The Little Friend

“This isn’t generally known, by the American people, the military application of these waves,” he said. “And I’ll tell you what the fuck else. Even the fucking Pentagon don’t know what these waves really are. Oh, they can generate ’em, and track ’em—” he laughed, a short, sharp-pitched laugh—“but they don’t know what the fuck they’re made of.”

I have got to cut this shit out

. All I have to do, Danny told himself—horribly aware of a fly which buzzed, repetitively, at his ear, like a tape loop in some endless fucking nightmare—all I have to do is get on the ball, clean up, sleep for a day or two. I can go grab the crank and get out of town while he’s still sitting on the ground out here gibbering about radio waves and tearing up toasters with a screwdriver.…

“Electrons damage the brain,” said Farish. As he said this, he looked keenly at Danny, as if he suspected that Danny disagreed with him on some point.

Danny felt faint. It was past time for his hourly bump. Pretty soon—without it—he’d have to crash, as his over-taxed heart fluttered, as his blood pressure sank to a thread, half-crazy with the fear it would stop altogether because sleep ceased to be sleep when you never had any; dammed up, irresistible, it rolled in at the last and crushed you senseless, a high, black wall that was more like death.

“And what are radio waves?” said Farish.

Farish had been through this with Danny before. “Electrons.”

“Exactly, numbnuts!” Farish, with a manic, Charles Manson glitter, leaned forward and thumped his own skull with surprising violence. “Electrons! Electrons!”

The screwdriver glinted: bang, Danny saw it, on a giant movie screen, like a cold wind blowing from his future … saw himself lying on his sweaty little bed, knocked out and defenseless and too weak to move. Clock ticking, curtains stirring. Then creak went the trailer’s padded door, ever so slowly, Farish easing quietly to his bedside, butcher knife in his fist.…

“No!” he cried, and opened his eyes to see Farish’s good eye bearing down on him like a power drill.

For a long, bizarre moment, they stared at each other. Then Farish snapped: “Look at your hand. What you done to it? ”

Confused, Danny brought both hands up, trembling, before his eyes and saw that his thumb was covered in blood where he’d been picking at the hangnail.

“Better look after yourself, brother,” Farish said.

————

In the morning, Edie—dressed soberly in navy blue—came by Harriet’s house to pick up Harriet’s mother, so the two of them could go out for breakfast before Edie met the accountant at ten. She’d called to arrange the date three days earlier, and Harriet—after answering the telephone, and getting her mother to pick up—had listened to the first part of their conversation before putting down the receiver. Edie had said that there was something personal they needed to talk about, that it was important, and that she didn’t want to talk about it over the telephone. Now, in the hallway, she refused to sit down and kept glancing at her wristwatch, glancing at the top of the stairs.

“They’ll be through serving breakfast by the time we get there,” she said, and recrossed her arms with an impatient little clucking sound: tch tch tch. Her cheeks were pale with powder and her lips (sharply drawn in a cupid’s bow, in the waxy scarlet lipstick that Edie usually saved for church) were less like a lady’s lips than the thin, pursed lips of old Sieur d’Iberville in Harriet’s Mississippi history book. Her suit—nipped at the waist, with three-quarter-length sleeves—was very severe, stylish too in its old-fashioned way, the suit that (Libby said) made Edie look like Mrs. Simpson who had married the King of England.

Harriet, who was sprawled across the bottom step and glowering at the carpet, raised her head and blurted: “But WHY can’t I go?”

“For one,” said Edie—looking not at Harriet but over her head—“your mother and I have something to discuss.”

“I’ll be quiet!”

“In private. For two,” Edie said, turning her chilly bright gaze quite ferociously on Harriet, “you aren’t dressed to go anywhere. Why don’t you go upstairs and get in the bathtub?”

“If I do, will you bring me back some pancakes?”

“Oh, Mother,” said Charlotte, hurrying down the stairs in an unpressed dress with her hair still damp from the bath. “I’m so sorry. I—”

“Oh! That’s all right!” said Edie, but her voice made it plain that it wasn’t all right, not at all.

Out they went. Harriet—all in a sulk—watched them drive away, through the dusty organdy curtains.

Allison was still upstairs, asleep. She’d come in late the night before. Except for certain mechanical noises—the tick of the clock, the whir of the exhaust fan and the hum of the hot-water heater—the house was as silent as a submarine.