The Little Friend

With a pop of astonishment—an audible pop, one he could feel, like a small detonation inside his head—Danny realized that he’d been speaking aloud, the whole time he thought he’d been thinking quietly to himself. Or had he? The quarters were still in his hand, but as he raised his arm to toss them over, yet another shock bolted through his head because the girl was gone. The bench was empty; there was no sign of her—or, indeed, of any living being, not so much as a stray cat—either up or down the street.

“Yodel-ay-hee-hoo,” he said to himself, very softly, beneath his breath.

————

“But what happened?” said Hely in an agony of impatience. The two of them were sitting on the rusted metal steps of an abandoned cotton warehouse near the railroad tracks. It was a marshy spot, secluded by scrubby pine trees, and the stinking black mud attracted flies. The doors of the warehouse were peppered with dark spots from two summers before when Hely and Harriet and Dick Pillow, who was now at Camp de Selby, had amused themselves for several days by throwing muddy tennis balls against them.

Harriet didn’t answer. She was so quiet that it was making him uncomfortable. In his agitation he stood and began to pace.

Moments passed. She didn’t seem impressed by his expert pacing. A small breeze wrinkled the surface of a puddle cut by a tire track in the mud.

Uneasily—anxious not to irritate her but anxious too to make her talk—he bumped her with his elbow. “Come on,” he said encouragingly. “Did he do something to you?”

“No.”

“He better not have. I’ll kick his ass.”

The pine woods—loblollys, mostly, trash trees no good for lumber—were close and stifling. The red bark was shaggy and sloughed off in great red and silvery patches, like snakeskin. Beyond the warehouse, grasshoppers whirred in the high sawgrass.

“Come on.” Hely leapt up and struck a karate chop at the air, followed by a masterful kick. “You can tell me.”

Nearby, a locust trilled. Hely, in mid-punch, squinted up: locusts meant a storm gathering, rain on the way, but through the black snarl of branches the sky still burned a clear, suffocating blue.

He did another pair of karate punches, with twin grunts beneath his breath: huh, huh; but Harriet wasn’t even watching him.

“What’s eating you?” he said, aggressively, tossing the long hair off his forehead. Her preoccupied manner was beginning to make him feel strangely panicked, and he was starting to suspect that she had devised some sort of secret plan that didn’t include him.

She glanced up at him, so quickly that for a second he thought she was going to jump up and kick his ass. But all she said was: “I was thinking about the fall when I was in the second grade. I dug a grave in the back yard.”

“A grave?” Hely was skeptical. He’d tried to dig plenty of holes in his own yard (underground bunkers, passsages to China) but had never got past two feet or so. “How’d you climb in and out?”

“It wasn’t deep. Just—” she held her hands a foot apart—“so deep. And long enough for me to lie down in.”

“Why’d you want to do something like that? Hey, Harriet!” he exclaimed—for on the ground he’d just noticed a gigantic beetle with pincers and horns, two inches long. “Look at that, would you? Man! That’s the biggest bug I’ve ever seen!”

Harriet leaned forward and looked at it, without curiosity. “Yeah, that’s something,” she said. “Anyway. Remember when I was in the hospital with bronchitis? When I missed the Halloween party at school?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Hely, averting his eyes from the beetle and suppressing, with difficulty, the urge to pick it up and mess with it.

“That’s why I got sick. The ground was really cold. I’d cover up with dead leaves and lie there until it got dark and Ida called me to come in.”

“You know what?” said Hely, who—unable to resist—had stretched out a foot to prod the beetle with his toe. “There’s this woman in Ripley’s Believe It or Not!

that’s got a telephone in her grave. You call the number, and the phone rings under the ground. Isn’t that crazy?” He sat down beside her. “Hey, what about this? Listen, this is great. Like, what if Mrs. Bohannon had a phone in her coffin, and she called you up in the middle of the night, and says, I want my golden wig. Give me back my goooolden wig.…”

“You’d better not,” said Harriet sharply, eyeing his hand creeping stealthily towards her. Mrs. Bohannon was the church organist; she had died in January after a long illness. “Anyway, they buried Mrs. Bohannon with her wig on.”

“How do you know?”

“Ida told me. Her real hair fell out from the cancer.”

They sat without talking for some time. Hely glanced around for the gigantic beetle, but—sadly—it had disappeared; he swayed from side to side, kicked the heel of his sneaker, rhythmically, against the metal riser of the stairs, bong bong bong bong.…