The Little Friend

  Harriet listened, icily.

  “Ida was with us for so many years that I guess I sort of talked myself into thinking I couldn’t do without her, but … we’ve been fine, haven’t we?”

  Harriet bit her upper lip, stared obstinately into the corner of the room—mess everywhere, the corner table littered with pens, envelopes, coasters, old handkerchiefs, an overflowing ashtray atop a stack of magazines.

  “Haven’t we? Been fine? Ida—” her mother looked around, helplessly—“Ida just rode roughshod over me, didn’t you see that?”

  There was a long silence during which—out of the corner of her eye—Harriet saw a bullet she’d missed lying on the carpet under the table.

  “Don’t get me wrong. When you girls were little, I couldn’t have done without Ida. She helped me enormously. Especially with …” Harriet’s mother sighed. “But for the last few years, she hasn’t been pleased with anything that went on around here. I guess she was fine with you all but with me, she was so resentful, just standing there with her arms folded and judging me.…”

  Harriet stared fixedly at the bullet. A little bored now, listening to her mother’s voice without really hearing it, she kept her eyes on the floor and soon drifted away into a favorite daydream. The time machine was leaving; she was carrying emergency supplies to Scott’s party at the pole; everything depended on her. Packing lists, packing lists, and he’d brought all the wrong things. Must fight it out to the last biscuit.… She would save them all, with stores brought from the future: instant cocoa and vitamin C tablets, canned heat, peanut butter, gasoline for the sledges and fresh vegetables from the garden and battery-powered flashlights.…

  Suddenly, the different position of her mother’s voice got her attention. Harriet looked up. Her mother was standing in the doorway now.

  “I guess I can’t do anything right, can I?” she said.

  She turned and left the room. It was not yet ten o’clock. The living room was still shady and cool; beyond, the depressing depths of the hallway. A faint, fruity trace of her mother’s perfume still hung in the dusty air.

  Hangers jingled and rasped in the coat closet. Harriet stood where she was, and when, after several minutes, she heard her mother still scratching around out in the hall, she edged over to where the stray bullet lay and kicked it under the sofa. She sat down on the edge of Ida’s chair; she waited. Finally, after a long time, she ventured out into the hall, and found her mother standing in the open door of the closet, refolding—not very neatly—some linens that she’d pulled down from the top shelf.

  As if nothing at all had happened, her mother smiled. With a comical little sigh, she stepped back from the mess and said: “My goodness. Sometimes I think we should just pack up the car and move in with your father.”

  She cut her eyes over at Harriet. “Hmn?” she said, brightly, as if she’d suggested some great treat. “What would you think about that?”

  She’ll do what she wants, Harriet thought, hopelessly. It doesn’t matter what I say.

  “I don’t know about you,” said her mother, returning to her linens, “but I think it’s time for us to start acting more like a family.”

  “Why?” said Harriet, after a confused pause. Her mother’s choice of words was alarming. Often, when Harriet’s father was about to issue some unreasonable order, he preceded it with the observation: we need to start acting more like a family here.

  “Well, it’s just too much,” her mother said dreamily. “Raising two girls on my own.”

  Harriet went upstairs and sat on her window seat and looked out her bedroom window. The streets were hot and empty. All day long, the clouds passed by. At four o’clock in the afternoon, she walked over to Edie’s house and sat on the front steps with her chin in her hands until Edie’s car rolled around the corner at five o’clock.

  Harriet ran to meet her. Edie rapped on the window and smiled. Her navy suit was a little less sharp now, rumpled from the heat, and as she climbed out of the car her movements were creaky and slow. Harriet galloped along the walk beside her, up the steps and onto the porch, breathlessly explaining that her mother had proposed moving to Nashville—and was shocked when Edie only breathed deeply, and shook her head.

  “Well,” she said, “maybe that’s not such a bad idea.”

  Harriet waited.

  “If your mother wants to be married, she’s going to have to make a little effort, I’m afraid.” Edie stood still a moment, sighed—then turned the key in the door. “Things can’t continue like this.”

  “But why?” wailed Harriet.

  Edie stopped, closed her eyes, as if her head hurt. “He’s your father, Harriet.”

  “But I don’t like him.”

  “I don’t care for him either,” snapped Edie. “But if they’re going to stay married I reckon they should live in the same state, don’t you?”

  “Dad doesn’t care,” said Harriet, after an appalled little pause. “He likes things just the way they are.”

  Edie sniffed. “Yes, I suppose he does.”

  “Won’t you miss me? If we move?”

  “Sometimes life doesn’t turn out the way we think it ought to,” Edie said, as if relating some cheery but little-known fact. “When school starts …”

  Where? thought Harriet. Here, or Tennessee?

  “… you should throw yourself into your studies. That’ll take your mind off things.”

  Soon she’ll be dead, thought Harriet, staring at Edie’s hands, which were swollen at the knuckles, and speckled with chocolate-brown spots like a bird’s egg. Libby’s hands—though similar in shape—had been whiter and more slender, with the veins showing blue on the back.

  She glanced up from her reverie, and was a bit shocked at Edie’s cold, speculative eyes observing her closely.

  “You ought not to have quit your piano lessons,” she said.

  “That was Allison!” Harriet was always horribly taken aback when Edie made mistakes like this. “I never took piano.”

  “Well, you ought to start. You don’t have half enough to do, that’s your problem, Harriet. When I was your age,” said Edie, “I rode, and played violin, and made all my own clothes. If you learned how to sew, you might start taking a little more interest in your appearance.”

  “Will you take me out to see Tribulation?” Harriet said suddenly.

  Edie looked startled. “There’s nothing to see.”

  “But will you take me to the place? Please? Where it was?”

  Edie didn’t answer. She was gazing over Harriet’s shoulder with a rather blank look on her face. At the roar of a car accelerating in the street, Harriet glanced over her shoulder just in time to see a metallic flash vanish around the corner.

  “Wrong house,” said Edie, and sneezed: ka-choo. “Thank goodness. No,” she said, blinking, fishing in her pocketbook for a tissue, “there’s not much to see out at Tribulation any more. The fellow that owns the land now is a chicken farmer, and he may not even let us up to look at the place where the house was.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s a fat old rascal. Everything out there’s gone to pieces.” She patted Harriet on the back, distractedly. “Now run along home and let Edie get out of these high heels.”

  “If they move to Nashville, can I stay here and live with you?”

  “Why Harriet!” said Edie, after a shocked little pause. “Don’t you want to be with your mother and Allison?”

  “No. Maam,” Harriet added, observing Edie closely.

  But Edie only raised her eyebrows, as if amused. In her infuriating, chipper way, she said: “Oh, I expect you’d change your mind about that after a week or two!”

  Tears rose to Harriet’s eyes. “No!” she cried, after a sullen, unsatisfying pause. “Why do you always say that? I know what I want, I never change my—”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, shall we,” said Edie. “Just the other day I read something Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams when h
e was an old man, that most of the things he’d worried about in his life never came to pass. ‘How much pain have cost us the evils that never happened.’ Or something of the sort.” She glanced at her wristwatch. “If it’s any comfort, I think it’ll take a torpedo to get your mother out of that house, but that’s my opinion. Now run along,” she said to Harriet, who stood staring at her balefully, with red eyes.

  ————

  As soon as he swung round the corner, Danny pulled over in front of the Presbyterian church. “Godamighty,” said Farish. He was breathing hard, through the nostrils. “Was that her?”

  Danny—too high and overcome to speak—nodded his head. He could hear all kinds of small, frightening noises: trees breathing, wires singing, grass crackling as it grew.

  Farish turned in his seat to look out the back window. “Damn it, I told you to look for that kid. You’re telling me this is the first time you’ve seen her?”

  “Yes,” said Danny sharply. He was shaken by how suddenly the girl had jumped into view, at the uncomfortable tail end of his sight, just like she’d done at the water tower (though he couldn’t tell Farish about the water tower; he wasn’t supposed to be at the water tower). And now, on this roundabout circuit, going nowhere (vary your route, said Farish, vary your travel times, keep checking your mirrors) he’d turned the corner and seen—who but the girl? standing on a porch.

  All kinds of echoes. Breathing shining stirring. A thousand mirrors glinted out of the treetops. Who was the old lady? As the car slowed, she’d met Danny’s gaze, had met it dead on for a confused and curious flash, and her eyes were exactly the same as the girl’s.… For a heartbeat, everything had dropped away.

  “Go,” Farish had said, slapping the dash; and then, when they were around the corner, Danny had to pull the car over because he felt way too high, because something weird was going on, some whacking multi-level speed telepathy (escalators going up and up, disco balls revolving on every floor); they both sensed it, they didn’t even have to say a word and Danny could hardly even look at Farish because he knew they were both remembering the same exact damn freaky thing that had happened about six o’clock that morning: how (after being up all night) Farish had walked into the living room in undershorts, with a carton of milk, and at the same time a bearded cartoon character in undershorts holding a carton of milk had strode out across the television set. Farish stopped; the character stopped.

  Are you seeing this? said Farish.

  Yes, said Danny. He was sweating. His eyes met Farish’s for an instant. When they looked back at the television, the picture had changed to something else.

  Together they sat in the hot car, their hearts pounding almost audibly.

  “Did you notice,” said Farish, suddenly, “how every single truck we seen on the way here was black?”

  “What?”

  “They’re moving something. Damn if I know what.”

  Danny said nothing. Part of him knew it was bullshit, Farish’s paranoid talk, but another part knew that it meant something. Three times the previous night, an hour apart exactly, the phone had rung; and someone had hung up without talking. Then there was the spent rifle shell Farish had found on the windowsill of the laboratory. What was that about?

  And now this: the girl again, the girl. The lush, sprinkled lawn of the Presbyterian church glowed blue-green in the shadows of the ornamental spruce: curvy brick walks, clipped boxwoods, everything as neat and twinkly as a toy train set.

  “What I can’t figure out is who the hell she is,” said Farish, scrabbling in his pocket for the crank. “You shouldn’t have let her get away.”

  “It was Eugene let her go, not me.” Danny gnawed on the inside of his mouth. No, it wasn’t his imagination: the girl had vanished off the face of the earth in the weeks after Gum’s accident, when he’d driven the town looking for her. But now: think of her, mention her and there she was, glowing at a distance with that black Chinese haircut and those spiteful eyes.

  They each had a toot, which steadied them somewhat.

  “Somebody,” said Danny, and inhaled, “somebody has put that kid out to spy on us.” High as he was, he was sorry the instant he’d said it.

  Farish’s brow darkened. “Say what? If somebody,” he growled, scouring his wet nostrils with the back of his hand, “if somebody put that little dab out to spy on me, I’ll rip her wide open.”

  “She knows something,” said Danny. Why? Because she’d looked at him from the window of a hearse. Because she’d invaded his dreams. Because she was haunting him, hunting him, messing with his head.

  “Well, I’d sure like to know what she was doing up at Eugene’s. If that little bitch busted out my tail-lights …”

  His melodramatic manner made Danny suspicious. “If she busted the tail-lights,” he said, carefully avoiding Farish’s eye, “why you reckon she knocked on the door and told us about it?”

  Farish shrugged. He was picking at a crusty patch on his pants leg, had all at once got very preoccupied with it, and Danny—suddenly—was convinced that he knew more about the girl (and about all of it) than he was saying.

  No, it didn’t make sense, but all the same there was something to it. Dogs barked in the distance.

  “Somebody,” said Farish, suddenly—shifting his weight—“some body clumb up there and turned them snakes aloose at Eugene’s. The windows is painted shut except for that one in the bathroom. Nobody could have got through that but a kid.”

  “I’m on talk to her,” said Danny. Ask her lots of things. Like why I never saw you in my life before, and now I see you everywhere? Like why do you brush and flitter against my windows at night like a death’s-head moth?

  He’d been so long without sleep that when he closed his eyes, he was in a place with weeds and dark lakes, wrecked skiffs awash in scummy water. There she was, with her moth-white face and her crow-black hair, whispering something in the moist cicada-shrieking gloom, something he almost understood but couldn’t quite.…

  I can’t hear you, he said.

  “Can’t hear what?”

  Bing: black dashboard, blue Presbyterian spruces, Farish staring from the passenger’s seat. “Can’t hear what?” he repeated.

  Danny blinked, wiped his forehead. “Forget it,” he said. He was sweating.

  “In Nam, them little sapper girls was tough sons of bitches,” said Farish cheerfully. “Running with live grenades, it was all a game to them. You can get a kid to do shit wouldn’t nobody but a crazy man try.”

  “Right,” Danny said. This was one of Farish’s pet theories. During Danny’s childhood, he had used it to justify getting Danny and Eugene and Mike and Ricky Lee to do all his dirty work for him, climbing in windows while he, Farish, sat eating Honey Buns and getting high in the car.

  “Kid gets caught? So what? Juvenile Hall? Hell—” Farish laughed—“when yall was boys, I had yall trained to it. Ricky was crawling in windows soon as he could stand up on my shoulders. And if a cop come by—”

  “God amighty,” said Danny, soberly, and sat up; for in the rear view mirror he’d just seen the girl—alone—walk around the corner.

  ————

  Harriet—head down, brow clouded with thought—was walking down the sidewalk towards the Presbyterian church (and, three streets over, her desolate home) when the door of a car parked about twenty feet ahead of her suddenly clicked open.

  It was the Trans Am. Almost before she had time to think she doubled back, darted into the dank, mossy yard of the Presbyterian church and kept running.

  The side yard of the church led through to Mrs. Claiborne’s garden (hydrangea bushes, tiny greenhouse) directly to Edie’s back yard—which was cut off by a board fence, six feet high. Harriet ran through the dark passageway (Edie’s fence on one side; a prickly, inpenetrable row of arborvitae bordering the yard adjacent) and ran smack into another fence: Mrs. Davenport’s, chain-link. In a panic, Harriet scrambled over it; a wire on top caught her shorts and with a twist of her
whole body she wrenched free and hopped down, panting.

  Behind, in the leafy passage, the burst and crash of footsteps. There was not much cover in Mrs. Davenport’s yard, and she looked about helplessly before she ran across it and unlatched the gate and ran down the driveway. She’d intended to double back to Edie’s house, but when she got out to the sidewalk something stopped her (where were those footsteps coming from?) and, after a split-second pause of deliberation, she ran straight ahead, towards the O’Bryants’ house. To her shock, while she was in the middle of the street, the Trans Am swung around the corner.

  So they’d split up. That was smart. Harriet ran—under the tall pines, through the pine needles that carpeted the O’Bryants’ deeply shaded front yard—directly to the little house out back where Mr. O’Bryant kept his pool table. She seized the handle, shook it: locked. Harriet, breathless, stared in at the yellowy pine-panelled walls—at bookshelves, empty except for a few old yearbooks from Alexandria Academy; at the glass lamp that said Coca-Cola dangling from a chain over the dark table—and then darted off to the right.

  No good: another fence. The dog in the next yard was barking. If she stayed off the street, the guy in the Trans Am obviously couldn’t catch her, but she had to take care that the one on foot didn’t corner her, or flush her out into the open.

  Heart galloping, lungs aching, she swerved to the left. Behind, she heard heavy breaths, the crash of heavy feet. On she zig-zagged, through labyrinths of shrubbery, crossing and re-crossing and veering off at right angles when her path closed off in front of her: through strange gardens, over fences and into a perplexity of lawns checkered with patios and flagstones, past swing-sets and clothes-posts and barbecue grills, past a round-eyed baby who gazed at her fearfully and sat down hard in his playpen. Further down—an ugly old man with a bulldog face hoisted himself halfway from his porch chair and bawled “Get away!” when Harriet, in relief (for he was the first grown-up she’d seen), slowed to catch her breath.

  His words were like a slap; as frightened as she was, the shock of them stopped her for a heartbeat and she blinked in astonishment at the inflamed eyes, blazing away at her, at the freckled, puffy old fist, raised as if to strike. “That’s right, you!” he cried. “Get away from here!”