The Little Friend

Laboriously, he opened the car door and hoisted himself out (gamely, stiff in his legs, swaying like an old sea captain) and went inside to get the fountain Coke and the hot ham sandwich.

Danny sat in silence. Farish’s smell hung plump and extravagant in the stifling car. The last thing in the world he wanted was a hot ham sandwich; somehow he would have to choke the thing down.

The girl’s afterburn raced through his mind like jet trails: a dark-headed blur, a moving target. But it was the face of the old lady on the porch that stayed with him. As he drove past that house (her house?) in what felt like slow motion, the old lady’s eyes (powerful eyes, full of light) had passed over him without seeing him and he’d felt a gliddery, queasy shock of recognition. For he knew the old lady—intimately, but distantly, like something from a long-ago dream.

Through the plate glass window, he saw Farish leaning on the counter, jawing expansively with a bony little waitress he liked. Possibly because they were afraid of him, or because they needed the business, or maybe because they were just kind, the waitresses at the White Kitchen listened respectfully to Farish’s wild stories, and didn’t seem irritated by his grooming or his bad eye or his hectoring know-it-all streak. If he raised his voice, if he got agitated and started waving his arms around or knocked over his coffee, they remained calm and polite. Farish, in turn, refrained from foul language in their presence, even when he was wired out of his mind, and on Valentine’s Day, he’d even brought a bunch of flowers down to the restaurant.

Keeping an eye on his brother, Danny got out of the car and walked around to the side of the restaurant, past a margin of dried-up shrubs, to the phone booth. Half the pages in the directory had been torn out, but luckily the last half, and he ran a trembling fingertip down the C’s. The name on the mailbox had been Cleve. Sure enough, right there in black and white: on Margin Street, an E. Cleve.

And—strangely—it chimed. Danny stood in the stifling hot phone booth, letting the connection sink in. For he had met the old lady, so long ago that it seemed from a different life. She was known around the county—not so much for herself but for her father, who had been a big cheese politically, and for the former house of her family, which was called Tribulation. But the house—famous in its day—was long gone, and now survived in name only. On the Interstate, not far from where the house had been, there was a greasy-spoon restaurant (with a white-columned mansion on the billboard) calling itself Tribulation Steak House. The billboard was still there, but now even the restaurant was boarded up and haunted-looking, with graffiti-covered signs that said No Trespassing and weeds growing in the planters out front, as if something about the land itself had sucked all the newness out of the building and made it look old.

When he was a kid (what grade, he couldn’t remember, school was all a dreary blur to him) he’d gone to a birthday party at Tribulation. The memory had stayed with him: huge rooms, spooky and dim and historical, with rusty wallpaper and chandeliers. The old lady who the house belonged to was Robin’s grandmother, and Robin was a schoolmate of Danny’s. Robin lived in town, and Danny—who often roamed the streets on foot, while Farish was in the pool hall—had spotted him late one windy afternoon in fall, playing alone in front of his house. They stood and looked at each other for a while—Danny in the street, Robin in his yard—like wary little animals. Then Robin said: “I like Batman.”

“I like Batman, too,” said Danny. Then they ran up and down the sidewalk together and played until it got dark.

Since Robin had invited everybody in the class to his party (raising his hand for permission, walking up and down the rows and handing an envelope to every single kid) it was easy for Danny to hitch a ride without his father or Gum knowing. Kids like Danny didn’t have birthday parties, and Danny’s father didn’t want him attending them even if he was invited (which he usually wasn’t) because no boy of his was going to pay for something useless like a present, not for some rich man’s son or daughter. Jimmy George Ratliff wasn’t bankrolling that nonsense. Their grandmother reasoned differently. If Danny went to a party, he’d be obligated to the host: “beholden.” Why accept invitations of town folk who (no doubt) had only invited Danny to make fun of him: of his hand-me-down clothes, of his country manners? Danny’s family were poor; they were “plain people.” The fanciness of cake and party clothes was not for them. Gum was forever reminding her grandsons of this, so there was never any danger of them growing exuberant and forgetting it.