  “We can’t. He’s went off somewhere.”

  “Damn.” Danny sat and thought for a moment. “Where you planning on hiding it? The engine?”

  “I know places that the FBI could tear that truck apart and never find it.”

  “How long’s it going to take you? … I said, how long’s it going to take you,” Danny repeated, when he saw a hostile light spark up suddenly in Farish’s eyes. “To hide the stuff.” Farish was slightly deaf in one ear, from the gunshot; and when he was drugged up and paranoid, sometimes he misunderstood things in a really twisted way, thought you’d told him to go fuck himself when really you’d asked him to shut the door or pass the salt.

  “How long you say?” Farish held up five fingers.

  “So, all right now. Here’s what we do. Why don’t we skip the preaching and go on over there to the Mission afterwards? I’ll keep em busy upstairs while you go out and put the package in the truck, wherever, and that’s all there is to it.”

  “Tell you what bothers me,” said Farish abruptly. He sat down at the table beside Danny and began to clean his fingernails with a pocketknife. “It was a car over there at Gene’s just now. He called me about it.”

  “Car? What kind of a car?”

  “Unmarked. Parked out front.” Farish heaved a bilious sigh. “Took off when they saw Gene looking out the window at em.”

  “It’s probably nothing.”

  “What?” Farish reared back, and blinked. “Don’t be whispering at me, now. I can’t stand it when you whisper.”

  “I said it’s nothing.” Danny looked at his brother intently, then shook his head. “What would anybody want with Eugene?”

  “It’s not Eugene they want,” said Farish, darkly. “It’s me. I’m telling you, there’s government agencies got a file on me this thick.”

  “Farish.” You didn’t want to get Farish started on the Federal Government, not when he was cranked up like this. He’d rant all night and into the next day.

  “Look here,” he said, “if you’d just go on and pay that tax—”

  Farish shot a quick, angry glance at him.

  “There was a letter come just the other day. If you don’t pay your taxes, Farish, they’re going to come after you.”

  “This isn’t about any tax,” said Farish. “The government’s been surveilling my ass for twenty years.”

  ————

  Harriet’s mother pushed open the door to the kitchen, where Harriet—head in hands—sat slumped at the table. Hoping to be asked what was wrong, she slumped down even further; but her mother did not notice her and went directly to the freezer, where she dug out the striped gallon bucket of peppermint ice cream.

  Harriet watched her as she reached up on tiptoe to get a wine glass from the top shelf, and then, laboriously, scooped a few spoonfuls of ice cream into it. The nightgown she had on was very old, with filmy ice-blue skirts and ribbons at the throat. When Harriet was small, she had been captivated by it because it looked like the Blue Fairy’s gown in her book of Pinocchio. Now, it just looked old: wilted, gone gray at the seams.

  Harriet’s mother, turning to put the ice cream back in the freezer, saw Harriet slouching at the table. “What’s the matter?” she said, as the freezer door barked shut.

  “To start with,” said Harriet, loudly, “I’m starving.”

  Harriet’s mother wrinkled her brow—vaguely, pleasantly—and then (no, don’t let her say it, thought Harriet) asked the very question that Harriet had known she would ask. “Why don’t you have some of this ice cream?”

  “I … hate … that … kind … of … ice … cream.” How many times had she said it?

  “Hmn?”

  “Mother, I hate peppermint ice cream.” She felt desperate all of a sudden; didn’t anybody ever listen to her? “I can’t stand it! I’ve never liked it! Nobody’s ever liked it but you!”

  She was gratified to see her mother’s hurt expression. “I’m sorry … I just thought we all enjoyed a little something light and cool to eat … now that it’s so hot at night.…”

  “I don’t.”

  “Well, get Ida to fix you something.…”

  “Ida’s gone!”

  “Didn’t she leave you anything?”

  “No!” Nothing Harriet wanted, anyway: only tuna fish.

  “Well, what would you like, then? It’s so hot—you don’t want anything heavy,” she said doubtfully.

  “Yes I do!” At Hely’s house, no matter how hot it was, they sat down and ate a real supper every night, big, hot, greasy suppers that left the kitchen swelte
ring: roast beef, lasagne, fried shrimp.

  But her mother wasn’t listening. “Maybe some toast,” she said brightly, as she replaced the ice cream carton in the freezer.

  “Toast?”

  “Why, what’s wrong with that?”

  “People don’t have toast for dinner! Why can’t we eat like regular people?” At school, in health class, when Harriet’s teacher had asked the children to record their diets for two weeks, Harriet had been shocked to see how bad her own diet looked when it was written down on paper, particularly on the nights that Ida didn’t cook: Popsicles, black olives, toast and butter. So she’d torn up the real list, and dutifully copied from a cookbook her mother had received as a wedding present (A Thousand Ways to Please Your Family) a prim series of balanced menus: chicken piccata, summer squash gratin, garden salad, apple compote.

  “It’s Ida’s responsibility,” said her mother, with sudden sharpness, “to fix you something. That’s what I pay her for. If she’s not fulfilling her duties, then we’ll have to find somebody else.”

  “Shut up!” screamed Harriet, overcome by the unfairness of this.

  “Your father is after me all the time about Ida. He says she doesn’t do enough around the house. I know you like Ida but—”

  “It’s not her fault!”

  “—if she’s not doing what she should be, then Ida and I will have to have a little talk,” said her mother. “Tomorrow …”

  She drifted out, with her glass of peppermint ice cream. Harriet—dazed and baffled by the turn their conversation had taken—put her forehead on the table.

  Presently she heard someone come into the kitchen. Dully she glanced up to see Allison standing in the doorway.

  “You shouldn’t have said that,” she said.

  “Leave me alone!”

  Just then, the telephone rang. Allison picked it up and said, “Hello?” Then her face went blank. She dropped the receiver so it swung by the cord.

  “For you,” she said to Harriet, walking out.

  The instant she said hello, Hely said in a rush: “Harriet? Listen to this—”

  “Can I eat dinner at your house?”

  “No,” said Hely, after a confused pause. Dinner at his house was over, but he’d been too excited to eat. “Listen, Essie did go berserk. She busted some glasses in the kitchen and left, and my dad drove by her house and Essie’s boyfriend came out on the porch and they got into a huge fight and Dad told him to tell Essie not to come back, she was fired. Yaaay! But that’s not why I called,” he said, rapidly; for Harriet had begun to stutter with horror at this. “Listen, Harriet. There isn’t much time. That preacher with the scar is down at the square right now. There’s two of them. I saw it with Dad, on the way home from Essie’s, but I don’t know how long they’re going to be there. They’ve got a loudspeaker. I can hear them from my house.”

  Harriet put the telephone down on the counter and went to the back door. Sure enough, from the vine-tangled seclusion of the porch, she heard the tinny echo of a loudspeaker: someone shouting, indistinctly, the hiss and crackle of a bad microphone.

  When she went back to the telephone Hely’s breath, on the other end, was ragged and secretive.

  “Can you come out?” she said.

  “I’ll meet you at the corner.”

  It was after seven, still light outside. Harriet splashed some water on her face from the kitchen sink and went to the toolshed for her bicycle. As she flew down the driveway, the gravel popped under her tires until bump: her front wheel hit the street, and off she skimmed.

  Hely, astride his bicycle, was waiting at his corner. When he saw her in the distance, he took off; pedalling furiously, she soon caught up with him. The street lamps were not yet lit; the air smelled like hedge clippings, and bug spray, and honeysuckle. Rose beds blazed magenta and carmine and Tropicana orange in the fading light. They sped past drowsy houses; hissing sprinklers; a yipping terrier who shot out after them, chased behind them for a block or two with his little short legs flying, and then fell away.

  Sharply, they turned the corner of Walthall Street. The wide gables of Mr. Lilly’s shingle Victorian flew towards them at a forty-five-degree angle, like a house-boat beached at a sideways tilt upon a green embankment. Harriet let the momentum whisk her through the turn, the fragrance of his climbing roses—clouds of sweetheart pink, tumbling in great drifts from his trellised porch—blowing spicy and evanescent past her as she coasted, free, for a second or two, and then pedalled furiously rounding out upon Main: a hall of mirrors, white facades and columns in the rich light, receding in long, grand perspectives towards the square—where the flimsy white lattices and pickets of bandstand and gazebo bristled in the dim, lavender distance, against the deep blue scrim of the sky—all tranquility, like a backlit stage set at the high-school play (Our Town) except for the two men in white shirts and dark trousers pacing back and forth, waving their arms, bowing and rearing back to shout as they walked, their paths meeting in the center and criss-crossing to and fro to all four corners in an X formation. They were going at it like a pair of auctioneers, amplified and rhythmic cants that met, and clashed, and pulled apart, in two distinct lines, Eugene Ratliff’s mush-mouthed basso and the high hysterical counterpoint of the younger man, an up-country twang, the sharp-plucked i’s and e’s of the mountains:

  “—your mama—”

  “—your daddy—”

  “—your poor little baby that’s in the ground—”

  “You mean to tell me that they’re gettin up?”

  “I mean to tell you that they’re gettin up.”

  “You mean to tell me that they’ll rise again?”

  “I mean to tell you that they’ll rise again.”

  “The Book means to tell you that they’ll rise again.”

  “Christ means to tell you that they’ll rise again.”

  “The prophets mean to tell you that they’ll rise again.…”

  As Eugene Ratliff stomped his foot, and clapped, so that a greasy hank of the gray ducktail shook loose and fell over his face, the wild-haired fellow flung his hands up and broke out in a dance. He shook all over; his white hands twitched, as if the electrical current blazing from his eyes and standing his hair on end had crackled throughout his entire body, jerking and jittering him all over the bandstand in forthright convulsions.

  “—I mean to shout it like the Bible times—”

  “—I mean to shout it like Elijah done.”

  “—Shout it loud to make the Devil mad—”

  “—Come on children make the Devil mad!”

  The square was practically deserted. Across the street stood a couple of teenaged girls, giggling uneasily. Mrs. Mireille Abbott stood in the door of the jewelry store; over by the hardware store, a family sat in a parked car with the windows down, watching. On the little finger of the Ratliff preacher (held lifted out, slightly, from the pencil-thin microphone, as if from a teacup’s handle) a ruby-colored stone caught the setting sun and flashed deep red.

  “—Here in these Last Days we’re living in—”

  “—We’re here to preach the truth from this Bible.”

  “—We’re preaching this Book like the Olden Days.”

  “—We’re preaching It like the Prophets done.”

  Harriet saw the truck (THIS WORLD IS NOT MY HOME!)—and saw, with disappointment, that the bed was empty, except for a little vinyl-sided amplifier that looked like a cheap briefcase.

  “Oh, it’s been a long time since some of you here now—”

  “—read your Bible—”

  “—gone to Church—”

  “—got on your knees like a little child …”

  With a jolt, Harriet noticed that Eugene Ratliff was looking directly at her.

  “… for to be carnally minded is DEATH—”

  “—to be vengefully minded is DEATH—”

  “—for the Lust of the Flush is DEATH …”

  “Flesh,” said Harriet, rather mechanicall
y.

  “What?” Hely said.

  “It’s flesh. Not flush.”

  “—for the wages of sin is DEATH—”

  “—for the lies of the Devil are HELL AND DEATH …”

  They’d made a mistake, Harriet realized, by venturing up a little too close, but there was nothing to be done for it now. Hely stood staring with his mouth open. She nudged him in the ribs. “Come on,” she whispered.

  “What?” said Hely, wiping a forearm across his sticky forehead.

  Harriet cut her eyes to the side in a way that meant let’s go. Without a word, they turned and walked their bikes politely away until they were around the corner and out of sight.

  “But where were the snakes?” said Hely, plaintively. “I thought you said they were in the truck.”

  “They must have carried them back in the house after Mr. Dial left.”

  “Come on,” said Hely. “Let’s ride over there. Hurry, before they finish.”

  They jumped back on their bicycles and pedalled to the Mormon house, as fast as they could. The shadows were getting sharper, and more complicated. The clipped boxwood globes punctuating the median of Main Street glowed brilliantly at the sun’s edge, like a long rank of crescent moons with three-quarters of their spheres darkened, but still visible. Crickets and frogs had begun to shriek in the dark banks of privet along the street. When, at last—gasping for breath, stepping down hard on the pedals—they rode in sight of the frame house, they saw that the porch was dark and the driveway empty. Up and down the street, the only soul in sight was an ancient black man with sharp, shiny cheekbones, as taut-faced and serene as a mummy, ambling peacefully down the sidewalk with a paper bag under his arm.

  Hely and Harriet concealed their bicycles beneath a sprawling summersweet bush in the median’s center. From behind it they watched, warily, until the old man tottered around the corner and out of view. Then they darted across the street and squatted amidst the low, sprawling branches of a fig tree in the yard next door—for there was no cover in the yard of the frame house, not even a shrub, nothing but a brackish tuft of monkey grass encircling a sawn tree trunk.