The Little Friend

The flowers were the only pinprick of color in the room. When Gum was in the hospital, Eugene had returned to look in the door at his poor neighbor, with whom he had never exchanged a word. The bed was empty but the flowers were still there, blazing up red from the bed table as if in sympathy with the deep, red, basso pain that throbbed in his bitten arm, and suddenly the veil fell away, and it was revealed to Eugene that the flowers themselves were the sign he’d prayed for. They were little live things, the flowers, created by God and living like his heart was: tender, slender lovelies that had veins, and vessels, that sipped water from their hobnail vase, that breathed their weak, pretty scent of cloves even in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. And as he was thinking on these things, the Lord himself had spoken to Eugene, there as he stood in the quiet of the afternoon, saying: Plant my gardens.

This was the third epiphany. That very afternoon, Eugene had hunted through the seed packs on the back porch and planted a row of collards and another of winter turnip greens in a moist, dark patch of earth where—until recently—a stack of old tractor tires had sat atop a sheet of black plastic. He’d also purchased two rosebushes on sale at the feed store and planted them in the scrubby grass in front of his grandmother’s trailer. Gum, typically, was suspicious, as if the roses were a sly trick at her expense; Eugene, several times, had caught her standing in the front yard staring at the poor little shrubs as if they were dangerous intruders, freeloaders and parasites, there to rob them all blind. “What I want to know,” she said, limping after Eugene as he ministered to the roses with pesticide and watering can, “is, who’s gone attend to them thangs? Who’s gone pay for all that fancy spray, and fertilizer? Who’s gone get stuck with watering them, and dusting them, and nursing them, and fooling with them all the time?” And she cast a cloudy old martyred eye at Eugene, as if to say that she knew that the burden of their care would only crush down joylessly on her own shoulders.

The door of the trailer squeaked open—so loudly that Eugene jumped—and in trudged Danny: dirty, unshaven, hollow-eyed and dehydrated-looking, as if he’d been wandering the desert for days. He was so thin that his jeans were falling off his hip-bones.

Eugene said: “You look awful.”

Danny gave him a sharp look, then collapsed at the table with his head in his hands.

“It’s your own fault. You ort to just stop taking that stuff.”

Danny raised his head. His vacant stare was frightening. Suddenly he said: “Do you remember that little black-haired girl come up to the back door of the Mission the night you got bit?”

“Well, yes,” said Eugene, closing the booklet on his finger. “Yes, I do. Farsh can go around saying any crazy thing he wants to, and can’t nobody question it—”

“You remember her, then.”

“Yes. And it’s funny you mention it.” Eugene considered where to begin. “That girl run off from me,” he said, “before the snakes was even out of the window. She was nervous, down there on the sidewalk with me, and the second that yell come from up there she was off.

” Eugene set the booklet aside. “And I can tell you another thing, I did not leave that door unlocked. I don’t care what Farsh says. It was standing open when we come back, and—”

He drew his neck back and blinked at the tiny photograph which Danny had suddenly shoved in his face.

“Why, that’s you,” he said.

“I—” Danny shuddered and turned up his red-rimmed eyes at the ceiling.

“Where’d this come from?”

“She left it.”

“Left it where?” said Eugene, and then said: “What’s that noise?” Outside, someone was wailing loudly. “Is that Curtis?” he said, standing up.

“No—” Danny drew a deep, ragged breath—“it’s Farish.”

“Farish?”

Danny scraped back his chair; he looked wildly about the room. The sobs were broken, guttural, as despairing as a child’s sobs but more violent, as if Farish was spitting and choking up his own heart.

“My gosh,” said Eugene, awed. “Listen at that.”

“I had a bad time with him just now, in the parking lot of the White Kitchen,” said Danny. He held up his hands, which were dirty and skinned up.

“What happened?” said Eugene. He went to the window and peered out. “Where’s Curtis?” Curtis, who had bronchial and breathing problems, often went into savage coughing fits when he was upset—or when someone else was, which got him more upset than anything.

Danny shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, his voice hoarse and strained, as from overuse. “I’m sick of being scared all the time.” To Eugene’s astonishment he drew a mean-looking bill-hook knife from his boot and—with a stoned but significant look—set it down on the table with a solid clack.

“This is my protection,” he said. “From him.” And he rolled up his eyes in a particularly squidlike way—whites showing—that Eugene took to mean Farish.