The Little Friend

  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.

  “Who?”

  “That man.”

  “He confessed to killing his brother,” said Edie, returning to her crossword, “and they were looking for him on a drugs charge, too. So I would expect that they’ve carried him away to jail.”

  “Jail?” Harriet was silent. “Does it say so in the paper?”

  “Oh, he’ll be out again soon enough, never you worry,” said Edie crisply. “They hardly catch these people and lock them up before they let them out again. Don’t you want your breakfast?” she said, noting Harriet’s untouched tray.

  Harriet made a conspicuous display of returning to her rice. If he’s not dead, she thought, then I’m not a murderer. I haven’t done anything. Or have I?

  “There. That’s better. You’ll want to eat a little something before they run these tests, whatever they are,” said Edie. “If they take blood, it may make you a little dizzy.”

  Harriet ate, diligently, with her eyes down, but her mind raced back and forth like an animal in a cage, and suddenly a thought so horrible leapt afresh to her mind that she blurted, aloud: “Is he sick?”

  “Who? That boy, you mean?” said Edie crossly, without looking up from her puzzle. “I don’t hold with all this nonsense about criminals being sick.”

  Just then, someone knocked loudly on the open door of the room, and Harriet started up from her bed in such alarm that she nearly upset her tray.

  “Hello, I’m Dr. Baxter,” said the man, offering Edie his hand. Though he was young-looking—younger than Dr. Breedlove—his hair was thinning at the top; he was carrying an old-fashioned black doctor bag which looked very heavy. “I’m the neurologist.”

  “Ah.” Edie looked suspiciously at his shoes—running shoes with fat soles and blue suede trim, like the shoes the track team wore up at the high school.

  “I’m surprised yall aren’t having rain up here,” the doctor said, opening his bag and beginning to fish around in it. “I drove up from Jackson early this morning—”

  “Well,” said Edie briskly, “you’ll be the first person that hasn’t made us wait all day around here.” She was still looking at his shoes.

  “When I left home,” said the doctor, “at six o’clock, there was a severe thunderstorm warning for Central Mississippi. It was raining down there like you wouldn’t believe.” He unrolled a rectangle of gray flannel on the bedside table; upon it, in a neat line, he placed a light, a silver hammer, a black gadget with dials.

  “I drove through some terrible weather to get here,” he said. “For a while I was afraid I was going to have to go back home.”

  “Well, I declare,” said Edie politely.

  “It’s lucky I made it,” said the doctor. “Around Vaiden, the roads were really bad—”

  He turned, and as he did so, observed Harriet’s expression.

  “My goodness! Why are you looking at me like that? I’m not going to hurt you.” He looked her over for a moment, and then he closed the bag.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll just start out by asking you some questions.” He got her chart off the foot of the bed and gazed at it steadily, his breaths loud in the stillness.

  “How about that?” he said, looking up at Harriet. “You’re not afraid of answering a few questions, are you?”

  “No.”

  “No sir,” said Edie, putting the newspaper aside.

  “Now, these are going to be some real easy questions,” said the doctor, sitting down on the edge of her bed. “You’re going to be wishing that all the questions on your tests at school were this easy. What’s your name?”

  “Harriet Cleve Dufresnes.”

  “Good. How old are you, Harriet?”

  “Twelve and a half.”

  “When’s your birthday?”

  He asked Harriet to count backward from ten; he asked her to smile, and frown, and stick out her tongue; he asked her to keep her head still and follow his finger with her eyes. Harriet did as she was told—shrugging her shoulders for him, touching her nose with her finger, bending her knees and then straightening them—while all the time keeping her expression composed and her breath calm.

  “Now, this is an ophthalmoscope,” the doctor said to Harriet. He smelled distinctly of alcohol—whether rubbing alcohol, or drinking alcohol, or even a sharp, alcohol-smelling aftershave, Harriet could not tell. “Nothing to worry about, all it’s going to do is flash a real strong light back there on your optic nerve so I can see if you’ve got any pressure on your brain …”

  Harriet gazed fixedly ahead. An uneasy thought had just occurred to her: if Danny Ratliff wasn’t dead, how was she going to keep Hely from talking about what had happened? When Hely found out that Danny was alive, he wouldn’t care any more about his fingerprints on the
gun; he would feel free to say what he wanted, without fear of the electric chair. And he would want to talk about what had happened; of that, Harriet was sure. She would have to think of a way to keep him quiet …

  The doctor was not true to his word, as the tests grew more and more unpleasant as they went along—a stick down Harriet’s throat, to make her gag; wisps of cotton on her eyeball, to make her blink; a hammer rapped on her funny bone and a sharp pin stuck here and there on her body, to see if she could feel it. Edie—arms crossed—stood off to the side, observing him closely.

  “You look mighty young to be a doctor,” she said.

  The doctor did not answer. He was still busy with the pin. “Feel that?” he said to Harriet.

  Harriet—her eyes closed—twitched fretfully as he jabbed her forehead and then her cheek. At least the gun was gone. Hely didn’t have any proof that he had gone down there to get it for her. She must keep telling herself that. As bad as things might seem, it was still his word against hers.

  But he would be full of questions. He would want to know all about it—everything that had happened down at the water tower—and now what could she say? That Danny Ratliff had gotten away from her, that she hadn’t actually done what she set out to do? Or, worse: that maybe she’d been mistaken all along; that maybe she didn’t really know who murdered Robin, and maybe she never would?

  No, she thought in a sudden panic, that’s not good enough. I have to think of something else.

  “What?” said the doctor. “Did I hurt you?”

  “A little.”

  “That’s a good sign,” said Edie. “If it hurts.”

  Maybe, thought Harriet—looking up at the ceiling, pressing her lips together as the doctor dragged something sharp down the sole of her foot—maybe Danny Ratliff really had killed Robin. It would be easier if he had. Certainly it would be the easiest thing to tell Hely: that Danny Ratliff had confessed to her at the end (maybe it was an accident, maybe he hadn’t meant to do it?), maybe that he’d even begged her forgiveness. Rich possibilities of story began to open like poisonous flowers all around her. She could say that she’d spared Danny Ratliff’s life, standing over him in a grand gesture of mercy; she could say that she’d taken pity on him at the last and left him up in the tower to be rescued.

  “Now, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” the doctor said, standing up.

  Harriet said, rapidly: “Now can I go home?”

  The doctor laughed. “Ho!” he said. “Not so fast. I’m just going to go out in the hall and talk to your grandmother for a few minutes, is that all right?”

  Edie stood up. Harriet heard her say, as the two of them were walking out of the room, “It’s not meningitis, is it?”

  “No, maam.”

  “Did they tell you about the vomiting and diarrhea? And the fever?”

  Quietly, Harriet sat in her bed. She could hear the doctor talking out in the hall, but though she was anxious to know what he was saying about her, the murmur of his voice was remote and mysterious and much too low for her to hear. She stared at her hands on the white coverlet. Danny Ratliff was alive, and though she never would have believed it, even half an hour ago, she was glad. Even if it meant that she had failed, she was glad. And if what she’d wanted had been impossible from the start, still there was a certain lonely comfort in the fact that she’d known it was impossible and had gone ahead and done it anyway.

  ————

  “Geez,” said Pem, and pushed back from the table, where he was eating a slice of Boston cream pie for breakfast. “Two whole days he was up there. Poor guy. Even if he did kill his brother.”

  Hely looked up from his cereal and—with an almost unbearable effort—managed to keep his mouth shut.

  Pem shook his head. His hair was still damp from the shower. “He couldn’t even swim. Imagine that. He was in there jumping up and down for two whole days, trying to keep his head above water. It’s like this thing I read, I think it was World War II and this plane went down in the Pacific. These guys were in the water for days, and there were tons of sharks. You couldn’t go to sleep, you had to be swimming around and watching for sharks constantly, or else they’d slip up and bite your leg off.” He looked hard at the picture, and shuddered. “Poor guy. Two whole days stuck up in that nasty thing, like a rat in a bucket. It’s a stupid place to hide, if you couldn’t swim.”

  Hely, unable to resist, blurted: “That’s not how it happened.”

  “Right,” said Pem, in a bored voice. “Like you know.”

  Hely—agitated, swinging his legs—waited for his brother to look up from the newspaper or say something else.

  “It was Harriet,” he said at last. “She did it.”

  “Hmm?”

  “It was her. She was the one pushed him in there.”

  Pem looked at him. “Pushed who?” he said. “You mean Danny Ratliff?”

  “Yes. Because he killed her brother.”

  Pem snorted. “Danny Ratliff didn’t kill Robin, any more than I did,” he said, turning the page of the newspaper. “We were all in the same class in school.”

  “He did,” said Hely devoutly. “Harriet has proof.”

  “Oh yeah? Like what?”

  “I don’t know—a lot of stuff. But she can prove it.”

  “Sure.”

  “Anyway,” said Hely, unable to contain himself, “she followed them down there, and chased them with a gun, and she shot Farish Ratliff, and then she made Danny Ratliff climb up the water tower and jump in.”

  Pemberton turned to the back of the paper, to the comic strips. “I think Mom’s been letting you drink too much Coke,” he said.

  “It’s true! I swear!” said Hely in agitation. “Because—” And then he remembered that he couldn’t say just how he knew, and looked down.

  “If she had a gun,” said Pemberton, “why didn’t she just shoot them both and get it over with?” He pushed his plate aside and looked at Hely like he was a cretin. “How the hell is Harriet going to make Danny Ratliff of all people climb up that thing? Danny Ratliff is a tough son of a bitch. Even if she had a gun, he could take it away from her in two seconds. Hell, he could take a gun away from me in two seconds. If you’re going to make up lies, Hely, you’re going to have to do better than that.”

  “I don’t know how she did it,” said Hely, stubbornly, staring into his cereal bowl, “but she did it. I know she did.”

  “Read the thing yourself,” said Pem, pushing the paper at him, “and see what an idiot you are. They had drugs hidden at the tower. And they were fighting over them. There were drugs floating in the water. That’s why they were up there in the first place.”

  Hely—with a gigantic effort—remained silent. He was suddenly, uneasily conscious that he’d said a whole lot more than he should have.

  “Besides,” said Pemberton, “Harriet’s in the hospital. You know that, dum-dum.”

  “Well, what if she was down at the water tower with a gun?” said Hely angrily. “What if she got in a fight with those guys? And got hurt? And what if she left the gun at the water tower, and what if she asked somebody to go and—”

  “No. Harriet is in the hospital because she has epilepsy. Epilepsy,” said Pemberton, tapping his forehead. “You moron.”

  “Oh, Pem!” said their mother from the doorway. Her hair was freshly blow-dried; she was in a short little tennis dress that showed off her tan. “Why’d you tell him?”

  “I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to,” said Pem sulkily.

  “I told you not to!”

  “Sorry. I forgot.”

  Hely, in confusion, looked between the two of them.

  “It’s such a stigma for a child at school,” said their mother, sitting down with them at the table. “It would be terrible for her if it got around. Although,” she said, reaching for Pem’s fork, taking a big bite of his leftover pie, “I wasn’t surprised when I heard it, and neither was your father. It explains a lot.”

  “What is epil
epsy?” said Hely uneasily. “Does it mean like nuts?”

  “No, peanut,” said his mother hastily, putting down the fork, “no, no, no, that’s not true. Don’t go around saying that. It just means she blanks out sometimes. Has seizures. Like—”

  “Like this,” said Pem. He did a wild imitation, tongue lolling, eyes rolled up, jittering in his chair.

  “Pem! Stop!”

  “Allison saw the whole thing,” said Pemberton. “She said it lasted like ten minutes.”

  Hely’s mother—observing the odd expression on his face—reached out and patted his hand. “Don’t worry, sweetie,” she said. “Epilepsy’s not dangerous.”

  “Unless you’re driving a car,” said Pem. “Or flying a plane.”

  His mother gave him a stern look—as stern as she ever gave him, which wasn’t very.

  “I’m going over to the club now,” she said, standing up. “Dad said he’d drop you off at band this morning, Hely. But don’t you go around telling people at school about this. And don’t worry about Harriet. She’s going to be fine. I promise.”

  After their mother left, and they heard her car pulling out of the driveway, Pemberton got up and went to the refrigerator and began to grapple around on the top shelf. Eventually he found what he was looking for—a can of Sprite.

  “You are so retarded,” he said, leaning back against the refrigerator, pushing the hair out of his eyes. “It’s a miracle they don’t have you in Special Ed.”

  Hely, though he wanted worse than anything in the world to tell Pemberton about going to the tower to get the gun—kept his lips clamped shut and glowered down at the table. He would call Harriet when he got home from band. Probably she wouldn’t be able to talk. But he could ask her questions, and she could answer yes or no.

  Pemberton cracked open his soda and said: “You know, it’s embarrassing that you go around making up lies the way you do. You think it’s cool, but it just makes you look really dumb.”

  Hely said nothing. He would call her, the first chance he got. If he could sneak away from the group, he might even go out to the pay phone and call her from school. And as soon as she got home, and they were by themselves, out in the toolshed, she would explain to him about the gun, and how she had masterminded the whole thing—shot Farish Ratliff, and trapped Danny in the tower—and it would be amazing. The mission was accomplished, the battle won; somehow—incredibly—she had done exactly what she said she would, and got away with the whole thing.