The Little Friend

  Too late—as sometimes happened when he caught himself gawking at the spaghetti-sauce guts of some animal squashed on the highway—Hely shut his eyes. Black circles on orange—the light’s afterburn, thrown into negative—drifted up from the bottom of his vision, one after another, like bubbles in a fish tank, growing fainter and fainter as they rose and vanished.…

  Vibrations in the floor: footsteps. The steps paused; and then another set, heavier, and quicker, tramped in and stopped abruptly.

  What if my shoe is poking out? thought Hely, with a near-uncontrollable sizzle of horror.

  Everything stopped. The steps reversed themselves a pace or two. More muffled talking. It seemed to him as if one set of feet went to the window, paced fitfully, then retreated. How many different voices there were, he could not tell, but one voice rose distinct from the rest: garbled, singsong, like the game that he and Harriet sometimes played at the swimming pool where they took turns saying sentences underwater and tried to figure out what the other person was saying. At the same time he was aware of a quiet scritch scritch scritch coming from the snake box, a noise so faint that he thought he must be imagining it. He opened his eyes. In the narrow strip between beanbag and smelly carpet, he found himself staring sideways at eight pale inches of snake-belly, resting weirdly against the screen of the box opposite. Like the livery tip of some sea-creature’s tentacle, blindly it oscillated back and forth, like a windshield wiper … scratching itself, Hely realized, with horrified fascination, scritch … scritch … scritch.…

  Off snapped the overhead lights, unexpectedly. The footsteps and the voices retreated.

  Scritch … scritch … scritch … scritch … scritch …

  Hely—rigid, his palms pressed between his knees—stared out hopelessly into the dim. The snake’s belly was still visible, just barely, through the screen. What if he had to spend the night here? Helplessly, his thoughts skittered and bumped around in such a wild confusion that he felt sick. Remember your exits, he told himself; that was what his Health workbook said to do in case of fire or emergency, but he had not been paying very good attention and the exits he did remember were of absolutely no use: back door, inaccessible … inside staircase, padlocked by the Mormons … bathroom window—yes, that was possible—though coming in had been hard enough, never mind trying to squeeze out again unheard, and in the dark.…

  For the first time, he remembered Harriet. Where was she? He tried to think what he would do if their positions were reversed. Would she have the sense to run get someone? In any other circumstances Hely would sooner have her pour hot coals down his back than call his dad, but now—short of death—he saw no alternative. Balding, soft around the middle, Hely’s father was neither large nor imposing; if anything, he was slightly below the average height but his years as a high-school administrator had given him a gaze which was Authority itself, and a stony manner of stretching out his silences at which even grown men faltered.

  Harriet? Tensely, he pictured the white Princess phone in his parents’ bedroom. If Hely’s dad knew what had happened, he would march straight up here unafraid and yank him up by the shoulder and tow him out—to the car, for a whipping, and a lecture on the drive home which would leave Hely’s ears sizzling—while the preacher cowered in confusion among his serpents mumbling yes sir thankee sir not knowing what had hit him.

  His neck hurt. He couldn’t hear anything, not even the snake. Suddenly it occurred to him that Harriet might be dead: strangled, shot, hit by the preacher’s truck, for all he knew, turning in right on top of her.

  Nobody knows where I am. His legs were cramping. Ever so slightly, he straightened them. Nobody. Nobody. Nobody.

  A shower of pinpricks sparkled through his calves. He lay very still for some minutes—tensed, fully expecting the preacher to swoop down on him at any moment. At last, when nothing happened, he rolled over. Blood tingled through his pinched limbs. He wriggled his toes; he turned his head from side to side. He waited. Then, at last, when he could stand it no longer, he poked his head from beneath the beanbag.

  In the darkness, the boxes sparkled. A skewed rectangle of light spilled onto the snuff-colored carpet from the doorway. Beyond—Hely inched forward, on his elbows—was framed a grimy yellow room, brilliantly lit by a ceiling bulb. A high-pitched hillbilly voice was speaking, rapid but indistinct.

  A growly voice interrupted. “Jesus never done a thing for me, and the law sure aint.” Then, quite suddenly, a gigantic shadow blocked the doorway.

  Hely clutched the carpet; he lay petrified, trying not to breathe. Then another voice spoke: distant, peevish. “These reptiles aint got a thing to do with the Lord. All they are is nasty.”

  The shadow in the doorway let out a weird, high-pitched chuckle—and Hely froze to iron. Farish Ratliff. From the doorway, his bad eye—pale like a boiled pickerel’s—raked across the darkness like the search beam of a lighthouse.

  “Tell you what you ort to do …” To Hely’s immense relief, the heavy tread retreated. From the next room, there was a squeak like a kitchen cabinet opening. When, at last, he opened his eyes, the bright doorway stood empty.

  “… what you ort to do, if you’re tired of hauling them around, is to take them all in the woods and turn em aloose and shoot em. Kill the shit out of ever last one of them. Light em on fire,” he said, loudly, over the preacher’s objection, “chunk them in the river, I don’t care. Then you aint got a problem.”

  A belligerent silence. “Snakes can swim,” said a different voice—male, too, white, but younger.

  “They aint going to swim far in a damn box, are they?” A crunch, as if Farish had bitten into something; in a jocular, crumbly voice, he continued. “Look, Eugene, if you don’t want to fool with em, I got me a .38 down there in the glove compartment. For ten cents, I’ll go in there right now and kill ever last one of them.”

  Hely’s heart plummeted. Harriet! he thought wildly. Where are you? These were the men who had killed her brother; when they found him (and they would find him, of that he was sure) they would kill him too.…

  What weapon did he have? How to defend himself? A second snake had nosed up the screen alongside the first one, his snout on the underside of the other’s jaw; they looked like the twined snakes on a medical staff. The nastiness of this commonplace symbol—printed in red on his mother’s collection envelopes for the Lung Association—had never before occurred to him. His mind spun. Hardly aware what he was doing, Hely reached out with trembling hand and lifted the latch on the box of snakes in front of him.

  There, that’ll slow ’em down, he thought, rolling on his back and staring at the foam-panelled ceiling. He might be able to escape in whatever confusion ensued. Even if he was bit, he might make it to the hospital.…

  One of the snakes had snapped at him, fitfully, as he reached for the lock. Now he felt something sticky—poison?—on the palm of his hand. The thing had struck and sprayed him clear through the screen. Hurriedly, he scrubbed his hand on the back of his shorts, hoping he didn’t have any cuts or scratches he’d forgotten about.

  It took the snakes a little while to figure out they were loose. The two leaning against the screen had tumbled free at once; for some moments they lay there, without moving, until other snakes nosed in over their backs to see what was going on. All at once—as if a signal had been given—they seemed to understand that they were free and slid out gladly, fanning in all directions.

  Hely—sweating—squirmed out from under the beanbag and crawled as rapidly as he dared past the open doorway, through the light spilling in from the next room. Though he was sick with apprehension, he dared not glance in but kept his gaze rigidly down for fear that they would sense his eyes upon them.

  When he was safely past the door—safe for the moment, anyway—he slumped in the shadow of the opposite wall, shaky and weak from the beating of his heart. He was all out of ideas. If somebody decided to get up again and come in and turn on the lights, they would see him instantly, hudd
led defenseless against the particle-board.…

  Had he really set those snakes loose? From where he stood, he saw two lying in the open floor; another wriggling, energetically, towards the light. A moment ago it had seemed like a good plan but now he was fervently sorry: please, God, please don’t let it crawl over here.… The snakes had patterns on their backs like copperheads, only sharper. On the audacious snake—which was making brazenly for the next room—he now made out the two-inch stack of rattle buttons on the tail.

  But it was the ones he couldn’t see that made him nervous. There had been at least five or six snakes in that box—possibly more. Where were they?

  From the front windows it was a sheer drop to the street. His only hope was the bathroom. Once he got out on the roof, he could dangle from the edge before dropping the rest of the way. He’d jumped from tree limbs nearly as high.

  But to his dismay, the bathroom door wasn’t where he thought it was. Down the wall he inched—too far altogether for his taste, down into the dark area where he’d turned the snakes loose—but what he’d thought was the door wasn’t the door at all but only a piece of particle-board propped against the wall.

  Hely was perplexed. The bathroom door was on the left, he was sure of it; he was debating whether to move farther down or go back when with an abrupt pitch of his heart he realized that it was on the left side of the other room.

  He was too stunned to move. For an instant, the room plunged away (great depths, soundless wells, pupils dilating in response) and when it rushed back again, it took him a moment to figure out where he was. He leaned his head against the wall, rolling it back and forth. How could he be so dumb? He always had trouble with directions, confusing left with right; letters and numbers switched chairs when he was looking away from the page, and grinned back at him from different places; sometimes he even sat down at the wrong chair at school without realizing it. Careless! Careless! screamed the red writing on his book reports, on his math tests and scratched-up worksheets.

  ————

  When the lights swung into the driveway, Harriet was caught wholly off-guard. She dropped to the ground and rolled under the house—bump, right into the cobra’s box, which lashed angrily in reply. The gravel crackled and almost before she could catch her breath, tires roared by a few feet from her face, in a blast of wind and bluish light that rippled through the ragged grass.

  Harriet—face down in powdery dust—smelled a strong nauseating odor of something dead. All the houses in Alexandria had crawlspaces, for fear of floods, and this one was no more than a foot high and not much less claustrophobic than a grave.

  The cobra—who had not enjoyed being jostled downstairs, and tipped on his side—whacked against the box, with horrid dry slashes she could feel through the wood. But worse than the snake or the dead-rat smell was the dust, which tickled her nose unbearably. She turned her head. A reddish pan from the tail-lights slanted under the house, glowing suddenly over squiggled earthworm castings, ant hills, a dirty shard of glass.

  Then everything went black. The car door slammed. “—that’s what started that car on fire,” said a growly voice, not the preacher’s. “ ‘All right,’ I said to him—they had me laying all proned out on the ground—‘I’m on be honest with you sir, and you can take me to jail right now, but this one here’s got a warrant on him long as your arm.’ Ha! Well, he took off running.”

  “That was all there was to that, I reckon.”

  Laughter: not nice. “You got that right.”

  The feet were tramping toward her. Harriet—desperately battling a sneeze—held her breath, clamped a hand over her mouth and pinched her nose shut. Over her head and up the stairs the footsteps clomped. A tentative stinger pricked her ankle. Finding no resistance, it settled and sank in deeper, as Harriet trembled head to foot with the urge to slap it.

  Another sting, this one on her calf. Fire ants. Great.

  “Well, when he come on back home,” said the growly voice—fainter now, receding—“they all got to seeing who could get the true story out of him.…”

  Then the voice stopped. Upstairs, everything was quiet, but she hadn’t heard the door open, and she sensed they hadn’t gone inside, but were lingering on the landing, watchfully. Stiffly she lay there, straining to listen with every ounce of her attention.

  Minutes passed. The fire ants—energetically and in growing numbers—stung her arms and legs. Her back was still pressed against the box and every now and again, through the wood, the cobra whacked sullenly against her spine. In the stifling quiet, she imagined she heard voices, footsteps—and yet, when she tried to make them out, the noises shimmered and dissolved away into nothingness.

  Rigid with terror, she lay on her side, staring out at the pitch-dark driveway. How long would she have to lie here? If they came after her, she would have no choice but to crawl further under the house, and never mind the fire ants: wasps built their nests under houses, as did skunks, and spiders, and all manner of rodents and reptiles; sick cats and rabid possums dragged themselves there to die; a black man named Sam Bebus who repaired furnaces for people had recently got on the front page of the newspaper when he found a human skull beneath Marselles, a Greek Revival mansion on Main Street, only a few blocks away.

  Suddenly the moon came out from behind a cloud, silvering the straggly grass that grew at the house’s margin. Ignoring the fire ants, she lifted her cheek from the dust and listened. Tall blades of witch-grass—white at the edges with moonlight—shivered at eye level, then blew flat against the ground for a moment before they sprang back, disheveled, all a-jitter. She waited. At last, after a long, breathless silence, she inched forward on her elbows and put her head out from under the house.

  “Hely?” she whispered. The yard was deathly still. Weeds shaped like tiny green wheat-stalks pushed up through the sparkling gravel of the driveway. At the end of the driveway the truck—towering up stupendous out of all proportion—stood silent and dark with its back to her.

  Harriet whistled; she waited. Finally, after what seemed like a long time, she crawled out and climbed to her feet. Something that felt like a crushed bug-shell was embedded in her cheek; she wiped it away, with gritty hands, dusted the ants from her arms and legs. Wispy brown clouds like gasoline vapors blew raggedly over the moon. Then they blew free entirely, and the yard was bathed in a clear, ashen light.

  Quickly Harriet stepped back into the shadows around the house. The treeless lawn was as bright as day. For the first time, it occurred to her that she hadn’t actually heard Hely come down the stairs.

  Around the corner she peeped. The yard next door, leaf-shade jangling on the grass, was empty: not a soul. With growing unease, she edged along the side of the house. Through a chain-link fence, she found herself staring into the glassy stillness of the next yard over, where a kiddie pool sat lonely and abandoned on the moonlit grass.

  In the shadows, her back to the wall, Harriet circled the house but there was no sign of Hely anywhere. In all likelihood he’d run home and left her. Reluctantly, she stepped out onto the lawn and craned to look at the second story. The landing was empty; the bathroom window—still partially open—was dark. Upstairs were lights: movement, voices, too vague to distinguish.

  Harriet worked up her courage, and ran out into the brightly lit street—but when she got to the bush on the median where they’d left the bikes, her heart tripped and skidded and she stopped in mid-step, unable to believe what she saw. Beneath the white-flowering branches, both bicycles lay sprawled on their sides, undisturbed.

  For a moment she stood frozen. Then she came to her senses and ducked behind the bush and dropped to her knees. Hely’s bicycle was expensive and new; he was particular about it to a ridiculous degree. Head in hands, she stared at it, trying not to panic, and then she parted the branches and peered across the street, at the lighted second story of the Mormon house.

  The calmness of the house, with its silvered windows glinting eerie on the top floor, put h
er in a great fear, and all at once the weight of the situation crashed in on her. Hely was trapped up there, she was sure of it. And she needed help; but there was no time, and she was alone. For some moments, she sat back on her heels in a daze, looking about, trying to decide what to do. There was the bathroom window, still partially open—but what good did that do her? In “A Scandal in Bohemia” Sherlock Holmes had thrown a smoke bomb in the window to get Irene Adler out of the house—nice idea, but Harriet didn’t have a smoke bomb, or anything else at hand except sticks and gravel.

  For a moment more, she sat thinking—and then, in the high, broad moonlight, she ran back across the street, next door, to the yard where they’d hidden under the fig tree. Under a canopy of pecan trees sprawled an untidy bed of shade plants (caladiums, gas-plant) circled by chunks of whitewashed rock.

  Harriet dropped to her knees and tried to lift one of the stones, but they were cemented together. Faintly, from inside, beneath an air-conditioner roaring hot air from a side window, a dog yapped sharp and tirelessly. Like a raccoon patting for fish on a stream’s bottom, she plunged her hands into the froth of greenery and felt around blindly in the overgrown tumble until her fingers closed on a smooth chunk of concrete. With both hands, she heaved it up. The dog was still yapping. “Pancho!” shrilled an ugly Yankee voice: an old woman’s voice, rough as sandpaper. She sounded sick. “Hush yer mouth!”

  Stooped with the rock’s weight, Harriet ran back into the driveway of the frame house. There were two trucks, she saw, down at the end of the driveway. One was from Mississippi—Alexandria County—but the other had Kentucky plates, and as heavy as the rock was, Harriet stopped where she was and took a moment to fix the numbers in her mind. Nobody had thought to remember any license-plate numbers back when Robin was murdered.

  Quickly, she ducked behind the first truck—the Kentucky one. Then she took the chunk of concrete (which, she now noticed, was not just any old chunk of concrete but a lawn ornament in the shape of a curled-up kitten) and knocked it against the headlight.