The Little Friend

The only way to find out exactly what he was doing, she decided, was to go down to the freight yards and see for herself.

————

She hadn’t talked to Hely in ages. Because he was the only seventh grader at the Band Clinic, he now thought he was too good to associate with Harriet. Never mind that he’d only been invited because the brass section was short on trombones. The last time she and Hely had spoken—by telephone, and she had called him—he’d talked of nothing but band, volunteering gossip about the big kids as if he actually knew them, referring to the drum majorette and the hot-shot brass soloists by first name. In a chatty but remote tone—as if she were a teacher, or a friend of his parents—he informed her of the many, many technical details of the half-time number they were working on: a Beatles medley, which the band would conclude by playing “Yellow Submarine” while forming a gigantic submarine (its propeller represented by a twirled baton) on the football field. Harriet listened in silence. She was silent, too, at Hely’s vague but enthusiastic interjections about how “crazy” the kids in the high-school band were. “The football players don’t have any fun. They have to get up and run laps while it’s still dark, Coach Cogwell screams at them all the time, it’s like the National Guards or something. But Chuck, and Frank, and Rusty, and the sophomores in the trumpet section … they are so much wilder than any of the guys on the football team.”

“Hmmn.”

“All they do is talk back and crack crazy jokes and they wear their sunglasses all day long. Mr. Wooburn’s cool, he doesn’t care. Like yesterday—wait, wait,” he said to Harriet, and then to some peevish voice in the background: “What?”

Conversation. Harriet waited. After a moment or two Hely returned.

“Sorry. I have to go practice,” he said virtuously. “Dad says I need to practice every day because my new trombone is worth a lot of money.”

Harriet hung up and—in the still, dingy light of the hallway—leaned with her elbows on the telephone table and thought. Had he forgot about Danny Ratliff? Or did he just not care? Her lack of concern over Hely’s distant manner took her by surprise, but she could not help being pleased by how little pain his indifference caused her.

————

The night before, it had rained; and though the ground was wet, Harriet couldn’t tell if a car had recently passed through the broad gravel expanse (a loading area for cotton wagons, not really a road) that connected the switching yards with the freight yards, and the freight yards with the river. With her backpack and her orange notebook under her arm, in case there were clues she needed to write down, she stood on the edge of the vast, black, mechanical plain, and gazed out at the scissors and loops and starts and stops of track, the white warning crosses and the dead signal lanterns, the rust-locked freight cars in the distance and the water tower rising up tall behind them, atop spindly legs: an enormous round tank with its roof peaked like the Tin Woodman’s hat in The Wizard of Oz. In early childhood, she’d formed an obscure attachment to the water tower, perhaps because of this resemblance; it seemed a dumb, friendly guardian of some sort; and when she went to sleep, she often thought of it standing lonely and unappreciated out somewhere in the dark. Then, when Harriet was six, some bad boys had climbed up the tower on Halloween and painted a scary jack-o’-lantern face on the tank, with slit eyes and sawteeth—and for many nights after, Harriet lay awake and agitated, and could not sleep for the thought of her steadfast companion (fanged now, and hostile) scowling out over the silent rooftops.

The scary face had faded long ago. Someone else had sprayed Class of ’70 over it in gold paint, and now this too had faded, bleached by sun and washed dull by years and years of rain. Melancholy black drips of decay streaked the tank’s facade from top to bottom—but even though it wasn’t really there any more, the devil face, still it burned in Harriet’s memory, like a light’s afterburn in a recently darkened room.

The sky was white and empty. With Hely, she thought, at least there’s somebody to talk to. Had Robin wandered down here to play, had he stood astride his bicycle to look across the train tracks? She tried to imagine seeing it all through his eyes. Things wouldn’t have changed much: maybe the telegraph wires would sag a little more, maybe the creeper and the bindweed would hang a little thicker on the trees. How would it all look in a hundred years, after she was dead?

She cut through the freight yards—hopping over the tracks, humming to herself—towards the woods. Her voice was very loud in the silence; she had never ventured so far into this abandoned area by herself. What if there was a disease in Alexandria, she thought, and everybody died but me?