The Little Friend

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, huddled defenseless against the particle-board.…