The Little Friend

At its grimmest point—by the Alexandria Hotel—Main Street turned into Highway 5. The Interstate had passed Alexandria by; and now the highway suffered the same dereliction as the shops on the square: defunct grocery stores and car lots, baking in a poisonous gray heat haze; the Checkerboard Feed Store and the old Southland gas station, boarded up now (its faded sign: a saucy black kitten with white bib and stockings, batting with its paw at a cotton boll). A north turn, onto County Line Road, took them by Oak Lawn Estates and under an abandoned overpass, into cow pastures and cotton fields and tiny, dusty little sharecropper farms, laboriously cut from dry red-clay barrens. Harriet and Hely’s school—Alexandria Academy—was out here, a fifteen-minute drive from town: a low building of cinder block and corrugated metal which sprawled in the middle of a dusty field like an airplane hangar. Ten miles north, past the academy, the pines took over from the pastures entirely and pressed against either side of the road in a dark, high, claustrophobic wall which bore down relentlessly almost to the Tennessee border.

Instead of heading out into the country, however, they stopped at the red light by Jumbo’s, where the rearing circus elephant held aloft in his sun-bleached trunk a neon ball advertising:

CONES

SHAKES

BURGERS

and—past the town cemetery, rising high upon its hill like a stage backdrop (black iron fences, graceful-throated stone angels guarding the marble gateposts to north, south, east, and west)—they circled around through town again.

When Harriet was younger, the east end of Natchez Street had been all white. Now both blacks and whites lived here, harmoniously for the most part. The black families were young and prosperous, with children; most of the whites—like Allison’s piano teacher, and Libby’s friend Mrs. Newman McLemore—were old, widowed ladies without family.

“Hey, Pem, slow down in front of the Mormon house here,” said Hely.

Pem blinked at him. “What’s the matter?” he said, but he slowed down, anyway.

Curtis was gone, and so was Mr. Dial’s car. A pickup was parked in the driveway but Harriet could see that it wasn’t the same truck. The gate was down, and the bed was empty except for a metal tool chest.

“They’re in that?” said Hely, breaking off short in the midst of his complaints about Essie Lee.

“Man, what is that up there?” said Pemberton, stopping the car in the middle of the street. “Is that tin foil on the windows?”

“Harriet, tell him what you saw. She said she saw—”

“I don’t even want to know what goes on up there. Are they making dirty movies, or what? Man,” said Pemberton, throwing the car into park, peering upward with his hand shading his eyes, “what kind of a creep rolls tin foil over all their windows?”

“Oh my gosh.” Hely flounced around in the seat and stared straight ahead.

“What’s your problem?”

“Pem, come on, let’s go.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Look,” said Harriet, after several moments of fascinated silence. A triangle of black had appeared in the center window, where the tinfoil was being peeled back from within by some anonymous but artful claw.

————

As the car sped off, Eugene rolled the tin foil back over the window with trembling fingers. He was coming down with a migraine headache. Tears streamed from his eye; as he stepped from the window, in the darkness and confusion, he bumped into a crate of soda bottles, and the racket slashed in a brilliant zig-zag of pain down the left side of his face.

Migraine headaches ran in the Ratliff family. It was said of Eugene’s grandfather—“Papaw” Ratliff, long deceased—that when suffering from what he called “a sick headache,” he had beaten out a cow’s eye with a two-by-four. And Eugene’s father, similarly afflicted, had slapped Danny so hard on some long-ago Christmas Eve that he flew head-first against the freezer and cracked a permanent tooth.

This headache had descended with less warning than most. The snakes were enough to make anybody sick, not to mention the anxiety of Roy Dial rolling up unannounced; but neither cops, nor Dial, was likely to come snooping in a flashy old gunboat like the car that had stopped out front.

He went into the other room, where it was cooler, and sat down at the card table with his head in his hands. He could still taste the ham sandwich he had for lunch. He had enjoyed it very little, and the bitter, aspirin overtaste in his mouth rendered the memory even more unpleasant.