The Little Friend

Loyal Reese was all of a sudden behind him. “This isn’t right,” he said to Eugene, looking down at the dead snake, but Farish was already pounding down the back stairs with fists clenched and murder in his eyes and before Loyal—blinking like a baby—could say another word Farish swung him around and punched him in the mouth and sent him staggering.

“Who you working for?” he bellowed.

Loyal stumbled backward and opened his mouth—which was wet and bleeding thinly—and when nothing came out of it after a moment or two, Farish glanced quickly over his shoulder and then punched him again, this time to the ground.

“Who sent you?” he screamed. Loyal’s mouth was bloody; Farish grabbed his shirtfront and jerked him up to his feet. “Whose idea was this? You and Dolphus, yall just thought you’d fuck with me, make some easy money, but yall are fucking with the wrong person—”

“Farish,” called Danny—white as chalk, running down the stairs two at a time—“you got that .38 in the truck?”

“Wait,” said Eugene, panic-stricken—guns in Mr. Dial’s rental apartment? a dead body? “Yall got it wrong,” he called, waving his hands in the air. “Everybody calm down.”

Farish pushed Loyal to the ground. “I got all night,” he said. “Motherfucker. Double-cross me and I’m on break ye teeth out and blow a hole in your chest.”

Danny caught Farish’s arm. “Leave him, Farish, come on. We need the gun upstairs.”

Loyal, on the ground, raised himself up on his elbows. “Is they out?” he said; and his voice was full of such innocent astonishment that even Farish stopped cold.

Danny staggered back in his motorcycle boots and wiped a dirty arm across his forehead. He looked shellshocked. “All over the fucking place,” he said.

————

“We’re missing one,” said Loyal, ten minutes later, wiping the blood-tinged spit from his mouth with his knuckle. His left eye was purple and swollen to a slit.

Danny said: “I smell something funny. This place smells like piss. Do you smell it, Gene?” he asked his brother.

“There he goes!” cried Farish suddenly, and lunged for a defunct heating register from which protruded six inches of snake tail.

The tail flicked, with a parting rattle, and disappeared down the register like a whiplash.

“Quit,” said Loyal to Farish, who was pounding the register with the toe of his motorcycle boot. Moving quickly to the register, he bent over it fearlessly (Eugene and Danny and even Farish, ceasing his dance, stepping well back). Pursing his lips, he emitted an eerie, cutting little whistle: eeeeeeeee, like a cross between a teakettle and a wet finger rubbed across a balloon.

Silence. Loyal puckered up again, with bloodied and swollen lips—eeeeeeee, a whistle to raise the hair on the back of your neck. Then he listened, with his ear to the ground. After a full five minutes of silence he climbed painfully to his feet and rubbed the palms of his hands on his thighs.

“He’s gone,” he announced.

“Gone?” cried Eugene. “Gone where?”

Loyal wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “He’s went down in that other apartment,” he said gloomily.

“You ort to be in the circus,” said Farish, looking at Loyal with newfound respect. “That’s some trick. Who taught you how to whistle like that?”

“Snakes mind me,” said Loyal, modestly, as they all stood staring at him.

“Ho!” Farish clapped an arm around him; the whistle had so impressed him that he’d forgotten all about being angry. “Reckon you can teach me to do that?”

Staring out the window, Danny muttered: “Something funny’s going on around here.”

“What’s that?” snapped Farish, wheeling on him. “You got something to say to me, Danny boy, you say it to my face.”

“I said something funny’s going on around here. That door was open when we come up here tonight.”

“Gene,” said Loyal, clearing his throat, “you need to call these people downstairs. I know exactly where that fellow’s gone. He’s went down that retchister, and he’s making himself comfortable in the hot water pipes.”

“Reckon why he don’t come on back?” said Farish. He pursed his lips and tried, unsuccessfully, to imitate the unearthly whistle that Loyal had employed to lure six timber rattlers, one by one, from varying parts of the room. “Aint he trained as good as the others?”

“Aint none of em trained. They don’t like all this hollering and stomping. Nope,” said Loyal, scratching his head as he looked down into the register, “he’s gone.”

“Hi you going to get him back?”

“Listen, I got to get to the doctor!” wailed Eugene, wringing his wrist. His hand was so swollen that it looked like a blown-up rubber glove.

“I be damned,” Farish said brightly. “You are bit.”

“I told you I was bit! There, there, and there!”

Loyal said, coming over to see: “He don’t always use all his venom in one strike.”