The Little Friend

Harriet, breathing like she had asthma, glanced over her shoulder. “Okay …” she said, “here we go, one, two …”

The car disappeared beneath the bridge; she shot the bolt; and the world went into slow motion as together, in a single effort, they tipped the box. As the cobra slid and shifted, flipping his tail in an attempt to right himself, several thoughts flashed through Hely’s mind at once: chief among them, how they were going to get away. Could they outrun him? For certainly he’d stop—any fool would, with a cobra falling on the roof of his car—and take out after them.…

The concrete rumbled beneath their feet just as the cobra slid free, and fell through empty air. Harriet stood up, her hands on the railing, and her face as hard and mean as any eighth-grade boy’s. “Bombs away,” she said.

They leaned over the railing to watch. Hely felt dizzy. Down the cobra writhed through space, filliping toward the asphalt below. We missed, he thought, looking down at the empty road, and just at that moment the Trans Am—with its T-top open—shot from under their feet and directly beneath the falling snake.…

Several years before, Pem had been throwing baseballs to Hely down the street from their grandmother’s house: an old house with a modern addition—mostly glass—on the Parkway in Memphis. “Put it through that window,” said Pem, “and I’ll give you a million dollars.” “All right,” said Hely, and swung without thinking, and hit the ball crack without even looking at it, hit it so far that even Pem’s jaw dropped as it flew overhead and sailed far far far, straight and undeviating on its path until it crashed, bang: right through the sun-porch window and practically into the lap of his grandmother, who was talking on the telephone—to Hely’s dad, as it turned out. It was a million-to-one shot, impossible: Hely was no good at baseball; he was always the last non-gay or -retarded kid to get picked for a team; never had he hit any ball so high and hard and sure, and the bat had clunked to the ground as he stared in wonder at its clean, pure arc, curving straight for the center panel of his grandma’s glassed-in porch.…

And the thing was, he’d known the ball was going to break his grandma’s window, known it the second he felt the ball strike solid against the bat; as he’d watched it speeding for the center pane like a guided missile he’d had no time to feel anything but the most bracing joy, and for a breathless heartbeat or two (right before it struck the glass, that impossible and distant mark) Hely and the baseball had become one; he’d felt he was guiding it with his mind, that God had for some reason this strange moment decided to grant him absolute mental control over this dumb object hurtling at top speed towards its inevitable target, splash, whackeroo, banzai.…

Despite what came later (tears, a whipping) it remained one of the most satisfying moments of his life. And it was with the same disbelief—and terror, and exhilaration, and dumbstruck goggling awe at all the invisible powers of the universe rising in concert and bearing down simultaneously upon this one impossible point—that Hely watched the five-foot cobra strike the open T-top unevenly, at a diagonal, so that his top-heavy tail slid abruptly inside the Trans Am and pulled the rest of him in after it.

Hely—unable to contain himself—jumped up, struck the air with his fist: “Yes!” Yipping and capering like a demon, he grabbed Harriet’s arm and shook it, stabbing a gleeful finger at the Trans Am, which had braked with a screech and swerved to the other side of the road. Gently, in a cloud of dust, it coasted onto the pebbly shoulder, the gravel cracking under its tires.

Then it stopped. Before either of them could move, or speak, the door opened and out tumbled not Danny Ratliff but an emaciated mummy of a creature: frail, sexless, clad in a repellent mustard-yellow pants suit. Feebly, it clawed at itself, tottered onto the highway, then halted, and wobbled a few feet in the opposite direction. Aiiiieeeeeeee, it wailed. Its cries were thin and strangely bloodless considering that the cobra was fastened to the creature’s shoulder: five feet of long black body hanging down solid and pendulous from the hood (wicked spectacle-marks clearly visible) ending in a length of narrow and frightfully active black tail that lashed up a thunderous cloud of red dust.

Harriet stood transfixed. Though she’d envisioned the moment clearly enough, somehow it was happening wrong-side-out, through the small end of the telescope—cries remote and inhuman, gestures flat, stretched thin with a spacey, ritualized horror. Impossible to quit now, put the toys up, knock down the chessboard and start again.