The Little Friend

The awful crying had died down. Eugene left the window and sat down by Danny. “You’re killing yourself,” he said. “You need to get some sleep.”

“Get some sleep,” Danny repeated. He stood up, as if he was about to make a speech, and then sat back down.

“When I us coming up,” said Gum, creeping in on her walker, rocking forward an inch at a time, click click, click click

, “my diddy said it was something wrong with any man that’ll sit down in a chair and read a book.”

This she said with a sort of peaceful tenderness, as if the plain wisdom of the remark did her father credit. The booklet lay on the table. With a trembling old hand, she reached out and picked it up. Holding it at arm’s length, she looked at the front of it, and then she turned it around and looked at the back. “Bless ye heart, Gene.”

Eugene looked over the tops of his glasses. “What is it?”

“Oh,” said Gum, after a tolerant pause. “Well. I just hate to see ye get your hopes up. It’s a hard old world for folks like us. I sure do hate to think of all them young college professors, standing up in the job line ahead of you.”

“Hon? Can’t I just look at the dern thing?” Certainly she meant no harm, his grandmother: she was just a poor little broken-down old lady who’d worked hard her whole life, and never had anything, and never had a chance, and never knew what a chance was. But why this meant her grandsons didn’t have a chance, either, Eugene wasn’t quite sure.

“It’s just something I picked up at the Extension Office, hun,” he said. “For free. You ought to go down there and look sometime. They have things there on how to grow just about every crop and vegetable and tree there is.”

Danny—who had been sitting quietly all this time, staring into space—stood up, a little too suddenly. He had a glazed look, and swayed on his feet. Both Eugene and Gum looked at him. He took a step backwards.

“Them glasses look good on you,” he said to Eugene.

“Thank you,” said Eugene, reaching up self-consciously to adjust them.

“They look good,” said Danny. His eyes were glassy with an uncomfortable fascination. “You ort to wear them all the time.”

He turned; and as he did, his knees buckled under him and he fell to the floor.

————

All the dreams Danny had fought off for the past two weeks thundered down on him all at once, like a cataract from a burst dam, with wrecks and jetsam from various stages of his life jumbled and crashing down along with it—so that he was thirteen again, and lying on a cot his first night in Juvenile Hall (tan cinder block, industrial fan rocking back and forth on the concrete floor like it was about to take off and fly away) but also five—in first grade—and nine, with his mother in the hospital, missing her so terribly, so afraid of her dying, and of his drunk father in the next room, that he lay awake in a delirium of terror memorizing every single spice on the printed curtains which had then hung in his bedroom. They were old kitchen curtains: Danny still didn’t know what Coriander was, or Mace, but he could still see the brown letters jingling along the mustard-yellow cotton (mace, nutmeg, coriander, clove) and the very names were a poem that called up grinning Nightmare, in top hat, to his very bedside.…

Tossing on his bed, Danny was all these ages at once and yet himself, and twenty—with a record, with a habit, with a virtual fortune of his brother’s crank calling him in a shrill eerie voice from its hiding place high above the town—so that the water tower was confused in his mind with a tree he’d climbed and thrown a bird-dog puppy out of once, when he was a kid, to see what would happen (it died) and his guilty thoughts about ripping Farish off were stoppered and shaken up with shameful childhood lies he’d told about driving race cars, and beating up and killing people; with memories of school, and court, and prison, and the guitar his father had made him quit playing because he said it took too much work (where was that guitar? he needed to find it, people were waiting for him out in the car, if he didn’t hurry they’d go off and leave him). The tug of all these contradictory times and places made him roll back and forth on his pillow from the confusion of it all. He saw his mother—his mother!—looking in the window at him, and the concern on her swollen, kindly face made him want to weep; other faces made him start back in terror. How to tell the difference between the living and the dead? Some were friendly; some weren’t. And they all spoke to him and to each other, though they’d never known each other in life, walking in and out in large, businesslike groups, and it was hard to know who belonged where and what they were all doing together here in his room, where they didn’t belong, their voices mingled with the rain striking down on the tin roof of the trailer and themselves as gray and formless as the rain.