The Little Friend

Danny was expecting the party to be at Robin’s house (which was nice enough) but he’d been stunned when the packed station wagon piloted by the mother of some girl he didn’t know drove out of the city limits, past cotton fields, down a long alley of trees and up to the columned house. He didn’t belong in a place like this. And, even worse, he hadn’t brought a present. At school, he’d tried to wrap up a Matchbox car he’d found, in some notebook paper, but he didn’t have any tape and it didn’t look like a present at all, only a wadded-up sheet of old homework.

But no one seemed to notice he didn’t have a present; at least no one said anything. And, up close, the house wasn’t so grand as it had looked from far away—in fact, it was falling to pieces, with moth-eaten rugs and broken plaster and cracks on the ceiling. The old lady—Robin’s grandmother—had presided over the party, and she too was large and formal and frightening; when she’d opened the front door she’d scared him to death, looming over him with her stiff posture, her black, rich-looking clothes and her angry eyebrows. Her voice was sharp, and so were her footsteps, clicking fast through the echoing rooms, so brisk and witchy that the children stopped talking when she walked into their midst. But she had handed him a beautiful piece of white cake on a glass plate: a piece with a fat icing rose, and writing too, the big pink H

in HAPPY

. She had looked over the heads of the other children, crowding around her at the beautiful table; and she had reached out over their heads and handed to Danny (hanging in the back) the special piece with the pink rose, as if Danny was the one person in the room who she wanted to have it.

So that was the old lady. E. Cleve

. He had not seen her or thought of her in years. When Tribulation caught fire—a fire that lit up the night sky for miles around—Danny’s father and grandmother shook their heads with sly, amused gravity, as if they had known all along that such a house must burn. They could not help but relish the spectacle of “the high and mighty” brought down a notch or two, and Gum resented Tribulation in particular, since as a girl she’d picked cotton in its fields. There was a certain snooty class of white—traitors to their race, said Danny’s father—who regarded white folks down on their luck as no better than the common yard nigger.

Yes: the old lady had come down, and to fall in the world as she had fallen was foreign, and sad and mysterious. Danny’s own family had nowhere much to fall from. And Robin (a generous, friendly kid) was dead—dead many years now—murdered by some creep passing through, or some filthy old tramp who wandered up from the train tracks, nobody knew. At school that Monday morning, the teacher, Mrs. Marter (a mean fat-ass with a beehive, who had made Danny wear a woman’s yellow wig for a whole week at school, punishment for something or other, he couldn’t remember what), stood whispering with the other teachers in the hall, and her eyes were red like she’d been crying. After the bell rang, she sat down at her desk and said, “Class, I have some very sad news.”

Most of the town kids had already heard—but not Danny. At first, he’d thought Mrs. Marter was bullshitting them, but when she made them get out crayons and construction paper and start making cards to send to Robin’s family, he realized she wasn’t. On his card, he drew careful pictures of Batman and Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk, standing in front of Robin’s house, all in a line. He wanted to draw them in action postures—rescuing Robin, pulverizing bad guys—but he wasn’t a good enough artist, he’d just had to draw them standing in a line staring straight ahead. As an afterthought, he drew himself in the picture too, off to the side. He’d let Robin down, he felt. Usually the maid wasn’t around on Sundays, but that day, she was. If he hadn’t let her chase him off, earlier in the afternoon, then Robin might still be alive.